A bit over 6 months ago I met with a couple of friends of mine I knew from my student days in London.
Shaun was from the London School of Economics
and Wilson from Warwick.
We talked about all the group buying sites that were coming up in Malaysia and they felt one thing: That they could do better.
So I talked to Ming about it and we decided to invest in them. They started a group buying site in January called Milkadeal.com. January was waaaaaayy late in the game. By the time they got in there were like some 30 other sites or so in there already. Ming and I gave them whatever support we could on the sides but on their own they built a business from scratch. I remember the first time I walked into their office some 5 months ago.
It was empty except for Wilson, Shaun and another 2 people. That 5 months passed and just recently when I walked into their office I noticed a big change. It was buzzing with busy people all around and there was all sorts of stuff written on white boards around and stuck on the walls.
Recently though a particular wealthy, well-known and well-connected angel investor in Malaysia (who doesn’t want to be named) approached them. Like many before him, he showed interest in owning a stake of Milkadeal.com but Shaun and Wilson weren’t interested to sell. All they wanted to do was continue to grow. Anything else other than that was a distraction to them. According to some metrics they were the 3rd largest group buying site in Malaysia but they knew it wasn’t good enough.
I have always thought very highly of that angel investor. So much that I call him “the Peter Thiel of Malaysia”, a title he always plays down. (Peter Thiel is the Co-Founder of Paypal who made lots of money from Paypal and now invests in a lot of success startups… one of them being Facebook). But just like everything else in Milkadeal, Ming and I play the passive partners. Wilson and Shaun decide on everything! So if they didn’t want to sell… then so be it.
The angel investor was persistent though and eventually Shaun and Wilson grew to like him. So they eventually agreed to open up Milkadeal to outside investors. The round of financing valued Milkadeal in the many millions. If you had invested RM100,000 in Milkadeal 6 months ago, that same stake would be worth RM2,500,000 today. I’m not allowed to go into the details or valuations of the deal but it gave Milkadeal a lot of funding to grow the company and made both Shaun and Wilson millionaires at age 27.
Over in the USA we’re reading every day about entrepreneurs making millions and millions from their internet companies. Some even going into billions but it’s so exciting to see something like that happen locally (albeit on a smaller scale) and best part is… to get to be a small part of it.
Wilson and Shaun are now among the few self-made millionaires under 30 that I know of… and I can’t wait to see where Milkadeal goes next under their leadership. Shaun promises to make it much much bigger.
You can check out Milkadeal.com here.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space