MindValley Blog

Over the past couple of weeks, I have received several good questions from potential recruits and I just wanted to take the time to address these questions.

Here is a set of new questions that we just received from a very promising Ruby developer in Singapore.

1. Are all of you working in KL? If so, how did you all end up at MindValley?

Yes, all of us are working at our KL office. We are probably one of the most diverse small companies around. At one point, we had over 10 nationalities in our team of 15 people. At this point we have people from Belgium, Canada, Finland, Germany, Indonesia, Poland, The United States, and of course Malaysia in our office.

How did we end up here? Great question.

Vishen and I first met in the US in 1995 and we always wanted to start a company together. About 4 years ago we decided to give it a go.

We started MindValley in the US. Both of us had full-time jobs and were building up the company on nights and weekends. Once we grew up (about six months after getting started) Vishen quit his full-time job and decided to dedicate all of his time towards building MindValley. We had big plans for the company but did not like the costs of doing business in Silicon Valley. Since Vishen is from Kuala Lumpur, we decided to head out to Malaysia to build MindValley.

Why Malaysia?

• The MSC status makes it easy to attract foreign knowledge workers so we can find the best and brightest people from here and abroad
• Vishen was from KL and already very familiar with the country so it was easier to get started here vs. other countries in South East Asia. He also has some big plans for this region…
• We liked to be in an environment where MindValley can quickly become ‘the’ leading Internet company. If you go to other centers such as Bangalore, the salaries are already approaching US levels and there are already hundreds of other highly successful Internet companies. In Malaysia, there is a vacuum of Silicon Valley like startups so over time, we hope to become one of the leaders here, which will help us attract the best and the brightest. And I have to say that the people we have recruited from Malaysia so far are among the smartest people I have ever met or worked with.

2. What kind of web applications are MindValley building? Social networks, office webapps, ecommerce, etc?

We are working on three types of applications:

• Ecommerce applications… We make a lot of money by selling personal development products over the Internet. These are not our products but we have built an expertise in marketing personal development products and some of the leading authors are working with MindValley to sell their goods online. Vishen, myself, and many of our team members are passionate about personal development. Our plan is to become on of the leaders in this $5B market through innovative technologies, web applications, and Internet Marketing.
• We develop breakthrough applications that have the power to be very disruptive, more on this in the next 2 weeks…
• We also love developing tools to help ourselves work better and smarter, such as productivity tools to help us get more work done in less time. In the past month, we have already developed 3 of these applications. Two are completed and have already boosted the productivity of our ecommerce team by 25%. In the coming months, we will start to commercialize these applications.

  For now, we are working on a brand new killer productivity tool for “knowledge workers”, the “ideas people”, or business people in particular. There are A LOT of online to-do-list systems and dozens of tools for product developers to help them with product management (e.g. TRAC, etc.) but we believe we have identified something which will really change the way other knowledge workers get things done.

  KhaiLee, one of our leading thinkers, has conceived of an idea, combining best practices in personal productivity and observations on team dynamics. We are now in the middle of developing this application using Ruby on Rails. Khailee might blog more about it here as we approach the launch date…

3. What’s the IT (especially web 2.0) environment like in KL?

Truth be told, it is just getting started. However, we are focused on the global market. We want to be an international success story and one day list the company on the NASDAQ. So, even though the IT environment in KL is not (yet) world class, it does not stop us or prevent us from being able to successfully compete in the global market. Plus, while the country at large is lagging behind in IT, there are still some of the best and brightest developers in this country and we are lucky to already have a couple of them working for us.

4. If there’s something that MindValley wouldn’t mind doing for free. What would that be?

We are already thinking of how to best give back to the community, and have been looking into different approaches. While have not yet formalized our plans, we will most likely give back by helping people become successful entrepreneurs. Exactly how we will do this has not been formalized. Best to talk to Janne on our team who wants to launch an entrepreneurship university in South East Asia.

5. I am currently based in Singapore, are there any Singaporeans in your talented workforce?

No, but we would love to get the first superstar from Singapore to join our team!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 5:21 am and is filed under From Mike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.