As an entrepreneur who doesn't has a rich dad, to be my Angel investor, to support my business venture financially, I went to seek Malaysian Government for help.

Here is my experience applying for 2 of the easiest programmes that the Malaysian Government has for entrepreneurs. With my ingenious Web 2.0 business idea and my ability to explain revolutionary Internet Business Model to a normal investors, i successfully accepted in Jtrend Incubator Lab and Cradle Investment Programme.

Duration from application to approval : 2 weeks
Ease of application : Easy
Funds : None

Benefits :-

1. Free shared office space inside the incubator to place your programmers & designers.
2. Free usage of office facilities and amenities.
3. Free consultation from Java expert in the lab to solve technical problems face by employees.
4. Free ussage of lab workstations and expensive servers.
5. Tap on jTrend name as a recognition when market ready product.
6. Market development help from jTrend.

Well maintain office clean and comfortable and free coffee too

My desk in jTrend, found a huge huge monitor lying around doing nothing so connect to my notebook and presto, dual monitor. One for my work and another for my MSN Messenger as a chat screen.

Conclution : Central Incubator is a great programme helping new entrepreneurs who doesn't have much capital to start their business to get started. They can hire programmer to be place in the incubator and utilise all the expensive servers and workstations available in the incubator. The only drawbacks is incubator always focus on companies developing softwares only.

Duration from application to approval : Unknown apply since May 2005 until today
Ease of application : Extremely Hard
Funds : RM 50K

Benefits :-

1. RM 50K grant (Pay first reimburse later)
2. A Mentor, great if you can get a good mentor that really helps your conceptualise your business idea. (You have to Pay the mentor RM 5K from the RM 50K you got)
3. Business Networking Party to link entrepreneurs and investors together

Conclutions : Theorically Cradle Investment Programme is a briliant idea by Tun Dr Mahatir to encourage Malaysian to take risk and create high innovative company and hopefully out of all the 100 - 200 companies invested, there will be a global billion dollar company that all Malaysian would be proud. But then after I went thru all the tedius process to apply for the programme, I am really fustrated and I gave up. Cradle people are just too slow in processing stuff and the money disbursement is taking too long. For my case, I applied Cradle last year May 2005, and they get back to me on Jun 2005 for some question requesting for extra details. We went for our first interview on February 2006. We got conditional approval on May 2006. The agreement is ready and sign on August 2006. We are suppose to get our first reimbursement after the agreement is signed but until today it there has been delay and more delays.

I really pity a friend of mine who has 20K of debt spending for his project but he has waited 3 months for the reimbursement and it is yet to come. With such a slow processing time, I am having second thought on the whole programme. The world is moving at a very fast pace and by the time an entrepreneur got some money to start our project, our idea might have already obsolute in the market.

Advice to entrepreneur, do apply to Cradle Invesment Programme only if you have to. If you are a poor entrepreneur like me, beware you might end up in a huge cash flow problem. When it comes to money, nothing is easy. Untill Malaysia have a venture capital market like the US, Malaysian entrepreneurs have to work slow and steady. Focus on niche niche markets.