About Me
Get to know me before anything else.
Mud, Rivers & MS-DOS
My childhood memories were playing in the mud, bathing in the river, playing with spinning tops, and participating in other cool activities that were popular among kids in the 90s.
Born and raised in Ipoh, Perak. I am the second child out of five siblings.
Back in '95/'96, my father bought a computer from Megamate, pre-installed with Windows NT (if I'm not mistaken!). A few of my older brother's friends came to our house to teach us how to install a game called DOOM. It was installed using a floppy disk in MS-DOS. That was my very first memory of using a computer.
Building PCs & Breaking Things
Fast forward to 2007. While I was waiting for my STPM results, I actually stumbled into a job at a computer shop called Sniper Technology over in Yik Foong Complex—which was the exact spot we all used to hang out at during our teenage years. I was just accompanying a friend who was buying some gear, but ended up walking out with a role as a Sales Representative. For about three months, my forte was selling laptops, custom PCs, and accessories, but I eventually transferred over to the technical team. That’s where I really got my hands dirty—assembling PCs, troubleshooting hardware issues, handling repairs, and managing warranty exchanges. Whenever the company joined major events like the PC Fair, I was also the guy responsible for training all our part-time sales staff on the products.
On top of the day job, I was always hustling on the side. I ran a freelance gig doing laptop and PC upgrades and repairs, and even teamed up with a few friends to do freelance website design.
Nothing Went According to Plan
In October 2009, due to a family request, I applied for a government position and got hired as a contract staff under Pejabat Tanah Dan Galian. I was posted to the Pejabat Daerah dan Tanah Slim River in Perak and placed under the Technical Unit. Interestingly, "Technical Unit" meant the Surveyor Team, not IT. My main task was handling the land acquisition for the PLUS Highway stretch from Slim River to Tanjong Malim.
My day-to-day was the absolute textbook routine of a government servant working in the outskirts. The slow living life went a little something like this: have breakfast from 8:30 AM to 10:00 AM, dig through a never-ending mountain of unapproved land documents to prepare for work, and then head out for lunch from 12:30 PM to 2:30 PM. After lunch, it was back to hunting through those endless piles of paperwork. If we actually found what we needed, we’d head out to visit the land—or the landowner, if they were still alive! Then, we'd enjoy a high tea from 4:30 PM until it was time to pack up (we even used to fry pisang goreng right there in the office for tea time!). Hit repeat. That was the routine until January 2010.
Then, one fine morning in January 2010, I walked into the office and found a termination letter sitting on my desk. It wasn’t just me; the government had announced budget cuts a few days prior, and they axed every single contract staff under PTG across the country overnight.
After that sudden exit, I was willing to try anything to get my footing back. I wanted to learn electrical engineering, and since I’ve always been a hands-on learner, I figured the best way was to just go do it. I got hired by SCK Electrical Control, where my job was to assist the wiremen with wiring installations and troubleshooting electrical issues. Around the same time, I also started dabbling in business, launching my own small ventures in F&B and IT services.
By early 2012, I decided to migrate from Ipoh to Kuala Lumpur to chase bigger opportunities. I poured every cent of my savings into a new business venture—and it failed miserably. I spent the next several months bouncing around a few random jobs here and there, but nothing felt right.
That was until I got hired by a startup collection agency called Milliken & Craig (M) Sdn Bhd. I started out working as a debt collector, but after just four months or so, my knack for tech caught the eye of Mr. Ahmad Yani. He recognized my potential and pulled me out of collections to kickstart the company's IT operations. There wasn't even an IT department back then—it was basically created around me, bringing me right back into the IT world where I belonged.
Bigger Toys, Bigger Problems
2012 really kick-started my journey into the corporate world. Working at a startup, "IT" meant literally everything fell on my shoulders. I was tasked with driving company growth, but as a one-man show with a near-zero budget, I had to be smart about my battles. I focused on implementing policies to sharpen our call center efficiency and boost revenue. It worked—our team quickly grew from 20 to 50 people. On the tech side, I dragged our infrastructure into the modern era: switching from hard phones to softphones, physical lines to VoIP, basic routers to firewalls, and unmanaged to managed switches.
Within three years, the company exploded regionally, expanding into Penang, Johor, Bangkok, Hong Kong, China, and Vietnam. Because our scope had grown so much, the IT Department was rebranded as the Special Projects Department, covering three distinct groups: Operations, Investigation, and Special Collection. I was tasked with overseeing all three, reporting directly to the HOD and the Country Head. By this point, our IT budget had grown so massive that we could pretty much get whatever we wanted for R&D.
Then, somewhere in 2016, our headquarters decided to sell the company to the Stena Group, a massive Swedish conglomerate. Under the new management, the company pivoted toward becoming a FinTech player, and I was put in charge of the IT infrastructure upgrades. With an even bigger budget to play with, I went all out upgrading everything. After a few rebranding phases, that company is now known as Collectius CMS.
By early 2017, I decided to join STAR CRM to pick up some new skills and knowledge. They’re an SME specializing in CRM software and call center solutions, built entirely on the Oracle ecosystem using APEX and Oracle DB. I was brought on to completely revamp their infrastructure, wearing the hats of a Sysadmin, DBA, and handling both internal and external IT support.
Because the company heavily favored open-source software over paid alternatives, I was thrown into the deep end—which turned out to be the ultimate sandbox for my career. Managing an open-source infrastructure meant I couldn't just rely on ready-made commercial tools; I had to learn how to configure, optimize, and troubleshoot everything from scratch. It gave me an incredible amount of hands-on experience and rapidly expanded my technical skillset.
As part of my infrastructure revamp plan, I tackled everything from the ground up: overhauling our backup procedures, fixing the local network setup, migrating our OS environments from Windows to Linux, and transitioning our setups from on-premise to the cloud.
Honestly, that place was the busiest, most stressful, and most fun company I have ever worked for. Every single person there was incredibly intelligent and professional, and I learned an immense amount during my time there—it basically shaped who I am today. To top it off, they also provided the best bonuses, and benefits package I'd had up to that point.
COVID, Blockchain & Chaos
Early in 2020, I received a better offer from one of the biggest media companies in Malaysia. Resign from STAR CRM end of Jan 2020 to take a time off and schedule to start working on middle of March 2020.
Then, luck runs out and COVID happened...
The company froze hiring almost immediately, and just like that, my plans disappeared overnight. For a few months, everything slowed down. Businesses stopped moving, uncertainty was everywhere, and like many others during that period, I was figuring out what the next step should be.
As things slowly recovered, I received several offers and eventually decided to join FNSValue, a Korean tech startup focused on blockchain-based authentication and security solutions. At that time, blockchain was still a very niche industry in Malaysia. While most people were focused on cryptocurrency and investment hype, I was more interested in the security side of the technology. The idea of using blockchain for authentication, identity verification, and MFA solutions caught my attention very early on, especially when real-world adoption was still limited.
Coming from an infrastructure and systems background, I was curious to see how blockchain could actually solve security problems beyond crypto trading and speculation. That interest eventually became one of the main reasons I decided to join FNSValue
I was the first employee hired for the Malaysia office. In a startup environment, that basically means doing everything.
Honestly, when I first started, my world was all about infrastructure, deployment, and keeping the technical lights on. But as the company scaled, I ended up wearing a ton of different hats. I was actually brought on specifically to build out our development team from the ground up, because we needed to adapt our core products to fit the Malaysian and international markets.
That pushed me into a bit of everything—from product localization, technical pre-sales, and project implementation, to solution architecture. Because our core systems were developed in Korea, I naturally became the bridge between our HQ tech team and our local team and clients, basically translating technical needs, business goals, and reality checks both ways.
One of our biggest hurdles was taking those blockchain-based authentication products and making them actually work for international corporate clients. Every country, industry, and client had wildly different standards for security, compliance, infrastructure, and UX. We quickly realized that just because a solution worked flawlessly in Korea didn't mean it would fly everywhere else.
During my time there, I led our team through the entire development and enhancement lifecycle, managing everything from initial product scoping and system architecture to final deployment and infrastructure. Our main focus was on our Passwordless Blockchain Multi-factor Authentication product, making sure it integrated smoothly with both cloud and on-prem systems, enterprise setups, and API workflows. At the same time, I was bridging the gap on the business side of things—handling technical proposals, tackling RFPs, designing deployment architecture, and managing customer onboarding and day-to-day support.
By the time the company expanded, my role had evolved into Tech Lead for the Product Development Team, where I focused on R&D, major implementation projects, and our overall tech strategy. Looking back, those three years were an absolute crash course in startup culture, fast-paced R&D, strict enterprise security, and what it actually takes to scale a tech business from the ground up.
Current Chapter
After FNSValue, I decided to move on to the new advanture - eLearning. Currently with Nixfon as Technical Consultant.