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Lack of Silicon Valley Opportunities and Programs

Dav Hoi 10 years ago 0
I think the country lack of these and it is very more important to have more of it.

To make Malaysia a 'truly' world class tech startup country, we need to sponsor and send more talented people over to the United States for the best entrepreneurship training and education.

A few great example of those who have benefited from such programs would be Robin Li of Baidu, Jack Ma of Alibaba, Masayoshi Son of Softbank plus many more.

Malaysia tech startup scene is too focus on developing the local and regional niche markets due to low competition and market proximity. However, the tradeoffs can be huge as well such as far less lucrative regional markets, low equity valuation and lack of uniqueness / superiority of the startup applications.

I believe to be truly world class, one needs to look forward and start from appropriate overseas market as well.

A perfect example would be Petronas Oil and gas businesses which contributes 33% of Malaysia's overall GDP. Malaysia is blessed with quite a lot of oil and gas reserves however compared to OPEC nations and other oil superpower nations, we are actually very small.

If Petronas only focus on developing local oil and gas fields and sell to local markets, Malaysia's economy would have literally collapsed long time ago and the GDP would have only increased with very little percentage year-on-year. 

Therefore, overseas development and markets are actually a lot more important than local ones in this respect and it cannot be overlooked in anyway.

However, many of our policy and decision makers in this country can be extremely myopic minded due to their outdated ideologies and traditional mindset. 

Something needs to be done immediately in order to right this wrong and hopefully somebody here can do something about it.