When end and new year, I was in Vietnam but I skype with my family living in Japan and could make a conversation.
In this blog, I'd like to "declare" 3 things that we must achieve this year. This is not "a dream" but objectives that we must achieve.
1. Monetize with our service
Our company is a startup.
When I interview with candidates who applied for our company, I often ask them "Are you interested in a startup?" then most of them answer like "Yes, because I can learn more things and get more changes in smaller than big companies".
But I would say startup and just "a small company" is completely different. IMO, a startup must grow up quickly and create the new value to the society.
We've got income through outsourcing projects so we've not been a startup in the real meaning.
Now we're starting the new business and will launch as a closed beta in February. Then we aim to get enough income so that we can operate our company. Then we can say "we're a startup company".
2. Realize the optimum working environment for entrepreneurs
This could be realized if we could realize No.1 above.What I want to is the working environment that we can work anytime & anywhere.
We can work anytime
Project members have a wide variety of backgrounds such as male/female, single/married, short sleeper/long sleeper, Vietnamese/foreigners and so on. From now on, I'd like to recruit members from more types of countries. Then it'll be more diverse. In this situation, it's almost impossible that all members get the performance in the same time. Someone can work their brain in the early morning, some might work the best at midnight (actually I can concentrate at midnight).
One more thing is that it's almost meaningless that the working time is fixed. In our company working time is from 9:00 to 17:30 so 7.5 hours. But it's just a kind of custom of the era of Industrial Revolution. If our output depends on the body and power, we should ensure the time to work. But we work with our brain. It doesn't matter with the time. Sometimes we may perform well for long but sometimes we may work well for only short. Or performance for 1 hour with very deep concentration might be higher than the one for 8 hours without concentration.
But we must notice we need to ensure the time to work in the outsourcing projects because we basically make the contract to specify the time like 8 hour a day then the customer can pay for it.
We can work anywhere
Because we're working for IT industry, we can work anywhere if we have a laptop. Our source code is managed in the private remote repository on Github. The test server is in the cloud environment. We can communicate via Slack. So we don't need to work at the office necessarily.
But we must think of communication among team members too.
Of course, we can make more deep and frequent communication with team members if we work in the same environment. It will make us stressful if we must make every conversation with members via chat tool (and late reply makes us more stressful). And communication is the most important in software development. So we take a balance to work remotely or not and this balance will be one of the business skill from now on.
3. Promote the community of startup
Honestly not so many startup teams are in Hanoi, Vietnam. Also, most of the engineers here are used to the outsourcing projects and not so optimum for startup (these kinds of person can develop software with only fixed requirement). But I dream of Hanoi like San Francisco or Israel, lots of new services are born from here. In order to do that, I really think that we need the situation of friendly competition between startups and startups. So I'd like to promote the community of startup.Maintain the status quo equals to decline
As I mentioned above, the startup needs to grow up quickly. In order to grow up, we must "change" something.Albert Einstein also defined
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.In Japan, there is a habit of saying the in the new year like "I'll make this year the year of a leap" but I really hate it. Instead of it, I'd like to declare what I wanna "change".
I think I worked hard the last year but I don't think it was enough and I'm not satisfied with the result of the last year. So I wanna change myself.
Ohmae Kenichi san, one of the greatest thinker, said
There are only three ways in which people can change.So this year I try to spend more time for my health. In order to work hard, I need more stamina. Recently I feel it's decreasing so I'll train it more.
The first one is changing the time allocation.
The second is changing the place to live.
The third is changing the person who is associated.
Then I'd like to prove that we can work anytime & anywhere. I'm thinking I need to work more.
Finally one more thing is we always welcome the people with startup spirit!
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