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Surf! speaks to the man responsible for bringing the Global Entrepreneur Week to Malaysia.
Dhakshinamoorthy or Dash as he prefers to be called, is the consummate entrepreneur. Little wonder than that when the Global Entrepreneur Week (GEW) was looking for a Malaysian host, it would be Dash’s company, Warisan Global that stepped forward to take up the challenge.
Surf! meets up with the man driven by the desire to develop entrepreneurship among youths.
“I guess I was always an entrepreneur. When I was in school, I was selling matchbox cars, fighting fish and what not”, he offers as proof that the entrepreneur spirit has always been there in his case.
Dash was born and bred in KL spending his childhood in the Air Panas New Village in Setapak. By the time he reached Form 6, he had started his own tuition centre. After leaving school, he had two choices; either go to university and probably end up a teacher or venture out into the world of work and business. No prizes for guessing which direction he took.
He first got articled with Ernst & Young. That made him quickly realise that he did not want to count other people’s money. Next he worked for some time for a small business before setting up his own consulting firm. Along the way, he completed his MBA and his firm grew from 2 to 15 people and he was handling 200 clients.
His next venture saw him bringing in IT grads from India to work in Malaysia. “The MSC was starting up and there was a need for IT workers.” In 2000, he started his own training company. “I thought to myself, why not create our own IT people?”
Dash took on a franchise from the Indian based NIIT education group. He set up their first Centre for Advanced Technology in Malaysia. Unfortunately, his timing was impeccable! “The day we opened, the NASDAQ crashed. The dotcom bubble had burst, and the IT industry went down. Along with it went all the money I had pumped into the franchise.”
Still, he did not give up and instead tried to reinvent that business. “I rewrote the entire NIIT strategy but unfortunately, my recommendations were not taken up by the president of NIIT. “So at the end of 3 years, when the franchise expired, I said thank you and we put up the Warisan Global signboard.
“I dreamed of setting up a social enterprise. I wanted to manage socially focused projects. But dreams need clients to become reality. Thank God, we got clients and grew slowly. Entrepreneurship was hot and we started doing entrepreneur programmes in Universities and so on.”
Warisan Global later tied up with the Judge Business School, Cambridge University and set up a centre for entrepreneur development in Malaysia.
Last year, the Global Entrepreneur Week (GEW) came along. It was a tremendous opportunity for a company like Global Warisan. But hard work was required and the challenges were aplenty.
Again, his entrepreneur background convinced him to take on the challenge. GEW was a success in Malaysia. Dash and Warisan Global spearheaded a project that saw Malaysia become just about the top country for GEW activities outside US and UK.
We had one final question for Dash. What would he like to see happen next? “I would like to see Malaysia right up there on the global entrepreneur map. To show that we are a thriving entrepreneur society.”
Dash would also like to see Malaysian entrepreneurs reach out to their counterparts globally without inhibitions as well as see them connect more with each other locally. Personally, he dreams of continuing the work he has started with GEW. “I would like to be seen as a global entrepreneur connector.”
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