People @ Peek: Ye Myat Min (Jeff), Co-founder
A peek at the people behind the product
Meet my co-founder at Peek; Ye Myat Min. Or as many of you know him, Jeff.
This is his story.
Growing up in Yangon
Born and raised in Yangon, Myanmar, he took an interest in technology from an early age. But in the nineties, Myanmar didn't really have internet access.
Jeff’s only portal to the world of tech was through the lens of sci-fi movies like Star Wars, and (like many other kids of that era) pirated computer games.
Like many amateur hobbyists, he went from being an avid consumer, to dabbling in producing. As a teenager, he tried to learn computer programming to make his own games.
While most middle-class Asian parents bought their children pianos or violins, Jeff’s parents had to foresight to buy him his first computer.
To learn coding in the pre-internet age, Jeff had to resort to an increasingly rare and arcane method of acquiring information: reading books.
He began with simple apps like calculators using Java, before up a few more languages such as PHP.
But what really turbocharged this young teen’s tech career was the opportunity to study in Singapore.
Welcome to Singapore
Coming to this ultra-modern island nation, Jeff experienced numerous “firsts”. His first airplane flight. His first taste of McDonalds’. His first mobile phone. Jeff recalls he was so excited to use 2G that he busted his mobile plan within the first day!
Back home in Yangon, Jeff was an oddball among his peers. In Singapore, he suddenly found himself surrounded with like-minded techies working on cool stuff.
At Republic Polytechnic, Jeff says he “fell in love” with Ruby on Rails and was determined to become a full stack developer. But most of what Jeff learned came outside the classroom. He would spend time using different apps and products to research and learning from other masters of their craft.
He quickly found himself spending more time working on external projects learning web and mobile development, rather than school assignments. Inspired by the tech blogs he read online, and other entrepreneurs around him, Jeff decided to start taking on freelance gigs with his technical skills.
By his second year, he’d already started a side hustle building apps for companies and entrepreneurs. Jeff quickly found himself thronged with far more work than he alone could manage, so he roped in a few friends to work together on projects.
When Jeff finally graduated from high school, he’d amassed an impressive portfolio. Not only had he built thousands of Facebook games, mini-apps; it earned him enough to put him through 3 years of school in one of the most expensive cities in Asia.
Dropping Out of College
Despite his burgeoning dev agency, going to college is a rite of passage for many Asian kids. For Jeff, it was no different. He ended up going to one of the nation’s top business colleges; Singapore Management University (SMU).
Like many enterprising kids in college, Jeff’s “side hustle” started to look more like his main quest. In fact, as he found himself inundated with far more clients, he started outsourcing more of the technical work to focus on being a project manager.
However with the rapid growth in the business, the tensions between his academic life and entrepreneurial pursuits began to grow.
Ironically, as his grades began to fall precipitously, Jeff was working even harder to pay tuition to stay enrolled. He could not avoid the growing sense that school was getting in the way of his entrepreneurial passion.
This tension finally reached a breaking point when a lecturer gave him a bad grade for writing a Python script to scrape the internet, to avoid having to do a group project.
Around the same time, Myanmar was opening up in 2013. To the outside world, the resource-rich, hungry Southeast Asian country felt like China in the 1990s.
Jeff had the fortune of being introduced to an entrepreneur, Ned Philips who was eager to invest in the country. With little more than a handshake agreement, Ned immediately wired Jeff an angel cheque of $50k.
That very semester, he dropped out of school and started his own company - Nexlabs.
Moving Back to Myanmar
Myanmar was experiencing a new digital gold rush. The number of internet users in the country went from around 200k, to a few million in mere months.
With so many users going online, Jeff figured that more retail activity would also move online, just like he’d seen during his time in Singapore.
Together with four friends, Jeff set out to build an e-commerce store builder like Shopify - but for mobile. They spent two years building the core tech which allowed them to compile native mobile apps on the cloud. They’d built a no-code app builder, before “no-code” was a term in the public consciousness.
It turns out, they were right - but in all the wrong ways. E-commerce was booming in Myanmar. People started to shop online, and merchants started to sell online. But no one wanted to have their own store. Instead, they sold through Facebook pages.
In desperation, they tried to pivot to a social media app to ape Facebook’s success. But they quickly learned about one crucial ingredient that these tech giants had, that they could never hope to compete with: American venture capital.
Unlike in Silicon Valley, startups in Asia struggle to raise money fast enough, to run winner-takes all businesses like social media in this part of the world.
At this point, Nexlabs had come close to closing down several times. In fact, there were months where they had only just a few days of runway left.
Defeated but undeterred, Jeff and his team went back to what they did best: building software for others.
That's when their bad fortunes took a turn. The company’s headcount quadrupled from around 20 to 80+ within a few years. They started expanding their services to online marketing, winning contracts with large corporate clients like the insurance giant, Prudential.
Nexlabs was growing so quickly that they even started launching spinoff companies to solve the problems they encountered as they were growing. One of those growing pains was payroll.
Asking around among their clients, they discovered that everyone from small local businesses to large multinationals was having the same issue. Everyone was running their payroll operations on Excel, which was incredibly error-prone and laborious.
So they did what all software engineers do: build.
The team incubated the idea and the prototype within Nexlabs for a few years, before formally spinning it off in 2018, with its own CEO and management team. Called “Better HR”, it was accurately processing millions in payroll annually for about 35,000 employees across 4 countries.
When Jeff quit college in 2013, he had just a motley crew of four. By 2020, Nexlabs had over 120 people on payroll, and were looking to scale.
This Means War
On the morning of 1 February 2021, Jeff and his team woke up in panic. Nothing was working. The internet was down. Even phone calls weren’t getting through. Banks had paused all financial services.
As footage of Soviet-era armored personnel carriers rolling into the capital spread, it was clear that a military coup was in full swing.
Things started going downhill quickly as soldiers opened fire on protestors, and stories of people disappearing on night raids became more common.
Jeff had to make the difficult decision to step away from his business, and to flee the country to neighboring Thailand, before making his way back to Singapore. It was the fastest route out of the country amidst pandemic travel restrictions.
It Is Always Day One
Having just lost the past decade building his own company, Jeff was unsure if he was ready to start another company from scratch in Singapore. With little to lose, he enrolled himself into the Entrepreneur First incubator program's tenth batch.
Just like when he first arrived in Singapore as a teen, Jeff found himself once again surrounded by amazing founders like him from all over the world.
That's where Jeff met the team that would launch Peek, working at first as a consultant, before finally joining full-time.
Picking himself back up again, Jeff is committed to Peek's mission of using technology to bring empowerment and transparency to personal finance - just like when he was gifted with his first computer all those years ago.
Reflecting back, Jeff says that the proudest moments in the journey were the people he met along the way. Through all the highs and lows of trying to build things people want, he forged friendships that have lasted over a decade.
Even though Jeff and his crew today live across the world, from the US to Asia, they still continue to support each other on projects.
Concluding thoughts
From his humble beginnings of teaching himself to code with books in Myanmar, to dropping out of college and fleeing a coup, his story reminds us that for many startup founders, it is sometimes literally always “Day One”.
Like Jeff, our company has also weathered our fair share of struggles during the tech winter, multiple pivots, and company restructuring.
But we’re committed to building things that people will want and love using to manage their personal finances. If you want to learn more about how we’re doing that, visit: peek.money.