Meeting Derek Sivers

I was checking my email one day and was surprised and overjoyed to receive an invitation to catch up for coffee from Derek Sivers.

I read many of Derek’s books and have emailed him in the past, and he’s been kind enough to respond. This time he was stopping by Malaysia for a few days, and was catching up with the Malaysians who are on his NowNowNow site.

As we were meeting up at the Aloft hotel in KL Sentral, I also took the opportunity to scout the route to the SoftBank Malaysia office, as I was about to be stationed there by Shieldbase.

Community Building

I shared some of my community building experiences with him, from co-founding Remote Work Malaysia to the HeySubang community. Of course, starting a movement is something Derek knows a lot about, and I’d have to say that his NowNowNow is both a successful movement and community at the same time, and I’m loving it. He seemed to be particularly fascinated by my viewpoint that communities form around solutions. I always felt that too many people try to build communities for strange purposes, like using them as a marketing funnel or something. But I primarily like to solve problems, and I find that when you solve a problem, people tend to be attracted to the solution, and that momentum itself forms a community. Some of my solutions aren’t really major things or new discoveries, but rather just removing certain friction points that prevent certain solutions from connecting to each other and becoming something more useful. Oftentimes I’m curious why people don’t do it, but then again, I have my own strange way of looking at things, which may or may not be a good thing.

Later on, when Derek was adding an entry about our meet-up to his website, I got the feeling that he was checking out the HeySubang website and it probably didn’t live up to the community that I was describing, which is a good reminder to myself that I really need to clean up that site, which is currently in a half-broken state. Quite the embarrassment. Good driver to push myself harder, though.

Parenting

We talked about parenthood too, and I loved some of the perspective he shared with me about his life, and the upcoming adventure for his son. It gave me a good reminder that the world is so large and beautiful, and I hope I’ll be able to allow my son to experience more of it as part of growing up.

Esperanto

The topic strayed to Esperanto, and I think he was surprised to find out I was familiar with the topic. But after I explained to him how it fit into my view of horizontal connecting platforms, it probably made sense to him. After all, Esperanto can be viewed as trying to be a meta common layer above all other languages, but timing and history didn’t favour it. In the end, English has probably achieved what Esperanto set out to achieve. I had forgotten that he wrote about it in one of his books before too. I probably did take a light-hearted stab at learning Esperanto when I was a kid, but more as an idealistic experiment.

Online Legacies

He also shared his view about setting up a foundation for websites and domains to outlive a person. I mentioned to him that WordPress already offered something along those lines with the 100-year plan, and it was cool when he told me that Matt (Mullenweg) got the idea from him and called him for advice before he launched that product. Not too long after our meet-up, Derek launched it at KeepSite. I told him I was addressing this topic in a slightly different way, by focusing on family domain for my last name (family name), primarily so that my son will have a good website address and email when he grows up, but since we share the same last name, I get the benefit too.

IndieWeb and NowNowNow

Sometimes it’s also interesting how wide-reaching the IndieWeb can be, but also how close netizens are to each other. Of the people he was contacting during this trip, Elizabeth and Colin are already old friends of mine who I keep in regular contact with, not to mention Jenxi over in Shenzhen, and Daniel Cerventus. Funnily enough, I didn’t even know he was meeting up with Colin, until I got a text from Colin later. If we knew, maybe Colin and I could have had a coffee too.

Gratitude

I enjoyed our meet-up, and am extremely grateful for the time and sharing of perspectives. It felt quite weird to consciously talk about myself, since whenever I’m with someone, I’m always conscious to ensure that the discussion isn’t about me, and that I encourage the other person to talk. However considering that I correctly guessed that Derek had queued up all his coffee sessions back to back, it’d be really weird for him to repeat his story to everybody he meets, and it’d be more logical that he wanted to hear the different perspectives of the people he met. I mentioned my concerns as we were walking him back to the hotel, and he confirmed that he’d be disappointed if I didn’t talk about myself. So that was a weight off my shoulders.

I got a hug before we parted ways, which made me happy.