How the Engineer Was Made

The Imperial Standard

London, 2005. The air in the lecture halls of Imperial College was thick with a specific kind of intensity. It wasn’t just about passing exams; it was about precision.

At Imperial, “close enough” was a failing grade.

I remember staring at a structural mechanics problem set. The bridge would either hold the load, or it would collapse. There was no middle ground. There was no “persuading” the steel beam to be stronger through charisma.

This was my first major lesson in business, though I didn’t know it yet: Physics doesn’t care about your story.

The Variable of Chaos

Engineering taught me to love predictable systems. Input A + Process B = Output C.

But when I graduated and looked at the business world, I saw nothing but messy variables. Humans are irrational. Markets are emotional. Luck plays a statistical role.

I had a choice:

1. Stay in pure engineering, where the variables are controlled.
2. Enter entrepreneurship, where the variables are infinite.

I chose the chaos. But I entered it with a hacker’s mindset.

I didn’t see a “customer interaction”; I saw a data point. I didn’t see a “sales team”; I saw a distributed processing network. I didn’t see a “business plan”; I saw a system architecture diagram.

Debugging Real Life

My early career wasn’t a straight line to success. It was a series of compilation errors.

I tried to build businesses that were technically perfect but ignored the human element. I built products that I loved but no one wanted to buy.

I realized that in the real world, the “code” includes psychology. You have to account for the buffer overflows of human emotion. You have to handle the exceptions of market volatility.

The Pivot

The turning point came when I stopped trying to avoid the messiness of people and started modeling it.

I realized that sales isn’t magic; it’s a probability funnel. I realized that leadership isn’t charisma; it’s incentive alignment.

I started applying the rigorous logic of Imperial College to the chaotic world of Malaysian real estate and tech startups.

And that is when the systems started to work.