Patron & Founders

StartupMalaysia.org is motivated by Global Entrepreneurship Week Malaysia Patron Dato’ Saifuddin Abdullah’s active involvement in the field of entrepreneurship. The Deputy Higher Education Minister’s drive and support for Malaysian entrepreneurs is valuable towards catalysing more high-growth startups and transforming the entrepreneurial landscape in Malaysia.

GEW was founded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which is aimed at connecting enterprise people globally as well as inspiring young people to embrace innovation, imagination and creativity.

StartupMalaysia.org was founded by a serial entrepreneur, startup catalyst and evangelist Dhakshinamoorthy (aka “Dash”), and co-founded by Rebeca Hwang from the San Francisco-based firm YouNoodle.   

Dash’s inspiration and drive for StartupMalaysia stems from his deep desire to see more Malaysian startups going global. This desire was further ignited when he is constantly told that “Malaysian startups don’t feature in global conversations”. 

Dash leads the Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) movement in Malaysia as its host for the last three years and was also an attendee to President Obama’s Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in Washington D.C last year; Dash is also a fellow of the US Government’s Prestigious International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) in the domain of Entrepreneurship.

Rebeca is a global entrepreneur:  born in Korea, raised in Argentina and educated in the US.

Rebeca lectures “High Tech Entrepreneurship” at Stanford University. She also has been invited as a speaker to many places around the world including Ministry of Education in Denmark, University of Zaragoza in Spain, University of Porto in Portugal, University EAFIT in Colombia, EnterPrize Puerto Rico, IEEE Egypt, Tech de Monterey in Mexico, IIT India, and the annual MIT Global Startup Workshop in Buenos Aires, Norway, Spain, South Africa, and Iceland.

Rebeca’s dream is to create a world where meritocracy rules entrepreneurship.