BiG Talk : All The Stars Are Closer

Written by Ying Chia  |

One of Brunei’s most famous exports, Keeran Janin has a knack for creating complex and coherent things out of seemingly thin air. From apps to watches, Keeran has been honing his business sense since he was young; his journey started from what he calls a “cliché story” of working from a spare room at home on a shoe-string budget if prize money won at a local competition, to start his first company. An unusual choice perhaps for a teenager, but Keeran used his early ability of foresight to great success with his current ventures that include local ride-sharing business, Dart and haute horlogerie brand, Avantist. he considers himself a serial entrepreneur who believes anything is possible, as long as you have the right mindset. Currently in the midst of finalising the massive BN40 Gigapixel photo of Brunei Darussalam, we sat him down for a chat about gratitude, being half Dusun and the new Avantist watch featuring an out of this world element. 

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The concept of ‘failure as a form of redirection’ probably isn’t new to you. How do you know when to quit a losing game and when to stick it out?

KEERAN JANIN:  You shouldn’t be attached to anything. If you look at something and it’s a negative to you … you do the calculations of ‘How much am I gonna have to put in, of time, energy, emotion’. So if you do the math and you think ‘Oh yeah, it can be done’ and this is the amount that I want to put in, you just stick to it. Otherwise, you just say ‘It’s gonna take too much of my time to fix’ and you let it go. Your business is like a baby, right? You’re so attached to it or it’s almost like a part of your own body. It’s the same thing. If I just found out on day that I’ve got a really bad injury on my hand, for example, and the doctors are like ‘Okay, there’s a 50-50 chance that you could save your fingers and you have to do all these things’. Right? So you try, try, try. And then it turns out you were trying so much … but you can’t save it. If you continue trying, you might lose your whole arm. But if you just nip it in the bu, you might just have to amputate your hand and you can focus on other things that you can do for a full life. So you have to think about yourself. Is this thing that you don’t wanna let go actually gonna affect all the other things in your business too?

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You don’t just say, ‘I’m gonna shut it down and then everyone loses their jobs’. You, as a good human being, you would’ve known we’ve only got six months left and it doesn’t look good. That should never be a surprise that you wake up one morning going ‘Oh wait a minute, we’re bankrupt’. That should never really happen. I think I’ve been in certain situations before where you have so many opportunities. Like five different potential things to do this year, and I know I can’t do all of them. I can maybe do at best two or three, but I’ve already got two or three things going on. If I’ve got a new opportunity and it’s really big, I can’t just add it because everything will fail. If I’ve got some which are not doing so well then I might think now it’s time to let go of that and now I’m gonna free up so much time to chase something new. 

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What’s your biggest mistake taught you about doing business?

KEERAN JANIN:  Which one, this week? Today? The last 15 minutes since I got here? (Laughs) I’ve made so many mistakes! I wouldn’t say there was just one big mistake. Just maybe in the early days where you make a lot of them. I didn’t come from a business background or anything like that. So a lot of my first mistakes were just all learning from experiences, a lot of it was being a little too proud to ask for help. I realise nowadays the best thing in any case, the first thing I do is I find as many people who are absolute experts in the field and ask as many questions. I just want to know everything, and then keep asking, and being curious. 

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You’ve mentioned quite a bit in the past about the importance of a good team, or the right team, in business success. How can you tell if a team is going to work?

KEERAN JANIN:  Generally, when it comes to building teams, I always look for people who’ve done things before and they\ve got a track record, if I’ve got a project that requires certain technical skills sets in certain domain.  Then I’ll go and find people are experts that’s done something similar in that domain. You really only need five or less people of your choice. And after that, everybody else, is their choice. In terms of how do you know the team’s gonna work well together? You don’t have to. You just have to make sure the people around you work really well together and then everybody around them should technically trickle down right.

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You seem to be quite good at having an awareness of being present and grateful. Where does that ability to recognise the importance of what’s in front of you, come from?

KEERAN JANIN:  Because you just have to look around at my situation, like, I just like the fact that I can be in Brunei and like to be in a position where I can try my hand at things that interest me some and do make a living and everything. I mean there’s billions of people in the world that would absolutely kill to be in my position, right. So you can’t complain. I don’t know what else to say. It seems pretty obvious, I’m quite grateful!

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You’re half Dusun, which interestingly there isn’t much about it online! What values from that side of you culture have helped or supported your success and the way you approach wealth and life?

KEERAN JANIN:  I think the Dusun values are probably quite in alignment with Bruneian values really, in general. We are still such a small country. So, we’re all very, very similar in some sense. There’s a lot of this sense of family, community. We’re not really competing with each other, we just … everyone just helps each other. It’s like, what’s mine is your, you know, and I’ll help you if I can. I guess it’s more like this — I’ve always, with the teams I’ve put together … everything is equitable. Everyone’s always rewarded. Everyone’s doing things collaboratively. So in terms of like success in projects and teams I’ve been a part of, they’ve always been quite happy. And you know, don’t treat people like they’re commodities. Treat them like they’re human beings. Or part of a family. 

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You’re launching a new watch under Avantist, I hear. Can you tell me more?

KEERAN JANIN:  Yeah, it’s basically the next version of the Legend series launching somewhere around July. This first one I did was one with Martina Navratilova. And then I did a Jubilee edition for His Majesty The Sultan of Brunei, and a couple other special editions. For this latest one, we’re doing two models. One of them has dials inlaid with slices of meteorite. But these meteorites are really special — whereas most watches you’ll get the meteorites in metallic and they come from very common, really large meteorites that landed over thousands of years ago. The ones coming out of Avantist are actually slices of authenticated moon rock. And then the real special one is Martian rock where the dials are made from meteorites which are confirmed to have been from the surface of Mars. So you’ve literally got another planet on your wrist. And they’re going to be a surprisingly affordable watch. I think these materials are just incredibly rare. And if you’re a space buff or you’re into astronomy and things, it’s super cool to know that you have that here on your wrist and there’s a whole report on how it’s been like certified and it’s been sent to all the different labs. We’re only making 50 watches, that’s it. Super, super rare!

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