An afternoon with MDeC – Being sustainable, scalable and ambitious

I made a quick trip to Urban Village at Bangsar just to meet Datuk Badlisham of MDeC. There are about 20 other youths joining me during that session. Among the few key takeaways for the meeting with MDeC.

1. Sustainability and Scalability. To be honest, I have been hearing both of these qualities as a successfull determinant to any business model so many times during this 2-month-holiday vacation. :P. From Celcom Axiata, CitiBank, and now from MDeC. Google MSC (Multimedia Super Corridor) if you are not familiar with the term MDeC.

2. Size of the opportunity. Here, Datuk is talking about how big the opportunity can go and how ambitious we are in setting up our business plan. One of the project that I’m really interested is the project of bringing Silicon Valley to Malaysia. I knew that MSC is once considered as Silicon Valley of Malaysia once upon a time (*wink*), and that many big names like Bill Gates from Microsoft, HP and so on have invested in this opportunity land. It’s  still remained as a question mark whether it’s considered a successful plan now or not now. I hope if anyone of you know more about this, do comment below! 😀

3. We have to think big, in term of the market opportunity.

4. Given more input to GTP Social media and economy from youth side.

A very simple post I know! See you guys again for my next post! Hopefully I have the time to elaborate more! 😀

The perspective game – Dinner with YCM founder

I promised to write a post especially for this amazing guy, Wan Mohd Firdaus. If you are not sure who he is, google MSLS (Malaysian Student Leadership Summit), YCM (Young Corporate Malaysians), and IDEAS. He is the co-founder of all these organizations. Google JP Morgan too! :p Haha. I have decided to write the points he raised during our meeting at KL Central Hilton in point form as I don’t really want to elaborate all of them.

1. The 80/20 principle
2. If you want to help others, help yourself first.
3. Successful companies are those who have experience. He asked me what I wanted to do after graduation and whether I was limited to just engineering companies. I said no, and I said I wanted to eventually venture into the business field and have my own business. He straight away said, “Join consulting. You know, McKinsey and BCG.”
4. If you want to be a billionaire, work with billionares, and become one of them. He has personally met 9 billionaires in his life and has worked with all 9 of them. Brilliant!
5. Whatever you do, give it your full concentration. (This coincides with a video that I have recently watched on YouTube. It’s a Chinese show called ‘Dialogue,’ which interviewed Malaysia’s richest man, Robert Kuok. His advice to business owners, give full concentration to whatever you are doing.)
6. Time and money
7. It’s all about perspective. He told me that someone bought a watch that cost RM945,000. Yeah, it’s RM55,000 to a million. Just for a watch! Afterall, it’s all about perspective.

September – The happening month

I went to Mahathir and Marina’s Open house at the Mines last week on 4 September. Many people attended too, and I really love seeing people from all walks of life and all ethnicity groups come under one roof to eat and have a chit-chat session.

One thing that I really don’t like is the Malaysian mindset, still. For those who attended, you will easily observe that rubbish is everywhere. We like to take things for granted. We were given free food, and the used plates were dumped everywhere on the floor. Something is not right here again. Now that Malaysians don’t even respect our former Prime Minister’s home, will they respect any random roads all around Malaysia?

We then had dinner together at the Little Korea BBQ at Sunway Mentari. The food portion was huge, and I was satisfied, giving the fact that I seldom eat Korean food. Chris and I went to meet Firdaus the following Tuesday at KL Central Hilton. He gave a very good ‘lecture’ to Chris (LOL! I’m just kidding) and some advice to me. I wrote a post about that meeting Here.

Later on Friday, I went to the OUMC (Oxford University Malaysian Council) at the Ritz-Carlton. It was great having Dato Omar (another Oxford Graduate who started up Ethos Consulting in Malaysia) be the speaker there. I posted one line of his speech to my twitter feed – “I hope that you start with fear, but continue with hope for your journey” #datoomar. Later that day, Helmi, Theen Yew, and Irfan sent me back to Sunway (they are actually staying in Cheras). Thanks for that, bro!

I went to Animangaki that weekend and saw a lot of cosplay, including Yu-Gi from Yu-Gi-Oh, Kamen Raider, and Pikachu. (I hadn’t followed anime for a while so I don’t really know the other characters’ names).