As the founder and CEO of R1, I’ve been fortunate enough to have found myself on several stages over my career, many of which involved late night coaches. From personal fireside chats to intense deliberating panels and everything in between. As a typical technical introvert the prospect of talking publicly was initially petrifying, and to some degree – still is. Long before launching my own training and consulting business, one of my first public speaking opportunities was at WebCamp KL when I took part in a CMS showdown. Strangely enough, despite being a huge WordPress fan and user, I was battling against both them and Drupal when I hit the stage for the first time to talk about my own content management system that I had started working on, called MongoPress.
It was the numerous presentations on various topics through my early years at WebCamp KL that gave me the confidence to tackle bigger and more impactful stages in the future. From presenting at the first TEDx event in Sarawak to taking part in countless conferences with Finnovasia and IFN, through to even making several appearances on BFM radio and local TV.
However, it wasn’t until after spending three months in Silicon Valley as part of the 500 Startups batch 9 accelerator, launching our first product at TechCrunch disrupt and then conducting a European Tour in 2015 – where we spent 8 days onboarding developers from 6 different countries; that I realised I had a real passion for sharing ideas.
This fifteen minutes of fame led to some interesting opportunities. From being hired by DBS Bank to help them arrange the world’s first bank-backed blockchain hackathon in 2016 in partnership with Luno, which saw hundreds of developers from all over the world congregate in Singapore for a week long series of workshops and training sessions in preparation for the main event. We were even fortunate to have our APIs and SDKs powering the second place winner, NuBank.
Upon returning to Malaysia from Singapore, we were then engaged by the Securities Commission of Malaysia with training and workshops, which eventually led to an active pilot project we helped them conduct. Project Castor was used to determine the validity of digital asset custodians within the capital markets. This later resulted in the formation of CoKeeps.
As a registered HRDC training provider with qualified trainers we have been able to help a wide range of businesses and individuals to better understand blockchain technology and the possible use cases that apply to their organisations or daily life. The most satisfying of these sessions is when we are able to connect with developers and students.
Ironically, R1 has spent more time conducting workshops and training sessions without being qualified to do so than it has since being registered with HRDC and MoF, which both took place just months before Covid hit. It’s exciting to be producing educational content again.
“Our recent training in Penang where we partnered with Sinegy and Forward College was perhaps one of the most exciting sessions we’ve ever done as it was with students studying computer science. If you think your organisation could benefit from training or workshops to figure out how best to apply blockchains to your business, please reach out for more details.”
Mark Smalley
Founder & CEO
Social Experiences
Each user is given a space of their own and the ability to communicate and share with other users within the same or interconnected networks and groups that your organization establishes. Allow for private messaging or internal forums.