Tag: Startups

(1/2) “I started off as an engineer, and have worked in corporate finance, IPOs, and even the sales line – so what was next?

(1/2) “I started off as an engineer, and have worked in corporate finance, IPOs, and even the sales line – so what was next? I wanted to do something that could change the world. At that time I naively thought, of joining a Silicon Valley startup – go to the US – and join Google or Microsoft. So I blindly applied to do an MBA in Stanford University – and was rejected.

Life is like a box of chocolates. A month after the rejection letter, I got interviews from Microsoft, Google and a few venture capitals. Eventually I decided to join Microsoft in China. Microsoft‘s HQ is in Seattle, but they have two big R&D centres in India and China.

I joined China’s engineering team on Microsoft Office, starting from Outlook, to Office Android, to Sharepoint Online. Sharepoint was the fastest selling Microsoft product ever.

They hired thousands of engineers for China. China has a big talent pool – every year China is producing 7 million graduates, the majority are engineering students. That’s the talent pool that they have the luxury of tapping from. I will always remember HR telling me, how they hired 1 person out of 2000 candidates.

A lot of people complain about the lack of talent pool in Malaysia. Last time we used to have a lot of Malaysians who are top students in universities abroad. But when they come back to Malaysia, its hard for them to find job opportunities where they can learn.

If there are more big tech organizations like Microsoft, Google and Amazon or well-funded local startups like Grab and Lazada – setting up global product engineering teams here in Malaysia, it will bring world-class engineering practice, that will nurture the local talent pool and subsequently benefit the local startup ecosystem.

This is exactly what happened in China 20 to 30 years ago. When Microsoft moved to China, it took them about 20 years to build up the talent pool. At the very beginning, they only employed junior engineers from China, whilst senior engineers were brought over from the US.

The senior engineers will nurture the junior engineers. In a few years time, the juniors became a strong middle layer. The middle layers came out and joined forces with the likes of Alibaba and Baidu, and continue to nurture homegrown startups.

Luckily, I managed to pull one of my colleagues from Microsoft China to start up a software business together. That’s how Kakitangan.com started.

We wanted to build softwares previously only available to big corporate companies, for smaller companies. Kakitangan.com automates HR (Human Resources) operations such as leave submissions and payroll operations, so the staff can spend more time building their business and their people.

In smaller companies, HR spend most of their time doing payroll and leave applications. These are the kind of things you should use software to automate, and let your staff focus on the important work – how to keep employees engaged, how to keep employees improving.

If 3 years down the road, we help Malaysian SMEs (Small-Medium Enterprises) become 10{eb97150a49149dc6c9e8165e90f1c9129bb6172e02a598b4264a1fc329d7d5bc} or 20{eb97150a49149dc6c9e8165e90f1c9129bb6172e02a598b4264a1fc329d7d5bc} more efficient, that’s a relatively good contribution to the country.

Agencies like MaGIC has helped us grow, by introducing us to other startups that eventually became our clients. By joining the ASEAN Accelerator track, we also made friends with startups from the rest of Southeast Asia, which we still keep in touch until today. It even taught us how to explore and move the business to other countries.

That’s how I hope to contribute to a better Malaysia, by bringing international world class engineering knowledge to Malaysia, due to our experience as founders of a software company, where we can help build Malaysia’s talent pool. I always tell my colleagues, the future is not talked out, the future is built out. The future is built by you, one step at a time.”
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Humans of Kuala Lumpur is partnering with Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC) in featuring inspiring and impact-driven entrepreneurs, problem solvers and startups in their mission to solve Malaysia’s problems!#HumansofMaGIC

Photostory by Amalina Davis
Edited by Mushamir Mustafa

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(This post was first published on July 14th 2018)

MaGIC Startups

(1/2) “If I were to write a book about myself, I would call it ‘The Roller Coaster’.

(1/2) “If I were to write a book about myself, I would call it ‘The Roller Coaster’. When I first entered university, I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t know where to go, I didn’t know what to study. I think this stage happens to a lot of people. In my first year of uni, I failed my subjects. But something happened that changed my life forever – my father was hospitalized for 6 months and it was a wake up call for me.

After he entered into hospital, I decided to stay in Malaysia, I studied in a local university so I can be close to my family.

In my first year of uni, I failed my subjects, so you can see that I was not too keen on studying, but after my father got hospitalized, that’s when I woke up and I realized I want to start a business to support myself and I said ‘you know you need to study hard’.

My results improved in second and third year of university when I started getting Distinctions.

While studying, I also started working to support myself. I made a decision to start a contracting company, for renovation. It was tough and I didn’t have a wonderful university life – it was always spent either working, going to meetings or studying. This is how I started my career and background in this industry. That actually changed my whole life.

When I graduated, I went into the construction business. I remember there was one project where we lost a lot of money due to a combination of factors. Because of this loss, we realized that we have to change the industry by increasing the transparency and options for homeowners and contractors. I won’t call it a failure, I call it a learning curve, and it taught us how to recover from a loss.

From there, BuildEasy was formed.

BuildEasy is an online platform that connects freelance interior designers and homeowners. We help homeowners find the right designer, design their dream home and turn their dream home into a reality.

My advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is this – idea is cheap and execution is a lot of hard work. Success is 97{eb97150a49149dc6c9e8165e90f1c9129bb6172e02a598b4264a1fc329d7d5bc} hard work and 3{eb97150a49149dc6c9e8165e90f1c9129bb6172e02a598b4264a1fc329d7d5bc} luck. I believe luck will only come when you set the right conditions, and the right condition will only come when you work hard for it. There is no substitute for hard work and there is no shortcuts.

Along this journey, MaGIC has really changed the way we look at things and we are very proud to be a part of them. We participated in the Stanford Go2Market programme, where we had a one week course with a professor from Stanford. We even went to Stanford University in the US for two weeks! It taught me to see things from a global perspective – from my small tiny dream to be a Malaysian champion, to eventually become a regional champion.

I think MaGIC really stands for magic – it has given us the magic and through it, we created our own motion and spell.
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Photostory by Samantha Siow
Edited by Mushamir Mustafa and Amalina Davis

Do you have a story? Let us know here: https://forms.gle/ht4HsvbxgSgcKS5h8

(This post was first published on July 18th 2018)

MaGIC Startups

“I am mixed Chinese-Kadazan from Kota Kinabalu, Sabah…”

“I am mixed Chinese-Kadazan from Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. The government school I went to had a strict language policy – when you speak English, it has to be proper English, same goes if you are speaking Malay. Education is done differently there compared to government schools.

My school shaped who I am. They allowed us to express ourselves, be how we are, in what we were aligned with. There were no restrictions or values to practice as long as its legal. I noticed that some of my friends in the Peninsular only got the same exposure in university or college. So we become more outspoken and outgoing.

And so it has always been my childhood dream to become a pilot. When I saw the birds fly in the sky, I used to imagine myself up there. After STPM, I took a few gap years where I graduated as a certified commercial pilot. But life has it in such a way that when times go bad and you are only left with an STPM qualification, you better find a way out.

In 2010, the aviation industry was going through a lay off period. I realised that if I get retrenched, I can’t get a decent job. Eventually, if I don’t get retrenched now, and I am laid off at 40, how bad is that? If I have a degree, I can still be an office boy or a clerk.

At 22, I did my degree in international business and marketing. College was also the place I met my co-founder for my startup Catjira, Sheng who was a finance student. We were two eccentric guys with spare time over the weekday nights and weekend, and we came up with our own side project. That was how we started tinkering with softwares and when we saw a little form of traction, we went all out.

How CatJira is today is very different from when we first started. We have pivoted across multiple products to come to what we are now, which is social media analytics.

Think of it as Facebook 2.0, where we are able to give you more information on your Facebook page insights and turn it into an easily understandable presentation.

We can tell clients what kind of audience might have potential pockets of opportunity, with proper cross-reference age and the location of these groups of people.

In the beginning, the nature of our work took us a year and half to two with no revenue. It took us three years to gain proper traction. Three years of tightening your belt, cutting cost wherever is necessary. The seed funding helped keep us sustainable, if not we both would have gone back to the corporate field.

I have been in both corporate and startup; it’s the same to me. The only difference is, you will have an emotional tie to your own company, so your drive is higher.

That is something I won’t deny. Even in start ups, you don’t wake up everyday loving what you do. There will be days when you feel like quitting, and question whether it’s worth it. But when those days happen you just have to ask yourself why you started it and is it worth continuing.

MaGIC has been integral to our early days as a place where like-minded people and resources gather. I’d akin them to be a safe space or a nursery for early stage companies. There’s workspace, educational modules, and a team that looks after our welfare to enable us to focus on what we do. They eventually became the bridge for us to move forward into things such as growth and investments. They joined MaGIC for a cause, and that is translated into how they touch our lives.

If time and opportunity arises i would like to move my company back to Sabah. Its an environment where its conducive for software development. It’s peaceful. Mountains are an hour’s drive away; islands, 20 minutes away. It allows creative work to be more productive.”
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Photostory by Christine Cheah
Edited by Mushamir Mustafa and Amalina Davis

Do you have a story? Let us know here: https://forms.gle/ht4HsvbxgSgcKS5h8

(This post was first published on July 15th 2018)

MaGIC Startups