Thirteen years.
Every lesson, at cost price.

built

Before any of the ventures, I was a computer-science student at Multimedia University who ran the campus internet radio station, Radio MMU, as its President. It grew to 150+ on-air deejays and 470+ members across Mandarin, Cantonese, English and Malay slots. With the Dee Jay Club I also staged the DJ Club Revathon — a marathon that turned seven mobile games (Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Diner Dash, Doodle Jump and more) into real-life, playable versions for the Masters of Rev Up 2013 competition.

what worked

The station reached listeners as far as Japan, the US and the UK, and the work drew real coverage — New Straits Times, Sin Chew Daily and Sinar Harian all ran features. It was the first time I felt the gap between a thing people are told about and a thing people show up for.

what didn't

It was a student club, not a business — I mistook the buzz of a good event for the grind of a real product. That confusion waited until Qtix to actually cost me money.

built

A mobile queue management system — grab a ticket from your phone, watch the line move in real time, show up exactly when it's your turn. I built the Android app, the iOS app, and the web apps for the TV displays and counter kiosks. Alone.

what worked

Frost & Sullivan Product Innovation Award 2015. First cohort of the MaGIC Accelerator. Seed funding from SUN Group Holdings in Singapore. Interviews on BFM, features on TechInAsia and VulcanPost, exhibits in KL and Singapore.

what didn't

The company closed in January 2016. We were brilliant at winning recognition and mediocre at winning paying venues. Every award ceremony was a week not spent closing the merchants whose counters we needed to live on.

built

Cloud printing: send a PDF from anywhere, collect it at a print shop near you. We even converted Word and PowerPoint files server-side so anything you sent came out right.

what worked

First runner-up at the IHL–MSC Startup Challenge 2016, Gold Award at ITEX 2017. The product genuinely worked, and print shops liked the extra traffic.

what didn't

Demand density never arrived. Printing is an errand people batch, not an emergency they'll pay a premium for — and the shops that were our distribution had no incentive to push a service that made them interchangeable.

built

Smart-city systems for real governments: the PJ City Bus app for Majlis Bandaraya Petaling Jaya — live bus positions and arrival ETAs for every station — and tracking analytics for solid-waste truck fleets in Petaling Jaya and Penang. I led the technical team and ran the data-science experiments.

what worked

We shipped. Two local governments ran our software in production, and my masters research in deep learning finally had a street address: real vehicles, real routes, real citizens checking when the bus arrives. The company outlived my tenure — its transit platform lives on today.

what didn't

Government sales cycles are measured in budget years, not sprints. A small team can build the product in months and then wait quarters for procurement — cashflow dies in that gap. I moved on in mid-2018; the durable business took years longer to emerge.

built

A live public Layer-1 — proof-of-work, 60-second blocks, a masternode-governed DAO treasury. I didn't start it: I was hired after the token had already gone live to build the mining pool, then stayed to redo the block explorer, update the wallet for our colored-coins-inspired TriveAsset layer, and grow into leading development — the TriveAsset tokenization that powered TriveCredential's on-chain certificates and TRVC.App, which put durian-tree ownership certificates on-chain in 2019, before 'real-world assets' was a buzzword. The hardest part was hard-forking the chain's proof-of-work from X11 to X16R at a set block height, to stay ASIC-resistant on a live network.

what worked

This is where I earned my protocol stripes — you learn what immutability really costs when a mistake can't be hot-fixed. Very few engineers in the region have operated an actual L1: consensus, masternodes, treasury governance. The code is still public — 29 repositories.

what didn't

A regional chain competes with global liquidity. Technical soundness couldn't overcome the gravitational pull of larger ecosystems. So when the chain wound down in 2021, I built the migration that moved TRVC holders to BNB Chain — a clean exit for holders rather than a slow abandonment.

built

A blockchain R&D and education house — hands-on developer workshops and a researcher-lab program with MaGIC and the Malaysia Blockchain Association. Named Best Blockchain Technology Developer at Bloconomic Expo 2019.

what worked

Teaching compounds. The workshops and university collaborations built a network across the Malaysian blockchain ecosystem that outlived every single product I've made. That network reached both Borneo states in 2018 — a "Borneo Blockchain Hub" collaboration in Sarawak (Kuching) and a programme to grow blockchain talent with local entrepreneurs and Universiti Malaysia Sabah — each written up across the Sarawak and Sabah press.

what didn't

Education revenue is linear: you sell hours. It funded the mission but was never going to scale like a product, and I let product work crowd out the teaching more than I should have.

built

Not a venture — a committee seat, and the one the TriveAcademy network earned. Appointed Vice President in 2019, I co-launched the MaGIC × MBA Blockchain Researcher Lab, ran the Association's hands-on developer workshops, and spoke under its banner at universities and industry forums. At the most recent AGM I handed the VP seat onward and took over as Treasurer.

what worked

An association outlives products. Through two full market cycles — ICO winter to the P2E crash — the MBA stayed a neutral table where builders, regulators, and universities could actually talk. Seven years on its committee has outlasted every company on this page, and the researcher lab we launched with MaGIC in 2019 is the kind of thing only that neutral table makes possible.

what didn't

A volunteer body moves at the speed of consensus, which is rarely the speed of the market — an association can convene, educate, and endorse, but it cannot ship. And six years is long enough in any seat: handing the Vice Presidency onward at the AGM was succession practised, not position lost.

built

A full game studio on Polygon, not just one game: an NFT marketplace, the SpaceDen social world inspired by Animal Crossing, Anchorland (story-driven PvE), Battlefield (PvP), and a standalone title — Space Invasion — that we later migrated into a Telegram mini-app. We even shipped Razortooth AI, an agent that talked to our community and monitored our Telegram group. Raised ~$2.5M from 21 backers at the peak of play-to-earn.

what worked

At its peak, more than 60 people worked on Playermon, coordinated through weekly meetings across time zones for genuinely global reach — a community above 140,000 followers. We kept shipping long after the hype left: marketplace V3, PvP 3.0 in 2024, the Telegram mini-app, a booth at YGG Play Summit Manila three years after launch. Through a 99% token drawdown, nobody ever accused us of running away, because we didn't.

what didn't

Play-to-earn was a subsidy dressed as a business model. When token incentives are the reason people play, the game dies the day the incentives do. We fought that gravity with real gameplay, but the model's flaw was structural. Even the ending taught me something: I exited through an acquisition, but the buyer's plans for the brand were not mine, and what Playermon became after the handover is their chapter — not mine. Diligence goes both ways: a sale is only as clean as the buyer's intentions.

built

I built the smart contract behind NFTapir — a Malaysian "phygital" NFT platform that pairs a physical fine-art work with an on-chain certificate of authenticity and provenance on Ethereum, run with G13 Gallery. My part was the contract: minting, the physical-twin certificate, and provenance that traces back to the artist's own address.

what worked

The platform ran a real gallery exhibition and was written up in theSun and Penang Monthly. Proof I can drop into someone else's product as the blockchain layer and ship — not only run my own chain.

what didn't

I built the rails, not the business — the founder and the gallery drove it, and the smart-contract developer rarely gets the byline. That's the honest shape of the work, and I'm fine with it.

built

I lead GamBit Custody — the digital-asset custody arm of GamBit Group, regulated by Securities Commission Malaysia — as a fractional CEO: security architecture, key management, and the operational controls that make "trust us to hold it" a fact rather than a slogan. Around it, independent advisory and fractional-CTO work, plus small, useful, ad-free tools under my own name, because craft needs an outlet that doesn't need a pitch deck.

what worked

The through-line finally has a name. Digital assets are the first form of wealth that can vanish with a single lost key — and this timeline turns out to be the preparation: I've built the machinery that makes assets exist on-chain (TriveAsset), provable (TriveCredential), and tradable (Playermon's economy), and when Trivechain wound down I moved every holder to a new network rather than strand them. Custody is the same discipline with higher stakes: making sure wealth survives its handovers — between markets, between owners, between generations.

what didn't

Too early for scars, so here's the candor up front instead: the CEO mandate is fractional by design. A lean custody team doesn't need a full-time chief — it needs controls that run on process, not presence — and I keep the independence to advise and build elsewhere. Ask me in five years how that trade reads.