The book GO FOR BROKE! Tales of Entrepreneurship, edited by Oon Yeoh is a rich and highly readable resource for those who want to learn about the various approaches, philosophies, trials and tribulations of 21 prominent entrepreneurs who have made their mark on the local, regional and international technology scene.

The term “technopreneur” is most probably a uniquely Malaysian construct which means a technology entrepreneur or an entrepreneur involved in technology, since the term can neither be found in Wikipedia nor the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.

Most of the 21 entrepreneurs are involved in or related to information and communications technology, some are involved in biotechnology, intellectual property consulting, help startups obtain financing and in holistic medicine.

Most are also in their mid forties, while some are even grandfathers. Most also began their careers in the rather conventional way by first joining an established company where they learned the business, made their contacts and built up their finances before they ventured out on their own.

Many ventured out long before initiatives such as MSC Malaysia were even conceived, so there were no such things as Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC), MAVCAP, or Cradle Investment Programme grants and hand holding to rely on, so they had to rely on their savings, forego their salaries, survive on instant noodles and water (no pricey lattes), and upon the goodwill of others, and since angel funding and venture capital were things only found in the United States back then, some had to obtain a bank loan if they needed extra cash.

The book also provides examples of thinking outside the box which are invaluable lessons, especially where many who fancy themselves to be thinking outside the box are in fact thinking within a different box, whatever box it may be.

A rather ironic example of thinking within different boxes can be seen in youthful rebellion of the 1960s and 1970s against the conformist corporate man. The youth expressed their rejection through their dress which comprised blue denim jeans, a long sleeved tee shirt, a blue denim shirt and had long flowing hair, which wasn’t all that different from the dark blue trousers, white shirt, dark blue tie and short cropped hair worn by IBM employees.

Mathavan Chandran, chief executive officer of biotechnology company InfoValley and an ethnic Indian, rejects the model favoured by hip technnoprenenurs of growing their business fast and instead he favours the “Chinaman” approach of keeping costs low, hence profit high.

He also rejects the trendy notion that that knowledge management can be achieved through a web-based portal but instead believes that knowledge thrives and is shared among people in face-to-face interaction, since information isn’t knowledge, which is a far cry from the Facebook entrepreneurship which is popular today.

On the other hand, Wei Chuan Beng, group chief executive officer of REDtone and an ethnic Chinese, rejects the “Chinaman” approach of his parents wholesale foodstuffs distribution business in favour of the innovative application of core competencies which generate lots of income, instead of slogging for long hours.

In another example, while MOL AccessPortal’s flagship offering is its MOLePoints online micropayments system, when the company had teamed up with eBay to let Malaysians make safe payments for purchases through MOL SafePay, its chief executive officer Ganesh Kumar Bangah realised that since MOLePoints still wasn’t accepted by most merchants, he adopted a more practical approach to enable payment using MOL Freedom Prepaid Mastercard issued by EON Bank and which is accepted by merchants and available through 7-Eleven stores nationwide to anyone above 12 years of age.

There are others who refused to obtain venture capital in preference for organic growth, while others refuse to list their companies as a means to obtain cheap funds for expansion, since both approaches have their drawbacks in terms of independence and added bureaucracy.

The story of Harres Tan, chief executive officer of HT Consulting is a fine example of having to quickly adapt to rapid changes taking place in the technology industry.

In 1980, Tan joined local computer hardware supplier Unidata to help it grow but 10 years later he realised that the heydays of hardware would be soon over and the future lucrative area was in software.

At that time, an 40MB Ampex hard disk drive like those sold by Unidata sold for several tens of thousands of Ringgit, required at least two persons to lift and like a car had to be regularly serviced by a technician, so it could fetch wide profit margins but as we can see today, a 250GB hard disk drive costs under RM200, fits into a trouser pocket and once installed, can be forgotten until it needs replacement years later.

However, Unidata’s founder KC Toh didn’t share Tan’s belief, so Tan left to found Unify Software which supplied database management systems and fourth generation languages from Unify Corporation in the US to the Asian region and his company made several millions of Ringgit within five years.

Today, Tan is looking at a new business model for HT Consulting, whereby like Fuji Xerox, it will put its computer hardware and software in its client’s premises and charge them for its use on a per transaction basis.

To maintain espirit de corp and camaraderie among his current and former employees, they all meet for happy hours of free drinks and food in HT Consulting’s reception area at 5.30pm each Friday. Thankfully, they haven’t caught the Starbucks/Facebook entrepreneurship bug and they can afford not to.

A past chairman of PIKOM, Tan is also an accomplished musician who plays in his band MP3, comprised of executives in PIKOM member companies, which shows that hardworking technopreneurs know how to play hard as well.

An interesting thing about GO FOR BROKE! is that all of the 21 technopreneurs are men. Surely, there must be some women technopreneurs out there.

GO FOR BROKE! (ISBN 978-983-2992-07-3) is published by GoodBasic Media in collaboration with the Technopreneurs Association of Malaysia (TeAM) and MDEC. It’s available at RM39.95 from leading bookstores.
 

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