Open For Business

ESG guidance and advisory firm Joshua Rayan Communications (JRC) was established in 2007 with one clear conviction: that sustainability reporting should be done properly, personally, and affordably. Today, the bootstrapped, seven-figure firm boasts a near 100% client closure rate and serves corporate giants like Sunway, BAT, Ranhill, and MMC across Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. 

Rather than treating ESG as a simple box-ticking reporting exercise, JRC provides end-to-end advisory. Using a unique "vanguard system" where senior leaders remain actively involved in project execution, they help clients identify critical data gaps long before a final report is drafted.  

Founder and CEO Joshua Rayan joins us to unpack the business of sustainability reporting in a highly competitive market. We discuss running a 20-person consultancy with a "no-boss" culture, why homegrown ESG practitioners want to be more actively engaged in national policy and standard-setting rooms, and the firm’s ambitious five-year roadmap toward an IPO.

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In November 2022, two grounded pilots came on Open For Business to talk about a smash burger stall they'd started from a home kitchen during the pandemic. The story was charming — airline pilots flipping burgers at night markets — but the business was still early, still scrappy, still unproven.

A lot has changed since then. Grill Haven now has a proper restaurant in Plaza Damansara, Bukit Damansara. FY2025 revenue hit RM3.65 million, up some 48% year-on-year. The team has been to Japan, twice. And they have their sights set on Johor, Penang, and a multi-brand F&B empire. 

We catch up with co-founder First Officer Afiq Nazar to find out what the last three years actually looked like from the inside — the discipline, the growing pains, and whether two pilots can really build a restaurant group without choosing between the cockpit and the kitchen.

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In 1977, Theresa Padilla moved from Mexico to the United States with nothing. Three years later, she took a job as a press operator at a small plastics company in Oxnard, California. That company was Rakar Inc. - founded in 1951 to make electrical connectors and insulators for the US military.

Forty years later, she bought it.

Today, Rakar is a Tier 2 supplier to NASA, Boeing, SpaceX, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and the US Defense Logistics Agency. Theresa's son Diego, Executive Vice President and Advanced Manufacturing Lead, runs strategy and communications alongside her.

This is the story of an immigrant woman who rose from the factory floor to run one of America's most specialised aerospace suppliers,  and why she believes Malaysia is the next chapter.

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By 2048, Malaysia will officially be an aged nation, yet currently, only 14.7 percent of our elderly are actually ageing healthily. The traditional eldercare market is almost entirely focused on clinical nursing homes, leaving a massive gap for seniors who are medically stable but socially isolated. After witnessing this crisis firsthand in the home care sector, co-founders Gan Pooi Chan and Sandyeep Sandhu realised the real crisis in the care economy wasn't just a shortage of medical beds — it was a severe shortage of belonging.

To solve this, PC and Sandyeep launched Kampungku in 2023. Actively rejecting the traditional "daycare" label, they built an engaging clubhouse where independent seniors can exercise, socialise, and rebuild their community on their own terms. Treating seniors as active participants rather than patients has proven to be a highly viable business model, with the company reaching full profitability and stabilising at a 15 percent quarter-on-quarter growth rate.

PC and Sandy join us to unpack the dynamics of preventative eldercare and the structural challenges facing the industry. We discuss why lumping active senior centres into the same tax category as beauty and wellness is an unfair policy burdening middle-class families, the looming 60 percent nursing shortage threatening the sector, and a highly anticipated "larger-than-life" partnership that could completely change the scale of Kampungku's operations.

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LEGO is one of the most valuable toy brands in the world. It is also, for a large portion of its most devoted fans, out of reach — either because the official sets don't go far enough in complexity, or because building a truly ambitious custom creation costs a small fortune in loose bricks.

EasternBrick was built to solve that problem. Founded by Wong Keit Sean & Bilal Raja — both veterans of Lumos, the smart bicycle helmet startup that raised USD 2.9 million on Kickstarter and made Oprah's Favourite Things list — EasternBrick is a LEGO-compatible brick company focused on large, complex sets for adults. Sets that go where LEGO doesn't.

But EasternBrick is not just another alternative brick brand. It's also a quiet act of justice for the independent designers whose creations get stolen by cheap factories and sold without credit or compensation. Sean and Bilal talk to us about building a global D2C business from Malaysia with zero paid marketing, low-seven-figure revenue in under six months, and a pre-order model that has kept the business profitable from day one.

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Malaysia spends over RM1 billion importing onions every single year. For decades, it was assumed that our local soil and climate were fundamentally hostile to the crop, making it cheaper to rely entirely on foreign manpower and imports. Shahrizal Denci is stepping into that massive market gap to prove that assumption wrong. As the founder of Bantu Tani, an agricultural social enterprise based in Sabah, he is building Malaysia’s first comprehensive onion ecosystem from scratch.

After completely failing his first two crop cycles, Shahrizal partnered with MARDI to refine the growing model to successfully cultivate the resilient BAW2 shallot variety. Today, Bantu Tani has produced over 200 tons and developed a high-margin seed that harvests in just 70 days. Backed by a RM2.4 million grant from the Ministry of Economy, they are currently expanding across 40 acres, and building critical post-harvest infrastructure—after discovering that a lack of proper drying houses was initially causing a 20% loss in their harvests.

Shahrizal joins us to discuss their journey; how a 40-hour bus and boat trip to Sulawesi, Indonesia solved their drying bottleneck, and how their farm is actively helping rural communities earn over RM2,000 a month while pushing Malaysia toward its 2030 goal of 30% self-sufficiency.

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Most conversations about the future of technology are framed entirely around Artificial Intelligence. But what if the next massive leap in computing isn't artificial at all? Cortical Labs is pioneering a new paradigm known as "Synthetic Biological Intelligence," developing systems that merge living, lab-grown neurons with traditional silicon hardware.

Powered by real brain cells cultivated from just 10 millilitres of the founder's own blood, these biological computing units consume the energy of a basic pocket calculator, yet possess the ability to learn in real-time. Cortical Labs has already demonstrated this by teaching 200,000 neurons to play video games like Pong and Doom. Now, they are transitioning from a sci-fi kitchen experiment into a commercial enterprise, raising capital to scale their hardware manufacturing right here in Malaysia.

Founder and CEO of Cortical Labs Dr. Chong Hon Weng joins us to unpack the realities of biological computing, the physical energy limits of traditional AI, and the ethics of computing with living neurons.

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For three decades, Cyberview has operated primarily as the landowner and custodian of Cyberjaya. Now, the agency is making a massive strategic pivot to become an active, innovation-led property developer. As the city celebrates its 30th anniversary, Cyberview is rolling out its new Strategic Plan 2026–2030 and a comprehensive 5-year Masterplan aimed at unlocking land value, generating recurring income, and deepening the local technology ecosystem.

CEO of Cyberview, Kamarul Ariffin Abdul Samad joins us to unpack this major transition. We discuss the competitive realities of entering the Malaysian property market, how "placemaking" can solve the challenge of retaining top tech talent , and the strategic roadmap to ensuring Cyberjaya remains the preferred destination for Foreign Direct Investment in Southeast Asia.

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How did Selkirk scale a "mom-and-pop" hobby into a $200 million pickleball performance powerhouse?

In 2014, long before pickleball became America's fastest-growing sport, two teenage brothers opted out of college to start making pickleball paddles. Today, Selkirk Sport is a premium market leader, recently securing a $30 million private equity investment at a $200 million valuation.

As they target $100 million in revenue for 2026, the founders tell us their story, but also reveal why they have anchored their global "Orchestration" hub in Kuala Lumpur to dominate the Asian market.

Tune In To Find Out:

• The 1,900% Surge: The internal mechanics of scaling from a garage to a $200M valuation, and surviving an overnight 70% revenue crash.

• The Vertical Moat: Why Selkirk killed the high-margin "dropshipping" model to double down on in-house US manufacturing and R&D.

• The $30M Trigger: Why they finally accepted private equity after 10 years of self-funding to dominate the coming industry consolidation.

• The M&A Hunt: Their strategy for acquiring strategic brands that "fit the ecosystem" to reinforce the Selkirk brand while driving top-line revenue.

• The KL HQ Strategy: Why the founders are hiring 50+ staff in Malaysia to control the software and supply chain layer of their global empire.

• The "Boomstick" Investment: How spending 8x more on R&D and hiring an in-house patent attorney created a high-tech barrier to entry.

Photo Credit: Selkirk Sport

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In Malaysia's RM6 billion early childhood education market, the default playbook is simple: pack in as many children as possible, keep educator costs low, and lean on academic drills to justify premium fees. Justina Chen wants nothing to do with that model.

A former PwC consultant and World Bank policy researcher turned UCL-trained early years educator, Justina co-founded Wonder Village in 2023 — a deliberately tiny nursery and preschool in PJ with a maximum of 26 children and ratios as low as 1:2. The business is bootstrapped, not yet profitable, and completely intentional about all of it.

She joins us to talk about the business of building slowly — and why in a sector obsessed with scale, restraint might be the real competitive advantage.

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