About Dave Chong

My name is Dave Chong. I am the Founder of IQI EliteOne Team, Group Vice President of IQI, Founder of Mykey Global Sdn Bhd, and Founder of DJC AI Sdn Bhd.

My journey spans engineering, real estate, hospitality, and artificial intelligence—but the common thread has always been systems. I do not build businesses by chance or personality. I design them deliberately, so performance can scale beyond the individual.

Engineering Foundations

I graduated as a Civil Engineer from Imperial College London in 2008, earning First Class Honours.

Engineering shaped the way I think:

Outcomes are governed by structure
Failures are design problems, not luck
Systems outperform effort over time

From 2009 to 2010, I worked as a Civil & Structural Engineer at Foster Wheeler in Reading, United Kingdom. That experience trained me in discipline, accountability, and first-principles thinking—skills that later became critical in leadership and business.

Returning to Malaysia & First Entrepreneurship

At the end of 2010, I returned to Malaysia and entered business through birdnest trading, processing and exporting cleaned birdnests to China.

It was my first real exposure to:

Cash-flow pressure
Operational uncertainty
Market risk
Human dependency

This phase taught me a lesson that stayed with me throughout my career:

Hard work alone does not scale. Only systems do.

Entry into Real Estate & IQI

In 2013, I purchased my first property in Mont Kiara.

In 2014, the agent who sold me that property—Derek Soh—introduced me to IQI.

I joined IQI with modest expectations. My initial goal was simply to create additional income, not to build a career.

However, in my first year (2014), I became one of the top-performing agents in IQI.

Performance created momentum. Momentum attracted people.

Founding EliteOne & Team Scaling

At the end of 2014, I began building a team. That team became IQI EliteOne.

What started organically scaled rapidly through structure and systems:

2015: RM 175 million in sales (35 team members, first year of team building)
2016: RM 250 million
2017: RM 450 million

At this stage, I transitioned full-time into IQI.

Over time, EliteOne evolved from a sales team into a system-driven organisation.

After the COVID period, despite market uncertainty, IQI EliteOne consistently achieved more than RM1 billion in sales annually, and in 2025, achieved RM2 billion in sales in a single year.

This sustained performance led to my promotion as Group Vice President of IQI.

Mykey Global: From Investor Demand to Market Leader

In 2016, many property investors within my network requested property management services, particularly for short-term rentals.

This led to the founding of Mykey Global Sdn Bhd, specialising in Airbnb and short-term rental operations.

The early years were extremely challenging:

No operational blueprint
High owner expectations
Tight margins
Constant execution pressure

There were moments where quitting felt rational. We persisted.

Through continuous systemisation and process refinement, Mykey Global grew into one of the largest Airbnb operators in Malaysia.

DJC System & DJC AI: Turning Internal Tools into SaaS

By 2022, operational complexity across teams highlighted a critical gap:

Lead management
Team accountability
Activity tracking
Scalable follow-ups

To solve this, I built DJC System—initially as an internal CRM and workflow platform.

In 2023, with the arrival of large language models such as ChatGPT, I integrated AI directly into the system—automating responses, follow-ups, and sales workflows.

As interest from outside teams grew, I established DJC AI Sdn Bhd to offer the platform as a SaaS solution.

Core Philosophy

Across engineering, real estate, hospitality, and AI, one belief has remained constant:

Talent is rare. Systems are replicable. Scale only happens when systems replace heroics.

I believe in:

Clarity over cleverness
Execution over theory
Design over motivation
Long-term compounding over short-term wins

I build systems that allow people and organisations to perform consistently—without breaking as they scale.

Why I Write

I write to:

Clarify my own thinking
Document systems that work
Share lessons learned under real pressure

This is not a highlight reel. It is a record of how things were built.

— Dave Chong