This past weekend, there was a large variety of different events that relate to the entrepreneurship and startup ecosystem in Malaysia; while I didn’t go for the first one, I did get the chance to go for the second one, which was Jobstreet’s Seekscapes – it’s not exactly related to entrepreneurship exactly and more related to the idea of employment and seeking a career, which does reach at the core issue that’s at hand when we think about jobs but isn’t completely related.
There were two groups of people that I wanted to meet.
The first? There were Tien Ming and Wei Fong; Tien Ming I’d known from the time that I offered free JPA Scholarship consultation and guidance sessions, and Wei Fong started looking for people who understood how to code in Developer Kaki.
Tien Ming I’d known for ages but not met in a while, and he’d reached out again with a quick “PM Tepi”, after which we’d decided to meet – I wasn’t too sure where to meet him exactly, but figured that since Jobstreet Seekscapes was happening on the day that we’d agreed to meet that we could meet there for lunch – we ate at this Indian restaurant that served some pretty unique food, laughed about gimbals (there was this dude who kept touching my gimbal but thankfully that didn’t persist for too long).
Anyway, it was a great decision, leading to many productive connections and also to a ton of learning!
There were two days during Jobstreet’s Seekscapes, but I could only go for the second one because I had a few commitments and clients to meet on Saturday, which meant that I didn’t have the time to show up…
But show up I did, which gave me the chance to meet the second group of people:
The speakers, Chen Chow and Daren.
Both had very different perspectives to share, both of which were valuable and interesting for me and no doubt for the rest of the audience as well.
Beyond Chen Chow’s present role as one of the co-founders of Fave, I’d known him for many years since Recom and @usapps days; I will try not to overstate things but will say that what he has done to support education in Malaysia is difficult to estimate and ever-compounding, and the man’s work has touched lives far beyond himself across dozens of different organizations across Malaysia and certainly beyond it as well.
Daren on the other hand is founder of Developer Kaki, the largest developer Facebook community in Malaysia – we’ve not known each other for very long, though he’s clearly ambitious, talented and hardworking, will no doubt get where he wishes to go, and has good taste in chairs (apparently he discovered my chair persona a while ago LOL)
The challenges of entrepreneurship and the inevitable tests of character embodied in challenges that are inclement to building something meaningful – the idea that life is a game with rewards and choices through which we must fight to initiate on a limited time scale; both of these sessions were valuable in different ways.
Beyond this, there was yet another twist: The third group of people.
On the left, we have my Taylor’s juniors, and on the right, you have another three new friends who came along to speak with me at the session – both groups I met completely by chance on account of stuff that I don’t completely remember anymore.
The first? I met them through a free math workshop that i conducted for charity for Taylor’s for A Levels a while ago, and the second through a conversation that I was having with Luno’s Jeroni Khoo after his Partnerships and Affiliates session, during which they decided to ask me about the AI podcast that I’m interested to start 🙂
What unites them both is that they’re groups of people that I was asked to support at a random time – I don’t think I was fully ready back then to support the Taylor’s kids yes, but I wasn’t fully ready to teach the kids on the right about AI either – whether you go left or you go right, what remains seems to be that I was brought into a position whereby I had to provide my support through my mind and the things that I do in ways that I wasn’t entirely prepared to.
It’s funny, because I remember that during our lunchtime conversation, Ming and Lean quizzed me how I got into entrepreneurship, asking if there was a specific moment in time when I knew that that was what I wanted to do:
I answered that I didn’t know if there was a specific moment – things just happened the way that they did one moment and one opportunity at a time, and before I knew it, I had just become an educator and had started serving people in the best way that I could, even if I don’t know at the moment what the best possible ways to do so happen to be.
Still, I guess I stepped up at that time and I’m happy about it and the opportunity to enlighten many young minds 🙂
Cheers and thank you for reading!! Can’t wait for the next days ahead!
