At 28, Uma Thana Balasingam packed her bags, left her job at IBM Malaysia and crossed the Causeway on a journey that put her at the head of billion-dollar tech businesses across Asia-Pacific.
Nineteen years later, the Johor Bahru-raised woman has become a Singapore citizen, and is now building her own companies.
Uma’s journey is a story echoed by hundreds of thousands of Malaysians leaving home, for Singapore and other countries, in search of opportunity, safety and dignity.
“There were push and pull factors. When I applied for Universiti Malaya, there was a racial quota system. I always wondered what would happen if racial constraints were not a factor,” she told FMT. She said she chose to do computer science, the last choice of five available course options.
That was the first…