For the past few months, Ming has been thinking hard about what kind of wedding gift to buy me and Shorty. I told him to get me a blender or something but he took that as an insult. He said as my business partner he wanted to give me something more meaningful. So one day he had the idea to buy Shorty and me a piece of art. Our first piece of art at least.

He knew that Shorty and I are into an artist called Coplu. So he got the gallery to send us a catalog and got us to pick one. In the end we both fell in love with one of the pieces and chose it. Yesterday it got delivered to our apartment.

This is Shorty admiring it.

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This piece is called “Almost there”. It’s portrays the husband and wife working together (the husband rowing and the wife reaching for the ladder) to get to a goal. How I interpreted it on a personal level was that Shorty and I are about to start our married lives. We are about to face lots of struggles or married life or the rest of our lives together and this painting is a reminder to us that as hard as we try… push a little bit more. Because we’re “Almost there”.

I have never really learned to appreciate art. But this is one piece… that I can relate to. And thanks to Ming…. we have it.

So a few weeks ago I posted that this was a picture of me and Shorty’s wedding invitation card.

It was going to be an UP-Themed wedding hence the balloons and all. We were happy and we were all settled with the design. Then somebody actually pointed out something. That is actually looked more like a birthday invitation card than a wedding invitation card.

So Shorty went back to the drawing board with our designer Chee Ching. Shorty… being as creative as she always is came up with the idea that maybe our invitation card should be in the form of a plane ticket or a boarding pass. Since UP is about adventure and you know, getting married to each other is like embarking on a whole new adventure for us.

The idea was that the boarding pass would be placed inside a typical old-school “Air Mail” envelope that looked like this.

And inside… the boarding passes (invites) to our wedding.

Below is how our wedding invitation card looks like now:

This is the front.

and this is the back.

I gotta say that I’m really proud of Shorty so far when it comes to the wedding preparations. When she asked me what our budget was for the wedding, I gave her a figure that I thought was generous. While one might expect her to spare no expense considering that we only get married once, she actually has been really prudent. Shorty never looked at that figure as a target but actually tried to save in whatever areas that she could but still putting together a beautiful wedding.

This card is a perfect example of that. When we looked at wedding card vendors outside they typically cost something like RM5 per card. She made our wedding invitation card for less than one third of the price at RM1.50 each. And it’s perfect for us.

I think it means a lot to have a beautiful wedding and to be willing to spend on that beautiful occasion. What I have learned to appreciate even more is the opportunity to watch how my future wife spends my money at our wedding. For it gives me an indication on how she will likely spend wisely in the rest of our lives.

Did any of you guys manage to catch this article on Rage that came out on Friday?

They interviewed some entrepreneurs in Malaysia including the guy who brought in the Cha Time franchise into Malaysia. In which Shorty just realized was actually her college mate or something.

Anyway here’s the short interview they did with me 🙂

The photo of me here actually came from our wedding photo shoot. I was too lazy to actually take a proper studio profile picture of myself so I got them to do one at the wedding shoot .

Have a good Sunday everyone!

Two weeks ago I told my Dad that I was going to subscribe to the Facebook IPO that’s happening tomorrow. My Dad was very against it. He had his reasons. My Dad is a very seasoned investor that looked at the fundamentals of any company he invests in to determine if they are worth the money at that price. Facebook’s valuation by his measure was CRAZY.

I thought I understood more than him though. That it’s not what Facebook is today but what it will be in the next 2 years that is what people are betting on. Still my Dad didn’t relent. He sent me reports from various investment banks that mark Facebook as a very risky stock to invest in. Of Analyst reports that in all honest truth you don’t really need because every other website/blog out there is talking about Facebook and doing the homework for you on whether it’s worth it.

In the end, I decided to listen to my Dad and sit this one out for now. I won’t be surprised if Facebook’s share price soared in the first day of its IPO, even if institutional investors are saying that it’s not a good buy. Yes there is lots of skepticism out there about it. Whether they will be able to make money from its mobile users, that their growth is slowing, that advertisers find their ads ineffective. All these kind of things about how their growth is slowing and even things about how the Class A shares being sold to public only account for less than 4% of the company’s voting rights.

What I do think though that I think some analysts are missing is that Facebook will potentially be even bigger in future not purely as an advertising business. When I was at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco and watched Mark Zuckerberg talk, he talked about how his vision is to build an economy within Facebook where people could develop apps and run businesses ON Facebook. Just like how Zynga makes loads of money from its Facebook games. Once this economy is there, all they have to do is tax it just like how they “tax” Zynga. If they’re successful in doing that, Facebook will do something even Google hasn’t been able to do yet: To get their core revenue from another source apart from advertising.

Then… Facebook could potentially be worth many times more than its IPO valuation. So while I’m sitting the IPO out, I might look into buying into it in future 🙂

Shorty and I were up by 7AM this past Saturday. I can’t even remember the last time we were up so early on a Saturday. We had a good reason to be up though…. to start a long day of wedding photo shoots. There were going to be 3 locations.

In the morning we would go to a studio to take pictures. In the afternoon to a park in TTDI and at night we ended up at Petaling Street. There are so many things to decide on when doing a pre-wedding shoot. First you have to pick a photographer, then a theme and then where you want to do it.

Well the first thing was easy. We picked One Way Ticket to do our photos, I’ll explain why I picked them in the next entry. The theme… well Shorty came up with that entirely so credit to her.

The last part though was the venue. Lots of my friends go overseas for their pre-wedding shoots to take pictures in beautiful locations all over the world. One thing Shorty and I always wanted to do though was to have our shoot in KL. Why KL?Because it’s the place we met, the place we spent the past 3 years of our lives in and the place where we will start our married life together.

Plus I always believed that a good photographer will always be able to find and bring out the beauty in any location you choose. So we did that.

It was a really tiring day and we took loads of pictures that day. At the end of it I figured that it was something I wouldn’t really wanna do again… but then again it’s something I’m glad I did.

Our official pictures are not out yet though. All these pictures I posted here were taken from my phone camera. When it does come out though, Shorty and I promised that we will look at the pictures together and we will share some of them up here for you guys 🙂

The photos are expected out end of this week so I guess you’ll only hear about that then. So until then… have a great week everyone.

Here’s from Tim and Aurdrey… haha.

You can read more about the behind the scenes of this shoot at Shorty’s blog.

Shorty and I just discovered this version of Christina Perri’s A Thousand Years and it’s beautiful. So beautiful that we’re thinking of using it for our wedding.

We were just talking yesterday when I told Shorty that like it or not, “our song” for the rest of our lives is going to be “A Thousand Years”, the soundtrack for the recent Twilight. The irony is that Shorty and I don’t like Twilight at all. Twilight actually still holds the record for the only movie that we ever walked out of the cinema of halfway through the movie. So much that when we first found out the song in our meme proposal video was from Twilight we were thinking of changing it. But we loved it so much that we decided to keep it.

And now… A Thousand Years will always be the song of Fatty and Shorty.

This week is only halfway through and it’s already been a pretty cool week for me. For the start of it, some of the Nuffies from the Nuffnang Hong Kong and Nuffnang Singapore office were down in KL for training. So I took them for dinner at where all hipsters go.

Publika.

I love getting to know all the Nuffies from all the different countries. They’re all similar in the way that the share the same culture but they’re different based on the different backgrounds they come from.

In this short week so far though I managed to see five pretty cool things. Here are the Top 4.

4) Superman Sticker

I saw this sticker on the back of Wilson from Milkadeal.com’s laptop. I thought it was especially cool when the laptop was turned on and the Apple logo lit up.
It wasn’t as cool though as what I saw on his girlfriend’s laptop which brings me to Number 3.

3) Minions!

This was on the back of Wilson’s girlfriend’s laptop. Her name is Huey Chin. Makes me wanna go… Ba ba ba ba… ba ba na na.

2) Man Utd Chair

If you watch football enough you would probably know what this is.

At Old Trafford, Alex Ferguson and some of the players often sit on this red Audi chair. When visiting Pierre’s house on Sunday she showed me this one that he had. It was signed by all the players in Man Utd.

Cool shit. Nobody dared to sit on it though. Some chairs are not meant for sitting.

1) Wedding Invitation Card

The number 1 cool thing I saw this week has got to be the first print of our wedding invitation card. Shorty and I didn’t want a grand wedding or anything. We wanted to a happy and colourful one so we opted for an UP-themed wedding (from Disney Pixar’s UP).
So we decided that our invitation card had to be along that theme too. So here it is.

And this is the back of it.

What do you guys think? 🙂

I just got back from Manila after spending a whole week there. Most of my time was spent with Ming and the 4 other Nuffies we brought along for the management training program.

We spent our days in the training program and we spent our nights recapping everything we learned and strategizing how to apply it to our company.

Thursday night though was a night we all decided to take off and go find the Nuffies at Nuffnang Philippines. The hotel we were staying was just 5 minutes walk away from our Nuffnang Philippines office at the Fort Bonifacio. So we walked over there.

When we got there it was 7PM and all the Nuffies were all still hard at work.

Someone asked me just a few days before how many Nuffies we had in Nuffnang Philippines. At first I thought it was just 8 but that day I realized there were actually 17 Nuffies already at work there. One thing we all love in our offices all over are snacks. So Nuffnang Philippines had their own home-made vending machine that “dispensed” chips.

It was a joke of course. The chips below can be taken out for free. I don’t even know what happens when you put the money at the top or who collects it. All I could see was that it was written on the “machine” that “Honesty is golden, so honesty system please”.

After hanging out in the office for a while we hauled for dinner. The Filipino Nuffies took us for dinner at a rooftop bar called Skye. It seems almost every city in the world now has a rooftop bar called “Sky” or some variation of that.

Here are some pictures we took that night.

This is Anne. I’ve known Anne for 3 years. She was one of the early account execs that we hired at the company.

and… here’s Elise, Mimi, Jel and me 🙂

Me and Trixie.

Trixie is one of the people I know who seem to love alcohol more than she does water.  Last year when we had our Nuffies Christmas Dinner she got so drunk we had to carry her home and she ended up missing her flight back to Manila the next day.

The Nuffies in Philippines are all a fun bunch and that’s what I kinda love about our company. Everywhere I go I see Nuffies from different backgrounds and different countries that share the same culture.

Everyone in the Philippines seems really optimistic now about their economy and how their country is growing. There is development everywhere and a growing middle class of very well educated people. My favourite part about the Philippines though is the Nuffies we have there 🙂

HELLO MANILA!

Yes I’m back in the Philippines again. This time for a management training course.

Ming and I have been facing new challenges this year. In the past year, our company has grown significantly to some 120 or so staff from our 7 offices in 7 countries. Growing is fun and something we never take for granted. That being said, it comes with its own set of “growing pains”. As a company grows, the entrepreneurs need to put in a strong command & control and reporting structure so we can better maneuver the company to new heights.

It was fun when we were a 20 man startup. But when you have over 100 employees, middle managers and lots of departments in between it’s a challenge to make sure that everyone shares the same culture, vision and is able to work efficiently past the necessary structure we have to put in.

That’s what Ming and I, and 4 other Nuffies are here in the Philippines to do. To learn.

We’re attending a 4 day training session by speakers from the USA on a course that was based from MIT. The other participants here are entrepreneurs from all sorts of different companies in various industries all over the world. One of the guys we met here was the boss of an air-con contractor in Australia that brings in revenues of some RM500 million a year.

That’s huge!

The course was expensive though. Costing us almost RM30K but it’s only the first of many investment Ming and I know we have to make to improve ourselves to better run the company. We’re all working really hard. Our sessions in the morning start at 8AM and last the whole day. After that we have dinner and then our team meets up every night to see how we can apply whatever we learned into our company. So that we don’t forget everything we learn too quick.

So I’ve been really busy. So busy that I just realized I don’t even have any pictures of myself with anyone at the conference. I did manage to grab a few of the event though…. conscious that I was going to blog sooner or later.

In between all these meetings and courses I have to find time to clear all my emails and manage whatever other daily business we have to do so forgive me if my updates have been a bit lacking. I’m with you at heart 🙂

Now I need to finish clearing my emails and then go for our discussion tonight. Have a great 2nd half of the week everyone!

PS: Guess who I met on the plane to Manila. Our Bank Negara governor Zeti. I saw her sitting at the front row when I walked into the plane. I leaned in and said “Hello Governor!” with a shy smile Kinda felt a little starstruck. She nodded and smiled back at me 🙂

Today was Bersih 3.0, the 3rd installment by a coalition campaigning for free and fair elections in Malaysia. Bersih is NOT about political party. It’s not a gathering to promote PR or BN, (In fact MCA Kelana division committee member Lee Hwa Beng was spotted at Bersih 3.0 according to Malaysiakini and it was made clear that no MCA members were barred from attending the protest.)

It’s a protest in an effort to fight for clean and fair elections.

When Bersih 2.0 happened, I was on my Hong Kong business trip.

I remember being glued to Twitter, reading the constant tweets about the event. I felt lousy about myself for not attending it. So this year Shorty and I decided to attend it. When I told my Dad that I was going to go, he called me every day persuading me not to. Not that he didn’t believe in Bersih’s cause, but that he feared for my safety as any father would. He was even going to be down in KL that weekend and I suspected that he was going to stop me from going if I tried walking out of the house. I was torn about going. Fighting between my desire to go and my respect for my father

Last night while attending a dinner meet in Bangkok with my Thai business partners, I decided to go. I called Shorty and told her that I was scheduled to fly back Saturday morning and we can go straight from LCCT after she picked me up. I told her to bring salt and 2 bottles of water for us. I told her though, not to tell anyone else because I didn’t want my father to know and worry.

Then this morning I woke up and went to Bangkok’s airport to take a flight back only. I was excited. All pumped from reading the tweets.

When I reached my departure gate though I realized that the Air Asia plane that was supposed to take me back wasn’t even there. They said the flight was going to be delayed for 2 hours and that drove me crazy. I wouldn’t be able to make it then. I read tweets that said the sit-down protest was supposed to be 2-4PM. So instead of reaching KLIA at 1PM, I would reach at 3PM. If my previous timing was cutting it close, with the 2 hour delay I wasn’t going to make it for sure.

When I touched down at LCCT, I called my friends who were at Bersih and asked if it was too late. They told me that the riot police had just shot tear gas into the crowd and the crowd was dispersing.

I rushed over from LCCT but by the time I had reached the city, I could see the crowd, dressed in yellow walking home. To me, they looked like war heroes who had just fought a fight.

Today I once again let my other fellow Malaysians risk their safety to fight for my rights as a voter. To these Malaysians I say Thank you.

Thank you for fighting for me… and my children. One day, I will fight for you and your children.