Numerous funding available in town but problem always that the gap between the good and bad one are huge
A bad funding program timeline
- Review of Proposal - 3- 6 months
- Pitch to technical committee
- Approval from technical committee 1-3 months
- wait for pitch to approval committee 1 - 3 months
- Pitch to approval committee
- Approval from approval committee 1 - 3 months
- Wait for official letter - 1 - 3 months
- Additional document needed for disbursement - to prepare document - 1 - 3 months
- Checking of document - 1 - 3 month
- Officer go on pregnancy leave - 4 bulan 
- Letter for disbursement ready - 3 months
- Send drawdown letter - 1 month
- Money in the bank - 1 month

If its a bad program you'll wait over 30 months or more before you get your money upon submission of proposal.

A good one 14 months wait.

Several paper has been written by Doc Siva of Team of how this could be improved;

Local start-ups are greedy and don't want to pay well in terms of salary or equity. I've encountered situations where engineers are expected to match the business founder in terms of cash in order to get significant equity. Their mindset is wrong. A techie's investment is his/her ability to build the product and that itself is an investment starting from RM 30K to RM 100K+ depending on how long he/she has to code and how broad his/her skills are - back-end, front-end, iOS app, Android app, etc. Without the initial MVP and iterating quickly, there is no business to start with. 

For every idea person who thinks idea is king and he/she should own 80-90% of the company, a developer who got duped will have to spend at least 1-3 months of his time to build the product. So best to treat the developer as an equal and then you can call the techie a tech co-founder. 

The challenge is in finding a techie who also has a business & marketing mind and is not just there to slave away at the snap of the business founders' fingers. If such technical founders cannot be found and offered significant equity, then the business founders should save money and pay a competent programmer properly.

Going back to the greedy business founder I met. In the end they would rather the start-up die rather than give away equity. Which is what happened 6 months later, even though they secured Cradle Catalyst fund of RM 150K.

I was talking to an entrepreneur who recently received a huge investment from a US VC-backed company, and his news was plastered on international news. But when I asked him to share his news to the local dailies, his response was "want to stay low profile locally." Is this mentality a problem when our local hero's are too shy to come out of their shell? 

For Magic to really happen, especially to support Malaysia Startup, I think the most important things for our Government to be transparent and Clean.

Not sure if you aware of this, few years back, we have a Safety App call "MyDistress", sponsored by PDRM Selangor, it's free to use, and so far, very effective app, as it direct link to Police Selangor..

Then our Government decided to kill the project, and started a New App call "SaveMe999", Project Cost-> RM 1 billion, without open tender, and not asking us "Watch Over Me App" to submit proposal, An App that have won Several International Awards (Including best Startup at Silicon Valley at 2012), and features in number of TV in US.

We aren't given chance to proof ourself..

How can we compete and growth in this environment?

This may sound harsh, but I hope I can avoid it. Business that rely on grants and packaged as startup, a lot of it in all types of programme. SMEs that without ambitions or the right scale, join in the name or labeled as such. Money-money-money business that only intend to earn more money.

Guys/gals, these are all serious distortions for perception, valuation and labeling. Please let not the reputation of startups, the place where scalability and learning are important, being degenerated into A) a money making machine without passion or vision; B) A risky gambling casino (true startup minimize risk) that generate bad mouth; C) Generic medicine that aren't useful of whatsoever.

Reading only Techcrunch is insufficient to understand what it takes and what to expect when starting an entrepreneurial journey. 

Typical and over-heard reactions: "I'm thinking off dropping of because Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg did." "My customers? Who do I target? Everybody of course!"

When trying to sell an enterprise solution to enterprise customers (problem exist primarily for bigger companies), they prefer to be emailed a product information deck then only (possibly) set up a meeting to see our solution despite identifying with the problem and indicating interest.

We ideally want a meeting to understand more about their problem and have a better chance by showing our solution and selling in person. To add salt to the wound, they are slow in responding.

1. Is there an effective way to get them for an initial meeting? (after sending the decks, many tend to not even read it)
2. Any ideas on how else we can get these elephants to move faster?

The popular recipe for creating the “next” Silicon Valley goes something like this:

• Build a big, beautiful, fully equipped technology park;
• Mix in R&D labs and university centers;
• Provide incentives to attract scientists, firms and users;
• Interconnect the industry through consortia and specialized suppliers;
• Protect intellectual property and tech transfer; and,
• Establish a favorable business environment and regulations.

Except … this approach to innovation clusters hasn’t really worked. Some have even dismissed these government-driven efforts as “modern-day snake oil.” Yet policymakers are always searching for the next Silicon Valley because of the critical link between tech innovation, economic growth and social opportunity.
Previous efforts at such clusters failed for a variety of reasons, but one big reason is that government efforts alone simply don’t draw people. That’s why a recent crop of experiments has focused more on building entrepreneurial communities, urban hubs and districts, and hackerspaces. Still, we’re “splitting the logic” on how to create an innovation ecosystem, according to MIT expert Fiona Murray in Technology Review: We’re either going top-down by focusing primarily on infrastructure—plunking down an office park next to a university—or bottom-up by focusing on just the networks. None of these efforts successfully pursue both paths at once, with government, academia and entrepreneurial communities proceeding together in lockstep—as was the case in the development of Silicon Valley.
But policymakers shouldn’t be trying to copy Silicon Valley. Instead, they should be figuring out what domain is (or could be) specific to their region—and then removing the regulatory hurdles for that particular domain. Because we don’t want 50 Silicon Valleys; we want 50 different variations of Silicon Valley, all unique from each other and all focusing on different domains.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/turn-detroit-into-drone-valley-107853.html#ixzz34xB4VaJY