There’s something I need to get out there. Something deep inside that has been bugging me for the past 3 and 1/2 Years that I have been in Malaysia. In one of my old blogs, I wrote about the sorry state of the Malaysian Open Source scene where despite a large amount of talented developers, it never seemed to move anywhere due to the infighting, the politics, and the huge egos that govern it. Unfortunately that plague is still around but in a much more potent form with the local web scene.

Living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, I have the fortunate advantage of being an hour away by flight from Singapore, the Silicon Valley of SEA, and I frequently abuse this privilege by hopping on a plane or a bus all the way down there whenever I get a chance. Frequenting Singapore has become a habit of mine simply because of the positive vibes I get from the Startup community there. How do we define these vibes ? Simple, people in Singapore have a natural knack for getting out there and seizing the day, making the best with what they have and rocking at their game. They do not complain, they do not ask, they just do.

This however is greatly contrasted with most (not all) of the folk in Malaysia. The Web and Startup scene here are filled with consumers, not providers and that bugs me. We are quick to complain, quick to judge, quick to ask, quick to defend but ALWAYS slow in executing.

In this space however, there have been a few outliers. People who just believed in something and made it happen. People who didn’t complain but instead just focused on the end goal and till today serve as my inspiration but unfortunately, placing the burden solely on these few individuals hardly seems fair. If I were to name them, it would mean that this blog post would expand to be much longer than expected so I’d rather break them up into individual posts to enable me to highlight their talents on a much more personal level and more importantly, underline which actions of theirs resonated with me deep inside.

To sum up, I do sincerely hope we balance out the ratio of producers to consumers in the years to come and understand that, in order to excel at something, we have to make the best of everything in our arsenal.