Archive for the ‘Entreprenuer’ Category
My 1st lesson – Altitude
Second Prize Medal
The picture is the medal that I got for the Second Prize in Ho Chi Minh city Mathematics Olympiad. It has always been in my desk since that time. Not because it is the greatest thing I have ever done. It is there to remind me of one of the biggest failure in my life. It is there to remind me what I did and felt when I was in 11th grade.
My feet were off the ground
The second highest winner in the Southern Mathematics Olympiad turned out to be a bad motivation for me. It killed my love with maths. It made me feel that I am too special. It made me overestimate myself. I believed that I couldn’t fail. That was a big mistake.
I didn’t prepare well enough and didn’t try hard enough on the next city contest. The result is: I couldn’t step into the next round. My friends and family wouldn’t know what happened. But I knew what was wrong. I put myself off the ground!
This failure led to the next big failure.
Depression
Now, imagine that everybody is looking at you; the next second, nobody gives you a shit. That was what happened to me. I felt totally useless and lose my orientation. I did not know what to do next, if I should continue studying maths or focusing on other subjects to pass the university entrance exam. I did not know what to do when losing all the attentions people gave to me. I was thirsty for that fame.
This made me lost my focus, forgot what was good for me, what I would like to do. It cost me 4 months living in jeaulous feeling with winner guys before I could realize what was meaningful to me. It was maths! Not the prize, but maths! I felt good that I recognized it early enough to be back on the right track and focus on what I love.
Both of them gave me a difficult time, and always kept reminding me of what is my true value, what I should aim for.
The purpose of this post is to try to remind me of what happened in the past. I know that people are talking a lot about me right now, but keeping my feet on the ground, being focused on my long term goal was the highest priority work.
Me in RMIT and Vietnamese Newspaper
You can read the Vietnamese version here
Many software engineers and IT professionals dream of developing a ‘killer App’ for popular products like the iPhone, which will make them rich. Other people dream of one day having a book published. Not many achieve either – and even fewer do so in their early 20s. But Vo Duy Khang (formerly student 3184092), an alumnus of RMIT Vietnam’s Bachelor of Information Technology program, has hit the jackpot with success in both of these areas – and now has the makings of a successful business spanning both Vietnam and Australia. Khang graduated from RMIT Vietnam in November 2010 and travelled to Adelaide, Australia, where he is now completing a Master of Information Technology with Carnegie Mellon University, under a full scholarship. With the benefit of the scholarship, Khang has been freed up to apply his own financial resources fully to get a small business off the ground while he also continues his studies. His hard work and talent have been recognised Khang’s creativity and expertise has also been applied to a new business start-up in this field which already has five people on staff in Australia. Khang has been visiting Vietnam in the past month seeking further talent from Vietnam to join his operation. Almost all his development team to date are RMIT students or graduates. “They speak English well, and they all have a good understanding of what is needed,” Khang says. According to Khang, the basis of a good user experience of any iPhone or iPad App is good performance. There is enormous potential in helping social networking applications such as Facebook to provide a better user experience by moving data in a quicker and smarter way over the net. Apress has been impressed by his thinking in this area, as shown on his own website and as shared amongst the online community overseas. One of Khang’s mentors has been Barend Scholtus, Academic Services Manager for the Bachelor of IT program, and the two continue to discuss shared interests regularly. “We hope – in fact we are pretty sure – that Khang’s learning experiences at RMIT Vietnam have made contributions to his achievements to date, and we hope the best is yet to come.”
 Khang (sitting) sharing knowledge with friends in Barcamp 2011
Khang’s book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Apps-Performance-Optimization-Professional-Apress/dp/1430237171/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321662306&sr=8-1 Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/vodkhang
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2nd professional year
Success is moving from failure to failure
So, today is the end day of my second year of professional working. As normal, I take a look back my career and see how it is going, what has happened over the last year and if it is going well with my old plan here.
What did I do?
I planned to learn more and work more in the technology, gain skills in Artificial Intelligence, Web and Mobile development. Almost all of them fail. All reasons started from this CMU scholarship admission that brought me back to Australia.
It was a huge chance, a chance that I had been dreaming for. It was not just the excellent environment of CMU, it was not just the reputation of this university, it was a chance for my own business. Coming back to a good market, having chance to work with smart people and starting inside a uni was a good chance.
So, I spent my time here studying finance, economics and entrepreneurship. I also spent most of time building up and trying different things, from outsourcing, writing book to product development. Lots of lessons, lots of new things and lots of failures as well. I again, grew up much faster than I ever did, just as the first time I went oversea to Melbourne. A lot of pains, but also a lot of gains.
What did I learn?
Well, I learnt something more about finance, economics and accounting. That helped me to solid my money management skills a little bit. It is better not to be fooled by those financial and business guys 
). I learnt from both the theory inside CMU and both from the work. And I sometimes had to pay more for the real life to learn.
I also learnt about sales, marketing and investment for both Android and iPhone apps. Go over 2 markets, learn different techniques, become a salesman and a customer support sometimes, all are painful when all look like a new job for a geek.
Management is also something I learnt more from real life than some boring courses in CMU. Painful and stressful sometimes, but I got lessons out of it, adjust more for the real life and moving forward.
Working deeper in some iphone and android project. I also gained and solid my iPhone skills after writing the book about it. Starting to learn android development. That’s all for my technical skills this year.
What will I do for this coming up year?
I now look for more chances to grow rather than just outsourcing and earning money. I am now working on a new and innovative project called Hearie (that I will write about it soon). I still need to figure out a good market for it but I still love doing it and it is moving ahead. That’s good.
A good fact is: failure always hurt, sometimes it damn hurts, but I learnt from it well.
High Risk – High Return
The best way to predict the future is to create it
People always say about how passion can make you successful, and there are plenty of books around that topic. So for now, I will just look at the problem by some limited financial perspective: High Risk, High Return. Well, all financial guys know this theory, huh? So, I just try to see what I did and achieved in these terms.
Since I was in high school, I started thinking about what would motivate me, what would make me feel good when I did something. I preferred taking risks to get a really good outcome rather than staying and following a safe path since my high school. Until some recent days, I recognized that this is the only way for me to get an excellent outcome in a short time. High Risk means High Return.
The Safe Zone
There is not much fun and passion if I just stay in my safe zone. Everybody does that, there is a safe way for you to go. And most of the time, I feel bored with going that safe way. Passion is important, but I feel that if I don’t go further and take some risks doing what I love, I don’t love it enough. Is it so much fun if you always know how the future works?
Passion will always give you to the edge of the safe zone, you can understand and see further than other people. Now, the thing is that you need to step out of that safe zone and take risks. If you are really passionate about something, do you want to see it become a huge success. If yes, make it! make the future!
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
Since the beginning of my career, I started asking myself “What to learn next in the IT career?” and how I can predict the future of this IT industry. And then, the more I move forward into the career, the more I know that the best way to predict the future is to create it. That’s why I get more involved in what I love and believe, joining open source community, try some start-up and cutting edge technologies.
No surprising, one of the most risky situation in IT is to try to invent some new product. People may or may not adopt your product, you may not find any users. And nobody may believe in your idea except yourself.
Google and Social Network
This was my paper that I submitted to Google for the Associated Product Management job a while ago and it becomes really out of date, after they release Google+. I just publish it here for record. Some of them are implemented by Google already. And I am still not sure if they would go over all of these.
Improve Google +1 and Social Network
Google is now losing the social networking battle to Facebook’s hands. That is undeniable. Although Google try his best to improve and create many social platforms and integrate many social ideas, Google still fails. Look! Google Wave, it disappears after couple of months, Google Buzz, nobody hears about it in the media world now. And what happens to the next Google approach, Google +1.
I keep asking myself what Google + 1 is actually trying to do, is it a better search or a better social network or anything else. At the current state, here is what I see about Google + 1.
- It is actually not a bookmark or read it later service like the way Delicious works.
- It is not about sharing when one user likes the page, none of his friends may know.
- It is not creating any connections or interactions between users.
- Does it bring more benefits to Google rather than to users with the machine learning algorithms?
I don’t think that in the general strategy, Google integrates +1 button for the machine learning algorithm. It already keeps track of what users click, what users see and what users behave when they do search. The +1 button may help a little bit over the algorithms but not much. So, I believe that Google does this for social networking efforts and to beat Facebook and Twitter.
In terms of social networking, my biggest question for Google + 1 is: how on earth, does a user want to click the +1 button? Look at the Like button of Facebook, I think that button is so successful because everybody wants to share, wants to let people know that they like this page. This acts as a virtual award for them. “Look, friends! I have this page for many of you”. Google +1 needs something like this. The content is created by users and needs to provide to users real or virtual benefits.
In brief, here are some ways or problems I think Google has to do to improve +1:
- Attract and give users awards for their efforts
- Attract 3rd party providers to integrate +1 button into their website
- Boost up Google Buzz and willing to cooperate with other services.
- Identify the market niche in social networking that Google can come in.
Social - Attract and give users awards
The last time I tested the Google +1, I cannot see any of my friends +1, and only a few from strangers. Here is the problem. In social, we have 2 concepts of friends sourcing and crowdsourcing. However, the friends’ sourcing is always more important than the crowdsourcing. The recent time is also important to let sharing between friends happen. If some of a user’s friends like an article 3 years ago, it does not affect much the current decision of that user.
Look at Facebook and Twitter where timeline is important. It is about if users can see what their friends are doing, liking and working on recently. If we want to improve our Google +1, we have to customize the Google Page Rank algorithms in such a way that can take the time dimension into account. It is also really important that I can see my friends’ rate for page more often when I do search. This is hard because searching is sometimes more random than keep surfing around the timeline of Facebook or Twitter.
Integrate +1 button into their website/chrome/android
Now, if we assume that users are willing to click that button to help their friends. However, will they do it before or after viewing the content of the page? The answer will be after. There is no point for them to rate it good before they actually see the contents of the web page. And we should not expect them to press the “Back” button in the web browser to come back just to rate +1 for the web page they like.
So, we have to take advantage of our current network of effects into users. There are 2 ways, browser and the web page. Browser is actually inside our control and web is not.
Chrome is taking more and more market share in the browser market. This is a huge advantage for us. We can integrate our +1 button somewhere in the browser so that everytime user search and go to a page, they can press that +1 button. Ping! We got data. And we got data not just from searching, we got data from every users enter any web page, any link, any article. We conquer the web.
But not all users are using our Chrome, we have to help them to have a more convenient way to rate our page. Just like facebook, we need to help them to put +1 in websites, a +1 button for every articles and pages inside that web page. We may not beat Facebook in this area but we can use it along with Chrome. Facebook and Twitter do not have this advantage. This button will be a great marketing tool for all websites to have.
Social Network Integrations – Buzz, Orkut and more
There is no doubt that Google Buzz is losing, it is nowhere near a success and nobody talks about it anymore. Orkut is successful in India and Brazil but is losing its market share now (only 38% market share, June, 2010). However, it would be bad idea if we do not try our best to integrate our new +1 into these services. Anybody who login to Google Account and press +1 for the web page or search result will appear on their Buzz and Orkut social network.
This will be where the friends come from. However, that would not be enough. This will be always an egg and chicken problem for Google. Will Google have a big user base first to spread out the +1 button to the whole world? Or will the spread of the +1 button help Google to have a bigger user base? I would suggest Google to use integrate with Facebook. In other words, allow users to post data from +1 to Facebook. That would be a big deal when Facebook can control and can know what Google’s users do. But, we can do it only for a short amount of time, when we need to grow Buzz up to the same level of Facebook.
After all, what are wrong with all Google efforts to go into social network?
- Google Wave was a success for me at the beginning but then some mistakes like private invitation makes it fail.
- Aadvark was also good but it can not go up too much.
- Youtube is an excellent video sharing service, but not much social there.
- Google Buzz is a nice try to integrate with Gmail, to utilize the current user base, but will fail because it is the wrong market segment. It also serves nothing else a news feed like Twitter.
- Orkut turns out to be successful in India but then get lost in the battle with Facebook.
- Android, why Android here? Because we have a strong userbase that can turn out to be a big value for us if we can create a social network there.
What is my thinking is that if Google can integrate and connect all of these platforms that it has in hand to create more connections, it can have some big social network. Imaging that every of its users have an Android phone, connect, chat and share together through Buzz, watch videos, recommend and share to every friends through YouTube. Ask and answer questions in Aadvark in the idle time or while waiting for the bus. If it can do that, this would be huge. Look at Microsoft and Facebook, they tie into each other. Microsoft and Nokia are the same. Facebook will be present in all Microsoft devices and in all Nokia devices. Even though Microsoft does not have a strong market share in smartphone now, it will keep growing up with these things.
Google has to create a bigger ecosystem and +1 should be improved to become a nice fit into the whole picture.
What’s the biggest lesson I learned so far this year?
Biggest lesson this year
My learning progress this year has been increasing so fast, many things change in my life for the last 3 months. I changed to new living environment, new learning environment and start up my business when I came here. There are lots of lessons that I learnt as a manager in my new startup and a student in CMU. I think the 2 biggest lessons I have learnt so far this year are: planning and time-management.
Plan and Vision
Let me tell about my story first. My plan has been changing every month since the last November. The event that I went to CMU has changed my plan for my master degree and my career. You can read over my past plan here. I had a plan to work hard and plan for the master degree 2 years later. Then that plan changed. Next, I plan to study hard in CMU. Then, chances came and plan changed.
The main point that I want to get is my visionary. My vision and objectives over all of the plans do not change. I want to become an entrepreneur and build something that can change the world, something innovative in terms of technology and business. Planning is a tool for me to set up my vision, to see what will happen for me and other trends and I am more than willing to change any plan when necessary.
I have learnt significant lessons over financial planning in my CMU, which will help me over my company growth a lot. I think that this is what I lack from my undergraduate career. Money. Financial. These are important for any business technology people. I believe if you want to be successful, you have to understand about 3: Money, People and Technology.
Time-Management
The last few months, I ran in a crazy way, not like ever before. Look, everybody, who knows me, will know how fast I learn, implement new ideas and improve myself. However, I never see I learn and work at that crazy speed before. Lots of things got done, lots of breaking news. And I am still looking for more.
There are a couple of issues and lessons I learn from that fast moving. Time-management. I got a few problems at the first time when I have too many things to do than the time I can have. Then, I try different approach to optimize my time, calendar, todo list and time saving strategy. I now work much more efficiently than months ago and can really focus on a thing that I do. That’s why I love moving fast. Only by moving fast, you can learn really fast.
Again, what I want to say is you have to focus, and have a good timing management skills to control your time. Time cannot be bought!
Try, Run, Fail and Motivate
Running And Failing
I am extremely happy these days, I got a full scholarship of CMU – the first one I got after, uhm…, 10 or more scholarship submissions. This one goes by some luck. You may not believe in that, I don’t either till it happens. I started applying and the decision is out for less than 2 weeks and I had no plan for this scholarship until the chance came and I took it seriously. Here are 3 things I learnt from this happy event.
1/ Keep trying, you do not know what happens next.
Some people love perfection and are scared of failures to try. In many cases, trying does not cost you much except, some money and efforts and in some cases, it is free to try. One important decision I made is to talk and then email CMU representatives to ask some information about my specific case with important background. That let me know some important information about the admission process and I took advantage of it successfully.
For things that are uncertain, the only way you can be sure about is to try it. Start up, scholarships and R&D job is like this. Sometimes, things go out of your hand and strategy, then you just keep moving fast to the next goal.
2/ Everything you do, either succeed or fail make you one step further
I am happy that I tried to apply for President Award of RMIT Vietnam although I didn’t get it. It was a huge step preparation for me for the scholarship. There is no way that I can prepare all documents like transcripts, recommendation letter in around 3 days without any earlier work.
Another thing that I learnt from the fail of President Award is that my approach is kind of not correct. I tried a with a crazy approach in the award essay just to see what happens. And, I think the result gives me some feedback over the approach for the next one.
3/ Fail and run again
I mean RUN, actually run not just to go ahead step by step. I am willing to fail while I am running rather than moving slowly to the goal without any failure. For some people, failure is not an option, you are not allowed to fail. However, in my opinion, passionate is necessary but not enough for people to be successful; sometimes what matters is to keep the highest motivation for long time. Only challenges keep me motivated and moving with my best skills and efforts. That’s why I love the Google quote: “Achieving 65% of the impossible is better than 100% of the ordinary” (Don Dodge’s blog) . Here is what you get from that kind of fail, you know that you did a great thing, you are motivated about what you do all the time and you know you are doing something only a few, the best people can do.
And I always remember the Edison quote, you don’t fail 1000 times, you just found 1000 ways that things do not work, and I am happy to get a confirmation if a way is a fail as soon as possible.
CMU Students
Just some information about CMU and my courses there:
- Top 6 in 2008 in Engineering and IT QS World University Rankings
- Top 12 in 2010 in Engineering and IT QS World University Rankings
- #1 in Computer Science Schools (US News and World Reports)
I hope that this is a great step to the next big goal:)