Malaysia vs Singapore – The Paradigm of State Part 1

I’ve been sitting on this one for three and a half years, which is about three and a half years longer than I sit on anything. So, here it goes. A while back, on some now-buried blog, I wrote about the sad state of Malaysia’s open source scene: a country stacked with genuinely talented developers, going nowhere, tripping over its own infighting, politics, and a supply of egos big enough to need their own zip code. That plague never left. It just leveled up and moved into the local web scene.

I live in Kuala Lumpur, an hour’s flight from Singapore, the Silicon Valley of Southeast Asia and a place I abuse the proximity to without shame. Plane, bus, whatever’s boarding, I’m on it. I keep going back for one reason: the startup community there gives off something Kuala Lumpur’s doesn’t. Singapore’s secret? They just ship. People there have a knack for getting out, seizing the day, making the most of what they’ve got, and being very good at the thing they do. They don’t complain, they don’t ask permission, they just do.

Most of the folks back in Malaysia (not all, but most) run the opposite playbook, and yeah, it bugs me. Our web and startup scene is packed with consumers, not providers. We’re quick to complain, quick to judge, quick to ask, quick to defend, and then reliably, almost impressively, slow to actually ship.

There are exceptions. A handful of people who believed in something, built it, and skipped the complaining entirely. Heads down, eyes on the goal. They are, to this day, my inspiration. But it’s not fair to pin a whole country’s worth of hope on so few people. If I named them all here, this post would balloon past anyone’s attention span, mine included. So I’m giving them each their own piece — room to show what they actually do up close, and to say plainly which of their moves hit me where I live.

Jokes aside: I want us to fix the ratio of producers to consumers in this scene, somewhere down the line. And I want us to finally get it through our heads that being great at anything means using everything in the arsenal, not just the parts that come easy.