Author: Perry Ismangil

CEO/Co-Founder of Teluu, the company behind pjsip.

Why Employees Make Great Entrepreneurs

I agree with Dharmesh on why students make great entrepreneurs. Together with Paul Graham’s reasoning, it is enough for me to let go of my need as a parent for total safety for my kids. I will certainly encourage them to consider “riskier” paths as well as “safer” paths.

However, for myself, this is a bit too late since I am already one of those employees, with a family, mortgage, loans and what have you. So I will now list the reasons why I would make great entrepreneurs, partly to see whether something can be salvaged for us salaried employees in a corporate environment.

Here’s my list, in no particular order:

  1. Realistic Optimism The optimism that we do have are realistic rather than starry eyed. We’ve seen mini-startups (internal projects) succeed or fail enough times to know what works and what doesn’t.
  2. Great Customer Contacts We already met the all important customers, or at least we know exactly where to find them. They’re the ones that our current company does not want to engage, or maybe they want to but cannot.
  3. Good Networking Because we go to board meetings and trade shows and conferences and user groups, we know many people who can help in our startup, either as an investor, partner, a consultant, beta tester, or whatever.
  4. Financially Aware Hey, we survived long enough to read Dharmesh’s blog, didn’t we? Yes, we have bills to pay, but we managed somehow to find enough cash to pay them (well maybe not ALL of them). So we already know the importance of hard cash rather than eyeballs or strategic partners stuff. We know being profitable is not enough, you need excellent cashflow as well.
  5. Excellent People Skills We know that great products come from great companies because they have great people. We already have the skills to weed out deadbeats from our projects. To give our star programmers freedom to innovate. To impress our boss enough to be given the resources. To impress customers enough to always buy and upgrade to new technologies from us.
  6. Kids If all else fails, we have kids in school. We can tell them to start a business, taking the role of a business angel instead. How cool is that?

There you are, for all employees, rejoice. We can be great entrepreneurs as well.

Posted on by Perry Ismangil

Aliya got a blog

Aliya has been using the Internet for a while now, normally for browsing and a bit of online games. A few months ago she started asking though: “How do you make a website?”

After searching a bit, and weighing whether I should host her site and so on, I decided instead to teach her to blog. She made her first post just now, I helped a bit as a spellchecker (I though wordpress.com has one… I guess it will be a paid feature 😉 ).

I also set up her email using GMail, with Google Talk as a notifier and maybe chat.

They are not quite there yet for a primary school kid, but close enough to be easy to use I guess. We’ll see how it goes.

Posted on by Perry Ismangil

Cool new phone service from my telco

Telewest’s new Talk Anywhere service

Telewest’s new Talk Anywhere service is the first of its kind in Britain and will give consumers a choice of packages with 200, 400 or 800 minutes per month. The time can be used to phone local, national, international, mobile and internet numbers for a fixed monthly fee, which also includes the phone line rental.

So let’s see: the cheapest is 200 minutes at £18, which includes line rental, which currently is £10.50. So that means for £7.50 I get 200 minutes, amounting to about 3.75p per minute. Not rock bottom for international calls to Indonesia (or anywhere for that matter) which I can get for 1p to 5p per minute through direct dial providers. But if the quality is as good as current Telewest line, then it’s definitely worth it. The direct dial providers varies so wildly in quality that you have to ring several numbers just to get a good line.

For mobiles 3.75p is extremely cheap, although there is a new company offering discounts to reach 1p per minute, but I’m sure that’s just a teaser rate.

For local/national calls 3.75p is considered expensive nowadays, with unlimited/1-hour redial for 5p etc.

So the big winner is callers to mobile, followed by international destinations if you care about ease of use (no more ever changing 0844 xxxx) and quality (“…so that’s the story. Over. Roger.”).

Posted on by Perry Ismangil

Would you like to own your home?

The Future Of Home-owning

A new housing report may reassure homeowners and potential homebuyers who are worried about the long-term demand for residential property.

An interesting take on residential property market in the UK. They asked young people, future home buyers, on their home-owning preferences. Almost all of them want to be a home owner.

I bought my home back in 2001, less than six months after I emigrated to the UK. I was renting a house for the first year. For me it was a no brainer, because I calculated that the mortage payment is only a bit more (less than 20%) compared with the rent. Even considering the costs involved, the possibility of a price decrease (didn’t happen, instead it increased 100% over 4 years), I figured the most I will lose is the same as renting, so it evens out. I did come into some inheritance money that I used for the deposit.

All in all I’m happy although I now have the additional burden of insurance and property maintenance!

Posted on by Perry Ismangil

Death: is it final?

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Hundreds killed in Hajj stampede

At least 345 Muslim pilgrims have died in a crush during the stone-throwing ritual at the Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, officials say.

Inna lillahi wa inna lillahi rojiun (We are from Allah and to whom we are returning)…

My sister-in-law is doing the Hajj this year, I pray for her but I am not in fear of losing her. This may be strange to non-Muslims, especially from what I perceive to be UK public reaction as reported by the media. Here, death is a final and fatalistic concept, while as Muslims we believe we are transitioning to the afterlife. This is especially true of the Hajj, where would be pilgrims are urged to finalise all affairs, leave no debts, ask forgiveness, due to total submission to Allah during the Hajj.

So while some may scorn the lack of health and safety during the Hajj, such earthly matters are the least of any pilgrim’s concern, it is Allah’s will that one should live or not. This does not mean that the Saudi government as the authority in charge should not do anything. In fact this particular area, which is particularly hard to manage due to a limited time window, has seen massive changes over the years. But if after all that people still die, then all we can say is: Inna lillahi wa inna lillahi rojiun.

Posted on by Perry Ismangil