My startup journey (part 1)

So, about 3 years ago, I used to live in Kuala Lumpur where I worked as a producer for a digital agency. Had pretty much everything I could want at the time, a comfortable job abroad, a relationship, a nice place etc. For anyone in South Asia, that is considered to be the whole package, so I considered myself very lucky and things seemed good.

Well, after about a year of my company saying that I did not have to worry about renewing my visa, my boss drops this bomb on me. "We won't be able to renew your visa. It's just not going to be possible".

Turns out he hadn't looked into it in detail previously and when he finally did, it was either too difficult and expensive. To be honest, even if it was because they didn't think I was worth the effort, they could have told me before hand rather than convincing me everything would be alright. I had a shit ton of other job offers which I had previously declined and when he gave me this info, I only had a month and a half left before my visa expired. Shit....

I was all like

In the next month, several things happened. I tried desperately looking for ways to not go home, but there wasn't really anytime. I had to leave the country I grew to love and where I had lived for 4 years because I couldn't get another job/sponsor for my visa extension. Soon after, my girlfriend and I ended up breaking up and I flew back home.

I won't lie. It sucked balls. Having done everything I was supposed to, having the "good" life and then being back in my parents house with people thinking that I must have somehow fucked things up.

Luckily for me, I had been spending some time working on a project for fun with a friend in the UK. It was an education project we were just playing around with and we never really thought it would go anywhere. I had all this free time though and thought I would just try to see where things go.

It's around this time that I came across this brilliant man and his collection of essays.

#truth

For those of you who don't know who this legend is, he is Paul Graham, founder of the legendary Y Combinator software incubator which has helped create companies like Dropbox, AirBnB, Stripe and many more. He was a startup founder himself back in the early days of the interwebs, but now he just helps them grow.

His essays got me extremely interested in the world of startups and wet my appetite for starting something of my own. They also were luckily one of the best sources on the internet for information on how to build/run startups. You can find all of them here http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

I had all this time, so I devoured as many essays as I could and tried to apply whatever I could into my own project. Things slowly started to move.

I wasn't a programmer, I had a business/marketing background and was extremely intimidated by code. In most peoples (friends/family) eyes I had no chance and was wasting my time, but I decided to keep going. One of Paul's essays "Relentlessly Resourceful" helped me brave on and I soon found a team of people to help me with what I was doing. About a year down the line, something very surprising happened.

A picture I took while sitting on the sidewalk in front of All Souls college, Oxford (I was eating a Tesco meal deal)

My friend was doing some research at Oxford and suggested that we get in touch with the software incubator for some advice on how to take this forward. We were just clueless about how to take things to the next stage and wanted some guidance.

We had a Skype call booked with the head of the programme and I of course (in keeping with Skype tradition) was dressed smartly from the waist up. To our surprise, by the end of the call and our pitch, we were offered a place in their software incubator. They were even willing to give us a bit of money to get started!

A few weeks later I packed up everything I had, took all my savings and flew down to the city of dreaming spires :)

This was all about a year ago now and a lot has happened since then, but I will leave the rest for part 2. Thanks for reading :D

Meow meow tax

My co-founder took a picture of a kitty. He is a good picture man.