‘Malaysia’s geographical position great for startups’
Malaysia’s geographical position is great for startups looking to scale up regionally, said Gobi Partners.
With a 22-year history and a global portfolio of 400 startups, Gobi Partners has played a key role in boosting Malaysia’s startup scene.
Its co-founder and chair, Tom Tsao, said that with support from prominent partners, such as Malaysia Venture Capital Management Bhd, Khazanah Nasional
Bhd, and the Employees Provident Fund, Gobi Partners had injected nearly RM400 million into over 40 startups, fostering the creation of 7,000 jobs and generating RM8 billion in revenue.
Tsao’s decision to establish Gobi’s Southeast Asian headquarters in Kuala Lumpur in 2015 was strategic, capitalising on Malaysia’s unique advantages as a “PentaHub” — a gateway to five key markets.
“Fourteen years ago, most of my peers in the venture capital industry were trying to link the United States and China, the two biggest economies in the world and that made a lot of sense.
“But at Gobi, we identified a different opportunity: to connect Northeast Asia with Southeast Asia. We called this ‘Crouching Panda, Hidden Tapir’. So while others focused on east to west, we were building bridges between north to south.
“In 2015, I believed in this strategy so much that I relocated my family from Shanghai and set up our Southeast Asian headquarters in Kuala Lumpur because I saw the potential of Malaysia as a PentaHub,” he said at the KL20 Summit.
He said Malaysia offers many key advantages to entrepreneurs, such as startups, benefiting from a shared language with Indonesia, making it easier to enter the Indonesian market. Malaysia’s cultural diversity serves as a gateway for expansion into markets like India and China. Moreover, Malaysia provides an easy entry point for Western markets and is poised to tap into the growing global Muslim economy.