Category: Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship, Life Lessons

What I Know About Entrepreneurship, That Hawker Stall Uncle Taught Me First.

• Maverick Foo

Have you ever sat and observed a hawker stall operator? Me, I have a love-hate relationship with them. I love the food, don’t get me wrong, but that’s besides the point. I like having meals at hawkers stalls because, well, I feel that’s where the spirit of entrepreneurship lies.

I don’t like to call myself one, for “entrepreneur” is a title, a person, I aspire to be. An as an “asprireneur”, if there’s every such a term, I like to think the best entrepreneurs are born on the streets. A combination of street smart and resourcesfulness. A fixer of broken things. A spotter of gaps, holes and opportunities. An entertainer, ever ready to entice anyone with their new hairball of an idea, the master plan for world domination, the no-brainer-where-have-you-been-all-my-life solution to a daily problem. A seeker of the goldmine, as much as the adventure itself.

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Entrepreneurship, Ramblings

43 questions to check if you can be a lifestyle entrepreneur or digital nomad

• maverick

See that photo up there? It’s BS by the way. Tried and tested, and it only got my eyes freaking tired, with sand into laptop while my ass heats up to cook my balls.

When people know about our travels (Debbie and I try to do 90 days of travel a year, minimum 60), they always envy our lifestyle, and ask us how we did it.

Frankly, the how-we-did-it question is not even close to the real question they should be asking, which is:

What are you getting into?

And truth be told, there’s nothing much to envy about, which is why we hardly share our check-ins and travels on social media. Unless it’s something too stupidly funny. 🙂

Inspired by a post by Marcus Teoh, Debbie and I decided to compile a list of questions that should help you decide if being a lifestyle entrepreneur or digital nomad is something you really should strive for.

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Entrepreneurship, Life Lessons, Ramblings

How to Battle the Green Monster of Entrepreneurship

• maverick

There are only a couple of green monsters out there. It’s not the Hulk, or how your private parts looked like after being stung by an exotically fatal jungle hornet*.

No, I’m talking about the one inside you (again, dude, not the one in your pants).

Yeah, let’s talk about jealousy.

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Community Building, Entrepreneurship, Life Lessons

What this local startup did after pissing me off

• Maverick Foo

This all happened within a month, and I thought in the spirit of Fuckupnights, we can all learn from the incident.

Who’s the startup you ask? Piktochart.

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Community Building, Entrepreneurship, Productivity

Hacking Emails & Events, and rock the shit out of ’em

• maverick

Ok, let me just say that this presentation at the 1AES Growth Hack Labs was no way for me dicking-off, showing the wizardry I have around events and email writing. Just that over the past few years of running KICKSTART.MY, FuckUpNights KL and other various workshop, creative email copywriting accounts to over 83% in the success of filling up those events. In this workshop I’ve shared stuff that has worked for me, cutting-off the BS around email and events marketing, and basically, yeah, dicking-off lar. 🙂

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Entrepreneurship, Ramblings

Entrepreneurship Development, Education System. Same same lar…

• maverick

Ok, this is gonna be a piece that may be hurtful to some. So if you’re sensitive like some country leaders who’s ideal political practice is to remove anyone who say/write/update FB with things they don’t like, then better go back to scrolling that semi-hypnotic FB timeline for the 85th time today.

Ready? Here goes.

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Entrepreneurship, Life Lessons, Ramblings

What are startups running from?

• maverick

At the end of this blog post, I predict that two things will happen. And if you’re the smart ass who thinks, “Better scroll to the end now and read them predictions!”, then I’ll predict something else.

You’ll scroll back up here again.

Yup, welcome back.

Here’s the thing. Over the few years, I have to admit that the number of “startup entrepreneurs” are increasing, and initially, I felt proud. You see, when I started doing this glamour thing called entrepreneurship over a decade ago, hardly would I meet people my age. (Yeah, one of the reasons why we started KICKSTART back then was because I’m tired to seeing entrepreneurs my dad’s age at networking events. They so love to wear those ties and suits.) But now, I do. May it be at an event at an awesome hall, a meetup at the top floor of a tall building or at a workshop deep in the hearts of Cyberjaya, I see youngsters dominating the crowd, and that made me feel happy.

For a while. Until you deep dive a bit.

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Entrepreneurship, Life Lessons

Let’s talk about your Bankable Skills.

• maverick

IMG-20150713-WA0001After a killer breakfast in the busy corner of Seminyak, Bali (seriously, the place is called Corner House because, well, it’s around the corner), I’m faced with a life-changing crossroad – do I nap, work, or write something? After (pretend) working for like 3 hours, I decided to shift place and shift gears. I moved upstairs and do this writing shit.

One (coaching) question I recently liked to ask aspiring entrepreneurs or wantrepreneurs is:

What are your bankable skills?

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