The flagship entrepreneurship show on BFM, featuring personal business stories from early stage start-ups, all the way to billionaire octogenarians in Malaysia and abroad. Notable guests include Martin Cooper (father of the mobile phone), Julian Assange (founder of WikiLeaks), Ralph Henry Baer (father of video games), Tony Buzan (Mindmap Guru), Isaac Tigrett (Hard Rock Cafe founder), Robert Kiyosaki (Financial Guru), Nick Vujicic (motivational speaker) and more. Tap into this valuable resource of shared experiences for the SME industry, which also touches on news, issues and trends affecting the business community and beyond.
Free Coding Bootcamps, and The Business Behind Them
For more information on BFM's SME event, click the link here (https://event.bfm.my/maybanksmeforum).
When Inbaraj Suppiah was last on this show, JomHack was a hackathon company - designing and running 48-hour innovation sprints for corporates and government agencies.
It is now, to a considerable extent, a school.
For the past year JomHack has run a free 30-day Python bootcamp. Daily classes, no fees, and no coding background required. 380 students have been through it, every place sponsored by JomHack itself.
Running alongside that is something considerably larger. In 2024 Gamuda approached Inbaraj to design and implement a free AI Academy, in partnership with Google Cloud, training people in fullstack AI development over three-month cohorts. It is now on its eighth cohort in Kuala Lumpur, its sixth in Sabah, and its maiden edition in Sarawak .
All of it free to the participant. Which raises the obvious question: who pays, and why?
Inbaraj Suppiah returns to the studio to talk about how a company built on hackathons ended up building a talent pipeline - and whether giving away training is marketing, or a business model.
See omnystudio.com/listener (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information.
6 Oct 2026
Hot, Cold, Repeat: Building KL's First Social Recovery Club
The Contrast Club opened in Damansara Heights around three months ago: a communal Finnish stone sauna, pool-sized cold plunges, and a hot magnesium pool. You move between them - hot, cold, hot again - in a shared space rather than a private room.
That communal choice is the whole idea. Contrast therapy already existed in Kuala Lumpur, but mostly in small rooms built for one or two people. Their bet was that recovery works better as something you do alongside other people — a third space that isn't home and isn't the office.
Co-founders Paul Leo Versley and Lyv Koh join us to talk about building a physical, capital-heavy business from scratch, the operational reality of heating a sauna and chilling plunge pools in a tropical climate, and on their hardest problem - persuading people that recovery is a habit, not a treat.
See omnystudio.com/listener (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information.
5 Oct 2026
Bagging Profits From F&B Surplus
Every day, Malaysians discard roughly 13,800 tonnes of food. A significant portion of this isn't consumer waste - it is perfectly edible surplus that merchants produce to manage the unpredictability of daily walk-in traffic. Value Food was built to solve this inefficiency. The app allows merchants to package their unsold inventory into "Value Bags," selling them at a fraction of the original price. This model allows businesses to recover sunk capital on food destined for the landfill, while providing customers with heavily subsidised meals.
Despite being entirely self-funded, the startup has already achieved profitability and successfully onboarded over 500 merchant outlets, including global hospitality players like Hilton and Marriott. The platform drives revenue through three distinct streams: merchant subscriptions, per-bag transaction fees, and a unique monetization angle tied to corporate ESG reporting. By proving that sustainability can directly impact a merchant's bottom line, the platform has managed to scale rapidly across the local F&B ecosystem.
Founders Hariharan Nagendran and Vishnu Pathmanaban talk to us about building a marketplace out of inventory everyone else was throwing away. We discuss the B2B sales cycle required to convince luxury hotel chains to sell their buffet surplus, exactly why they refuse to position the app as a discount platform, and their strategic rationale for seeking external capital now that the bootstrapped model has been proven.
See omnystudio.com/listener (https://omnystudio.com/listener) for privacy information.
Who has been a guest on Open For Business
Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.
Thomas Ooi
Tiong Hsien Qing
Choy Ee Ling
Farah Che Lamin
Chan Foo Chuen
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
YouTube views
21,618,281
Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025
Spotify
5.0 / 5
11 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 87 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
99
Social presence
0
YouTube
93
Engagement
92
Contact Open For Business
Guest appearances
Books guests
Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.
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