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Long before his name appeared on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list, Eswaran Mohan was helping his father move furniture and collect scrap metal in a lorry.
After secondary school, he spent six months working as a petrol pump attendant, saving up for his matriculation fees and the things he would need to continue studying.
In 2025, Eswaran, better known as Waran, and his wife, Renuga Nair, made the Forbes list for the business they started together at university.
There was a time when they came close to giving it up. On the very day they talked about quitting, Waran’s family was waiting at home with a cake.
He started working at 14
Growing up in Shah Alam, Waran earned his first pocket money helping at catering events on weekends.
He served guests, cleared tables and did whatever else was needed. Around the same time, he began helping his father, a lorry driver, with house moves and scrap metal collection.
When his family went through a difficult period financially, Waran turned to books. He was 17 and found that reading gave him somewhere to escape for a while.
Over time, it also helped him imagine earning a living doing something he enjoyed, even though he had yet to figure out what that might be.
Once he finished secondary school, he was in a hurry to save before matriculation and took the job at the petrol station. Years later, the shifts he worked there still stand out to him.
Funny enough, working at the petrol station is still one of my fondest memories,” he told WeirdKaya.
He taught himself to make Snapchat filters at university
Waran went on to study Mechatronics Engineering at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and became the first in his family to graduate from university.
Some days, he skipped lectures and spent hours in the library teaching himself to make Snapchat filters.
He wanted to see if people could use their phone cameras to try on jewellery, clothes and hats without going to a shop.
The jewellery businesses he approached showed little interest, but Waran kept making and publishing his filters.
In 2018, Snap selected him as one of its first 30 Official Lens Creators worldwide.
He later became a consultant for the company and travelled to teach other creators how to build their own filters.
That same year, Waran and Renuga started ExAR Technologies while they were still at university.
Paying clients were hard to come by. To earn money while building the company, Waran gave tuition and helped businesses find potential customers and set up sales meetings.
His family bought a cake the day they almost quit
Around ExAR’s first anniversary, Waran and Renuga seriously considered giving up and looking for jobs.
They went back to Waran’s house after talking it over and found his parents and siblings waiting with a cake to celebrate the company’s first year.
His family had no idea what the two of them had just discussed.
Here we were, thinking that we had failed, while the people closest to us were celebrating the fact that we had made it through our first year,” he recalled.
Waran credits his family with giving him a reason to keep going. A breakthrough eventually came from someone who had hired him to set up sales meetings.
The client casually asked what else he did for a living, so Waran showed him some of ExAR’s augmented reality work.
By the end of the day, he had closed an RM10,000 deal. After about 18 months of trying to make the business work, someone was willing to pay for the kind of experience Waran had taught himself to build in the university library.
They whispered the Forbes news so their baby could sleep
Waran and Renuga were on a family holiday in London when he saw the Forbes list. It was still early in the morning when he woke her to share the news.
Their baby was asleep between them, so they whispered as they tried to take it in.
Coming from my background, there were things I never imagined would happen to someone like me. Being recognised by Forbes was one of them.”
Making the list alongside Renuga meant more to Waran because she knew what it had taken to get there.
She had been there when ExAR was an idea they were working on at university and when both of them wondered if they should walk away.
At 31, Waran is taking a chance on his curiosity again.
While running ExAR, he is exploring early childhood education and working on a product that uses technology to help children learn through play.
The Forbes recognition made him rethink how far someone with his background could go.
It also gave him the confidence to try something he has yet to figure out, much like he did years ago in the university library.
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