It’s just a few weeks now before our launch of our Silicon Valley startup based in this building in Sunnyvale, California.
This building is a huge center where loads of other Silicon Valley startups are based. Paypal was supposed to have started off here when they were first founded too.
The startup Ming and I are doing in Silicon Valley is called NuffnangX.
Even though it borrows on the name of Nuffnang that we came up with some 5 years ago, NuffnangX is a completely separate unrelated company from Nuffnang. Unlike Nuffnang which is a mid-sized company with a strong management team that practically runs the company now, NuffnangX is a startup with few staff and limited resources that will need loads of personal attention. So Ming and I have invested lots of our personal money and time into it because we believe in it.
But still we know that it’s one of those things that will either be really big some years from now… or completely fail. There is no middle ground because there is no revenue model yet and for it to really make money in future it needs scale. Lots of scale. So much scale that we know even if we’re successful in Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Australia or any of our other Asian countries we’re in… it wouldn’t be big enough to survive. So that’s why we decided to invest in setting up offices in Silicon Valley and in London, to try to cater to our US and UK users.
My colleagues in our US office here Ezen and Gabriel along with some others will be helping us with that.
NuffnangX isn’t meant to be a company or a product targeted just to the Malaysian or Singaporean market. It’s meant to be for the world and our dream is to change the blogosphere of the world.
So far the excitement and the experiences we’ve been having doing this new Silicon Valley startup has been really rewarding. The stress is tough… but still it brings me back to our exciting startup days from before. If we fail, I know at this point that we’ll have no regrets. Ming and I would have lost a lot of time and money… but we would have made in experiences and lessons.
If we succeed though, I hope we would be the first Asian company to be able to break into Silicon Valley.
Wish me luck guys.
If you want to be kept up to date with NuffnangX’s developments, you can go to www.nuffnangx.com.
Or follow NuffnangX on Twitter @NuffnangX.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space