WebCamp 2² – Being an Awesome Underdog

WebCamp KL

This month’s meetup was definitely one that would get everyone’s ears perked up as Aaron Chipper, CTO of Friendster came to give a talk. Most of us would fondly remember when Friendster is THE blazing hot social network in Asia and famously known to be plagued by crashes and performance issues before Facebook came in happily gobbled up their user base.

And with the announcement of our Malaysian owned MOL Sdn Bhd acquiring Friendster and people are made aware of the patents Friendster owned pertaining to social networks, Friendster has yet again gained media attention and having people wondering what Friendster is up to now.

The speaker lineup were as follows:

1. Joget Workflow – Law Tien Soon, VP Open Dynamics
2. “Being Awesome – it’s easy! (when you’re awesome)” – Aaron Chipper, CTO Friendster
3. How to be an underdog in overdrive – Chu Tzu-Ming, Persuasion Technologies
4. Pitching session: Introducing FeedGeorge.com – See Tho Chee Seong, founder of FeedGeorge.com
5. Event announcement: Startup Weekend – Daniel Cerventus
6. Event announcement: Nova Weekend – Hakim Albasrawy
7. Event announcement: IGDA Malaysia Meetup – Bazil Akmal Bidin

Summary

The event is given a kickstart with a demonstration from Tien Soon of how easy you can create workflow applications fast with no code involved. The audio certainly does no justice to seeing how impressive and easy Joget Workflow helps you in creating a workflow applications (the audience were awe-strucked), you would be interested to check the step-by-step video tutorials posted on Joget Workflow to see for yourselves.

Aaron Chipper, CTO of Friendster, later takes the limelight by constantly engaging the audience in candid conversations, like he puts it “Friendster is an agile company and so I think I’ll make this an agile chat.” He assures that Friendster is not dead yet (otherwise he wouldn’t be there) and shares the history and events that surrounds the birth and beginning of social media platform wars, handling the technology crisis, mismanagement and bad code as well as the future of Friendster.

The hilarious tragic comedy and lessons learned in dealing with bad technical direction and bad code is really worth listening to, and the dramatic history of the “YEAH! to meh…” roller-coaster ride in Friendster would keep you wanting to know what’s happening next. And with several relaunches and pivots that Friendster gone through, this cat is still going strong with more lives left.

Getting straight into business, Tzu Ming shares his stories of living through the dotcom boom and bust and why it is important to work towards being an underdog. He argues that success does not depend on your mindset, but rather the ability to focus on four elements of creating a successful business: aiming towards high returns, distribution, marketing and sales, self promotion and access to capital. With examples, he outlines a solid framework in thinking how you should think of structuring your business that would increasing your chances of succeeding.

For aspiring entrepreneurs, Tzu Ming’s talk is one that you shouldn’t miss.