As a boy at school in Singapore, Kenji Yeo kept having the same conversation. His classmates had no idea where Sabah was or what was in it, despite it being less than three hours away by plane. He decided early that he would do something about that. 

He did not begin in tourism, or in Sabah. Around the turn of the millennium he was working at Skylet Computer in Singapore, a PC hardware retailer that was among the first to sell NVIDIA's GeForce 256 and moved thousands of them to a generation of gamers. He was its general manager at 21, in the wealthiest country in the region, with a career that had nothing to do with home. He came back anyway. 

Amazing Borneo opened in Kota Kinabalu in May 2009, selling the state he was from to the world that had not heard of it. 

SabahTravel.com followed in 2019. Sabah's tour operators, hotels and transport companies all sold separately, and a traveller had nowhere to plan a whole trip in one place. The platform brought them together. Vendors set their own prices and control their own listings, and travellers can compare options and book tours, accommodation and transport from a single site. That design was deliberate. Larger travel platforms tend to compete by pressing suppliers to discount, which wins volume and moves margin offshore. Kenji wanted Sabah's operators competing on what they offer, rather than how far they will cut, and the earnings staying in Sabah. MalaysiaTravel.com now applies the same model nationally.

What makes him effective as a leader is not just what he can do himself but also what he sees in other people. He is a shrewd judge of talent, hires accordingly, and gives his directors real room to lead. He is comfortable letting them take the stage, and keeps a low profile himself. 

The same instinct shows in what he does with the money. He has consistently put it back into the company rather than take more out of it, spending on hiring and on building capacity. Outside Amazing Borneo he serves as vice president on the executive committee of SYBIL, the Sabah Young Business and Industry Leaders network. 

Amazing Borneo now serves more than 500,000 travellers and employs around 150 people.