MindValley Blog

It was business as usual on a Tuesday morning, half past ten local time, Kuala Lumpur.

Vishen - for some time hidden in the brainroom - opened the door with a dynamic cant. He took a footstep out of the room, threw his arms high up in the air and shouted out loud with a kind of shaky, nearly squeeky voice:
“Vishen 2.0 just launched!”

Eyes wide open and a huge grin in his face he was standing there - obviously as clueless and overwhelmed by the situation as the rest of the office crowd.

The noise level immediately went down to zero. Everybody stopped talking. Nearby colleagues tried to exchange some deranged looks. Shrug of shoulders worked a circuit and question marks mirrored in everybody’s faces.

3 mill. seconds of creepy silence had to pass by before seldom-caught-speechless Vishen gave it a second shot: “Guys- I am a father!”

Ahhhh… hands started clapping and the crowd, hardly in control over cheering about the good news, was willing to bombard the new-born father with all their questions: Heigh, weight, name, hair length, eye color, first word, most successful business plan - all the interesting questions, you know?!

But no chance. Vishen locked himself in the brainroom again for a decent amount of time.

Until today we are not so sure what happened in there. Though rumors started that Talat’s super-douper-crazy algorithm was able to identify some of Vishen’s hottest ideas on dealing with unexpected expected events.

For the rest of the day Vishen basically was faster than his shadow, obviously more intoxicated by coffein and adrenalin than (even for Vishen) usual.

When we finally had the chance to get rid of our questions he shared his insights with us by saying that it was simply like launching a website you have never ever seen before.

There it was - the glow in his eyes, the sparkle of incredible fatherhood joy.

Finally - as three days had passed by, Vishen was in charge of the camera and he invited us for an early preview.

Vishen 2.0 (aka Hayden Lakhiani) says: Hello World!

Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is.

- Jedi Master Yoda -

The world’s average number of marriages per 1000 people is 6.5, according to the United Nations Monthly Bulletin of Statistics, 2001.

If I count all my family members (even the over 70 and under 12 year olds), add close friends, random pick-ups, all my kindergarten fellas I had a crush on and party flirts so far, I might not even come close to 1000 acquaintances.

Well, maybe… however, I call myself a darling of fortune these days - I received my third wedding invitation this year.

Mike and Michelle tied the knot!!!

As I picture the happy couple my heartbeat immediately rises and a rush of adrenaline floods my body.

I am not a drama queen (in its original sense) nor am I exaggerating. Simply I allow myself at least a glimpse of romance in these hectic days of the 21st century.

One day, or more precisely, 25 hours, before the official ceremony took place I asked Mike, “Are you nervous?” Since I am used to the whole pre-marriage stress after attending two marriages earlier this year, I expected at least a trace of panic or serious concern.

Mike simply leaned back in his chair, gave me a surprised look (for this obviously weird question) and a counterquestion: Read the rest of this entry »

I created these comics over the weekend for fun. They do not represent actual events, just pokes fun at them ;P

You may have heard the saying…

“It can get lonely at the top.”

When I first started MindValley, I was not quite sure what to make of this saying but after having run a company for a few years, I now completely know what it is all about…

As a leader, it might be difficult to create an open work culture where employees are comfortable and completely at ease to voice their own opinion, especially if they have ideas that go against what the leader is pushing for.

Worse, if one is not careful, very soon, a leader can find him or herself surrounded by “yes men” that are too scared to contradict or question the ideas put forward by the leader.

Equally important, when a company is rapidly growing some items are bound to fall through the cracks.  This is not due to a lack of caring.  As a founder, you will  frequently find yourself juggling dozens of “urgent and important” items.  While focusing on the top priorities every day and every week is important, the founder will

1. Not always realize everything that is important and
2. Might not focus on what other people on his team would consider important. 

What I like to tell my teammates frequently is that “I have no crystall ball.” I don’t assume I know everything there is to know. 

So, if there are things that are ”not working for you,” I expect everyone to speak up!  I frequently mention this because I cannot over-emphasize the importance of having an open work culture. 

I am lucky enough to work with so many bright members that by discovering what is “not working” for them I can rapidly help to prioritize what it is that I need to focus on to help make MindValley more successful and to create a far more exciting and fun work culture. 

Creating this environment is no easy task. 

While I keep stressing the importance of open, honest, upward feedback, this is not easy for everyone to do.  Some people are just less comfortable to “critique” their boss.

Trust, me, we can take it and we want any and all feedback that will help make us more successful and will make work easier and more fun for everyone. 

If there are things that are “not working for you,” then the MindValley Way is to bring them up.  I am not a mind reader, I have no crystal ball, and I am not as smart as the rest of you so I look forward to hearing all of your constructive feedback on how to keep making things better and better. 

Over the coming weeks, I will be blogging a lot about “The MindValley Way” to help further build and cement MindValley’s culture. I am a firm believer that having a well defined culture will contribute greatly to:

• attracting and retaining the best employees
•  make work at MindValley far more enjoyable
•  help to take MindValley to the next level

At the core of ”The MindValley Way”, we expect ourselves to take ownership & initiative. 

What exactly does that mean?

At MindValley, everybody is given a lot of responsibility and freedom to get their job done.  We often let employees that have just started with us run some of our biggest money making websites or start to lead important new projects.  At the same time, we do not micro-manage.  Why?  First of all, I believe that great people manage themselves and don’t need to be micro-managed, they need to be coached and guided.  Secondly.  we have a flat organization and for a 15 people company, we are doing A LOT so there is no time to micro-manage anyone. 

However, that also means that every employee needs to take full ownership and take initiative.  Specifically, we expect that every employee should come up with their own action items of things that they should be doing to help move their project and the company forward.  Instead of waiting to be told what to do and what is next, we expect that everyone comes up with recommendations and proposed action items on how to best keep moving forward and achieve the targets that have been mutually agreed on. 

What have been the results of this so far?

Go getters tend to thrive.  They just grab the ball and run with it.  I believe it is better to execute and if someone makes a mistake they ask for forgiveness later.  At the same time, I have noticed that average people struggle with our culture.  That is because average people do not like to take initiative.  They do not like to think on their own two feet and they prefer to be spoon fed and told exactly what to do.  Well, we do not want average people.  We want great people and we are committed to creating a culture that is geared to see great people thrive and will hopefully quickly weed out the average people. 

I have also noticed that it is very important to keep communicating that this is part of our core DNA because when people first join they might find that sometimes they have an “empty to do list” and instead of sitting idle and waiting for what is next, we need to explain to them that often they are also expected to start thinking of what should be next to achieve the goals for the projects that they have been assigned to.  Having said that… that rarely happens since there is always a lot that needs to get done but we do want everyone to come up with lots of additional ideas and suggestions to take things to the next level.  :-) 

Last week, a few of us emerged from our caves to meet other members of the species. We were searching for cool people who may share similar interests.

And we found a few! :)

There were many web geeks, photographers and cool people at the 24 hours of Flickr party in KL.

Edu, Lou, Meike (our most recent hire from Germany), Khailee (me), Effa (my friend), Tim, and the dude captured by my muscular arm is Muid Latif, I’m a big fan of his artwork. He is one of Malaysia’s leading new media artists.

Jiangti (our lead developer) and I also had a good chat with Jason, who manages communications in Southeast Asia for Yahoo!. We explored the possibility of Hack Days in KL… whoopee!

Jiangti got to meet other web application developing creatures too! Like Tate. Who coincidentally organized a Worlds Debating Tournament I participated as a judge in. This was like, 3 years ago?

They decided to talk in acronyms so I left.

Overall it was really refreshing to meet like-minds in KL! The internet is the most exciting thing ever, and I rarely get to share this with other people, apart from my colleagues.

I’m sure in Silicon Valley you could talk about web2.Ohhnotagain with like, the bus driver. But Malaysia is not the same… it can get lonely here if you don’t proactively go out of your way.

Like this dude on the left.

His name is Edmund. He is pictured here socializing, like the rest of us.

Just want to clarify that he is not part of MindValley.

But he is “staying” with us for one month for a “brain exchange”. He’s an interesting internet marketer in his own right, and a really smart 20 year old for that matter. He’s helping us out on a top secret project.

Hence the disguise. Oh what the hell here’s his blog.

See more photos of the event. Good fun.

We were also at another event before this, organized by theMalaysian Multimedia Development Corporation.

Special thanks to John and the team at Hatchlings for the invite!

It was really nice to meet them! They’re all around my age, and have gotten funding for their game development company. Very interesting bunch.

I also met Jeff, who runs a mobile game development company which is getting listed in the HongKong next year, and Charles, a senior tech journalist.

I asked Charles if he knew any other exciting, interesting companies or people based in Malaysia, and he suggested a few… (few being the keyword)

Overall it was free food free booze a very encouraging experience.

Being based in Malaysia isn’t THAT lonely, I’m sure the community will grow!

All this has inspired me to organize some meetups too. Any ideas who we should invite?

Will you come? ;)

Joel created “The Joel Test,” which is way to measure of how good a software team is. The test is simple. Just answer yes or no to a set of 12 questions. According to Joel, if you do not score close to 12, then you have a lot of work left to do.

So, obviously we wanted to put MindValley to the test and before we share the detailed score with you, I will need to point out some important points regarding “The Joel Test.”

First, “The Joel Test” is about software development and a web development environment is a little bit different and so some of the points need to be tweaked.

Second, here at MindValley, we follow an agile development process. As we go through the Joel Test, you will see that it is a great starting point for a good web development environment but it is just a starting point if you want to have a truly agile development process. In other words, the Joel Test just scratches the surface to determine if a work environment is sufficient for agile development.

The Joel Test - Test Results

1. Do you use source control? YES (1)

Of course. Anyone not using source control must be insane. It is a must in any web development environment. Our weapon of choice is SVN.

2. Can you make a build in one step? YES (1)

Yes. We mostly use PHP and Ruby on Rails. To speed things up, we also have an “auto-update script” to automatically push all of the latest code that was submitted live to site in one click.

3. Do you make daily builds? YES (1)

Daily builds are too infrequent. Agile teams should commit code at least several times per day. Our report-fix-retest loop is also really tight. When / where applicable, we use unit testing to ensure everything works bug free.

4. Do you have a bug database? YES (1)

Yes, even agile teams have bugs.

Every bug is reported with:

• steps to reproduce the bug
• expected behavior
• observed (buggy) behavior
• who it’s assigned to
• whether or not its been fixed

5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? It Depends (1)

We believe in delivering bug free web applications. However, what we work on depends on what the key priorities are at the moment.

6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule? YES (1)

We follow the scrum agile development process and everything is broken out clearly into each sprint backlog. Not only that, we even developed our own productivity / scrum application to help us get things done faster. This is called “The MindValley Way”

7. Do you have a spec? YES (1)

Since we use Scrum, our spec is the current Sprint Backlogs along with the overall Product Backlog. However, agile development also means that specs are often moving targets and get refined and tweaked over time.

8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions? YES (0.5)

If you mean do they work in cubicles the answer is no and we are proud of it. We do not believe in cubicles! Having an open and collaborative work environment is far more engaging and creates a far more energetic and vibrant work environment and culture.

We do everything in teams and there is a huge advantage in having groups of 2-3 developers sit next to each other. It dramatically accelerates knowledge sharing.

Having said that, our office is generally very quiet.

9. Do you use the best tools money can buy? YES (0.5)

Recent examples:

1) We just upgraded the monitors to 22″ inch flat screens for everyone in the office.

2) We just pgraded our Internet to make it even faster and more reliable.

I believe in always asking our developers what tools / resources could help them boost their productivity and quality of their work environment.

As a bonus, we also have free snacks and drinks in the office to keep everyone well nourished. :-)

However, we do take pride in always having been a very profitable company and will not buy the latest and greatest toys if there is no business need that justifies the expense.

10) Do you have testers? YES (1)

Since we believe in agile development and unit testing, we do not need many manual testers. We develop many small web apps where the developers take full ownership of the product, which means that they are also responsible for testing and ensuring that everything works well.

11) Do new candidates write code during their interview? YES (1)

A coding test is part of the interviewing process and depending n the quality of the results of the initial test we may ask for even more sample work.

12) Do you do hallway usability testing? YES (1)

This is easy because we have lots of people in the office that are ot working intimiately on the project and so it is easy to just ask hem to take a look and see how they use / interact with the tools e are developing.

We also believe these questions are extremely important:

Are programmers given specs or part of determining the future look and feel and functionality of the application?

At MindValley, every person that is part of a project is expected to contribute their ideas and suggestions on how to keep improving the applications we are developing. We do not believe in spoon serving “specs” to a team of developers. On the contrary, we pride ourselves on assembling very diverse teams (we have people from over 8 countries at MindValley) and get everyone to work closely together to help us develop breakthrough applications.

I hope the above information gave you a little better glimpse into the development environment that we are creating at MindValley.

Last night, Talat gave birth to his first blog post on our team blog.

More importantly, Talat’s wife is giving birth to a GIRL! The baby is still in incubation, and will launch into Beta in November.

Congratulations Talat! I remember you told me you want to get more women involved in mathematics, now you have your chance.

Talat, our mathematician, pictured above, fighting fit and able. It was taken from our recent MindVallley Retreat to Langkawi Islands (illustrated in the video below)

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!

Hi, I am the mathematician here at MindValley.

Whenever we start on a new algorithm, I listen to all the non-mathematicians toss ideas on how to solve a problem (which I otherwise am paid to solve with some high-brow maths).

When they (and myself, in a non-mathematical capacity) are done with coming up with simple (but not simplistic) workarounds there are two areas where I get to apply my high-brow maths *wink*:

1. How to quantify and automate the ideas.
2. How to implement anything mathematically which otherwise is not possible heuristically (let’s not start on heuristic mathematics).

And while making the algorithm I take two things into considerations:

1. How to eliminate as much if-then statements and for-loops as possible.
2. How to use mathematics to save the computer the grunt work (although it is meant to do precisely that)- so that the application is lean (and mean).

I will give you a simple example from real life.

Read the rest of this entry »