What I can give BN credit for

Being a businessman in Malaysia is a confusing thing when politics and business often seem so intertwined. Upset the wrong person and it could be that you will have no hope of success when it comes to business of any large scale.

For those reasons, one of the things that I have always been careful about is to never publicly announce what my political affiliations are. The results of last night are a dream to me. I stayed awake in excitement to 3.30am to finally hear Tun M officially announce that he would be swearing in later today.

I can finally say it out loud now — since GE13, I have voted for Pakatan.

Now I have my own reasons, and to some degree I may be ashamed to say that it was not due to intense research into the candidates that I was voting for. Rather, I voted out of the belief that unbroken power corrupts, and that change is needed to ensure a balance.

I am very happy with the result of this election not only because we now have a new ruling government, I am also happy that we have gained a very strong opposition in the form of BN.

BN has been doing this job for so many years that I’m sure they know all the tricks in the book and they’re not going to let Pakatan get away with any. This heralded future looks magnificent. It looks like one where I hope we may move away from race-based politics to actual policy debate.

Anyway, I decided to write here not to cheer the victory of Pakatan. Rather conversely, I wanted to give acknowledgment to my experience in the working world with a BN government.

I would say my first interaction with government came with joining Social Enterprise Alliance, an NGO. Through great fortune, I was able to meet quite frequently with our Ketua Setiausaha Perbendaharaan — Tan Sri Irwan. Of course I am not of significant profile to have meetings on a one-to-one basis, but I was close enough to get a rough sense of the man through meetings on the formation of MaGIC.

My impressions of the man was that he genuinely gave a shit about startup, for real. Call it perhaps his personal pet project, but I think I can say with some fair level of confidence that if it was not for Tan Sri Irwan, Malaysia may not have the kind of startup scene that exists today.

ParkEasy owes a lot of its history to such initiatives to support startups. Here I recount them out chronologically.

First, I met my co-founder Eric Tan at a government startup event. Back then in 2013, Obama was scheduled to come to Malaysia for the Global Entrepreneurship Summit. In conjunction with GES, many satellite events were organized. And one night in Mutiara Damansara, at an event hosted by the then CEO of MDeC, Datuk Badlisham, all satellite event organizers were invited to a mixer of sorts.

As a satellite event organizer, I attended. And Eric, as a winner of a GES hack-a-thon, attended as well.

In casual conversation, I pitched to him this idea I had for a car park reservation system, and in return he gave me a look of incredulity. He immediately took out his phone to show me his own slides of the exact same idea. What are the chances of that?

He was the tech, I was the biz, we decided to work together.

ParkEasy actually began as Park’In, an indoor car park navigation system (hence why our logo has a compass in it). During those early days in 2014, our first supporter was PlaTCOM Ventures, an organization under Agensi Inovasi Malaysia and correspondingly under the Prime Minister’s Office.

We had approached them seeking to get a patent for our parking system because we had learnt that they had favourable legal fees as a government linked institution. What we did not know was that they also provided grants for innovation and commercialization.

Upon applying for a patent, they recommended us for their grant program which we were so fortunate to receive. We had taken personal loans to start the company, so this money from PlaTCOM although in the form of a grant and not an equity investment, was the first time we had ever received external funding. Money aside, it also gave us some level of validation that our idea might succeed.

Sure enough, our next investor was 1337 Ventures and we can once again link it back to government initiatives. It was at the launch event of MaGIC in 2014 that I had pitched ParkEasy at a GLC Accelerator program run by 1337. Months later they learnt that we were getting serious about starting ParkEasy, and hence we secured them as our first ever private investor.

Under 1337’s portfolio, we were introduced to many other potential investors, and one investor that had keen interest was Kumpulan Modal Perdana. Once again, I can trace this back to government initiatives as KMP is a government linked entity receiving its funds from Ministry of Finance (Tan Sri Irwan, the guy mentioned above).

We were once again fortunate to capture the interest and investment of KMP who made our largest private investment to date.

Lastly, and most recent, is the round of fundraising we just closed from a government linked body — Cradle Fund. All I can say is that we are very fortunate to be given the confidence of such established bodies and I do recognize that most of this money can be traced back to initiatives and programmes by the ruling coalition of the day back then — BN.

So yes, here’s my tribute article to really pay recognition to programmes that ParkEasy owes its existence to and to recognize that it all happened under the BN government.

What’s further worth noting is that all this government support came without knowing any government insider nor being a Bumi. I actually want to stress that latter part- I never felt racially discriminated during this entire time dealing with the government linked entities mentioned above.

My hope now for the new government is that they give credit where credit is due. Don’t just blindly wipe the slate clean and start everything anew.

While it can definitely be said that there were flaws of the previous government, they had attributes that deserved recognition as well.

My first hope for the new government, like all fellow citizens, is that they fix everything that was broken. But in addition to that, I also hope that they build upon what was done well.

Pakatan, don’t let me down. BN, thank you for your service.