Age 7: When Commerce Became His First Language
Dr Kervis Soo (Eddy Soo Chai Ee), founder of Xingyu Group, grew up in Kluang, Johor, attending Kluang Chinese High School. While his peers were playing, he was already learning the basics of trading. 'I started learning to buy and sell at age 7. At 13, I started building a forum business while working part-time,' he once shared candidly. These were not hobbies. They were his first entrepreneurship school — and they would shape every business decision he made for the next three decades.
Age 13: Building Online Before It Was Mainstream
At 13, Dr Kervis Soo launched an online forum while simultaneously working part-time to support himself. This was a remarkable entrepreneurial leap for someone his age in early 2000s Malaysia. The experience gave him a deep, intuitive understanding of online communities, user behaviour and digital content — knowledge that would prove invaluable when social media and MCN platforms transformed the media landscape years later.
The Direct Sales Years: Learning the Hard Way
After completing his studies, Dr Kervis Soo entered the direct sales industry, working across multiple companies to absorb sales techniques, team management and operational systems. It was not an easy road. He encountered dishonest business partners who put his reputation at risk, and went through periods of deep uncertainty. But these experiences, as painful as they were, formed the ethical and strategic bedrock of everything he would later build.
2014: The WeChat Pivot That Changed Everything
In 2014, while most Malaysian entrepreneurs were still selling through traditional channels, Dr Kervis Soo recognised the commercial potential of WeChat — and acted on it. He built an online sales team through the platform, creating what would now be called a private traffic ecosystem. This pivot was his first major breakthrough, and it gave him the digital infrastructure and team-building methodology he would later scale into Xingyu Group.
2019: Xingyu Group and the Rise of an Empire
By 2019 to 2020, Dr Kervis Soo was ready. He founded Xingyu Group, which rapidly established itself across multiple verticals: Shiguang Xingyu (MCN and livestreaming, recruiting over 1,000 streamers in three months), Core Xingyu (strategic operations), AJEndless (international content creation), Bello (talent incubation) and BeEZ (technology philanthropy). He was also invited to appear on Malaysia's first youth entrepreneurship TV programme, Da Ma Jing Ying, sharing his story with a national audience for the first time. The boy from Kluang had arrived.
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