Markey Tan, bringing tech to nontechnicals

Markey Tan

Markey Tan, a breathing fireball of positive energy and enthusiasm, is meant to help her fellow millennials learn and grow while doing the same herself.

It started for her just like it starts for so many others. Tan went to Thammasat university in Bangkok to study political science and international relations when she got increasingly conscious and observant of the social and economic problems all around her: from the fruit seller unable to market his product to the tattoo artist struggling to survive the competition. She would constantly be coming up with simple cost-effective ideas to solve these issues.

By the time she graduated, Tan couldn’t wait to entrepreneur the crap out of her ideas. Only to realize that ideas, no matter how good, can only take one so far. So, she went to business school.

She did her master’s in business management at Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School.

“I couldn’t have chosen a better city in which to study. Shenzhen was, and still remains, a dream come true for my entrepreneurial mind but even with all of its resources at my fingertips and the support of a great international community of entrepreneurs, I still find myself on the outside of things,” said Tan.

In 2017, Tan joined China Channel, Shanghai, as a co-founder and got an opportunity to learn about all sorts of tools and online marketing strategies. There was still something missing: technical knowledge.

It was now clear to Tan why so many genius ideas remain just that, ideas. A lack of technical know-how among business-minded people keeps them from ever making their dream projects a reality.

She decided to tackle this technical difficulty head-on by going back to school to learn to code. It was there that she met Thibault Genaitay, a co-founder of Le Wagon. He told her what he does, Tan told him what she wanted to do and, long-story-short, Tan spent the summer of 2018 in a nine-week coding bootcamp.

“Boy, was I glad that I went. Not only did I learn a programming language, my fear of all things programming related was gone!” said Tan.

Shenzhen has welcomed her, inspired her and encouraged her, so she has decided to give back to the tech and gadget capital of China the only way she could, by starting Le Wagon coding bootcamps for all of its brilliant minds, entrepreneurs, and indecisive newbies who aren’t quite sure about their career path yet.

She is currently holding meet-ups, workshops for TechCrunch and Techstars, all the while gearing up for her first Le Wagon coding bootcamp.