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At my company, we have unlimited budget for books or any other (educational) reading materials. I am actually proud of this policy and tell practically everyone that comes to our office for interview. I keep saying this to my team repeatedly, but most of them don’t take advantage of this. Perhaps mostly they just google up things and maybe they don’t quite see how books book can be useful.

Let me explain how unlimited book budget is feasible. It is really simple. You see, for what we pay our developers, a typical book cost roughly an hour or two of their working time. If, by reading this book, they manage to save an or two of their time, the book already paid for itself. Now, if the book is shared by a few developers, the book basically paid itself many times over. What if this time saving is continuous, 1 hour of saving per month, the ROI of a single book is now a few hundred percent!

There is nothing magical about this. It is simple mathematics, simple economic. And me, I always believe in simple economics!

Occasionally, I have this wonderful delusion that somehow, my company’s product, become ultra famous literally within a single day. You’ve heard it before. Some product gets features somewhere and suddenly become an overnight success, or that out of nowhere, a new product takes over the market by storm. Oh, and the famous “I don’t spent a single cent on marketing” bullshit.

They all seems wonderful, but they really an exception, not the norm. For most successful companies, there is an unbelievable amount of work that goes into it, including marketing the product. The work involved are tough, gritty and took very long hours. No ones likes to do it, but it increases your chance of success by 1,000 fold!

The sooner we accept that we really can’t skip the “hard work” part and that waiting for that magical moment of success to happen is not going to take us forward, the sooner it is we can get back to work and make things happen. Acceptance is the key!

Just a quick review of my recent Web 2.0 Expo trip, while it is still fresh in my head.

Firstly, almost everyone there rocking an iPad which is really amazing. Some of my friends dismiss the iPad as a fad, but I really think what we have here, while not perfect, is a glimpse into the future. It is a world where we are no longer carrying a keyboard bolted to a LCD screen, with limited computing hours. One day, when our portable computing device runs as long as the iPad, we are going to look back on how silly we were running around looking for power supply every few hours.

Now, let’s get back to business. I was there basically to recharge my entrepreneurial battery. The last 1 year has been a busy year and was filled with ton and tons of “executions”. It is fun to get into the strategic thinking mode again. The Lean Startup sessions were excellent. Although they use fancy words such as “pivot”, which simply means “change”, I was happy to be reminded that startups jobs, like mine is to continuously test new business model for maximum growth. There is no right or wrong about what we do. The very nature of startup is that both problems and solutions are not as clear cut or as well defined as traditional business. We have a vision how the future might look like, but the solution needs constant tweaking and sometimes, even the vision needs updating.

Less experienced individual might pee in their pants when facing with the uncertainty, but for me the challenge of building something new, and trying to steer the team is my daily morning coffee. It feels good to be surrounded with like-minded people who are as crazy as me.

Another important lesson from the expo is the idea that you should not be building a product, but instead a platform. It is a simple idea that many of us forgot. When we talk about platform, we sometimes overwhelmed with the thought of trying to create another iPhone platform or building another Facebook, the chances which of course, is as slim as anaroxic under-aged models. But it doesn’t have to be that massive. A good platform simply means that the core value of your offerings can be derived through multiple channels, your website being just one of of them. We need to starter thinking about multiple channels, mobile devices, phone, iPad, refrigerator! A solid API can do this, which is what we will focus on.

Third important lesson is perhaps the human analytics. Silicon valley startup are extremely aggressive in chasing leads and sales. It seems as if their marketing department are run by a bunch of Skynet-manufactured terminators, bend on hitting their sales numbers. There are exceptions of course, but by far, the more successful ones are pretty much sales driven. They are crazy about measuring their website analytics. So you are tracking your site daily traffic? That’s lame. These guys are tracking your daily visit to the loo!. Oh, you stopped reading this blog for 5 minutes, did you just come back from the toilet?, click here to have order your toilet paper.

Forth lesson, is the importance of customer development. However, this topic really deserve its own blog entry and I will get back to this later.

Now, I need to get back to my mind-numbing wait for my flight…

Here I am at LAX, bored out of my mind, waiting for my flight home. So I figure I could write a few words, reflecting my recent experience in Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

1. My first session, which is also one of the most useful one was about Economic 2.0 . Oh man, we are so far away. The world are moving at such a rapid pace, I don’t think most of us realize what’s coming. I thought I knew what Enterprise 2.0 is before, but to the extends it is being pursued is mind-boggling. It is a challenging environment we live in and the pursuit of business efficiency has never been this ruthless.

2. I feel that, we have an unhealthy culture of celebrating those who talk about entrepreneurship rather than those who actually do it. It is liberating to hear stories and experiences, direct from the actual entrepreneur themselves. They (most, but not all) talk with such passion, clarity and honesty, which are rare, locally.

3. Get real. We need to be honest to ourselves and start asking some real, hard questions. Will our business survive the global competition. Do we really have any competitive edge, or are we just syok sendiri ? Is our revenue model sustainable ? 5 years from now, how will people remember us? a loser who talk to much? Have we been resourceful ? or have we been complaining about lack of resource ?

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I recently read an interesting short writeup on bnet on how Twitter and the other revenue-less Web 2.0 company, now more than ever needed to get down to business. In case you missed it, we are actually in the middle of another tech bubble about to go bust. How can you tell ? easy. When a business is focusing on anything other than revenue and profitability, sooner or later its going to bite you.

The current economic turmoil doesn’t do anyone any good. Too much has been said about the Great Greed of Wall Street and I am not going to add anything new there. The interesting point is, while wall street become obsessed with generating more and more money, many Web 2.0 company manage to somehow turn the idea of generating real revenue into yesterday’s fad. Shocking! Generating revenue is NOT cool!.

Personally, I have no doubt that this crisis will affect us. Yes, I could be all optimistic and say, “oh, more now people will want to buy our stuff because it saves them money” all day. Not surprisingly,  almost all the entrepreneur that I knew say almost exactly that. We fail to see that entrepreneur are risk taker of disproportionate proportion. With 90% failure rate, optimism isn’t worth much.

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Just a short note. I will be giving a talk at CMS Expo in Denver, Colorado this 4th December 2008. CMS Expo is a very business-friendly event where the focus will be on education, business and networking. Despite the name, Joomla will still take a centre stage in this expo.

If you are a big fan of Joomla or wondering if Joomla will fit your needs, this would be a perfect event to attend. In no other event that so many Joomla expert will gather in one place, both commercial developer and developr within the core team. Personally, I am excited to meet up with everyone!

I will giving 2 talks, on component development and using Joomla! as your blogging platform. I will also be giving short presentation on JomSocial, our new Joomla! powered social networking platform.

You can register your seat here . I’ll see you there.

Morten Lundal (that digi dude) think that in the future, no one will wear that silly, tiny piece of fabric around your neck, also fondly known as “ties”. He was absolutely right. Those green thing that visit us from the future, (our great, great grand kid doing some, time-traveling joyride) seems not to wear much clothing at all. I mean, hey what’s the point right? Thanks to global warming, earth is hot enough already. They also perhaps have been “taking the time to re-think its relevance” and figure that clothing is a waste of time and money.

Seriously, I think Mr Lundal, have a very good point, that is to challenge existing beliefs (which by the way, he manage to write down just before I am about to erase any thought of his column). But to take it on the humble ‘ties’ is just cruel. Those ties has probably done a lot of good, compared to say, the pointless underwear?

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