Malaysia is a better place than Singapore to found a startup, says this VC

Dan Lain-Lain (Malay for “and others”) is a weekly column by TIA journalist Emmanuel Samarathisa that dissects the goings-on in the Malaysia tech scene but with a heavy mix of current affairs, policy, and politics. Click here to read past articles.

Kevin Brockland runs Kuala Lumpur-based Indelible Ventures, a seed-stage venture fund. He is also one of the more bullish voices for Malaysian startups – at least from the viewpoint of my LinkedIn feed.

Kevin Brockland runs Kuala Lumpur-based seed-stage fund Indelible Ventures / Photo credit: Kevin Brockland

But Brockland isn’t Malaysian, he is American. And, he has been in the country since 2015 when he worked as the principal investment officer and director for the Media Development Fund until 2021. He would go on to found Indelible Ventures shortly after.

Naturally, he has drawn a fair share of curiosity from the VC and investor space over here, simply because tech ventures here aren’t as hot as in neighboring Singapore – or even Indonesia and Vietnam.

What is he doing here then? From my perspective, the Malaysian scene is a bit uneventful. Local champions with the ability to compete abroad are an exotic species, with a number of promising players moving abroad to countries like Singapore at the behest of their investors.

Brockland, however, thinks differently. Besides putting his money where his mouth is, he has also launched a podcast called SEA of Startups to showcase Malaysian talent and is also looking to relaunch the Founder Institute in Malaysia. The famous Silicon Valley pre-seed accelerator was here for some time but has gone dormant. Brockland wants to reboot it.

We had a good chat recently about his Malaysian adventure. I’ll be splitting this into two parts. Today, we talk about his podcast and the pros and cons of the Malaysian startup ecosystem.

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity:

Why did you decide to start a podcast on Malaysian startups?

I’m an extremely obsessive podcast listener, and when I listen to a lot of podcasts in the startup space, they’re hugely valuable. You can extract a large amount of information and value by listening to some of the conversations.

And if you listen to the podcast, I kind of follow the same format, starting from the origin story of a startup and really trying to get a read on how the companies have been built and developed over time. So there are practical takeaways for other founders.

When I launched the podcast, there were two priorities. Priority one is to send these podcasts through to my own mailing list of investors, who are primarily based outside of Malaysia.

The intent there was that I felt people outside of Malaysia don’t know much about the success stories here.