Sure A Not

• From a B40 childhood, to the heart of Malaysia’s development scene, turning from a pipeline of opportunity to teams.
• Refuses “exposure” job, insists on follow-through, and treats federal aid as a benefit, not a interdependence

Inbaraj Suppiah describes himself as a society builder first and an organizer next. He uses this as a way to separate “doing events” from creating a network of opportunities for those who consistently show up for hackathons and are thirsty for a tear.

That target has origins in a youth story he tells openly. His home was raised in a small Kedah community, where manual labor and rubber tapping were frequent. His father was the first in the family to finish his tertiary education, which was a big deal in the 1950s, before becoming a teacher because his grandparents scraped to take him to school in the nearby town. One brother after went to India, trained as a medicine doctor, and later started a wholesale company again in Malaysia. He claimed that witnessing that change taught him a key lesson:” When he started his business, I realized that starting from scratch is the only way to break out of this poverty circle.”

It helps explain why he is afraid of programs that last for a trip and leave nothing behind, and why he feels at ease refusing to watch them, even when the money is tight.

Before the teams and commercial clients, there was a teenager who wanted to be a scholar. ” I watched National Geographic and Discovery Channel from a young time,” I said.

From science-related snobs to Pixaworks

Inbaraj’s first entrepreneurial venture started sweetly much while in primary school when he was 11: ink boxes made from excessive floor pieces. Some of my aunts were businesspeople. When they finished renovating their business, they removed the extra floors. I found it useless because they were such beautiful mats”, he said.

He used them to make elaborate pencil boxes out of the crumbs he had cut. Unexpected things occurred next. ” People wanted to buy them”! At a time when his normal class income was only 50 cents, he sold the pencil cases for between 20 and 30 percent.

He put the hustle away in secondary school and pursued a safer path: enrolling in college, earning a diploma, and continuing to pursue entrepreneurship as a choice rather than a gamble. ” At least with a degree, perhaps if I become an entrepreneur and failed, I had always fall back on my degree”, he said.

His SPM scores convinced him to enroll at the University of Technology in Johor, Malaysia, in 1999, to study remote perceiving. After graduating in 2003, he spent a month working for an NGO in Sabah that he had first volunteered for before going to college. He therefore took on a short stint as a research official for one of his multi instructors assignments before landing his second full time job in 2005 with a remote-sensing firm in Kuala Lumpur.

Any hopes he had that a degree would be the escape route from a low-income existence did not materialize on the payslip. He claimed that his remote sensing and GIS work “didn’t paid pretty well then,” and that he was living paycheck to paycheck. When a big state initiative slowed down function, he took it as a sign to keep. We’re generally sitting in the office doing everything, but I decided to step down and begin my own journey. Midway through 2007, this.

But, there was no way he was quitting without any copy. In 2005, he had quietly established Pixaworks Enterprise&nbsp, a freelancer for website development and creative design. Since I’ve been creating websites since I’ve been in secondary school, creating blogs for friends and family without charging them, is what I’ve always been like. Turning the passion into a side business gig saw him rapidly gain sufficient clients to the&nbsp, point where he was &nbsp, earning as much as his full-time salary.

As the business grew, he threw himself completely into Pixaworks, which he then changed to a Net Bhd ( Pte Ltd) status in 2013.

The first times, however, were unavoidably difficult. ” I walked around with one or two Ringgit in my pocket wondering where my next clientele was coming from”. He had a car and a apartments to pay for.

No complimentary” exposure”

If Pixaworks taught him how to succeed as an independent operator, group creating taught him how to level confidence. Along the way, he created a list of non-negotiables for what he would recognize.

He doesn’t engage in projects just because there is money involved. He said there are minimal requirements, including positioning with his principles, plus fundamental fees covering style and management, and awareness.

His most direct place is about a pervasive myth in the development area: that community builders should work for nothing in exchange for exposure. He said,” I never did anything for the sake of exposure, even from day one when I was a nobody.”

For Inbaraj, “impact” is measured in what members walk apart with: better career prospects, stronger business prospects, money, coaching, or business exposure. That is also the reason he has turned down lucrative offers. ” I’ve said no to millions of dollars worth of projects, even those from politicians, because I didn’t agree with their vision. Because alignment is very important. We come from a community perspective. I come first as a community builder.

What this means is,” There must be value on the table for me to want to bring young, talented people who are hungry for opportunities”, he added.

That tenet also applies to operations. When he attends a hackathon, he demands that he manage the marketing and recruitment. ” They ( clients ) won’t know how to reach out to our audience to run hackathons”.

From meetups to JomHack

After Pixaworks stabilized and his network expanded, Inbaraj’s entry into community development was through volunteer work.

In 2009 and 2010, he volunteered as an admin for Webcamp KL, a monthly meetup among hobbyists that grew from about 30 people a month to 300. He claimed that we even held the first MyTeksi demo back in 2011/2012.

A spinoff called OpenCoffee Club KL was founded in 2012 to encourage entrepreneurs, developers, and investors to network over informal meetups. ” Because not every programmer wants to be a startup founder. Not all startup founders are programmers, Inbaraj claimed.

The parent company decided to leave after a year, and Inbaraj took over. ” For the last 12 years, I’ve been running OpenCoffee Club KL, which now has been rebranded to Startups and SMEs Malaysia”, he said. ” We currently have 34, 000 members.

With those experiences in mind, he was placed in the middle of hackathons, demo days, business matching, and incubator programs, which suggested that his combination of technical background and community experience could be packaged as a repeatable service.

This led to the launch of a small incubator called Startup House in 2015. Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation ( MDEC ) looked into working with him when he oversaw the pilot. Initial discussions ended badly, but the organization suggested a hackathon program that focused on IoT that would later become JomHack.

Inbaraj ran two IoT LoRa hackathons for them, one was in Cyberjaya, and the other in Penang.

Hackathon-as-a-service

After those projects, MDEC decided against keeping the JomHack name and instead gave it to Inbaraj. The initial collaboration opened doors.

At first, the work looked like one-off assignments, including hackathons for iFlix and Telekom Malaysia. He claimed that the turning point was when Hong Leong Bank approached him. During the discussions, the idea came to mind as having treated corporate innovation and “hackathon-as-a-service” as a core business.

Hong Leong proposed a can you hack it program as part of its annual hackathon in 2018. ” They gave us seven stars in our postmortem meeting, because they said they’ve never seen an innovation program done like this”, Inbaraj said, still beaming with pride, recollecting the meeting.

The partnership expanded to include Hong Leong’s LaunchPad, a startup accelerator that invited startups to pitch solutions and explore joint ventures, and a hackathon program that focused on developing talent, especially students and recent graduates. Before management changes ended the collaboration, Hong Leong became a long-term client from 2018 to 2024.

” Hong Leong Bank actually introduced me to a lot of corporates who then became clients”, he said.

Today, Inbaraj speaks with the assurance of a professional who has repeatedly performed the task. ” I can safely say that we are the top hackathon host country in Malaysia.” We’ve done more than 30 corporate hackathons in total. Since 2016, we’ve run corporate hackathons. We typically conduct four to five hackathons annually, he said.

” Some years were less, like last year, we did two because we were running the Gamuda AI Academy”.

Gamuda AI Academy

He is currently doing this because of this. In 2024, Gamuda approached Inbaraj to design and implement a free AI Academy programme to upskill talent, in collaboration with Google Cloud.

He typically steers clear of long-term commitments because hackathons are usually held on a time frame. A hackathon is a two-month process, he said, from planning to execution.

But the Gamuda collaboration was different. When they presented this proposal to me, I was blown away because it was not just a good idea; it was also a very meaningful project, he said of the Academy, which had campuses throughout the country as well and has since expanded to Sabah. In order to open a campus there, Gambua has also signed an MoU with the Sarawak government.

With JomHack as implementation partner the programme is designed to train participants in full-stack AI development through three-month cohorts.

Four cohorts, including the fifth one from January, were completed for the Kuala Lumpur campus. Two cohorts of Sabah have been completed, with the third one forming soon.

His initial KPI was 30 students, but he said he regularly filled 40 or more seats, and the latest Kuala Lumpur intake hit 50. More than 170 students graduated from Kuala Lumpur, and 60 from Sabah.

” This year, I’m very focused on Gamuda Academy because I’ve kind of promised myself to be with them as they grow,” he continued.

Government support is a bonus

Inbaraj used to be open and critical of how government organizations worked to support the nation’s tech ecosystem, but his experience and backlash have caused him to tamper with his sharing online today.

Inbaraj has worked with organizations like MDEC, Cradle Fund, Malaysia Communications and Multimedia Commission, MyDigital Corporation, Malaysian Research Accelerator for Technology and Innovation, and the National AI Office as a program manager.

Still, his advice to startups and community builders is blunt: treat government support as a bonus, not a dependency.

He said,” If I want to get something done, I will do it myself,” which has always been my philosophy for the past 20 years. However, if a government agency or ministry comes and supports you after you have already kicked off something, that’s a bonus.

On funding, be it grants or funding from the public sector, his view is equally straightforward. Find a corporate client or sponsor if you need money. It’s unlikely to happen if you rely on the government to support you or grant you money.

On key lessons learnt from his journey, he returns to two fundamentals. First, competence. You must be extremely skilled in your field. I think that is non-negotiable”, he said. People will recognize you because your brand is established, which is true if you’re the best in the business.

Second, networking, particularly within the tech ecosystem. ” Because of the depth of the network that I have built over the last 20 years, that has helped me a lot”.

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