Wow, it’s been a hell of a weekend; the marathon wedding weekend of my brother Fadzarudin Shah to Vivy Sofinas, the founders of fashionvalet.net (go to the site and buy something! it’ll feed this new family)
I’m pretty excited about tomorrow… I’m finally jetting off for my pilgrimage to the Mecca of Startups: Silicon Valley!
Seems pretty surreal that my journey has come this far. It all really started with the ‘Silicon Valley Comes to Malaysia’ event. the defining moment was when Voucheres was NOT chosen for any of the 1-to-1 interview spots with 3 of the Silicon Valley titans. That’s when we cemented our mantra, as a team and individuals. In the words of MindValley’s Vishen Lakhiani “when there’s a problem, shift the paradigm to make that problem obsolete”. And that’s exactly what we did. I told my team, “We may not have gotten any 1-on-1’s, but I’m going to haul a** and get us 10 1-on-1’s over the next 3 days. What followed was the most fun 3 days of as an early startup. We researched all the speakers and took any opportunity to grab them for a chat. This culminated in Steve Koskie, Christina Brodbeck, Kulveer Taggar and Jawed Karim appearing in our episode of MyEG’s Make The Pitch… which I think swayed the judges. Sweet WTF moment!
Form then on, we adopted that mentality straight out. We worked around the ‘No’s’ and embraced the ‘Yes’s’ and ‘Sure-I’ll-give-it-a-shot’s’. And that really to Voucheres to places. Eventually it landed us a spot on this trip. Thanks to the StartupMalaysia.org guys for organizing the series, and MDeC’s Bumiputera Development Fund (finally a time that our Bumi-ness has come in handy) for sponsoring us.
It’ll definitely be a busy month. I have no delusions of this being a ‘holiday’. I’ve seen the schedule and it’ll be taxing for sure. But I’m nonetheless excited and lined up some meetings myself with the good ppl in DFJ, YC, 500 Startups, BVP and a whole bunch of startups that I think Voucheres could benefit from.
Well, here’s to a 17hour journey and living out of a suitcase for a month. Let’s just hope I end up back in KL next month, and not just emigrate outta here! **Just kidding Yas (and US embassy), I’ll be back**
Find out more about the Younoodle Camp!
— I’m going to tag all the posts while I’m in SF/SV “younoodle camp” in case you wanna read just about that!
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