Pertama Partners

Pertama Partners started because I kept seeing the same problem across Southeast Asia: companies wanted to adopt AI, but every solution on the market was either a million-dollar enterprise platform or a YouTube tutorial. Nothing in between. 

I'd spent years working with teams across Malaysia, Singapore, China, and beyond, and the pattern was always the same. Leaders knew AI mattered. Their teams were curious. But nobody could tell them where to start that didn't involve a six-month consulting engagement or a tool they'd abandon after two weeks.  

So I built Pertama Partners to fill that gap. We're a principal-led AI training and advisory firm. That means the person who sells the engagement is the same person who delivers it. No junior associates running your workshop from a slide deck they didn't write.

We work with mid-market enterprises across eight Southeast Asian markets. We train their teams, audit their workflows, and implement AI solutions that actually stick. The focus is always practical: which three tools matter for your team, how to chain them into a workflow, and how to measure whether it's working.

The name "Pertama" means "first" in Malay. It's a reminder of what we tell every client: start with one team, one workflow, one tool. Get that right first. Then scale.

We run on three principles:  

1. Ship real work
2. Learn every day
3. Don't waste each other's time

There are no status meetings that could have been an email. Our daily stand-ups are 15 minutes. Everyone shares what they're working on, what's blocking them, and what they need. Then we get back to work. 

Every week, the founder runs a hands-on AI training session, not a lecture. You'll open a laptop, learn a new tool or workflow, and use it in your actual work the same day. By the end of summer, you'll have practical experience with tools that most people only read about. 

We're remote first, with one or two days per week together in KL. When we're remote, we trust you to manage your own time. We measure output, not hours logged. When we're in person, we use the time for the things that are better face-to-face: brainstorming, creative reviews, and the conversations that don't happen over Slack. 

We give feedback directly and often. If something isn't working, you'll hear about it on the same day, not in the monthly review. We expect the same from you. If you think we're doing something wrong, say so. 

This is a small team. There's nowhere to hide, and there's no one to take credit for your work. What you produce is visible to everyone, including the CEO. That's the trade-off: more accountability, but also more recognition and more learning than you get at a company 10 times our size.