We were hosting many dotcoms at our data centre.
Our experience in hosting all these start ups had me thinking of creating an incubator of sorts to help other fledgling companies, not just in terms of hosting but in other areas like financing and marketing.
Azmi had a good point. Whatever funds we managed to raise was to fund our own activities.
Unfortunately, SNAP became a source of a serious rift between Azmi and me.
This led many to think that Azmi did not like SNAP. My opportunity came when I bumped into Jasmani Abbas, the CEO of Mayban Ventures, at Maybank’s Hari Raya open house in 1999.
Mayban Ventures had been given RM150 million by Bank Negara to fund technology companies. Collaborating with SNAP would give them instant expertise at evaluating IT companies.
The original idea was for SKALI to help Mayban Ventures source for start ups. The fund was RM60 million to be invested over two years. Finding suitable companies for Mayban Ventures turned out to be a lot harder than I’d expected. We’d spent nearly a year nurturing this company before submitting their application to Mayban Ventures, which liked the company and approved funding for it.
The CEO was a male individual who founded the company.
The management team was broken and so was the value of the company.
Fortunately for us, we had success in finding at least one company for Mayban Ventures to invest in. The problem was that Mayban Ventures wanted to invest only in companies at the “start up” stage, which means those that already had a developed product. Before a company can reach the “Start-up” stage they need to go through Concept and Seed stages. These two stages are termed as Early Stages of a venture.
The SNAP team, which consists of myself, Ida and staff members, Jeremy, Aida,
The program was also a commercial success for SKALI.