#6 The Whiteboard
27 May 2025
Entry #6
27 May 2025
Location: In front of my whiteboard, looking for markers that aren’t dried up by the kids.
This isn’t a sad story. This a story about starting over.
But to do that, let’s recap the big event that turned our life 180 degrees.
To simplify:
1) Started a company FashionValet that had a platform and own brands including dUCk. We were fast growing with the wind behind us.
2) Received multiple rounds of investment from various VCs including from a public fund, Khazanah.
3) Post-covid, some investors including Khazanah sold their shares to a new investor. (Fadza and I didn’t sell)
4) This divestment was asked in Parliament, making it a public uproar overnight.
5) Fadza and I were investigated and all the accounts got frozen during investigation (personal and companies).
6) After a month long investigation, Fadza and I got charged, in our capacity as directors, for a related-company transaction in 2018 that was made from FV bank account to dUCk bank account.
7) Because of the case, Fadza and I had no choice but to step aside from the company that we had built for 15 years.
Numbers 4 to 7 happened so quickly that everything Fadza and I had built… we essentially lost.
Yep, I’m waiting for Netflix to call. Anytime now, I think.
Maybe you’ve lost your job before, maybe you yourself had to close down a company. Maybe yours was less public-facing than mine, maybe it was more. It doesn’t matter. The pain of losing it all is still the biggest pain that one might have to face in life, no matter who the person is.
With everything taken away, we thought our whole careers would be over. We were between a rock and a hard place, yet we knew we couldn’t just go around asking for jobs – who would hire two people with a public court battle?
But we couldn’t mope around.
Life had to go on.
We knew that we had to find survival somehow.