Wednesday 18 February 2015

Tey Por Yee (Larry) kicks back: What it takes to be an Entrepreneur?

Entrepreneur

Dato Larry Tey Por Yee has often been described as an entrepreneur par excellence. He was born in Malaysia on 2nd February, 1976 in a modest family. His parents were not extremely rich. Yet, as on date, Larry Tey Por Yee can be counted amongst the most successful entrepreneurs that Malaysia has seen in the last few decades. He is a successful venture capitalist and angel investor who goes out of his way to help and promote startups in raising money. Larry is a member of Gomif Partners, a socialpreneur startup accelerator network bridging social businesses with investors.

Tey Por Yee is the founder and CEO of Nexgram Group of Malaysia with business interests in Malaysia, China, Thailand and Indonesia. He has investments and business interests in information technology, property, telecom, oil and gas, energy, commodities, mining, shipping, social media, internet, packaging and manufacturing industries.

Family members, friends, acquaintances and business associates of Dato Larry Tey Por Yee know and address him as Tey Por Yee, Larry Tey Por Yee and Dato Tey Por Yee. Being as affable as Tey Por Yee is, he responds to all these names with as much ease and affection as could be expected of the modest out of all highly successful entrepreneurs around.


Larry Tey Por Yee started his career as a small businessman. He invested in collectibles. The money earned and saved by him was re-invested in technology startups. He had already invested his money in more than 7 startups before he reached the age of 26. Some of these businesses went public and gave a windfall profit to Tey Por Yee. This was followed by cross border mergers and acquisitions. By the year 2012, Tey Por Yee had investments in more than 1000 companies spread in 5 continents.

Today, Nexgram is a listed investment holding company. It has many subsidiaries as well. The company which had started off as a software company is a huge conglomerate now. It even has a presence in surveillance and securities business with representative offices spread across the world. So much and more for the entrepreneur in Tey Por Yee!

Generally speaking, any person who takes the initiative to set up and manage his own business enterprise and takes the inherent financial risk in the hope and expectation of earning profits is an entrepreneur. What was just a concept in the mind of an individual soon takes the shape of a startup company which offers its products or services to its customers or clients due to the efforts of an entrepreneur.

Sometimes, a young person may start a small business as a sole proprietor and offer an existing product or service to his customers and may not really aim at much or any growth. Strictly speaking, such a non-dynamic person, howsoever successful he may be in his small business, will not fall within the definition of an entrepreneur. Dynamism, growth orientation, risk taking and other vital in built qualities of an entrepreneur are missing here. But Dato Larry Tey Por Yee is a hard core entrepreneur in every sense of the term. Tey Por Yee not only works hard but he also works smart. He is philanthropic too!

Dato Larry Tey Por Yee has all the characteristics of a successful entrepreneur. He is enthusiastic, dynamic, creative, far-sighted, persuasive, versatile, competitive, flexible and open minded. He has the necessary drive, initiative, risk taking ability, ethics and determination.



As opposed to a typical entrepreneur, who will often come up with an idea, start the company, and then see it through and play an important role in the day to day functioning of the new company, a serial entrepreneur will often come up with the idea and get things started, but then give responsibility to someone else. Larry fits the role as serial entrepreneur and help build many businesses for his investors, despite being an investor himself.

Larry Tey Por Yee is endowed with the uncommon trait of taking criticism and even false accusations in his stride. Tey Por Yee had an unfortunate business related experience some time back with an ex-associate. Yet, he simply believes in forgiving his detractors and moving on in life with full gutso!