In Great Britain, you know you’re a “big sausage” when people call you “Sir”.

But life is such… you may be a “big sausage“, but there is always a “bigger sausage”

And you know you’re a “gigantic sausage” when people call you
“His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales“.

Yep. That’s Prince Harry.

Just like his brother Prince William, Harry is a well groomed man.

From young, privileged people like himself are sent not to normal schools, but to special schools where they teach you how to be a gentleman and carry yourself well in public.

And they have been taught well.

I remember how both Prince Harry and William held back their tears so well at their mother’s funeral.

Something I probably wouldn’t be able to do if put in the same position.

I would imagine people of his class would grow up learning to play polo, travel in private jets and eat diamonds for breakfast every day.

Things that normal poor people like Stewie would never have the chance to experience.That, along with the “Prince” title that they carry makes most women love them and want to do ANYTHING with them.

Of course… love should always be two ways.

So women love Harry…

and Harry loves women too…

Really.

Yes, the media in the UK is probably taking Prince Harry apart for this one picture of him cupping a woman’s gigantic breast.

But lets put things in perspective.

When presented with a set of knockers the size of Australia, what do you do?

Do you say

or do you say

or even
So… Prince Harry… please don’t feel bad… at least we know you’re human after all.

Dotcom entrepreneurs are poor people.

Almost every cent they have has gone into the little idea they believe in and that leaves them with a very tight budget to lead the rest of their lives.

I am no different.

Yet, this month I forgot to take into account a little piece of expenditure that I should’ve thought about: My colleague’s birthday present. It cost me over a 100 bucks, the same amount I was supposed to spend on a long overdue date with my baby.

My baby is a smart girl.

She doesn’t fancy me taking her to a pretentious high class restaurant in Penang that often has lousy (or way overpriced) food.

She enjoys expensive food, but she wants to make sure that we’re paying for the value of the food, and not for the little pretentious environment we get to sit in.

So I took her to Ingolf’s Kneipe.
A small German restaurant in Penang that serves the best mushroom soup in the world (I shit u not).

Ingolf has a very casual environment. It’s not even fully air-conditioned but people go there for only one thing: the fantastic food. So there I was, taking my baby for a dinner that I couldn’t afford but I knew how I could find my way around to afford it.

Step 1: When you order Mushroom soup, ALWAYS ask for “Kurang Mushroom” and then insist that they charge you 40 cents less to compensate for the fewer mushrooms in your soup.

The logic for this is simple.

When you go eat wan tan mee and ask the hawker to “tambah wan tan”, they would normally charge you more. So similarly, if you ask the restaurant to “Kurang Mushroom”, they should charge you less… right?

Some restaurants also try to act smart and give you soup in a big bun that’s just too big to eat and too small to be cheap.

So when you come to instances like that, you ask to see the manager and say
“I ASKED FOR ONION SOUP… NOT BUN ONION SOUP!!! IF I WANTED AN ONION SOUP IN A BUN I WOULD’VE SAID ONION SOUP IN A BUN… NOW GIMME BACK MY 80 SEN!!!”

Step 2: When asked “What would you like to drink sir?”

Always say “TAP WATER” and insist that they NOT charge you a single cent for that (Drinking water is a HUMAN RIGHT).

Some places insist that they don’t serve tap water and instead force you to buy a bottle of mineral water from them for RM1.00.

When faced with a situation like that, stay calm… relax… and just politely say to the waiter

“MA CHOW H*I IF U DUN GIMME MY WATER RIGHT NOW I AM GOING TO HURT YOU”.

Step 3: The Steak

Normally when you order steak at a restaurant, the waiter would have to ask you
“How would you like your steak done sir? Medium, Medium-Well… Well-done?“

In which you should ALWAYS ask
“Which is cheaper?“

Some waiters would give you a good answer and then you should know how to pick the cheaper option.

Some waiters will try to be funny with you and say

“They’re all the same Sir”.

In which you should lose all your patience and say

“THEN WHY THE HUMP DO YOU EVEN BOTHER ASKING ME?!?!”

Step 4: The best things in life are free

When you’re at the restaurant, ordering more things cost more money. But there are some things that are free no matter how much you decide to use.

For example, salt & pepper.

No matter how much you use… it’s FREE!!!

So use up as much salt & pepper as you can.

Then when your food is salty/peppery enough, make sure you ‘steal’ the salt/pepper away in a plastic bag.

Do it at every restaurant for a week and at the end of the week, go to the market to sell your plastic bags of salt/pepper.

Talk about making money out of nothing.

Step 5: The best things in life are free… really!

Don’t forget that water and use of the toilet is free too (Restaurants that charge 20 sen per entry of their toilets should be burned to the ground).

So find the sink and wash your hand as much as you can. Wash it so much that you’d never would have to wash it again for a week!

Heck, take a shower there even. You won’t even need a towel to dry yourself… just get yourself a stack of serviettes (which are ALSO free by the way)

and wipe yourself off.

Oh… and lets not forget the TOOTHPICKS.

ALWAYS ask for toothpicks.

Restaurants with some class would provide you with not just ONE toothpick… but a stack of them just like this (though you normally only need one).

Now I’m sure many of you would start thinking of TAKING ALL THE TOOTHPICKS.

WELL SHAME ON YOU FOR THINKING OF DOING SUCH A TREACHEROUS THING!

That just reflects VERY VERY BADLY ON YOU.

The right thing would be to TAKE EVERYTHING but don’t be a bastard… leave one toothpick there for the poor customer after you that would be dying to pick something off his teeth.

If you keep stealing EVERTHING, soon restaurants will never want to provide toothpicks again. Ever wonder why Malaysian public toilets don’t come with toilet paper?

Because just like people steal toothpicks.. some people gain great satisfaction from stealing toilet paper his (really REALLY not funny)…. so much that people don’t even bother furnishing their toilets with toilet paper anymore.

So at the end of the dinner.

My baby was happy.

And I was happy with my juicy juicy medium-rare steak..So there you have it.

Learn from Stewie… and you may afford to live the life that you otherwise can’t afford to live.

Upon hearing that I’ve gone off to venture on something of my own, people often ask me
“Don’t you want to gain some work experience first? Now you’re still too young!“

When I people ask me this, I often reply by saying
“I know… I may be making the biggest mistake of my life”.

Yet, deep inside I have an answer to that question that I don’t reveal often enough. But since all of you who are still reading my blog (which has turned from humour to boring stuff) are either my friends or my most loyal readers, let me share the answer with you.

A word of caution before we go on. My views and my philosophy of life tend to be very radical. So feel free to be critical. I love criticism, especially constructive ones because they make me think. But please don’t take it too seriously.

I am after all a naive little boy who is probably misinformed into having the following views of life and career.


Now let me start by saying that I have the bad habit of questioning everything people tell me.

So naturally, when people tell me that I should gain some work experience first before starting on a business, I asked WHY.

When you work you gain 3 main skill sets.

1) You gain experience on how to work and deal with people.

2) You gain insight of how specific industries work.

3) You learn from people above you.

Yet, I will always remember what Richard Branson (Virgin Group) often advocates: Entrepreneurs are made in their early life and not in their thirties.

I look at my life now more like a ticking clock. I start thinking that ok, now that I’ve graduated and got myself the minimum of academic papers (a degree), I have till I’m 40 (18 years from now) to make sure that I am fairly wealthy by then.

If I am not ‘fairly’ rich by the time I’m 40, it will probably be far too late for me to be very rich in my lifetime (still possible… but unlikely).

Take for example Phillip Green, the retail mogul in the UK that owns Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and everything else under the shopping sun in the UK.

By the time he was 40, he wasn’t a multi-billionaire like he is today. He had wealth in the hundreds of millions of pounds but it was with this that he was able to jump to being a billionaire.

But the question remains… is it wrong to spend time working to gain work experience?

In my opinion, the answer is “It depends”.

And “It depends” on one thing.

What kind of work experience?

Today, if I decided to spend 3 years working as a cashier at McDs or as a receptionist at a cyber cafe, it’s still work experience. But is it useful work experience and would whatever I learn there help me much when I start a business.

Let me give you an example.

When considering whether to take up a job at an investment bank in KL, I started thinking about where I would be 5 years later.

The conclusion I came to was that in 5 years, I would probably be earning a 5-figure salary and would probably know plenty about stocks. Since I would be in finance, I would also probably learn a bit about some of the successful companies listed on the stock exchange.

So I might learn a thing or two about a company that makes rubber gloves.

I might learn how their business works, how their products sell and how they earn money.

So is that enough for me to start a successful glove manufacturing business like Datuk Lim Wee Chai of Topglove did?

The answer is probably NOT.

Sure, I would learn the things on the surface but you don’t have to spend years working in an investment bank to learn that.

All you have to do is buy a share of the company, pick up its Annual Report and go for its AGM.

Then ask plenty of questions.

Any man on the street could gain that knowledge.

What the man on the street won’t be able to learn are the more crucial things like

What exactly goes into the rubber that makes the gloves?

or

How does the chemical composition of each glove differ from the composition of its competitors and why is it better?

or

How do they keep their quality control on each pair of glove?

The man on the street would probably tell you

“Blow it up with your nose and see how much you can do that for before it pops”

The only way to really learn things like that would be to work in the industry.

Therefore, I decided that if I was going to work in an investment bank, unless I planned to start a Merchant Bank of Penang (which is highly unlikely), everything that I learned on the job wouldn’t exactly help me too much in any business I might pursue in future.

Sure, I would be highly paid at first.. but would I be a very rich man 20 years from now?

Pic info: If I had owned a Bank of Penang… this Maybank building would be MINE!!! And you guys would open accounts with me right?

Of course, there will be the general skills that I would be able to take with me like working in a team or organising time to meet deadlines.

But who says that an entrepreneur that starts fresh won’t be able to gain these skills?

Being the one to run the show, an entrepreneur would probably be forced to learn/gain all of these skills and more.

For example, an entrepreneur would also learn how to manage his cashflow, how to take calculated risks and how to react when faced with problems.

With this mindset that was far at odds with the traditional thinking of gaining work experience, I went to talk to one of my father’s friends.

A very successful Malaysian internet entrepreneur that has made millions after millions. He started doing business early in his life too, but not before he gained a few years of work experience as an engineer.

His answer to me was simple but made perfect sense.

“Timothy. Today the world’s economy has changed. During my time, people had to work in order to see opportunities. Today, with the internet coming up and plenty of visible opportunities at bay, you don’t have to work to see the opportunity. All you have to do is turn on your computer. So if you have an idea that you believe in. Go for it.”

What he said made perfect sense to me: That the world today has changed but so many people are not adapting to it hence the old belief that it is a MUST to first gain work experience.

Decades ago you would never hear of self-made billionaires that made became billionaires by the time they reached their thirties, but today it’s becoming increasingly common starting from Michael Dell of Dell Computers

and now on to people like Sergey Brin of Google Inc.

The world has changed in almost every way. Even in financing your business.

Many years ago if you wanted to do a business, you either put in your own money or borrow money from the bank.

(The latter can be very distructive especially if you’re doing a dotcom since you’ll have to be servicing bank interest when you probably won’t be generating any revenue or making any profit for the first few years.)

What has changed today is that there are venture capitalists. People who’re willing to invest in your company for just an equity stake.

There are also government grants and government support for dotcom companies down in the Multimedia Super Corridor.

Having no money to start a business has become less of an excuse now for the complacent.

How hard is it to get venture capitalists to invest in you?

Well, a few weeks ago, my little dotcom was unsuspectingly approached by a wealthy businessman looking to obtain an equity stake upon hearing of our business idea.

If an inexperienced and naive 22 year old boy (with nothing but an idea) could do get the door open… why can’t everyone else?

Now if you managed to read this far in this blog post, the next question you should ask is

“So what’s wrong with working for a few years first before I even attempt to start a business?”

That will be a question I will answer some time in the future.

PS: Of course, in life there is no one way to get to a certain place. So I’m not asking everyone to forget working and go straight into business. This is just what I’m doing… and something I may regret later in life if things don’t work out…

Upon hearing that I’ve gone off to venture on something of my own, people often ask me
“Don’t you want to gain some work experience first? Now you’re still too young!“

When I people ask me this, I often reply by saying
“I know… I may be making the biggest mistake of my life”.

Yet, deep inside I have an answer to that question that I don’t reveal often enough. But since all of you who are still reading my blog (which has turned from humour to boring stuff) are either my friends or my most loyal readers, let me share the answer with you.

A word of caution before we go on. My views and my philosophy of life tend to be very radical. So feel free to be critical. I love criticism, especially constructive ones because they make me think. But please don’t take it too seriously.

I am after all a naive little boy who is probably misinformed into having the following views of life and career.


Now let me start by saying that I have the bad habit of questioning everything people tell me.

So naturally, when people tell me that I should gain some work experience first before starting on a business, I asked WHY.

When you work you gain 3 main skill sets.

1) You gain experience on how to work and deal with people.

2) You gain insight of how specific industries work.

3) You learn from people above you.

Yet, I will always remember what Richard Branson (Virgin Group) often advocates: Entrepreneurs are made in their early life and not in their thirties.

I look at my life now more like a ticking clock. I start thinking that ok, now that I’ve graduated and got myself the minimum of academic papers (a degree), I have till I’m 40 (18 years from now) to make sure that I am fairly wealthy by then.

If I am not ‘fairly’ rich by the time I’m 40, it will probably be far too late for me to be very rich in my lifetime (still possible… but unlikely).

Take for example Phillip Green, the retail mogul in the UK that owns Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and everything else under the shopping sun in the UK.

By the time he was 40, he wasn’t a multi-billionaire like he is today. He had wealth in the hundreds of millions of pounds but it was with this that he was able to jump to being a billionaire.

But the question remains… is it wrong to spend time working to gain work experience?

In my opinion, the answer is “It depends”.

And “It depends” on one thing.

What kind of work experience?

Today, if I decided to spend 3 years working as a cashier at McDs or as a receptionist at a cyber cafe, it’s still work experience. But is it useful work experience and would whatever I learn there help me much when I start a business.

Let me give you an example.

When considering whether to take up a job at an investment bank in KL, I started thinking about where I would be 5 years later.

The conclusion I came to was that in 5 years, I would probably be earning a 5-figure salary and would probably know plenty about stocks. Since I would be in finance, I would also probably learn a bit about some of the successful companies listed on the stock exchange.

So I might learn a thing or two about a company that makes rubber gloves.

I might learn how their business works, how their products sell and how they earn money.

So is that enough for me to start a successful glove manufacturing business like Datuk Lim Wee Chai of Topglove did?

The answer is probably NOT.

Sure, I would learn the things on the surface but you don’t have to spend years working in an investment bank to learn that.

All you have to do is buy a share of the company, pick up its Annual Report and go for its AGM.

Then ask plenty of questions.

Any man on the street could gain that knowledge.

What the man on the street won’t be able to learn are the more crucial things like

What exactly goes into the rubber that makes the gloves?

or

How does the chemical composition of each glove differ from the composition of its competitors and why is it better?

or

How do they keep their quality control on each pair of glove?

The man on the street would probably tell you

“Blow it up with your nose and see how much you can do that for before it pops”

The only way to really learn things like that would be to work in the industry.

Therefore, I decided that if I was going to work in an investment bank, unless I planned to start a Merchant Bank of Penang (which is highly unlikely), everything that I learned on the job wouldn’t exactly help me too much in any business I might pursue in future.

Sure, I would be highly paid at first.. but would I be a very rich man 20 years from now?

Pic info: If I had owned a Bank of Penang… this Maybank building would be MINE!!! And you guys would open accounts with me right?

Of course, there will be the general skills that I would be able to take with me like working in a team or organising time to meet deadlines.

But who says that an entrepreneur that starts fresh won’t be able to gain these skills?

Being the one to run the show, an entrepreneur would probably be forced to learn/gain all of these skills and more.

For example, an entrepreneur would also learn how to manage his cashflow, how to take calculated risks and how to react when faced with problems.

With this mindset that was far at odds with the traditional thinking of gaining work experience, I went to talk to one of my father’s friends.

A very successful Malaysian internet entrepreneur that has made millions after millions. He started doing business early in his life too, but not before he gained a few years of work experience as an engineer.

His answer to me was simple but made perfect sense.

“Timothy. Today the world’s economy has changed. During my time, people had to work in order to see opportunities. Today, with the internet coming up and plenty of visible opportunities at bay, you don’t have to work to see the opportunity. All you have to do is turn on your computer. So if you have an idea that you believe in. Go for it.”

What he said made perfect sense to me: That the world today has changed but so many people are not adapting to it hence the old belief that it is a MUST to first gain work experience.

Decades ago you would never hear of self-made billionaires that made became billionaires by the time they reached their thirties, but today it’s becoming increasingly common starting from Michael Dell of Dell Computers

and now on to people like Sergey Brin of Google Inc.

The world has changed in almost every way. Even in financing your business.

Many years ago if you wanted to do a business, you either put in your own money or borrow money from the bank.

(The latter can be very distructive especially if you’re doing a dotcom since you’ll have to be servicing bank interest when you probably won’t be generating any revenue or making any profit for the first few years.)

What has changed today is that there are venture capitalists. People who’re willing to invest in your company for just an equity stake.

There are also government grants and government support for dotcom companies down in the Multimedia Super Corridor.

Having no money to start a business has become less of an excuse now for the complacent.

How hard is it to get venture capitalists to invest in you?

Well, a few weeks ago, my little dotcom was unsuspectingly approached by a wealthy businessman looking to obtain an equity stake upon hearing of our business idea.

If an inexperienced and naive 22 year old boy (with nothing but an idea) could do get the door open… why can’t everyone else?

Now if you managed to read this far in this blog post, the next question you should ask is

“So what’s wrong with working for a few years first before I even attempt to start a business?”

That will be a question I will answer some time in the future.

PS: Of course, in life there is no one way to get to a certain place. So I’m not asking everyone to forget working and go straight into business. This is just what I’m doing… and something I may regret later in life if things don’t work out…

Ack.. women…

Who needs these beautiful creatures that make us fly to heaven and back distract us from our everyday chore of being a MAN!

They say you just can’t live with women, but you can’t live without them either.

So every once in a while, a man has got to get away from his woman to spend some quality time on his own with other men.

And where else better to go than PC FAIR at PISA, PENANG!!!!

(Of course if you really want to go somewhere full of men, you could always go to prison. But let’s be good and respectable citizens and keep that out of minds ok?)

That’s right.

Last Saturday all the men in Penang were rushing to PISA causing a massive traffic jam in the area.

The PC Fair wasn’t too bad. Not everything there was as cheap as you’d imagine and it wasn’t really as huge as you would think.

But the amazing thing about it is the experience of… what a friend of mine calls, a “sausage fest” ie a place full of men.

But don’t take my word for it… check it out yourself
‘SAUSAGES’… and more ‘SAUSAGES’…

ALL KINDS OF ‘SAUSAGES’
IN ALL KINDS OF SIZES…..

Yet, it was a little weird.

It was supposed to be a PC Fair so you would imagine the ‘sausages’ there would be wanting to buy.. PCs right?

But no… all the sausages decided that the thing to buy for the year was.. PRINTERS!!!

And not just any printer.. CANON PRINTERS!!!

‘Sausages’ *hugz* Canon Printers.

But Canon was prepared.

They stocked up tons of printers. It was a warzone.

‘Sausages’ vs ‘Sausages’, everyone was pushing their printers over to the cashiers to buy it.

But on some fronts, it was very encouraging to see ‘sausages’ helping other ‘sausages’ push the printers over to the front.

WOOHOOO!!! ‘SAUSAGES’ UNITED!!!

It was almost as if every ‘sausage’ had to own a Canon.

My guess is even the big VIP ‘sausage’ that opened the event bought one himself

Feeling the peer pressure, my friends and I decided that we had to have one as well, eventhough we didn’t have enough money to buy one each.

So the 3 of us sausages shared one.

So uhmm… yeah….. we now have a printer that none of us really know what to do with.

Anyone want a printer bought by 3 sausages?

The dotcom company that Ming and I have been working on will cover the Singaporean internet market (though we have an office here in Penang to develop our product).

So naturally we planned to incorporate a Pte Ltd company in Singapore but before we could do that, I had to apply for an Entrepass (Entrepreneur’s Pass) which kinda acts like a work permit for me to be in Singapore to work on the business.

The Entrepass application is not like the standard application form you would imagine.

It had to include our business plan, my entire background, work experience and even the academic grades I achieved at university.

I was a little worried that my application may not go through since I would guess that I was among the youngest and the least experienced to apply.

Sure, I may have worked briefly for some foreign investment banks and I may have done a little internet venture that received modest media attention but that’s nothing compared to what an outstanding entrepreneur 10 years my senior would have strapped under his belt (someone like Irfan Khari).
Not to mention, the application included our business plan and needless to say, a rejection could also mean 3 things

1) Our business plan was not good enough (We didn’t do enough homework).

2) Our business idea sucked.

or

3) The government didn’t believe that Ming and I were good enough to pull it off.

We’ve been waiting for weeks for the answer.

This morning Ming called me up from Singapore.

“I have bad news… your Entrepass application was rejected“.

Ming and I have always tried to remind each other to work under the assumption that NOTHING EVER GOES AS PLANNED.

We had previously briefly discussed a backup plan should my application be discussed but right at that moment, the only words I could utter was

“So how…?”

Ming was quick to answer.

“So HOW?!? It was approved lar!!! That means we’ll be incorporating the Singaporean company soon… WOOHOO!!!”

It occured to me at that point in time to say to Ming
“Leh mah don’t go and play this prank on me lar c*bai”

But I was so relieved I couldn’t get myself to scold Ming.

So there you have it everyone.

Our first little victory after all this time.

This was the first time in this business that something once went as planned.

So thank you Singapore.
Thank you for giving Ming and I a chance to prove our worth.

My partner Ming and I are very different people.

Let me give you an example of how.

Before we started this business we spent a long time doing the necessary research. We spent time writing up a business plan, collecting market data and talking to the right people about it.

Yet, having worked in an investment bank twice in my life, I insisted that we build a financial model to predict the profitability of the business in the future.

So, with the help of Boss Lepton, I worked out a financial model on Excel.
As time passed, I tried perfecting the model by adding more variables to it to derive better predictions until there finally came a time where Ming said

“Listen… F*CK the model ok? They’re all assumptions at the end of the day and few things in our business is going to work out the way we assumed it would be“.

Ming was right.
The saying goes that the less educated you are the better an entrepreneur you would be and it comes from precisely this reason.

The more educated tend to over-analyze and when you over analyze any business, it will never turn out to be profitable enough for you.

Now, without Ming what I would’ve done (or at least try doing) was to build a kick ass state-of-the-art financial model that could predict how much our earnings would change even if the cute girl down the street decided to buy herself a new pair of shoes instead of our product.
What Ming would probably have done without me was… to not build a model.

But together, we had the best of both worlds and left the worst behind.

Our personalities complement each other but of course, they sometimes also clash.

Just yesterday we had our first significant argument.

It all started with a tiny mistake that Ming made in his work.

For me, it wasn’t so much the tiny mistake he made in his work.

I just expected Ming to take responsibility for his mistake and move on because I had always believed that if you never took responsibility for your mistake, you’ll never learn from it. But Ming on the other hand had another good point.

He expected me as a partner to not rat on about this mistake and just take the required measures to move on; something I had better learn to do in future when we make more mistakes and when the mistakes get bigger.

Both were reasonable expectations.

But you can imagine how they ran into each other.

Yet, the weird part about the argument was not the argument itself but rather the way we felt after the argument. Shortly after the argument when things were getting very emotional, Ming had the wisdom to say
“Ok look, I need some time to cool down… call me back in an hour“.

In the time between hanging up the phone and calling him back I had a very weird feeling.

One of my girl friends used to tell me that I am always very nice to my friends and people I know in every way that I can be but when people upset me, I can be unreasonably forgiving and write them off my life.

Suddenly, whichever friend that upsets me would become no more than a casual “Hi Bye” friend to me and to be honest, I often did it subconsciously so it never affected me.

The only exception for this is of course… when I have fights with my girlfriend (which I seldom do) Pic info: My baby, the only person in the world I would never shout at

and now.. this…

Ming was the first to mention it when I called him 3 hours later
“F*CK MAN, Do you know you’re like my girlfriend now?

After I argued with you I felt very affected by it”.

and then it hit me that I felt the same.

My mind was affected by the argument so much that I could barely concentrate on my work.

Instead, I kept thinking about what to say to him next and how I should apologize since I knew the way I talked to him before was wrong.

We kissed and made up in the end (not literally of course).

So there you have it everyone.

Meet my new girlfriend. His name is Ming.

He can be very bossy. But he’s worth it.