Last week I was in Singapore for a few days for our Annual Country Manager Summit. It’s an annual event we have Singapore where all the heads of our offices in the regions will come together, share updates and formulate a strategy to grow the whole company in the next year.

Last year we had representatives from our offices in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Australia and China. This year though we added Hong Kong and Thailand to the list.

This is David Lee and Kingston representing our Australia and Hong Kong side.

And here’s Carlos and David representing Philippines and China.

Carlos is one helluva sweet talker. I took a bus with him from KL to Singapore that morning. At the Singapore immigration check point there was this really pretty immigration officer. I went first, gave her my best smile and tried to convince her that I wasn’t going to run away to Singapore and work as a waiter there. I got my stamp and moved out.

Carlos then went after me. And in that 30-45 seconds that he was there. He not only got a stamp but managed to get her PHONE NUMBER. He eventually called her out that weekend and she came out to meet him. What the hell… I’ve seen guys pick up girls from all sorts of places in all sorts of scenarios but never have I seen anyone pick up a girl over the immigration counter.

So anyway back to the Summit. It opened as usual with an opening speech by Ming.

Telling us how bad he thinks the world economy is going to be next year and how we have to prepare for it and stuff like that.

Then it went on with each Country Manager sharing what their country has managed to achieve in the past year and together everyone taps on each others minds for the plans of the future.

The Summit lasts for 5 days. That’s right.. there is that much to discuss. On one of the nights though we went for a really nice Japanese restaurant for dinner. Ming has a media embargo on the name of this place because he says it’s his little secret and doesn’t want anyone else to know about it. Haha although I’m sure many already do.

Lucky for him I can’t even remember how to get to this place or even what it’s called. But I remember the food being really good. I was sitting next to Jamie.

Jamie works in our Regional Office in Singapore. She’s basically like the hub or the glue that glues all the countries together to make sure that good practices of one country is shared with the rest.

Before I end this post, let me share something with you guys. I saw this version of our Nuffnang logo in the Singapore office when I went down this trip. Guess what it’s made of.

Look closely. No the picture is not pixelated or messed up or anything. That’s how it looks in real life. That my friends…. is the Nuffnang logo made out of lego. Don’t ask me how they did it… but they did. Cool huh?

Last week when I was in Singapore I went with some of the Nuffies to Marina Bay Sands. We went to walk around the place and eventually ended up in the casino playing some baccarat and roulette. At the end of the night, all of us had lost money. Not even one of us won.

So the superstitious ones of us starting thinking. You know how they say that when people build casinos they have certain designs in place to create a better “Feng Shui”  for the casino which equates to worse luck for the gambler? Like they say RWS has pyramid shape things at the entrance to take away luck from you and stuff like that.

Well Marina Bay Sands only needs one thing. When you’re in the casino, look in the middle ceiling of the casino and you’ll see this.

What does it look like to you?

Heh well our Singaporean Nuffies told us that the locals there refer to it as “THE GIANT CIBAI”. That it’s meant to “Cibai” all your luck away. So that night we tried to avoid playing directly under it but clearly that wasn’t good enough to get past the giant cibai. Nothing escapes the giant cibai. It sees all and it cibais all!

PS: As a disclaimer, I’m sure many people have won at MBS before. Haha just sharing whatever I’ve heard.

I know. The title sounds like it belongs to a fashion blogger or at least a female blogger. When guy bloggers buy new shoes, it doesn’t normally make headlines. But I love shoes. Not all shoes actually… but more specifically sneakers… and even more specifically, Adidas Superstar sneakers.

So Ming came down to KL for the weekend and we went to Pavilion to shop a little. Ming wanted to buy a pair of shoes. I was browsing in Adidas but didn’t quite like what I saw. Then the salesperson then pointed out a particular shoe to me. It was this limited edition Adidas Star Wars shoe.

I decided to try it on and I couldn’t resist.

Love it love it love it.

It’s such a geeky sneaker. Like when you open the box, the sneakers are wrapped in Star Wars themed paper. WIth the words “Rebel Alliance”.

And inside the shoe, Star Wars all over.

There’s even a little Rebel Alliance logo at the back of the shoe.

The best part about it though is that eventhough it’s sooo geeky… it’s not particularly obvious when you wear it. So when I wear it, all you see is this.

See? Nobody can see the geeky X-Wing logo on my shoe or the words Star Wars. Girls won’t go running away the minute they see my sneakers.

I love Adidas sneakers. I don’t wanna wear any other kind of shoe but sneakers!

Simple luxuries like that in life make me happy 🙂

Hey Guys,

Sorry for the lack of updates but I’ve been so busy lately. So busy that I can hardly even find time to reply your comments. So if I’ve missed replying your comments in my recent previous posts, please don’t mind me. Know that I have took the time to read every one of them. When I do get the chance I’ll reply it all one day 🙂

Last week I was in Hong Kong to attend some meetings and also to attend a Nuffnang HK event there. It was a Stand-up Comedy event at a club and we had 60 Nuffnang HK bloggers attend. It was only the 3rd Nuffnang event we had there, and the biggest. Our previous events were simply lunches and all.

Here are some picture I took. The guy with the red checkered shirt in the middle is Kenshin. One of the top bloggers in Hong Kong.

Here’s a picture of two of our Nuffies in Nuffnang Hong Kong. Jason on the left and Kevin on the right.

The girl on the right told me that she had just graduated from New Zealand. She was thinking of looking for a job there when she heard that Nuffnang was opening up in Hong Kong so she came back just to apply for a job there.

The guy in between Kevin and Jason is a well-known stand-up comedian in Hong Kong. He’s of Indian descent but because he grew up in Hong Kong he speaks fluent Cantonese.

One of our bloggers there who won our iPad 2 giveaway.

My mistake was not taking a picture that captured the crowd there but I guess there’ll be another time.

After work on one of the days, my friend who works in an investment bank brought us out on his bank’s private boat. We sat on the top deck and it took us around Hong Kong Island.

We eventually ended up at Lama Island for a seafood dinner.

This is Jestina and Jason talking on the top deck. It was so romantic I was afraid they might fall in love and we’d have another inter-office-Nuffie relationship.

After a while the sun even began to set and it got even MORE romantic.

So I went in there for a while and pai lamp post.

Heh no la I didn’t purposely do that. Just took a picture with them.

And another picture with Kingston.

Once I had snapped enough pictures of people on the boat, I took this picture of one of the tallest buildings in Hong Kong.

Ahh it was so relaxing and so much fun. I could so get used to this life.

Too bad I’m not an investment banker. I hear they get at least 12 months bonus every year. If they get anything below that it’s considered a bad year.

In the past, I’ve written posts about how much I love Malaysia. You can read them here and here.

I love Malaysia… but watching this video on YouTube has made me feel a new love for Malaysia that I had never felt before. This video makes me emotional every time I watch it.

My Malaysian friends, I’m glad we all belong to the same country. It doesn’t matter what income levels, educational backgrounds or even ethnic backgrounds we all come from. We’re all Malaysians and what we have is each other.

Remember when I blogged about my “Business Class” pillow in the previous entry?

Haih … really sad story. In the past two days, this is what my Business Class pillow has become.

It’s black cover is put for wash and the memory foam that it is on the inside, I’m not sure if it’ll ever be the same again since I don’t think I’m really supposed to wash this but I didn’t have a choice.

Here’s what happened.

I checked out of my hotel in Hong Kong yesterday morning. I had another meeting to attend in the afternoon and I didn’t want to lug my luggage around so I left it in the Concierge. All except my backpack and my Business Class pillow because I normally just sling my business class around my backpack. Then I took a cab to Mong Kok for a quick shop before my meeting because my Dad asked me to go look for a digital camera for him. When I got out of the cab, I felt around at my backpack and noticed my Business Class was missing.

So I frantically looked around the street and found it lying there. Now here’s the joke. The street was dry. Why shouldn’t it be right? I don’t remember it raining at all in the past few days. There was one part of it that had a puddle… I don’t know how it got there but there was a puddle. And guess what… my cab happened to stop right outside that puddle and my Business Class just happened to drop ON THAT FLIPPING PUDDLE!!!

One side of it was entire soaked when that happened. I picked it up, pat some wet sand off it, cursed some profanities quietly to myself and then just carried on walking. I was upset… but not as upset as what happened next.

Two hours later I had just finished my lunch meeting. Picked up my backpack and my already dirty Business Class and was about to leave the restaurant. But I didn’t…. because I decided to go to the toilet before I leave (my backpack and business class still on me).  I went into the tiny toilet, did my small business then went on to wash my hands. After I washed my hands I realized that my Business Class was not hanging on my backpack anymore. I looked around on it and found it on the toilet floor.

Now here’s the thing… the toilet floor is dirty… but what is the DIRTIEST PART OF THE TOILET FLOOR?

The part right below the urinal. Why dirty? Because some guys miscue when they pee and drips of piss drop on right below. That glorious part of the toilet floor happened to be EXACTLY where I dropped my Business Class. I DROPPED MY BUSINESS CLASS ON URINE!

I panicked. I picked it up, tried to wash it as much as I could but decided I had to do it later when I had more time. When I did much later in the afternoon I smelled my Business Class and it smelled like urine. FUCK! So that’s why I decided to wash it to Kingdom come… even if it means the pillow’s now probably destroyed.

*Sigh* So that everyone is what happened to my Business Class.

I’m in Hong Kong now for some work. Will blog about more on that in time to come but my plane ride today inspired me to dedicate this post to a special “pillow”.

You guys know how I travel a lot right? I just realized that this month I will be traveling to another country every single week. I know it sounds fun but you know after traveling for work enough you kinda get a bit tired. Why? Because I travel alone so I find myself spending a lot of time in taxis on the way to the airports, or at airports alone waiting for the flight or the worse part… on the plane itself.

I saw this documentary once about how airlines have gone leaps and bounds in the past decade to improve their business class but their economy class more or less remains the same. In fact I think it’s even more crammed now than it was some 10 years ago.

Lots of companies though treat their staff well especially when they travel for work… or if not their general staff then at least the Directors of the company. Say if you travel anywhere above 5 hours or so they’ll put you on business class. It makes a huge difference. When you arrive at your destination you don’t feel as worn out and you can get straight to work.

That’s something Ming and I have officially agreed on… but in practice, I just can’t bear to spend the money. Heck a business class ticket just costs too much more and I’d rather use the money on so many other things. So what do I do?

I bring my very own business class.

Now I’ve always noticed some passengers carrying this neck pillow. Even traveled with Pierre once and saw him bring his own. I see it the most when I travel to Australia or on longer flights though. On one flight I saw almost every Australian having one of these so I thought to myself… it has to have some good use to it.

So I decided to buy one for myself one day and let me tell you… it has changed my flights completely. The small thing it does is just allows your head to rest down on it so it doesn’t strain your neck too much but that one small thing makes a big difference. I now sleep SOO much better on planes. So if you travel economy or Air Asia a lot, try one of these pillows.

If you’re rich and travel business class regularly though then… ignore this blog entry. Heck if you’re rich why are you even online reading blogs when you could be swimming in your money bin like Scrooge McDuck. Duck Tales woo woo.

A bit over 6 months ago I met with a couple of friends of mine I knew from my student days in London.

Shaun was from the London School of Economics

and Wilson from Warwick.

We talked about all the group buying sites that were coming up in Malaysia and they felt one thing: That they could do better.

So I talked to Ming about it and we decided to invest in them. They started a group buying site in January called Milkadeal.com. January was waaaaaayy late in the game. By the time they got in there were like some 30 other sites or so in there already. Ming and I gave them whatever support we could on the sides but on their own they built a business from scratch. I remember the first time I walked into their office some 5 months ago.

It was empty except for Wilson, Shaun and another 2 people. That 5 months passed and just recently when I walked into their office I noticed a big change. It was buzzing with busy people all around and there was all sorts of stuff written on white boards around and stuck on the walls.

Recently though a particular wealthy, well-known and well-connected angel investor in Malaysia (who doesn’t want to be named) approached them. Like many before him, he showed interest in owning a stake of Milkadeal.com but Shaun and Wilson weren’t interested to sell. All they wanted to do was continue to grow. Anything else other than that was a distraction to them.  According to some metrics they were the 3rd largest group buying site in Malaysia but they knew it wasn’t good enough.

I have always thought very highly of that angel investor. So much that I call him “the Peter Thiel of Malaysia”, a title he always plays down. (Peter Thiel is the Co-Founder of Paypal who made lots of money from Paypal and now invests in a lot of success startups… one of them being Facebook). But just like everything else in Milkadeal, Ming and I play the passive partners. Wilson and Shaun decide on everything! So if they didn’t want to sell… then so be it.

The angel investor was persistent though and eventually Shaun and Wilson grew to like him. So they eventually agreed to open up Milkadeal to outside investors. The round of financing valued Milkadeal in the many millions. If you had invested RM100,000 in Milkadeal 6 months ago, that same stake would be worth RM2,500,000 today. I’m not allowed to go into the details or valuations of the deal but it gave Milkadeal a lot of funding to grow the company and made both Shaun and Wilson millionaires at age 27.

Over in the USA we’re reading every day about entrepreneurs making millions and millions from their internet companies. Some even going into billions but it’s so exciting to see something like that happen locally (albeit on a smaller scale) and best part is… to get to be a small part of it.

Wilson and Shaun are now among the few self-made millionaires under 30 that I know of… and I can’t wait to see where Milkadeal goes next under their leadership. Shaun promises to make it much much bigger.

You can check out Milkadeal.com here.

I just realized that 3 weeks has passed since my birthday and I didn’t blog about the little surprise the Nuffies gave me. So here’s the story. The Nuffies were planning something for my birthday but they found out that Shorty was already bringing me on a surprise trip to Krabi. So they decided to do something a day before I left. It was the Friday before the 6th of June.

I walked into the office as usual in the morning. Turned on my computer and sat down to sign some documents. After some 15 minutes or so, Nicholas our Country Manager came over and said he needed to talk to me in private. Whenever he says that I always get paranoid that he’s going to give me some bad news. Like someone screwed up something and we had a mess to clear up or stuff. So I nervously walked with him towards the little glass meeting room in the middle of our orange office but he said asked to use the other meeting room at the back of the office. So okay I followed along.

When we got into that new section of the office I noticed it was dark.

All the lights were turned off and Nicholas said “WAH HALF DAY AH!?”. Hui Wen here was apparently hiding behind the wall waiting for me to come.

I thought an entire department was late for work. Then when I walked in the lights turned on and I saw everyone in our Nuffie meeting room filled with balloons.

They started singing Happy Birthday and brought out a cake. I’m good with singing birthday songs for other people but when it comes to people singing birthday songs for me I feel a bit awkward. Like don’t know what to do but just look around awkwardly.

After I cut the cake, they all showed me the big “birthday card” they put together for me. It was on our Ideapaint wall. You see in that particular meeting room we didn’t have a white board. Instead we had a wall painted with this special paint that allowed you to write on it with a marker and just rub it off later on. They each wrote birthday wishes on the wall filling it up entirely.

After they were done “touching” me, the Nuffies decided to torture me.

They made me hold Stewie, put on this bib and answer riddles.

The riddles were that they will tell me something really vague about somebody and they asked me to tell them who it was. If I got it wrong I had to do some sort of punishment. Like sit on a balloon and pop it.

I tried sitting on one balloon but boy were they good quality balloons. It just refused to pop.

All this while everyone was busy taking pictures of me making a fool of myself.

And yes everyone had a good laugh.

Perhaps it was one day in the year they could make fun of the boss. It was all in good fun though and at the end of all those riddles they gave me my present. It was this Mont Blanc pen.

I think it’s because they noticed how I just used any regular kilometrico pen to sign all the documents and cheques that I have to sign every day in the office. So now I have a nice pen 🙂

Was a really nice birthday surprise. Every year the Nuffies always plan something nice for me.

And the Nuffies that are based in our Singapore, Philippines, Australia, China and Hong Kong offices sent me loads of wishes. I’m so blessed to have them. They’re the reason why Ming and I could never sell the company we built in spite of all the offers we’ve gotten in the past 4 years.

To all my friends who wished me on that day 3 weeks ago, thank you so much for your wishes 🙂 I’m 27… and really lucky.

A few days ago I logged into my Facebook and went through my news feeds. One particular status update caught my attention. Was from this really pretty girl I knew from before and she was talking about this 5-star hotel that she was on holiday at. So I curiously went in to see how she was doing and she was doing well! She had a new boyfriend… a new rich boyfriend. Then I remembered how she always had a rich boyfriend. I mean she changed bfs a few times I think but all of them had one thing in common, they’re all rich. How does she do it?

Google “How to marry a rich man” and you’ll find so many articles teaching you how.

You’ll even find courses teaching people how to find and marry a rich man.

Most interesting link I found was this article on Forbes.

Heck there are even so movies about it. Like the famous HK movie that I quite liked called “Marry a rich man”.

Now here’s my take on this. Somehow in modern society, women who go after rich men are frowned upon. I used think like that too until one day I read an article about an interview with Donald Trump’s wife.

In the interview they asked her if she would be with Donald Trump if he wasn’t rich.

Her reply
“Would Donald be with me if I weren’t beautiful?”

I thought that was the smartest answer I could hear. It’s true. Think about it. Society accepts men who go after women just purely because a woman is beautiful but frowns upon women who go after men because of money. Why? Both money and looks are equally superficial. It’s just one of those things society has decided to draw the line on.

So I on the other hand have a much more balanced view. I don’t think there’s anything wrong at all if a woman goes after a man because of his money…. as long as I go after beautiful women.

Now in my view, the decision to be with someone is never solely based on money. It’s always a list of different things with different proportions.

So for some girls, looks is 20%, money is 20%, personality is 40% and well… the list goes on.

Girls who go after men with money or “gold diggers” as Kanye West would call it mainly differ only in the proportion. Sure it does matter whether the guy has a good heart and his personality does matter. But maybe a lot less importance is placed on it compared to money. So while a normal girl may have 20-50% of her decision to be with someone based on money, a “gold digger” would have say 50-90%.

So I started thinking of all the girls I knew who placed a lot of importance in money in the guy they went out with. Some of them are discreet about it but some of them are really open about wanting to marry a rich guy. Perhaps it’s because I don’t judge them for it and I’m equally open with them. I told them that I totally wouldn’t mind marrying a rich girl too. Or perhaps they don’t mind telling me some secrets because I don’t fall into the category of rich guys that they might go after.

I often asked them how they went about meeting these guys and here’s what a few things I gathered.

1) Rich People Hang Out With Rich People.

So if you meet one of them and you hang out with him long enough, he’ll probably introduce you to the rest of his friends who are likely to be rich. Remember though that rich is relative. Someone who has RM10 million is rich to me and I’m guessing most of our standards but perhaps to the guy who has RM100 million, RM10 million isn’t considered really rich.

2) Identifying The Rich

This one I actually read from a magazine article once when they interviewed girls who went after rich guys. They asked the girls how they knew a guy was rich and they pointed out a few things:

i) By the clothes he wears

ii) By the car he drives. You don’t always get to see it so look out for the car keys.

iii) By the watch he wears. If he wears a Swatch or ToyWatch like me then probably not going to cut it. If he wears a Tag Heuer then he’s above average. But if he wears a Rolex or Patek or Panerai or any of these high end watches then you’ve hit the jackpot. The watch thing is often accurate.

Sure there are fake Rolexs and Pateks but unlike fake bags that girls carry, guys don’t normally wear fake watches. I don’t know.. maybe it’s because we get less peer pressure but if we can’t afford an expensive watch we just don’t buy one. My friends all wear watches far more expensive than mine but I never felt the desire to buy one myself.

At least I think that’s accurate for now. I think by the time we reach the age of 40 does peer pressure really come up to us then.

3) Being A Good GF

This one is something I learned from a Hong Kong girl at university. Her life long plan is to do one thing. To marry a rich man! It’s not because she can’t earn her own money or anything. Nothing like that. In fact she’s a pretty good student and she’s really smart but well… some people long to grow up to be lawyers, doctors… she just wanted to grow up marrying a rich man.

Throughout my years of uni I would see her go around getting to know guys whom she knew came from rich families. She was close to my housemate but she hardly talked to me. Maybe because my cheap jeans and jacket gave it all away. She did once make a move on a fellow Malaysian friend of mine though. Someone had whispered to her that he came from a rich family in Malaysia and lived in a big house. She suddenly added him on MSN and started talking to him… asking about what his family does and all that (in a very subtle way).

While many rich kids studying in the UK aren’t afraid to flaunt their families’ money, this guy was all about keeping it low. So he downplayed whatever his family did and said it wasn’t true about the house and all that. Right after that conversation, he never ever once heard from her again. I didn’t see this girl again after graduation but my ex-housemate was close to her. One day she told my housemates the secrets of “keeping” a rich guy (and my housemate passed that knowledge to me one drunken night).

Here’s what she said:

i) Learn to cook.

Guys like girls who can cook. Not just learn to cook but learn to boil soup too when the guy is sick. So when he’s sick you can have him drink the soup and tell him all the good herbs you put inside to help whatever illness he has. That’ll give him the motherly love he would miss from back home.

ii) Learn to play games with him.

This is if he plays console or computer games. Learn to play it well enough for him to find it fun enough to play against you but don’t beat him or it’ll hurt his ego.

iii) Be good in bed

This I need not explain right?

So after she graduated she went back to Hong Kong with a degree from a good university. What did she do? She went to work in Goldman Sachs. Not as a banker or analyst but as a personal assistant to the investment bankers there. I asked my housemate why ? Why work as a PA when she definitely could have made it as an investment banker and she said that it was just a good way for her to meet rich investment banking dudes.

The happy ending to that is… this girl I knew got married a couple of years ago. Not to an investment banker or to the son of a rich tycoon. She married a policeman in Hong Kong. So I guess while she was chasing someone with money all along, she later learned that true love was more than enough for her.

I guess there’s no right and wrong in life. It’s just a matter of what makes us happy. I know many girls who didn’t marry rich and still have the happiest marriages ever… and girls who did marry rich and have unhappy marriages. I guess we all make decisions in life based on what we think fits us best and right or wrong, we have to live with them.

So do we really need to marry rich?