Life in a Leetle Dotcom

Alright I've been a bit held up with work lately. Believe it or not, I've been learning how to do Accounting for my little dotcom.

No no nooo.. not the kind of accounting we did in Form 5 where we
CREDIT - AKAUN MODAL AH SENG and
DEBIT - AKAUN KERETA LEMBU...

I mean proper accounting.

Yes... it's sad... our little dotcom is so poor, I'm the Sales, Marketing, Operations, HR and Finance guy all in one.
Just the other day somebody called my office. I picked up and heard the caller's sweet voice "Hello... could you please put me to your HR department please?"

I paused for a moment while I thought about what she just said. It took me only 3 seconds to realise that I was also the HR so I told her

"HR Department? Please hold on a second miss. I'll put you through right away".

I put her on hold and counted to 5.

Then I picked up the phone again and said in the poor British accent I managed to acquire while studying in London for 3 years

"Hello this is HR..." Yes... we are sooo understaffed but that can't be helped considering we're a tiny poor company.

It makes me wonder how a company like Google could find it in itself to start off for many many years without even generating a cent of revenue in this little garage.
I wonder how the founders slept at night.

We're so understaffed my partner Ming and I considered getting interns to work with us in our Penang office (Ming is based in our Singapore office).

We posted an ad on Jobstreet and we got a lot applicants coming in, but when I sent an e-mail to the ones worth interviewing to say
"I just want you to be clear that this is an INTERNSHIP so we will only provide you with a small allowance and not the salary of a full-time partner in our company"

(I call everyone in our little dotcom a "partner". I have never referred to anyone as an "employee" and I've never referred to myself as a "Boss" ).

But of the 10 e-mails I've sent out to potential interviewees, none of them were interested and most of them didn't even bother to reply.

Which made a little bit of sense since most of the applicants were already graduates.

If you've already graduated... you'd better be finding a proper job and not doing an unpaid relationship unless you're with a company you really believe would be phenomenal one day and you desperately want to be a part of it.

For example, if I had a chance to intern at Apple Computers when it was still a startup... I would probably have joined the company in the end, benefitted from the stock options and would today be a very rich man.Ahhh.... when I was a student I was always keen on doing internships during our holidays.

I remember the first interview I went for in my life which was for an internship position in an investment bank (which I later got)... the interviewer asked me

"So... do you have any commitments... or a girlfriend or anything?"

I looked at him a little surprise at the question and said

"No I don't officially have a girlfriend... why ask?" (it was true at the time)

He gave me a rather weird look and said

"Because over here, we work at least 12 hours a day and you will not have much of a social life".

That meant no more partying like this on weeknights.
(I'm the drunk dude on the right in this picture)

When I convinced him that I was more than ready for a job like that he then asked me
"So how much do you expect to get paid?"

I said
"Nothing... I would work your 12-16 hour days for free.The value of what I will learn from working here will be so much more than any money you can offer me at this stage".

In the end he still paid me a very generous salary...

Almost triple the salary that the standard intern in Malaysia gets (among the ones that get paid of course. Some interns don't get paid).

I learned plenty in my internships. I met up with the corporate heads of Malaysia CEOs and MDs of countless public listed companies and it was fun eventhough interns are usually the silent participants in these meetings.

Meaning we just sit down, listen and take notes... we don't say anything or ask any questions... we don't even ask if we can go to the toilet.

My favourite was a meeting with Zainal Amanshah of Redtone.He spoke very very well in the meeting and knew exactly what he was talking about.

But what is far more important is that the internships I did over my summer holidays helped broaden my horizons to see what I really wanted to do with my life.

Fortunately, our dotcom has managed to inspire a few people who insisted they wanted to work for us even if it was for free.

Lets not forget Mohd Zacky who was with us in our early days helping us put together the computers we now use to work out magic. He has now gone to gone back to college to finish his degree.

Of course to really have interns, our little dotcom would have to prove itself in becoming a fairly successful company to attract the interest of the mass crowd.

But ironically, when we do get to that stage, we probably wouldn't need to hire interns anymore.

Anyway, enough about my Little Dotcom Sdn Bhd.

On other issues... I thought I should give some credit to Koyuuken who wrote about Boss Lepton and I in his blog here.

And for those of you who read my blog at work and need some cheering up...

Check out this video by Russell Peters.. he's hilarious.



ME LOVE RUSSELL PETERS LONG TIME!

But me love all you guys who read my blog regularly even longer time ok?

That includes Lance, Suicidal, Mz, Chapree, Jackson, Cely, William, Gwen, Jason, Smash... and everyone else I may have missed out.