Advisory Email – Apr 2023

In the view of transparency, below is an excerpt from an advisory email I sent this month:

UPDATES 🎉
Off to SE Asia to do some Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EiR) work with SwissEP Vietnam. I’ll be in Hanoi to do some work with BizCare and in Da Nang.

Will also be back in Malaysia for the last time in a while to catch up with friends and family.

Generational Dinners: On pause till I return in August.

Startup Fuckup Podcast

Hiring the wrong people, AI and automation in recruitment, screening candidates, diversity & inclusion and more. Tanya Abbey and I discuss core concepts around attracting, engaging, and retaining the right talent for organizations.

• How to decide if something should be automated vs. delegated.
• How to approach automation while staying human.
• The Focus Funnel (by Rory Vaden).

• What constitutes company/organizational/workplace culture.
• Push vs. Pull values.
• Wrong and right ways of approaching Diversity & Inclusion.
• How to build an aligned team, and what to align for if you’re pursuing diversity of thought and opinions.

• Building your brand as an employer.
• Potential channels for talent acquisition.
• Advise around attracting the right talent.

• Culture vs. Mindset vs. Skill fit.
• Behavioural vs. Situational Interview questions.
• STAR Framework for behavioural interviews.
• Understanding what to look/listen for.
• Reference checking.

• Effective leadership vs. management.
• Servant leadership.
• How to motivate your team.
• Employee retention.
• Communicating & providing feedback.

• How to approach delegating tasks.
• Goal Setting (OKRs + SMART)
• Team Meetings.

LESSONS🎓

• Selling Ethically =/= Longer Sales Cycles (7min video)
• Research: Understanding your customer’s needs, quantifying value, and the challenge sales mindset (20min video)
• The most expensive answer you should know (5min read)
• Inauthentic vs. authentic urgency in sales (5min read, 60% ChatGPT generated)
• Ai is the new buzzword. Here’s why it’ll be stickier than NTFS and crypto combined and how to tell if it’s real AI or automation in disguise (7min read, 95% ChatGPT generated)

GRATITUDE 🤝

• Laura Barreca for having me speak on Values-based Leadership for BCIT’s Peak Leadership series.
• Alexei Schwartzman for making my tax filing as painless as possible again.
• Eva Yin for organizing and having me at her recent Mindful Bites dinner where we discussed next big trends vs. shiny objects.

WORDS OF WISDOM 🤓
So much gold from this one man: Naval Ravikant, co-founder @ AngelList

“A busy mind accelerates the passage of subjective time”

“Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want”

“In any situation in life, you only have three options. You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. It’s that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase that I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: accept.”

Next: May-Aug 2023 Advisory Newsletter