So let me tell you what Shorty and I have been up to lately. We’ve been busy making ice-cream.
See the story goes that two of my friends Adrian and Eddie gave us an ice-cream maker as a wedding gift a few months ago. We’ve never had the chance to use it until well… in the midst of some soul-searching I suddenly developed the interest to try it out. You see in Thailand there’s a type of ice-cream I really like. It’s called Umm Milk and it’s a milk flavoured ice-cream that tastes like you’re eating Dutch lady milk powder (in a good way).
But I’ve never seen this milk flavored ice-cream anywhere else in KL. In fact I don’t see many options for ice-cream in KL apart from Haagen and Baskin. Baskin of course being the one with the most variety of flavours and my favourite of the two. There’s a lot of Frozen Yoghurt stores in KL now but I don’t really like Froyo. I heard too that it’s not as healthy as people make it out to be and I believe that if you wanna have ice-cream, go all the way or don’t do it at all.
So one day I decided that we should do it. The machine came with a recipe booklet and we also Googled for some other recipes and tried our hand at making ice-cream. The first one we ever made was Nutella ice-cream.
It was horrible. I don’t want to show the picture here because I’m pretty ashamed of it. Haha. But today I made my milk flavoured ice-cream and it’s YUMMY! Not as good as Umm Milk yet but I think we’re on the right track. Just have to do a bit of trial and error.
The thing I love about ice-cream is that it’s such a happy thing. Can you ever imagine anyone holding an ice-cream cone looking angry? When we make ice-cream, I feel as if we’re making happiness in a bowl. To then pass it on. Maybe one day Shorty and I will start a small ice-cream store that sells this happiness. It’s probably really hard to make money as a business but hey as long as it doesn’t lose us money… why not sell a bit of happiness?
Now we’re looking for more flavours to try out. What’s your favourite ice-cream flavour that you can’t seem to get in KL?
Girls have loads of accessories to play with. Close to half the time my wife spends in Forever 21 is in the accessories department. There she browses everything from ear ring to bangles to well little iPhone accessories even like this.
This isn’t the case for us guys though. We don’t wear ear rings or little bangles. If we do wear something on our wrist it’s normally a little string or a wrist band. And I am yet to see a single guy that put a pink bow tie accessory on his iPhone’s antenna dock. It’s just not cool.
Sure I look around my body and I wear a 16 year old choker that looks like this.
A choker I have been wearing for the past ten years. So long that the string around it seems to be giving way but I wear it not because its cool. But because its my lucky choker.
When I recently told Shorty about it she kinda laughed. She said you don’t know for sure if its lucky right ? Well… Let me tell you the story.
I was 12 when my brother gave me this gemini choker. But I never wore it. I kept it in a drawer and forgot all about it. The next time I saw the choker again was when I was 19 years old. It was a tough time for me. I was in college and I had just broken up with my first girlfriend. I was the biggest loser for a while after that. You know one of those mopey guys you see on TV that can’t get over their ex.
One day though my friends decided they had enough. They came over to my house and dragged me out clubbing. This friend of mine Chi Ying did what any girl friends did for the guy friends. She picked the right shirt and pants for me to wear (those were the days I used to wear khakis, oh the horror). When she was done with me she then said something was missing. I needed to accessorize.
So she trawled through my drawers and found this neglected choker of mine. She took it out and with the help of another friend Muffy she tied it up for me. Once I had it on she stood back to look and me from top to toe and nodded in satisfaction. I was ready.
When I went out that night I didn’t get laid or anything but I remember having a lot of fun (you may also interchange the word “fun” with “alcohol” in this sentence and both statements will still prove true). I however had so much trouble taking the choker off at the end of the night that I just left it on. Days became weeks and weeks became months to years. Years passed as I continued to wear my lucky choker and I started to get a lot of good luck.
Think about it. 10 years since I put on this choker I found myself with this wonderful company we started called Nuffnang and ChurpChurp. I enjoy what I do, I travel the world for work and I got married to Shorty.
So that is why this is my lucky choker and why I have always had it on.
Coming back to accessories for guys, there is one other thing that guys wear. That’s watches.
Girls have their designer handbags, guys have watches. We’ve always loved our watched since growing up. I remember when I got my first Casio when I was 12. It was a watch with a tiny calculator keypad. Those days just the thought of you having a calculator on your watch made you go “FUUYOOHH I AM THE MAN”.
Then secondary school came and G-shock and Baby-Gs became the status symbol or the in thing.
I begged my Dad for a G-Shock every day and he eventually ended up buying me two during the entire span of my teenage years.
At university though I noticed things changed. Electronic watches started becoming a little childish and my friends started wearing Tag Heuer and the likes. Watches that I couldn’t afford.
Now in my late twenties, as I end up hanging out with people older than me their watches too get more expensive. I start seeing Rolex, Panerais, Hublot… Watches that cost a lot of money.
As for me, I have only to date bought myself one luxury watch. That was three years after Ming and I started Nuffnang and I had a little bit of savings. I remember taking a long time to think about it because it costs RM6k which is a lot of money. Ming said that I should. As a reward for working so hard. So I got myself this Tag Heuer.
Since then I’ve been lucky to have been gifted some really nice watches. Ming gave me this for my birthday years ago.
And Shorty’s parents gave me this Bell & Ross as a wedding gift when we got married.
My parents too gave me a really nice watch but it’s one of my fathers old watches that I can never sell and must keep safe for the rest of my life.
It’s nice wearing nice watches and I realize that guys do notice the other watches other guys wear. But I always fear losing them. So now I’m wearing a watch Ming just bought me.
It’s a G-Shock and brings me back to my childhood memories. I love G-Shocks.
They were awesome to me then, and they’re awesome to me now.
Oh there is one other accessory I wear now apart from watches.
And Shorty’s latest accessory is a pink neck pillow.
Ming is in London now and he sent me this page of a newspaper that had a small mention of NuffnangX in a column.
This means loads to us because the US and UK markets are really important markets for NuffnangX. Still a lot more work to do. Going to be flying off to the US again soon. Dreading the 18 hour long flight but looking forward to everything else.
I know I don’t really look it but I played a lot of sports growing up. It’s something my parents had always encouraged me to do and that’s the wonderful thing about school too. PE lessons give you the opportunity to learn all sorts of different sports. One of the things I enjoy the most has got to be the 200 meter dash. I can’t even remember when was the last time that I actually ran as fast as I could on a track or a field. Somehow as you get older you tend to get more afraid of falling down and getting hurt. So even when you’re in a hurry now, yeah you run but you never really run all out like you used to as a kid.
Anyway in school I played everything from football to volleyball to even this thing we used to play called “Captain Ball”. But the one sport I’m good at is table tennis.
At a young age my Dad made sure I had table tennis coaching. Why? Because table tennis is like a Tiah family sport. My grandfather played it, my Dad plays it and now my whole family plays it. So my sister and I will train 3-4 times a week. Training table tennis is different from playing table tennis. Training is like you hit one same stroke over and over again for like an hour until you get it right.
It paid off though. In school I became the Captain of the school team and I won many little trophies like this.
The first time my name ever appeared on a newspaper was on this Chinese newspaper that announced both me and my sister’s name for winning Gold medals in our Kelawai Zone MSSPP Tournament. When we went to state level though we got our asses kicked.
That never stopped my Dad from making sure I got trained though. Even when I studied in London I played for my university and during my summer vacation my Dad would get the Malaysia No1 player to train me for a month straight.
Funny enough though, even though I’m pretty good at table tennis, it’s not the sport I enjoy the most. I enjoy playing badminton the most (even though I’m not very good in it). I like it much more than table tennis because it’s a lot more simple. In table tennis you have to evaluate each serve your opponent gives or each ball he returns for the amount of spin and the direction the ball is spinning. In badminton though, you just have to make sure you get to the shuttlecock in time and hit it. So I find table tennis a lot more stressful and badminton a lot more leisurely. I have no doubt of course that it’s really hard to play good badminton like Lee Chong Wei but well just for leisure play, I find badminton easier to pick up.
Recently though I managed to sprain my wrist. So I had to stop playing badminton for a while (and even table tennis). The only sport I could then play is something that my friends like Pierre and Sam Tan (follow them on Twitter btw @pierrepang and @samCS10) Â have been asking me to play for the longest longest time. It’s called…. Golf and here is Pierre taking a swing.
Yes Yes I know. I like many others before me, always wondered why golf was considered a sport. But it is and now that I’m taking golf lessons I can kinda see why. You certainly don’t get any of that cardio exercise but it takes a lot of body movement. Surprisingly, I actually find it really fun. Pretty addictive when you get the swing right.
The friends I have who play golf though are extremely passionate about it. So passionate that they’re very persistent in getting me to pick it up. I always said “Ok ok one day one day”… but before that one day came, Pierre got impatient and dragged me to a Golf Pro shop and forced me to buy some clubs. He knew that if I had to spend money on clubs then I was committed and had to play. He was of course nice enough to give me his old irons so I saved some money from that.
Sam wasn’t any better influence. He once sent me an SMS and asked me to commit to golf by buying a golf club membership. Something I probably have to sell a kidney or something before I could afford it.
So golf is the newest game I’m playing. It’s really pretty fun even though I haven’t taken enough lessons to play on the course yet. All I’m doing so far is just practising swings at the driving range and even then it’s fun. I can’t wait for my first golf game. Pierre promises that I will love golf. So far he seems right… but we’re about to see for sure 🙂
If you notice, I hardly blog about my father. It’s not because my father doesn’t play a big part in my life. Quite the opposite really. He plays a very very huge part in my life growing up and even up till today. The thing is that my father is a VERY private person. He accepts that I blog and reveal things about myself sometimes but he made me promise never to put his picture on my blog.
So my Dad has always received very little coverage. But today I’m going to talk about him a little bit. My Dad came from a fairly poor family. He spent many of his years building a career trying to provide for my brothers and sisters and he did a fantastic job at that. He’s traditional in many senses. So much that every Chinese New Year I would have to kneel down and serve tea for him as his son. Something that I enjoy actually.
As traditional and old fashioned he is, my Dad keeps up with technology. He’s on Facebook, uses an iPhone and uses all sorts of apps regularly. Most of it he learned on his own. So his birthday is coming up this week and my brothers and sister and I thought that it might be a good idea to buy him a new phone. We were at first thinking about an iPhone 5 but when I asked my Dad about it he said that he wanted a Samsung Galaxy S3 instead. That kinda worried me a little. Because as much as I am a fan of the S3, I acknowledge that the iPhone is a simpler phone to use. But my Dad’s reasoning for not wanting the iPhone: “What for? It’s the same as my current phone just a bit longer?”.
I guess my Dad is one person unaffected by the iPhone 5 hype and his point was pretty objective. So we got him as S3 and I helped him set it up and showed him the features. After I gave him the introduction on what the S3 can do he said “Wow… really powerful ah this phone”. Then he told me that he already has had lots to absorb and wanted to take an afternoon nap.
An hour later he came to me and said “Tiam (he calls me Tiam)! Help ! I’ve suddenly added everyone on my contact list on Facebook!”.
I realized that when I set up his phone I actually opted to sync his contact list with his Facebook account. So he added every contact on his phone as his Facebook friend. He had everyone from friends he hadn’t seen for years, the plumber, the gardener, Â my uncle’s driver or even Polis Diraja Malaysia.
Today my really private Dad unknowingly sent out hundreds of Facebook friend requests. He had people responding to him all day saying “WOW LONG TIME NO C!”.
Today my Dad became the friendliest person on Facebook.
In the beginning of the year, I sat down with the ChurpChurp team here in Malaysia and talked about what ChurpChurp was going to do this year. Our initiatives in the previous years were to marketing campaigns to sign up more users in ChurpChurp. This year though we felt we had enough users and we wanted to do something different. So the idea for #ChurpOut2012 came about. We thought.. why don’t we have this huge festival thing  where social media users from all over Malaysia could come and have fun while also supporting some charities. All I gave was the general direction. The ChurpChurp team did the rest.
They put together an entire event where in the indoor section, we had a bazaar and artists that would draw your caricature . On the outside, fun-fair kind of games that we used to see as kids and of course performance. The date was 13th of October 2012, and it was held at Publika.
The following are pictures I took of the event.
We had many performances throughout the day. Everything from the Malaysian Ukulele Club to Manhand.
One of my favourite performances then was from a band called Half Past 6. Managed to take a video of them here.
The ChurpChurp team or Churpies as we call them worked throughout the entire week. Spending many many late nights too. The night before #ChurpOut2012 the bunch of them stayed till 6AM to prepare for the event and came back again at 9AM to manage the event. For an event that was expecting thousands of people, they knew they needed help so the Nuffies all volunteered to work on Saturdays.
They all took turns to manage game booths, do registration, pack goodie bangs and stuff like that.
I paid a visit to this booth where Angeline our accountant was helping with giving out prizes to the people who won points from the fun fair games they played. Mimi and Rina joined the picture too.
These are the kind of fun fair games that we had.
We had everything from this one where you had to throw rings on some bottles.
to my favourite rodeo.
XPAX was one of the sponsors and they had a booth there that was constantly packed with people. At their booth you could dunk celebrities or anyone who was nominated to be dunked into a big tub of water and ping pong balls.
The people who got dunked would get all wet but they could pick up the ping pong balls which could potentially win them some prizes. Things from a LED TV to a Samsung Galaxy S3. So naturally… lots of people wanted to get dunked… and even more wanted to dunk them.
Also in the XPAX booth was a competition where people could paint their own toy Mini Coopers and the one with the nicest paint job would win a prize.
Here were some of the ones I saw.
Or this cute one.
I managed to catch a picture with Linora who was the host for the day. She was awesome!
In the indoor section of #ChurpOut2012 there was a bazaar.
Shorty and Ringo had a booth where they sold Foruchizu stuff and some of their pre-loved stuff too.
This was how packed their booth was.
There were some other top Nuffnang bloggers there were selling their pre-loved stuff there too. Chuckei had a store.
And Hanis who is now a host of her own TV Show Mad Markets. Catch if on TV if you can!
By the end of the day, they had all sold loads of stuff and Shorty had almost nothing left to sell.
Halfway through the bazaar the Malaysian Ukulele Club set themselves up at a corner and started playing away. Their music is so fun and so damn cute. Makes me want to learn to play the ukuleleif… if only I had some musical talent at all.
At the bazaar Delectable had a store too and I saw them selling this… which I bought instantly.
It’s so cute so I bought it for Ming. But he couldn’t get himself to eat it… because that would be like eating ChurpChurp.
So that everyone is a snippet of what #ChurpOut2012 was like. The real heroes though are the Nuffies and the Churpies who put this really cool event together. It is today my favourite event that we ever put together in the 5 years we started. While it was one of the most fun events we ever had it was also one of the most taxing on our team. So tomorrow the Churpies won’t be coming to work. Instead, we sent the bunch of Churpies on a girl’s day out (since it so happens that the entire ChurpChurp team is female).
On their girls’ day out they will be going for a spa, massage, pedicure, manicure and get their hair washed. All fully paid by the company. We want them to get rested. So tomorrow is a day off for the girls at ChurpChurp… and I hope they have fun because they’ve earned themselves a good rest for the work they put in the past few weeks, not just for #ChurpOut2012 but for everything else too.
One last thing. #ChurpOut2012 wouldn’t have happened if not for our partners. To XPAX, BCARD, Durex, Mister Potato and all the rest, thank you for making this wonderful event possible.
If you guys missed out on this… we might do another one again next year (if the Churpie girls are up for it).. so see you guys then.
So I’ve been in Singapore for the past few days attending a couple of conferences. One of them being Failcon: a conference that got entrepreneurs and VCs alike to come talk about their experiences with failures. I thought that was a really cool idea.
Today was spent at our law firm here in Singapore for some meetings and tomorrow will be spent at another conference.
I’ve been meaning to blog about #ChurpOut2012 but I haven’t had the chance to yet. While surfing YouTube though I happened to stumble upon a video from our wedding that I totally forgot to share. It’s one of those video slideshows in most weddings where they show the bride and groom’s baby pictures then all the way till dating… you know that right?
We had that too. Yay! There were many things that we didn’t have in our wedding that I kinda wished we had (like the 3 times yam seng) but oh well… at least we got this.
Our montage was done by Chee Ching. So what do you think? (apart from Shorty being a very cute baby).
One of the most flattering things I have ever heard anyone say to me is “you inspire me”. What can anyone say about you that could put you in a higher regard than the fact that you inspire that person. It is an honour to be an inspiration to people. So let me tell you who inspires me. My partner does, my father, some friends of mine, some successful entrepreneurs like Richard Branson of course… but among all, the people who inspire me most sometimes is the Nuffies.
There is an old saying that goes “If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself”. I don’t necessarily agree with that. You see Ming and I made a decision years ago that we wanted to build a company that didn’t revolve around us. A company that would actually make Ming and I replaceable rather than irreplaceable. That’s why whenever we have media interviews these days, as much as I can I encourage our Nuffies to speak to represent the company, rather than have Ming or I doing it.
So if one day Ming and I disappeared, the company will continue to grow and be stronger.
I struggled with it at first. I struggled with having to let go of things for fear of something screwing up and I struggled to trust people wholeheartedly with every major task. So much that I frustrated our Country Manager Nic Chay who years ago who was meant to run things without me. I kept interfering, trying to make sure things were okay and trying to prevent mistakes. Then one day Ming told me that I need to let go completely and when Nic Chay and his team makes mistakes we just have to deal with it because we all make mistakes.
So I did. And since then our company has grown year after year without Ming and I having to be involved much. Yes we made mistakes. Many mistakes along the way but we worked together to overcome those mistakes. Eventually our company became about building strong teams of people within the company that could work independently and perform well. Sure sometimes those teams make mistakes too and has their moments of underperformance… but overall they exhibit excellence.
The wonderful thing about our company today is that these strong teams of Nuffies in our company sometimes come out with results far better than Ming and I or anyone else we know could have come up with individually. When they do, they inspire me and they remind me how great our company is. A kind of greatness not measured by our revenues or profits or the number of employees we have… but by the work they do and where we will eventually get to with that work.
This week I was inspired twice by our Nuffies:
1) The NuffnangX Video
A week before I asked a small team of Nuffies if they could come up with a video that explained NuffnangX. The video had to be short, had to seem more American than Asian (since we’re targeting the US market) and it had to explain NuffnangX very well in those 90 seconds or so. The small team of people worked on everything from the script to the storyboard and eventually the animation all in a week’s work. They came back to me only for some feedback here and there and eventually this is the video they made all by themselves.
What do you think of it?
I’ll tell you what I think. I love it!
2) ChurpOut
Today I attended Churpout 2012, an event organized by a separate team of Nuffies. Actually they’re sometimes referred to as the Churpies since they’re from the ChurpChurp part of our group.I will blog about that event in the next entry but all I can say is… WOW… I sincerely couldn’t have done it better myself.
Our company will go through good times and bad times… but with a strong team of Nuffies like what we have today (and with God’s will)… we will stand the test of time.
My colleagues inspire me. And that is what keeps me going.
The team at ChurpChurp have been working late nights the whole of this week in preparation for a huge event they have coming up this weekend. The story behind this is that many months ago, we decided that ChurpChurp should be more about sharing campaigns to earn money or sharing funny things with friends. We wanted it to be a place for everyone who’s connected to social media to get together.
So plans for Churpout were put in place and the team at ChurpChurp put together a full day of performances, carnival-like games and even a Bazaar.
Loads of celebrities and Alphas are going to be there. From Daphne Iking, Sazzy Falak, Patricia K, ManHanD, DJ Fuzz, JinnyBoy TV and loads of top bloggers too.
It’s going to be at Publika this Saturday at 11AM-10PM. That’s 3 days from now. So if you’re looking something to do this weekend, drop by! Admission is free and open to everyone regardless of whether you’re a ChurpChurp user or not.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space