The Coding Shophouse on Lebuh Melayu
It wasn’t what I was expecting to do on a Saturday night in Penang, but I ended up listening to three teams of developers presenting their start-up ideas at a very impromptu hackathon.
That I was doing this in a pre-war Chinese shophouse in the heart of the Georgetown World Heritage precinct made it even more interesting of course.
It’s a powerful sensation – the juxtaposition of old and new, the sense of a place that’s trying to keep its sense of heritage and yet embrace the new digital world, an island once called Pearl of the Orient now trying to reinvent itself as the Silicon Valley of the Orient.
The developers are part of the first batch of students being trained in coding and programming by a new venture started by Douglas Khoo, one of the three co-founders of Qunar, the website that started life as China’s first travel meta-search engine.
Just as Qunar has found new life after his exit, Khoo has also found new life as an investor as well as mentor and coach to start-ups back in his home country of Malaysia.
With this project, called the Coding Shophouse, Khoo hopes to create a training house to arm deserving youths with enough knowledge (gained after an intensive three-month course) to run their own start-up or join other start-ups.
He’s charging RM500 per student (comparable coding courses in Malaysia can cost up to RM10,000) and in fact, if truth be told, he’s probably subsidising some of the first 15 students.
I asked him how he chooses who to subsidise and he said, “I talk to them and listen to their stories.”
The first batch of students at the Coding Shophouse, Penang
The students I met on Saturday – all guys, all dressed in blue jeans and black T-shirts, all Mac users – were all enthusiastic and grateful for the opportunity. “There are courses like this but only in Kuala Lumpur and they are expensive. This is the first one in Penang,” one told me.
Some are fresh out of university and some have full-time jobs but are taking time off to learn a new skill so they can do their own start-up.
One of the teams presenting at Saturday’s hackathon
For the Saturday hackathon, they had been given a challenge to pitch a start-up idea. Split up into three teams, they presented an idea each – a job portal for part-time workers, a carpool service for students and a platform for Ruby On Rails developers to share Snippets.
In the audience were folks from the digital scene in Penang, among them, the Science Council, Invest Penang, MaGIC and DreamCatcher and other start-ups.
I was impressed by the smarts and confidence of the developers presenting, and the level of detail they’d brought to their idea, given that they only had 1.5 weeks to conceptualise it.
It also felt good to be surrounded by a like-minded community of folks who are working to build Penang up into a digital hub and to attract smart people to locate their start-ups on the island. Not only that but it gives Penang youths an opportunity to carve their own career path and stay on their island.
It felt almost like Singapore a few years ago, when WIT first started running our Bootcamps for start-ups.
Khoo: Aims to create a network to train, mentor, incubate and accelerate start-ups in Penang.
For Khoo, the Coding Shophouse which is housed within his own residence – he bought the property last year for this purpose – is only the start of his plans.
His idea is to create a network which will train, mentor, incubate and accelerate start-ups in Penang. Included in that will be events such as hackathons and conferences, the whole idea being “to inspire a new generation of Malaysian entrepreneurs”, he said
It was certainly a Saturday night well spent in good company.
