Does everyone here know who Mark Chang is?
Just in case your memory’s a little blurry.
Mark Chang is actually the Penangite who founded Jobstreet.com which is today without a doubt, still Malaysia’s most successful dotcom.
Now let me tell you a story.
Just a while before the renovation of our KL office was completed, I was hunting for office furniture. I went to everywhere from Ikea, to A-M.. I was looking for a big conference room style table.
Then a little piece of news came to my attention.
Just a floor above my office was another office that had an old conference room table the owner wanted to give away.
Apparently (or so the legend goes), that table once belonged to Mark Chang himself but after Jobstreet moved on to a bigger office, he passed it over to its current owner.
In the years that it had been with the current owner, his business had flourished and now he wanted to give it away.
So when I heard that this table was now up for grabs, I seized the opportunity.
I went straight to the current owner’s office to see the table. It was huge but old.
I wanted it anyway.
I didn’t know how I was going to bring the table down a floor to our new Nuffnang office but if there’s a will, there’s a way.
So when our office was ready enough for us to shift in our first pieces of furniture, I got the help of two guys to bring the table down.
It wasn’t an easy task.
Parts of the table could be dismantled, but the top was one HUGE piece of heavy wood.
The two heroes that handled most of the job were fantastic.
First they lifted the table up to dismantle all the screws on the inside.
Then they had to bring it down the long corridor of our office.
But that was the easy part.
The hard part came when we had to bring the huge table top down the fire exit stairwell.
Believe me when I say this, if that table was just 1 inch thicker, it wouldn’t have fit through it.
It took them 30 minutes (with some of our help) but they managed to bring the huge table top down eventually.
The next day, I came back to the office to see the table fully assembled again.
It wasn’t perfect. The table had lots of scratches and some of the wood was coming out on the edges. But that just made it even more desirable for me… just like the scars of a soldier.
Our contractor, Hanifah was nice enough to help me touch up the table as best as he could.
When the job was done, I stood at a window in our newly renovated Nuffnang office.
The smell of fresh paint still in the air as I looked out the window.
There in the distance, the KL Tower stood majestically before my eyes.
When you see a structure so magnificently tall, you can’t help but feel small and humble.
Just like how I was feeling… there I was standing at a window in the new office of a dotcom startup that has grown tremendously fast in just a few months.
I pondered about where I would be standing from in the next one year.
Dreams lingered in my mind when suddenly… my mobile phone rang.
It was time for me to get back to reality.
There was much work to do.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space