Sekolah2u Revisited

I haven’t been in touched with my entrepreneurial side for a long time. It seems I’ve been very comfortable with my position and the urge to be more adventurous gradually fading away. Couples with various commitments nowadays, it looks like my entrepreneurial goals will always be a secondary goal. But I’ve been awaken recently from The Edge article on Web 2.0 start-up who has made it to Sillicon Valley thru fund raised via venture capital in Malaysia. It seems the idea is pretty similar to what I had back in 2006, but these guys made it all the way to Sillicon Valley! Congrats to them. So what business venture is it?

Back in 2006, I was trying hard to push the Software-As-a-Service Solution for School Management System thru MDEC. I did all the software development and we called our solution as Sekolah2u (macam maybank2u laa konon).  We (me and a friend) even had the presentation with the MDEC’s General Manager to share our ideas on our solution. But they seem reluctant to proceed on our ideas, most probably because the concern on who will pay for the service. Our solution is based on subscription model rather than selling the software. Basically, it is the SAAS business model. From then on, the idea just fading away and we were getting busy with our work. Our mistake was not trying to push thru venture capital back then, but I remember it’s pretty tough to raise fund for start-up company like us. Without some capital, we were unable to sustain our business especially the needs for marketing, expenses, etc. Most importantly, our mistake was trying to focus on public schools (which of course has lots of bureaucracy) and not private schools. In addition, the market in Malaysia was definitely not ready at that time and even if we secured some private schools, it’ll be less than 10 schools. Lesson learnt!

But these guys, QuickSchools.com (see above – see some similarity) took a different path from us. They raised fund from venture capital in 2009, focus on ‘The Biggest Market’ in US and moved their operation to US. The rest as some would say is history. They managed to secure many schools around the world and surely, they will grow in time. While I’m sad I could not make it as what they have achieved, but I’m happy some Malaysians successfully deployed the idea to a reality especially in Sillicon Valley. Hats off to these guys….

SAP Consultant ..wondering what they are?

Besides Con + Insult people (that’s what we think about ourselves, just kidding J), it’s pretty grey area for people out there to really understand what we actually do. As I explained in my previous post, we are a hybrid between IT & Business. We try to enhance business processes in SAP context, the ultimate target is to eliminate unnecessary manual processes and improve efficiency and productivity. So you could have more time to be productive/decisive rather than wasting time doing manual and routine jobs. I hate to say this, at one point I feel guilty of trying to automate everything because eventually, people could be redundant and lost their job. Is technology guilty of reducing job opportunities? Is technology benefits highly skilled workers only? I read one article on this issue and the author said, we couldn’t blame technology because lets face it, it improves our life tremendously. We need to recognize that there is shift in paradigm in today’s economy, the knowledge economy. Everybody has the responsibility to upgrade their skills so that they won’t be left out. But it’s still frightening to see only 20% of Malaysian workforces can be considered skilled workers. I guess this need to be sorted out a.s.a.p!