It's mostly worked out.
The Accidental Start
When I was a kid, my mom asked me what my dream was. "To marry a computer," I said. "Or be the world's greatest hacker. Or a mad scientist." My mom was a programmer who ended up running IT for a credit card company, so I had computers at home since I was five years old.
At twelve, an ASEAN scholarship took me to Singapore, where I consistently came last in class in everything except computer club. The hostel charged us $5 an hour to use the computers, so I hacked the cash-card system to freeze the time and taught everyone how to do it so we could play Starcraft for hours. The IT administrator kept installing new protection; I kept cracking them, until he gave up and complained to the hostel matron. She threatened to report me to the Ministry of Education and cancel my scholarship. Only one friend stood up for me, and to this day I still remember that. I also became a Christian in my final year. That was probably a big deal.
University in Melbourne was 40 hours a week in a cyber cafe, maybe five in lectures, and I failed five subjects. I did win DotA tournaments, though. #worthit. I remember our first tournament: we lost every single practice match the night before and spent half the time training, half talking about how we played. The next day we took home the gold. Elvin, my teammate, still works with us at StoreHub today.
The Garage to Shanghai
After graduating I wanted to take a gap year. My mom was like, no such thing, go help your uncle out. He ran a small retail store that sometimes listed things on eBay. eBay, it turns out, is a game, so I played it the way I play everything: how do you obsess about this system, how do you break it? My uncle and I then founded OZHut together and grew it from $300k of revenue in our first year to $1.8m in our second. Moved out of my uncle's garage into a 10,000 square foot warehouse and reached $5m after 4 years. The growth was fueled by grey hatting our way to the top of Google Australia for telescopes. I was 21 when we started, 26 when I left.
I sold my stake, moved to Shanghai to reset, learn Mandarin, and travel around China. On the side I worked with the Chinese APEC team, sitting in meetings hearing executives talk about global supply chains and why people still go hungry. Those two years changed my whole outlook. I had spent 16 years away from Malaysia; now I was watching global politics up close and asking myself: what is my sphere of influence? That planted the hope that coming home, I could build something new from the grassroots up. Shanghai is also where a mutual friend introduced me to Congyu. We hit it off and talked 4 hours our first meeting.
StoreHub
So in 2013, my co-founder Congyu and I started StoreHub. We called it RiseHub, until enough people heard "rice hub" that we gave up. True story.
Today it's point of sale, QR ordering, payments, and loyalty for 20,000+ businesses across Southeast Asia. Better tech for the small guys. They're the soul of SEA, and too much tech ignores them or makes things worse. When COVID locked our merchants down overnight in 2020, we built Beep Delivery in basically 48 hours so thousands of them could keep selling.
We have almost died more than once. Every time, someone showed up. People at StoreHub joke that it's a company tradition. I feel grateful, and extremely lucky. But I feel like God is always looking out for me somehow. I've stopped calling it luck.
These Days
I often say I am a frustrated and frustrating person. I'm frustrated because I constantly see things around me that can be better. A hyper optimiser, some would say. And I'm frustrating because I can't help tell people around me about it. These days that lands in a few places.
The biggest one is AI. I'm rebuilding the whole company AI-first, and it cost me my old job: no more roadmap reviews, no more status meetings. I spend all day dictating my frustrations, the AI agents build overnight, and an AI chief of staff runs my mornings. Nowadays it's not just a chief of staff; I have a whole army of agents working for me, forty-two at last count, each with a heartbeat on a wall. My real job now is one skill: telling confident-sounding from correct, fast. Turns out my "useless" philosophy degree was the most useful thing I ever studied. Longer confession here: I was a bad philosophy student.
I'm also an avid skier who's been frustrated with traditional teaching and found a better way (it's called PMTS). I still play DOTA. And I'm still a Christian, although I question what the word even means and what the church should truly be about. Nonetheless, resurrection is still the hope.
I never did marry a computer. I just ended up with an army of them. Close enough. None of this was planned. Like really. Let's get back to building.
Trophies
- Tatler Asia's Most Influential
- Gen.T Leader of Tomorrow
- Alibaba eFounders Fellowship
- Australia's Best Young Entrepreneur, back in 2011 when I was actually young.