Monthly Archive for March, 2007

Sun Microsystems - They Get It

Published
by
Steven Loi
on March 21, 2007
in Companies and Technology
. 2 Comments

Sun Microsystems On Monday, March 19th, I had the privilege of attending Sun Mashup Event featuring a debate between Web blogger Mike Arrington and Sun Microsystems’ Tim Bray, most famously known for being the co-inventor of XML (Extensible Markup Language). The debate centered around the term “Web 2.0” and other related topics surrounding the current web where it has transformed the way we communicate, do business, and breaking the walls of information. Traveling from Davis to Menlo Park is quite a long drive; it took us, my team members and me, about an hour and forty minutes to get to Sun’s HQ.

Arriving there just in time to catch the last few questions the audience asked Sun’s CEO Mr. Jonathan Schwartz, I was excited to experience what the rest of the event had in store. Mr. Schwartz’s brief talk touched briefly about Sun’s approach now after having to deal with their rough times after the post dot com bubble. He admittedly mentioned Sun’s approach now is to develop that so called ‘listening gene,’ used in customer meetings to spread their technologies and hopefully win their business through their solid products. While the debate topics, which were the main event, between Mr. Bray and Mr. Arrington were interesting and mind stimulating, I was more interested throughout the event in taking what they talked about and analyze it from a, “What’s in it for us?” Sun prospective. Mr. Schwartz’s short appearance definitely got my mind thinking.

Here’s a bit of information about me and my interest in Sun even as a business major: Ever since Josh joined forces with Calvin and me in the company, Josh has fed me bits and pieces of his vast tech knowledge over time. One of these topics was about how highly he respected Sun’s technologies and their company. At the time, I was curious about SUNW and so I did some research. Despite the financial fundamentals of the company not looking too great since the dot com bust (from $64.31 to $6.18), Josh (stubbornly) encouraged me to look beyond that. With confidence, he explained Sun’s problem was never about their technology. They have great technology. They just did a terrible job running the business aspect of the company. Lately, they have been cleaning up their irresponsible spending. Six months removed from Josh telling me about Sun, they reported their first quarter (in January 2007) in the black (profit) after eight consecutive quarters in the red.

Back to yesterday’s event – from an attendee’s standpoint, I was impressed at first glance at Mr. Schwartz and Sun’s acceptance of the new web concepts and being the supporter of entrepreneurs and small businesses. They have followed through with their approach in forming bridges not walls: Opening up Solaris to the public, developing a Sun Startup Essentials program for startups, and had every single Sun employee at the event that I talked to, ask genuinely, “How may we help you? Is there anything we answer for you? If you have any questions, here’s our website and we are very responsive to questions asked online. It is our job to advise, answer, and share our knowledge of Sun’s products to help your business.” Sun is trying to reach out to all startups as a way to engage the next generation of infrastructure consuming companies by taking the try, learn, and if you like it, buy it and support us approach.

Linux PenguinIt’s unfortunate that I’m no Computer Science guy; I can only imagine how much more enthusiastic I would have been to be able to not only communicate on the business level, but on the technical level at the event as well. I believe their approach in opening Solaris up, in supporting up the entrepreneurs and small businesses, and offering many tools for developers to learn their technologies will pay off big time in the future – look no further than what Linux/MySQL has done to the web – with their movement. All this is a testament to Mr. Schwartz’s lead. He is the engine that is leading the way for Sun’s reemergence recently.

I’m excited to learn more about Suns’ initiatives from a minority shareholder’s standpoint and their technology from a small company standpoint. Thinking back, with all that’s going on, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Schwartz, in the role of President for four years and counting and CEO for less than two years and counting, used the business driven, multi-faceted approach made most popular by GE’s Jack Welch – Six Sigma - to lead this change at Sun. Whatever Mr. Schwartz and his team is doing, it seems to be working. They get it.

“What makes a good story?”

Published
by
Steven Loi
on March 12, 2007
in General
. 0 Comments

The last couple weeks I had been working hard to get together a Powerpoint presentation for my Saturday engagements. As with any other skills, constant practice is the only solution to bringing your A game. I hadn’t produced a well thought out presentation or written a Powerpoint in a long time so I decided last week to dig back in my saved links for some resources to better prep myself. And while going through and jotting down the points that would be relevant to the presentation I would give, I came across this video about Google. I think it was a beautifully done video and very well presented. It leaves the audience engaged and thinking. Oh yeah, the topic itself left me with more questions than I had going into the video. And, the theme of the blog post I read was, “What makes a good story?” See for yourself:

Staying Mentally Tough - Growing Intangibles

Published
by
Steven Loi
on March 5, 2007
in Leadership
. 0 Comments

This past week, above any recent weeks, was a difficult one. From my last post, you will see I was running on a bit of some octane as I was able to pull a long weekend last week to be able to complete my business plan for SEA for that past Monday. The rest of the week was also a hectic one:

  1. Outside of the usual hours at the office, I had to make a speech for my business fraternity on Wednesday over entrepreneurship on Wednesday night at their Professional Night held at UC Davis.
  2. As an vivid supporter of the student run organization now, I went to support their recruitment events Monday through Wednesday night.
  3. I got a message from my former regional director asking for a favor for a fraternity brother in Newport Beach that needed paperwork from the Secretary of State in Sacramento and was very time sensitive. So I hauled over to Sac to make the errands.
  4. Friday night, I started working on the Business Plan Powerpoint Presentation at 12:30am. I wasn’t too worried through the week just because I have experiences in both the plan and PPT presentations. But work is work, and I work all but two hours of the night till the 8:30am presentation time.
  5. Helped a friend Saturday with their interview for this Monday.
  6. Helped a friend’s exchange program friend with their resume Sunday night.
  7. Replied back to some client e-mails.

And here I sit. 3:30am, typing this post. However, this post, as with any future posts, aren’t merely a laundry list of the things I did - I’d hate writing just a list of “Just completed” as much as any reader hates reading them as well. The real reason for typing a weblog is to remind myself (and as a consequence inform my small, but hopefully loyal readers) that through all the deadlines and promises that I had to fulfill, the effort and work wasn’t that difficult. I’ve been in many of the situations before so it’s nothing new. The real battles that I dealt with this week and weekend and that I will continue to deal with is:

My over seemingly strong will to do “whatever it takes to succeed at business” that sometimes affect my friends and surrounding. For instance, I continue to get the nagging comments from parents and most family members who all criticizes my decision to live in Northern California and to continue grow a small start-up company from ground up.

I believe my friends knows how I am and how I am disciplined. The latter really just eats me up sometimes. I don’t mind the doubt; it drives me to work even harder, to wake up an hour earlier, to work another hour, to think about those “What else can be done?” questions constantly to make sure we will succeed. But, it’s disheartening to hear it from the same blood-related members. Although I have far too thick of a skin to let that deter me, I’d love for one day to share my successes, even if its minor, with them. For them to realize and understand, not all 8am - 5pm means success. It does mean security and safety, but it doesn’t mean it’s the only way. For one that is on the brink of living in his seventh place in six years, one thing I doesn’t affect me is security and safety if the overall message and bigger vision is worth it. I find them hypocritical for them to constantly stress finding success and making money as a result of the success over the span of my life time, yet, when I fully embrace their words and bust my tail, they still believe its wrong.

I guess it brings to another point in which a friend brought up recently and I took notice. I am victim to and is guilty of the whole “lead them, guide them, suggest to them, but don’t force them” process. Everyone has their own creativity and everyone wants to have some sense of ownership. By having ownership and feeling a part of something, you empower them to do things sometimes beyond what they ever imagined. To give options and to lead correctly, you challenge one in the most positive way and inspire them to reach beyond their limitations.

I understand it. I fully embrace it. I breathe it. And while I’ll continue to strive hard to not only find success and proving to my doubters, I say it with a smile. I smile when walking this difficult route because there are so many more intangibles that you learn about one self on top of what you learn as an entrepreneur than you can ever learn walking the normal/safe route.

A quote I’ll leave you with is one I used for my speech that is by Stephen Covey, who wrote the book The 8th Habit:

“Leadership is communicating to people their worth and potential so clearly that they are inspired to see it in themselves.”

I live it.

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