chapter 10

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, Elis and Suriyanti, must have looked at over 150 different companies. Mayban Ventures ended up investing in 10 of them – all within a year.

The program was also a commercial success for SKALI.

chapter 9

As an entrepreneur, and a bumiputra one at that, I was particularly concerned about the lack of success among bumiputra entrepreneurs in the IT sector.

The meetings probably served as some form of catharsis for the embattled entrepreneurs.

The NEF should play a policy advisory role rather than be just a platform for downtrodden bumiputra entrepreneurs to complain about their problems.

My arguments prevailed so when the NEF organised a networking function called NetBash, it was open to all. We held NetBash once every quarter and invited people from the private sector as well as the government to attend. It was a smashing success, with each event attended by around 600 people.

After the dotcom bubble burst and things started to slow down, interest in networking dropped. Once we had Derrik Khoo, a former poster boy of the New Economy, to speak about his experiences as an IT entrepreneur. The NEF is a lot quieter now but it’s still around with 27 members and a renewed focus: lobbying the government to provide more opportunities for bumiputra technology companies.

Spoon-feeding would be: “I’ll buy from you at your price and at whatever quality you have.”

Basically, his job was to match entrepreneurs with venture capitalists.

The NEF has its place and is important, but we desperately needed a national organisation as well.

Siva did a lot to raise the profile of TeAM and got the government to take our white papers and recommendations seriously. Chris Chan of The Media Shoppe (TMS) was subsequently elected the president of TeAM while I was elected deputy president.

We both started our companies around the same time.