I’m Lau Hong Heng (US: Hongheng Lau). Most people know me as Lau. I was born in Singapore and raised in Malaysia, where I grew up in a disadvantaged environment with limited access to technology, speaking seven languages and dialects — but not English. That early reality shaped how I see opportunity, inequity, and the barriers faced by people who start with less.

From elementary school through high school, I was consistently a top student in my class. But I had never touched a computer, and I couldn’t speak the language the world demanded. My dream of becoming an astronaut ended not because I lacked ability, but because geography, economics, and language made the path impossible. That was my first lesson in structural inequality: talent is universal, but opportunity is not.

After high school, I attended a community college in Kuala Lumpur. I still remember my first night there — spending four hours translating four pages of chemistry, not because I didn’t understand the subject, but because I didn’t understand the language. I was relearning something I already knew, simply because the system spoke a language I didn’t know.

My first computer class was even harder. I didn’t know how to turn on the machine. I typed Pascal code into the DOS prompt and received error after error. A lab assistant publicly mocked me for not knowing something I was never given the chance to learn. I didn’t quit. I studied relentlessly, asked for help, and kept going. Six months later, I became the lab assistant in that same class where I was once humiliated.

One year later, I took a $12,000 loan to pursue my degree in the U.S. I arrived as a first‑generation college student with limited English, limited computer background, and no safety net — just determination to refuse to let circumstance decide my future. I continued to learn, grow, and eventually earned a full scholarship for my master’s degree in computer science.

Those experiences taught me the truth that guides everything I build today:

Talent is universal. Opportunity is not. And language should never be the barrier.

This belief is also reflected in the causes I care about — education, health, and welfare for underserved communities. Access matters. Dignity matters. A better starting point matters.

CircinoNow is the platform I wish existed when I was young — built to make opportunity accessible to everyone, especially those who are capable but unseen, driven but unsupported, and talented but historically overlooked. I built CircinoNow to make opportunity multilingual, accessible, and fair, so no one is left behind because the system doesn’t speak their language.

My mission is simple: to use IT and technology as a bridge for those the system overlooks, to build tools that create equal ground so anyone, anywhere, can rise beyond the circumstances they were born into.