Chapter One: Dawn of the Web and the
Online Entrepreneur
I calculated once that if I have worked on average 50 hours a week,
with two to three weeks holiday a year, for more than 20 years, then I have
logged 50,000 hours at the online technology coal face. Maybe I took a few
more holidays, but on the other hand, I probably worked more than 50
hours a week. You get my point, anyway.
When I look back, it was an incredible ride from the early
embryonic days of the worldwide web to the Internet of Things today. The
blueprint for starting an online business that I discovered (and am sharing
with you in this book) has been shaped by truly authentic experiences—the
good, the bad, and the occasionally ugly!
Learning the online tech ropes in Asia
I joined my first startup in Tokyo in 1999. I loved the fast pace and
decided that startups were my thing. I hadn’t worked for a big company
before and knew now that I never would. When I joined, the company was
just five people. The basic service we provided was connecting office
networks for foreign companies in Tokyo. We helped Virgin Cinemas,
Goldman Sachs, and many other foreign companies open their offices in
Tokyo.
A few years later, I moved to Bangkok, Thailand, and joined another
very early stage online tech startup. There were only seven or eight people
in the beginning, but we grew to 260 in just a couple of years. We opened
more than a dozen different companies, which was enough to make your
head spin. One business ran the local MSN portal and sold advertising into
Hotmail and Messenger when they were still popular. Another company
sold Google Search. Then Facebook suddenly became popular in Bangkok;
it had the highest percentage of Facebook users of any city in the world at
one point.
My primary project was to build an online ad network, which is
where I first got to see how audiences work online. In the early 2000s,
advertisers and their agencies were still phoning websites to book banner
placements, paying on a weekly or monthly basis. We worked out a plan to
link hundreds of Southeast Asian websites in a platform for automated
advertising. We named it Admax, which we thought was pretty cool at the
time. We borrowed heavily from the ideas of Silicon Valley, especially
startups with even cooler names, like The Rubicon Project and Tribal
Fusion.
In 2005 I flew with a co-founder to San Francisco to meet Tribal
Fusion’s founder, Dilip DaSilva, to ask if we could partner with him in
Asia. He laughed and said that he planned to do it by himself. Admax did
win that battle in Southeast Asia, but Dilip’s network was much more
successful than ours in the end.
Despite some early wins, our technology wasn’t as advanced as
online ad networks in the US; it didn’t track all the things they could.
Machine learning was already developing, and we were a long way from
having anything like that. But we had hundreds of websites onboard, and
they appreciated the revenue we sent them. Admax was later sold for a bit
over $20 million.
The highs and lows of an entrepreneurial life
In 2009, I was offered the chance to sell my shares and jumped at it.
I had achieved a personal milestone and felt that I had finally “made it.”
Then I was convinced by another entrepreneur to take my earnings and
invest them in his technology startup. This time it was golf technology. As
you can see, I have never been scared to try things.
I thought I was going into a “lifestyle business,” where I would get
to play golf every day, but I had jumped out of the frying pan and into the
fire. Overexcited by some early success, we grew the company too quickly.
Soon, I was working harder than ever, building indoor golf centers, selling
memberships, and trying to create a golf coaching app. Our revenue never
caught up with our costs, and we struggled to break even. After four years
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