This was me on my first day of work. It’s been 4 years now.  

Here’s what I remember… I was terrified. It was my first full-time job, and the first time I’d be paid more than $500 for anything. This wasn’t actually a career path that I had identified for myself. I had gotten married 3 months earlier, and my wish was to be a flight steward with Singapore Airlines – I was hoping to write during the downtime. Dinesh (founder/CEO) emailed me out of the blue to introduce himself and to tell me that he was looking for someone to help run their blog. At the time I actually knew almost nothing about tech startups, in Singapore or anywhere else. I was familiar with Google, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It would be about a year before I used Uber for the first time. I had never heard of the phrase “SaaS” before. (It means software-as-a-service. Software used to be sold as a product – lots of money for a single product that gets obsolete pretty quickly.) 

I was curious to meet Dinesh for coffee because he was someone who had read my blog, who seemed smart and accomplished. Also he implied that I was a ‘talented individual’. Over coffee he told me about his vision for what he was building – I remember he described it as “Cisco for social networks”, which sounded really smart. But I didn’t really understand it. It sounded like a bunch of technology stuff, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted that. I wanted to travel and write about random social issues and stuff. So I think I told him… well I really need a job, and SIA is my first choice. I went for the interview a couple of days later, and I didn’t even make it past the first round. On retrospect, I’m really, really glad that SIA didn’t choose me.  

I was terrible at negotiating and I didn’t think I had any skills or bargaining chips. So when Dinesh asked me to suggest a salary, I said something like, “Um… I’m buying a house, the mortgage costs this much, and I’m going to need at least X a month to be able to focus on my job without worrying about finding freelance work, etc to make ends meet.” I can get emotional thinking about the kid I was then. I was completely uncertain of myself. He introduced me to the team over lunch, and  

Small team 

When I first joined, there were about 5-6 people in the team. We’d go out for lunch together every day. We’d turn the lights off and lock up the office. We’d all fit in a single elevator, and then we’d all fit in a single car (Zach’s SUV, which we dubbed the Zachmobile). We’d drive out to have lunch somewhere – Holland V, Buona Vista, Ghim Moh, etc. The team was small enough that you could know everything that was happening in the company, over lunch. I really enjoyed listening to the engineers describe the challenges they were dealing with – scaling issues, premature optimisation, etc. They were very patient with all of my noob questions.  

1-1’s 

I still remember this – on my first day of work, Dinesh told me that he had a meeting. Turns out that the meeting was with Zach, his co-founder. I remember very specifically thinking, there are only 6 guys in the room, and the two co-founders are obviously great friends, why do they need to have a “meeting”? But I quickly learned that this was a great habit, and I’m now of the belief that everybody should do regular 1-1s with anybody important to them in their lives. Spouses should do it. I think parents should do it with their children.