Indo Tekno Podcast: Recent Episodes
Alan Hellawell
According to a report by Charities Aid Foundation, Indonesia is considered the world’s most generous nations. Kitabisa Co-founder and CEO Vikra Ijas attributes Indonesia's global leadership in giving over the past six years to "religious and cultural influences" that have shaped "a very collectivist society." Kitabisa is Indonesia's largest online crowdfunding platform for social and personal medical causes. The company last year acquired a life insurance company, largely as an extension to its Saling Jaga offering (trans. "protecting each other), which is a mutual aid program where members can protect each from critical illness. Vikra explains the diversification as a move beyond crowd-funding, which is "limited to a more reactive or responsive type of aid", to becoming "more strategic and prepared for future risks, which is facilitated license-wise through insurance." Kitabisa currently facilitates roughly one donation every second, and is moreover now emerging into one of the country's fastest-growing digital life insurance platforms.
Dayu Dara Permata, a 2022 Endeavor Entrepreneur, joins the Indo Tekno podcast to discuss the "three barriers to home ownership" that her start-up Pinhome is focused on eliminating. "There's just huge information asymmetry in the market," she observes. Dara moreover estimates that 70-80% of homebuyers require financing to transact, and most have few means to secure it properly. The third challenge relates to the sheer complexity and cost of any transaction, particularly in its final stages. The company has sought to digitize as much of this historically fraught process as possible through a marketplace architecture. Ensuring "seamless onboarding and making the journey of uploading, publishing listings, etc. frictionless" has been key. A five-year veteran of Gojek having led its Lifestyle & Commerce Product Group, Dara discusses how that role helped inspire Pinhome's novel "Home Services" offering which, among other things has driven down the platform's CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) while maximizing LTV (Customer Lifetime Value).
Indonesia represents some 30% of global seaweed production, a market with the opportunity to grow to $26.15 B by 2028. Dodon Yamin, Cofounder and CEO of BANYU, joins the Indo Tekno podcast to discuss the company's end-to-end farm technology platform for Indonesia's seaweed farmers. BANYU's value proposition sits upon three pillars: 1) enhanced seedling availability for Indonesia's farmers, 2) the application of blockchain-based smart contracts in order to improve commercially an otherwise inefficient and "leaky" industry supply chain, and 3) the use of IOT-based (Internet of Things) equipment and software to generate data that can be aggregated, stored and analysed for better farming results. Impressed by the success of fellow ITB alumnus Gibran Huzaifah at eFishery (podcasts Season 1 Episode 14 and Season 5 Episode 5), Dodon acknowledges the need for broader investor understanding of Indonesia's rising "aquatech" movement. BANYU has set an ambitious goal of 10x growth both this year and next, seeking to position itself as a key player in unlocking the country's seaweed opportunity.
Our latest Indo Tekno podcast guest, TJ Tham, comes from the relatively unorthodox background of a formally trained musician. TJ feels he is able to apply the more "right-brained" traditions of a musical upbringing across a number of facets in his role as co-founder of tjufoo, one of Indonesia's most successful "brand aggregators". Success in both roles depends upon a number of similar skills in TJ's mind. For instance, "music involves a lot of patterns." Similarly, identifying successful small Indonesian merchants requires a "keen eye for pattern recognition." A brand aggregator team like tjufoo commonly invests in or acquires small merchants, and then applies specific expertise to multiply the merchant's growth. tjufoo's favorite sectors are currently consumer electronics, home & living and FMCG (consumables). Although some of tjufoo's global brand aggregator peers have gone bankrupt of recent, the company's leadership team feels it has struck a more sustainable business model, not by solving a succession of discrete problems, but by introducing the "processes (and) the frameworks to help small merchants grow sustainably in the long term."
James Prananto joins the Indo Tekno podcast to discuss the origins of his collaboration with fellow Kopi Kenangan cofounder Edward Tirtanata. "We wanted to prove that our model works...but the malls and landlords only wanted to deal with the big brands" in the early days. The pair's eventual success in raising high quality VC money helped solve this and other problems, raising Kopi Kenangan's profile and legitimacy. James and associates Fandy Cendrajaya and Christian Sutardi more recently founded Kopital Ventures to leverage their expertise and networks of contacts for the latest generation of Indonesian entrepreneurs. "It also allows me to give back to the community by growing the Indonesian startup ecosystem." The most defining value-add that Kopital offers its investee founders is "the amount of time that we spend with the founders." While James has found the latest crop of Indonesian entrepreneurs much more daring than their predecessors, he urges the country's younger founders to "dream bigger".
Indo Tekno guest Adi Nugroho's technological experimentation with mushrooms began nearly 15 years ago. His first major breakthroughs in exploiting "mycelium" as a sustainable alternative came in the construction industry, where it proved itself to be lightweight, less pollutive, fire-resistant and have good insulation properties. Adi's current venture, MYCL, has gained impressive traction in major industries such as automobiles, fashion and furniture, all of which seek natural and sustainable alternatives to the highly pollutive animal leather fabrication process. In harvesting a targeted 250,000 sq ft of mushrooms next year, MYCL can displace leather production which would otherwise create 430 tons of CO2 emissions, result in the slaughter of 7,000 cows and turn up to 1. 5 million liters of fresh water into tanning effluent.
The global e-book market totalled USD24 billion last year. KaryaKarsa founder Ario Tamat discusses the company's path to creating a viable self-serve online publishing platform, one of the first to enable significant monetization opportunities for Indonesia's writers, and creators of other sorts of media; from audio to video to comics to photographs. A talented musician himself, Ario and cofounders Pribadi Prananta and the late Aria Rajasa asked: "Why not create a platform where fans could give money directly to their favorite creators in return for them continuing to create their favorite work?" The business indeed seems to have found successful product-market fit selling weekly serialized stories. "We have 240,000 creators. Some 50% of them are writers and our current user base is 1.8 million registered users". An EBITDA-positive business, the company intends to add further categories and functionality to perpetuate its nearly 2X growth year-on-year.
Gibran Huzaifah returns for the first time since his last appearance on the Indo Tekno podcast three and a half years ago to offer updates on the eFishery business and answer big picture questions on topics such as personal development, leadership and the nature of entrepreneurship in Indonesia. eFishery has grown meteorically, from serving 7,000 fish farmers as of our last episode in August, 2020, to more than 200,000 farmers today. Gibran recounts organizational growing pains centered around unforeseen headcount and leadership expansion. Gibran also details the company's growing profusion of financial services (many offered through third party partners). These services are all powered by eFishery's big data-enabled credit scoring capabilities. eFishery is "the largest aquaculture technology company globally right now," he states. Gibran also walks listeners through eFishery's entry into the Indian market, and discusses his motivations to export to the competitive US market.
"An entrepreneur must start from empathy for those people that feel the problem," shared Wildiyanto Yawin, cofounder of SME credit analytics platform Finskor, "and by that motivation they bring impact and help others by solving the problem. " Finskor is an AI company providing SaaS to automate and digitize the credit analytics process for Indonesia's SME's. With IDR600 trillion in credit needs that cannot be served by traditional banks, Finskor labors intensively to build enough trust to onboard these banks, many of which are intensely risk averse and are (understandably) concerned over data security. The company leverages AI to replace the error-prone manual process of reviewing hundreds of pages of an SME's financial statements, which serves to reduce fraud and create much more reliable inputs for credit scoring. Yawin views Finskor's longer term success in advancing AI to compensate for Indonesia's notoriously fractured and "noisy" financial data sources.
Indonesia's high-value users (HVU's) "spend almost 7x more than the average digital consumer in the country" states Sapna Chadha, VP for SEA and South Asia at Google. While addressing the needs of the "HVU" will remain critical, "almost twice the opportunity is with that of non-high value users," she added. "Three quarters of non-high value users say that they would engage if their barriers were addressed." Sapna and fellow guest Florian Hoppe, Partner and Head of Vector in Asia-Pacific, Bain & Company, envision innovations in areas such as logistics and new online shopping functionality unlocking much of this growth potential. Our two guests join the Indo Tekno podcast to address the newly released 8th edition of the e-Conomy SEA report, titled "Reaching new heights: navigating the path to profitable growth". Florian additionally proposes a path to a resumption in Indo tech IPO's, one in which increasingly realistic entry valuations, and improving monetisation models, unlock a record USD16b in dry powder as of YE 2022. The team expects Indonesia's digital economy growth to reaccelerate from 8% YoY this year to a 15% CAGR, reaching ~$110B by 2025.
Having come from a family background in budget hotels, Carina Lukito began as a serial entrepreneur in the consumer goods & services space. Instances of malnutrition amongst her nieces specifically propelled her to cofound Little Joy, which is Indonesia’s fastest-growing Mom and Baby brand for "the first 1,000 days of a child." Nearly 1 of 3 babies is malnourished, and there is still a ~50% child mortality rate under one year old. Stunting moreover among Indonesia's children remains high. The platform is comprised of four components: Joyi World, MomsJoy, Dapur Little Joy and LittleJoyEdu, all designed to meet the holistic needs of Indonesia's 15m babies and 24m pregnant & lactating mothers. Little Joy leverages big data to do everything from optimizing baby food formulations to customizing advice for expectant and new moms. While Little Joy seeks to trump Indonesia's longstanding brands by addressing the unique needs of the latest generation of mothers, "ensuring the efficient and timely distribution of our product to every corner of the country" remains the company's most complex endeavor.
Goldman Sachs Head of SE Asia investment banking Andy Tai returns to the Indo Tekno podcast to summarize how global financial markets currently view Indonesia's tech sector. With investor enthusiasm having waned across much of tech and emerging markets over the past few years, Andy specifically reflects on the unprecedented scrutiny placed on incremental marketing spend by Indonesia's leading tech start-ups - emblematic of growing insistence on profitability over growth-at-all-costs. He also specifically calls out Agritech as a sector of particular interest amongst Indo tech-focused investors, and growing expectations around ESG (environmental social and governance) from institutional investors as companies begin to round the bend to IPO. Andy also revisits his previous views on the importance of best-in-class corporate governance for Indonesian start-ups, and urges founders not to underestimate the enormity of IPO preparation.
Ryan Manafe joins the Indo Tekno podcast to discuss both the difficulties and long-term rewards of staying true to rural e-commerce. While many of Indonesia's "warungtech" platforms claim to focus on enabling commerce in Tiers 3 & 4, many invariably retreat to urban markets such as Jakarta and Surabaya, given higher population density, consumer tech savviness and digital connectivity. Dagangan, which Ryan cofounded 4.5 years ago, maintains a disciplined focus on Indonesia's rural markets, home to 87% of the country's population and 75% of its household spending. Seeing far less competition in these regions, Dagangan leverages a "hub-and-spoke" architecture to access a larger profit pool compared to Indonesia's hyper-competitive Tier 1 markets. Ryan devotes a significant part of our discussion to the importance of meditation and mindfulness in navigating through today's challenges such as fund-raising and shifting competitive terrain.
“My articles (come) from a place of affection and empathy towards Indonesia”, says Leigh McKiernon, a leading headhunter in Indonesia. Leigh has cultivated a loyal social media following with his witty commentary on the big money, big personalities and big excesses that have resulted from Indonesia’s uninterrupted run in the tech space for the past decade.
Leigh in one article humorously summarises an entirely fictionalised “Aplikaskars” awards event which he describes as “a glamorous event put on by the Indonesian tech startup community celebrating the industry’s successes and failures.” Leigh seeks to “explore the limits of the absurd” in other humorous articles such as “Forbes 30 Under 30: A Mirage of Meritocracy” and “The False Modesty Olympics: When Being ‘Humbled’ Turns into a Competitive Spectacle.” All of Leigh’s work carries more than just a kernel of truth about the excesses of the industry.
One of Leigh’s most active focuses in executive recruitment and consulting is cultivating high retention corporate cultures amongst Indo’s leading tech companies. “Naturally when you double in size over a three month or a six month period, it's going to pose challenge for even the most experienced leaders.”
Christian Limawan joins the Indo Tekno podcast to discuss the mission criticality of sourcing truly relevant data, in order to properly serve Indonesia's tens of millions of underbanked MSME's. Unlike most emerging names in Indonesia's credit scoring space which analyze individual consumer credit worthiness, AIForesee has an exclusive B2B focus on the "productive segment" of enterprise, assisting financial institutions to improve lending to the country's MSME's. Christian reflects on the importance of being part of a broader fintech ecosystem to AIForesee's successful credit scoring, from the ease of new client referral and participation in broader "full-service" solutions with fellow group companies, to improved access to alternative data. AIForesee is a member of the Investree ecosystem, and partners closely with other group companies such as E-Procurement platform Mbiz and MSME aggregator Sahabat Bisnis; as well as other external data partners.
Former CEO of leading Indonesian digital asset exchange Tokocrypto, Pang Xue Kai, joins the Indo Tekno program to discuss his latest venture, Untukmu.AI, which involves the application of artificial intelligence to online gift-giving in Indonesia. Synthesizing disparate elements such as a recipient's preferences, budget considerations, the specific occasion and numerous other factors; Untukmu.AI seeks to vastly improve discovery in the on-line purchasing process. A native Singaporean, Xue Kai describes the genesis of Tokocypto as an attempt to address "great market inefficiencies" in the digital currency space. He also discusses the patchwork of talents that he and cofounders Estelle Van Der Linden, Oceane Alagia and Cory Pang bring together in the critical process of "ideation".
While Indonesia's leading e-commerce platforms have evolved massively over the past decade, many of the country's online merchants complain of the exorbitant fees they must pay the marketplaces, and the fact that they have little visibility into the customer buying from their storefront. Gery Nugraha and fellow cofounders Albert Theodore and Faza Fahleraz, all recent grads of ITB, offer "Checkout-as-a-Service", whereby their start-up SnapLink (formerly Payable) allows merchants to operate with full e-commerce capabilities on platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp. SnapLink is a turnkey solution which allows the small merchant to record new orders, calculate postage, receive payments, enable delivery and offer various other services. The seller can reestablish a direct relationship with the buyer and can avoid heavy commissions, platform fees & advertising expense.
With only 2.1% of the country's students deemed of “very active” physical fitness levels, seeking a digital means of improving access to wellbeing has achieved paramount importance in Indonesia. Fauzan Gani joins the Indo Tekno podcast to discuss his start-up DOOgether's integrated solutions for physical fitness, mental wellbeing and nutrition. Fauzan addresses how DOOgether has begun to differentiate its offering across Indonesia's Tiers 1, 2 and 3 markets. DOOfit is the company’s “Classpass-like” marketplace for 3rd party wellness and fitness studios, while DOOspace is a turnkey operator of fitness spaces for interested housing complexes, buildings and other open spaces. The two categories have take rates between 10-20%, although DOOgether sees significant additional revenue opportunity for ancillary services in its B2B business.
Founder Irzan Raditya joins the Indo Tekno podcast to address the profound deepening in functionality that the application of artificial intelligence (AI) has enabled to his earlier SMS-based digital assistant start-up YesBoss, in its 8+ year evolution into what is today Indonesia's leading chatbot platform, Kata.ai. With more than 170 paying enterprise customers, Kata.ai overlays generative AI to enhance Indonesia's near-ubiquitous use of "chat commerce" over platforms such as WhatsApp. Irzan traces the genesis of his career as a prolific serial entrepreneur to the age of eight, when he made a good business out of drawing caricatures for his classmates. Irzan also offers insightful suggestions around safeguards to any potential abuse of AI in the future.
Indonesia is the fastest growing insurance market in the world. Giacomo Ficari joins us to discuss how his start-up LifePal seeks to remove many of the frictions and the inefficiencies associated with the traditional agent-driven approach, to apply more of a direct-to-consumer model for Indo customers. A member of the Lazada "diaspora", Giacomo discusses his journey from banking in London to various entrepreneurial roles in Southeast Asia, striking a complementarity with his three fellow cofounders at LifePal, and how the company is now reimagining the insurance journey around massive verticals such as automobiles.
In the wake of the Indonesian government's announcement several days back that it would allocate 7 trillion rupiah (or $455.88 million) to subsidise electric motorcycle sales through 2024, we welcome onto the Indo Tekno Podcast James Chan, founder of ION Mobility, a company dedicated to "affordable, desirable, and sustainable mobility for everyone." The current share of "EV two wheelers" in new motorcycle sales in Indonesia remains below 1%. James believes that EV penetration of new sales could climb to north of 30% within five years, behind the ever-improving price and performance attributes of EV motorbikes such as ION's M1-S model, government incentives mentioned above, and clear shifts in consumer preferences. An accomplished entrepreneur and investor, James reflects candidly on the most formidable challenges that he has faced in growing ION through the COVID period to its leadership in EV motorbikes.
The global B2B (business-to-business) eCommerce market was valued at US$17.9 trillion in 2021. That is over 5 times that of the consumer-oriented B2C market. Wynn Nathaniel joins the Indo Tekno podcast to describe what his start-up, Proglix, is doing to digitize and streamline Indonesia's massive trade in raw materials such as steel and industrial goods such as electrical supplies. Joining us from his temporary base in the San Francisco Bay Area, Wynn and the Proglix team are in the Jan-Apr 2023 Y Combinator cohort, which he describes as a fantastic networking knowledge-building opportunity. Wynn also outlines ambitious 2024 growth goals, which the Proglix team is confident in meeting as it expands and simplifies raw materials procurement to Indonesia's smaller and medium-size enterprise.
At a time when the overall funding outlook for start-up's in Indonesia has grown increasingly inclement, Camille Krejci joins the Indo Tekno Podcast to outline the novel ways in which his new fund, 21yield, extends loan agreements to fintechs in emerging markets more flexibly to help them grow their loan portfolio. Fintech remains the most crowded category in Indonesia, while the proper tools to raise funds and lend onward for these start-up's remain scarce and ill-suited. Camille views the biggest deficiencies in debt lending to fintechs being most funds' inability to lend in the early stages, their long turnaround times, and generally pretty exacting requirements around runway. 21yield seeks to address these pain points through an approach more uniquely suited to these online lending businesses, supported by the application of deeper leveraging of data.
Indonesia boasts 25m neighborhood businesses, which represent an estimated 40% (US$450b) of the country's GDP. As part of our inaugural episode of 2023, Marshall Silver joins the Indo Tekno podcast to describe how his start-up DekatKita (meaning "near us" in Indonesian) is addressing growing discontent amongst local mom & pop stores, predominately in the food & beverage segment, with the high fees (20-30%) and disappearing subsidies of incumbent platforms such as Grab & GoTo. DekatKita has built an online storefront used by over 5,000 neighborhood merchants to promote and operate their businesses. After seeing some businesses boost sales exponentially using DekatKita Store, the company is now launching a marketplace for shoppers, to find and order from the neighborhood merchants offering the best product and customer experience—the “hidden gems” around them. An advocate of the tireless pursuit of product-market fit, Marshall describes how refinement of DekatKita functionality has helped them persuade over 20% of pilot merchants to upgrade from a free Store to a paid service.
Martyn Terpilowski joins us for the final Indo Tekno episode of 2022. The Founder of Bhumi Varta Technology, Martyn discusses the challenges of building a leading start-up in the deep tech space in Indonesia, and sees wins with major accounts such as Astro as testament to BVT's strengths in digital mapping and other "less sexy" enterprise-oriented technologies. Martyn takes exception with what he perceives as having been a prevailing culture of "back-slapping" within the tech and VC world in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. This very insular world, as he sees it, has failed to question an unhealthy fixation on "growth-at-all-costs" amongst even the highest profile of start-ups. In today's more treacherous global macro environment, Martyn is concerned that we could see an implosion across Southeast Asia's tech world on par with the "dotcom bust" at the turn of the millennium.
Raymond Au, the Chief Data Officer of TipTip, joins the Indo Tekno podcast to describe how big data has proved critical in opening up new venues of monetization for the creator economy, which earns over $104 billion dollars globally. TipTip is a recently funded monetization platform for content creators across Southeast Asia. Working with those generating content on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, posting on e-commerce platforms, and publishing work through e-books and other channels; TipTip represents a new breed of big data champions in Indonesia. It offers detailed analysis to generate additional income for content creators, "combining tactics and techniques...to build a brand" for aspiring influencers. Given the challenging macro environment, Raymond predicts that in 2023 "personal development will be the number one market for creators," likely followed by health and entertainment.
Kristie Neo, the Editor for Venture Capital coverage at DealStreetAsia, joins the Indo Tekno podcast to reflect on the highs-and-lows of an already storied career covering the tech sector in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. She describes as one of her proudest moments her widely profiled investigative exposé in which Kristie challenged a number of questionable assertions made by self-proclaimed unicorn, Filipino property developer Revolution Precrafted. Kristie laments the often contentious relationship between the media and the tech world. She for instance reflects on the turbulence generated from her recent coverage of the potential "down-round" of a Singapore-based software company, which led to a series of testy exchanges over social media. Kristie is excited with the emergence of the carbon credit market in Indo. Although she is worried that Indonesia's 2024 elections could jeopardize the country's strong support of the tech sector, she adds "I think the Indonesian ecosystem can only grow much bigger and better."
Mikko Perez and Adrian Lorenzo of Ayannah tell the story of the company's journey as a non-Indo start up setting up in Indonesia during the pandemic, and its strong growth trajectory in spite of the lockdowns and the current economic slowdown. Ayannah’s digital “Lending as a Service” platform processes close to USD2m (IDR 30 billion) a month in loans while maintaining a 100% collection rate by partnering with cooperatives serving blue collar workers and MSME (warung/toko) entrepreneurs. They also describe a “three layer wedding cake” business model that is enabling financial institutions and consumer brands to reach millions of underserved MSME entrepreneurs in Indonesia and the Philippines at scale via digital and hyperlocal channels.
Rama Suparta and Andrew Kandolha, cofounders of SATURDAYS, discuss Indonesia's leading Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) lifestyle eyewear brand. SATURDAYS has created its own streamlined supply chain in order to remove the massive middleman costs that the traditional industry is built upon. The company has pursued an "omnichannel strategy", with offline stores (famous also for their baristas), a website, mobile app and home try-on service, all fully integrated around the customer. The duo also addresses the success they have achieved in weaving social media influencers into SATURDAYS' marketing strategy. Enhancing further "all aspects of human resources and improving store productivity" are the company's current goals going into 2023.
Air conditioning (AC) emissions cause 13% of climate change globally. Indonesia, given its combination of strong economic growth and hot climate, is a massive emitter of freon and other global warming gases. Louis Potok, Founder of Recoolit, has built a technology-driven platform to enable the sale of high-quality carbon credits from refrigerant destruction. The solution engages with AC techs on the front lines and pays them to recover gas before they would otherwise scrap old units and vent the gas straight into the air. Recoolit has developed software to coordinate logistics to destroy the gas to international standards. The platform then sells voluntary carbon credits to global buyers. "We'd like to be about 10 x what we did in 2022" in 2023, on a longer term journey to prevent 1 billion tons CO2e by 2030.
Jakob Rost joins the Indo Tekno podcast to discuss Ayoconnect's aggressive evolution from an initial focus on payments aggregation toward a more elemental Open Finance platform. A company he founded in early-2016, Ayoconnect is modelled around the premise that “every company will be a fintech company”. It offers broad fullstack solutions to any financial institution or tech company seeking to enter online banking and payments services quickly and comprehensively. Jakob also shares the backstory of world-renowned hedge fund/PE Tiger Global's investment in Ayoconnect's early-2022 fund-raise, marking one of Tiger's earliest ever investment rounds in Southeast Asia.
The three lead authors of the annual e-Conomy SEA report return to the Indo Tekno podcast to share further color on this seminal report on the state of the Southeast Asian digital economy. Stephanie Davis of Google shares deep analysis around the nature of slowing digital adoption growth in 2022, describing the massive shift amongst the region's tech platforms from "acquisition to deeper engagement as a business model." Wai Hoong Fock from Temasek meanwhile reviews several mixed trends in public and private valuations, noting all the while a continued rise of interest in the region amongst investors, which is no better revealed than by the sharp growth in the number of single family investment offices based in Singapore from 400 in 2020, to 700 in 2021. Florian Hoppe of Bain & Company summarizes conversations with a wide swath of the firm's tech clients, noting surprise by how well Southeast Asia has held up. Compared to what his global colleagues are seeing, Florian posits that Southeast Asia "appears to be relatively far away from a real recession."
Climate Tech investment set a record half globally in 2022 1H, with $26.8B in venture funding across roughly 970 deals. However, less than 2% of start-ups in Asia are climate-oriented, while the global average is 15%. Jonathan Davy of Ecoxyztem joins the Indo Tekno Podcast to discuss the criticality of Ecoxyztem's unique turnkey venture builder model to address Indonesia's under-developed Climate Tech sector, and the broader opportunity that his incubatees have across the developing world. Jonathan also offers examples of the platform's 360-degree support of portfolio companies such waste4change, Enertec and ReservoAir.
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) standards within tech are rapidly evolving from a "nice-to-have" to a "need-to-have". Fellow AC Ventures colleague Lauren Blasco, who leads the fund's ESG efforts, shares findings from a first-of-its-kind report co-authored with BCG which sets the first quantifiable ESG standards for Indonesia’s tech sector. Lauren views "risk mitigation, streamlining operations and identifying opportunities" as common benefits that tech start-up's cite in adopting ESG guidelines. Such actions may not be optional going forward: a growing number of VC fund LP's require ESG adherence across a fund's portfolio. Moreover, the EU is close to mandating that all large companies disclose around ESG-related issues. The US SEC meanwhile is likely to require that all listed companies, tech & non-tech alike, address ESG in their filings.
Naga Tan, Co-Founder & CEO of ErudiFi, joins Indo Tekno to discuss solutions to Indonesia's extraordinarily depressed tertiary enrolment rates (~36%), one of the lowest in the region (eg: Thailand 60%, Singapore 90%). ErudiFi leverages alternative data to extend education financing in markets such as Indo and the Philippines (collective TAM of USD5b), in order to help increase enrolment and accelerate industry growth. Cash/informal loans often carry high interest rates while school internal instalment plans are limited. ErudiFi offers 0%-1.5% monthly interest rates, usually grants approvals within a day, and offers students a more generous tenor of 6-24 months. The platform seeks to fund over 300,000 Indonesian students by 2024.
Indonesia generates approximately 6.8 million tons of plastic waste every year, according to the Indonesia National Plastic Action Partnership (or NPAP). Shockingly, almost none of this waste has been sorted in the past. Indonesian actor and presenter Hamish Daud joins the Indo Tekno Podcast to discuss his efforts to apply data analysis and entirely new practices in order to address Indonesia's deficient waste collection and recycling practices. Octopus, a start-up he cofounded with partner Moehammad Ichsan, seeks to create an efficient reverse logistics service for Indonesia's packaging industries. The platform enables granular tracking of "Postconsumer Material" (PCM), offering valuable data services to FMCG clients such as Danone and P&G.
Vincent Iswara, CEO and Cofounder of Indonesian payments platform DANA, discusses an encouraging cooling in competition in the space amidst recent pressures in the global financial markets. He also sounded an optimistic tone around prospects for industry profitability going forward. DANA payment volumes in 1H 2022 alone surpassed the company's full-year 2021 volumes. Vince also offers a compare-and-contrast between China and Indo's payments players. DANA boasts several strategic investors on its "cap table" such as new investors Lazada Group and Sinarmas. DANA has taken an "open platform" approach as a payments provider, offering its capabilities to any major third party e-commerce or other commercial platforms requiring a payments solution. This strategy stands in contrast to "captive" payments solutions which serve largely one single individual e-commerce, ride-sharing or other large platform.
Helga Tjahjadi, the Cofounder and and CEO of food Indonesian tech start-up making plant-based beef and chicken Green Rebel Foods, joins us to discuss how the country is optimally placed to see strong secular growth in the ongoing shift to alternative proteins. Helga discusses what it takes to build an entirely new consumer brand in 2022, referencing customer relationships with multinationals such as Ikea and Starbucks. In addition to profiling several of Green Rebel's indigenous technological innovations such as "texturization" and "Rebel Emulsion", Helga also discusses Green Rebel's unique supply chain, expansion plans and goal to achieve price-parity with traditional proteins.
Pensieve Founder Farina Situmorang traces her deep interest in the application of advanced technology to politics and government to her fervour in supporting Barack Obama's campaign for the White House when she was studying in the US. Widely known as one of the architects of the successful digital campaign popularly known as “The Jokowi Effect”, Farina founded Pensieve in order to harness artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning to assist governments in emerging markets with digital transformation. Farina also shares views around both the good and the harm that large digital platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have had in political discourse, both in Indonesia and globally.
Ans Syuhada, Cofounder and Tech Lead of SME accounting solutions platform Delegasi, walks us through a career built around software engineering, from his early days when Ans' alma mater ITB began offering instruction in product management, to some 6.5 years running engineering and platform & data at leading aquaculture platform eFishery. A Y-Combinator Summer 2022 participant, Delegasi seeks to vastly simplify the accounting challenges of the small business owner, starting with Indonesia's restaurant segment.
Gojek CEO joins the Indo Tekno podcast again in a wide sweeping discussion of his personal management philosophy, work-life balance, innovation in Web3 and crypto, and investing in a successful partnership with one's spouse.
Timothy Astandu, CEO and Co-Founder at consumer insights platform Populix, offers an entertaining retelling of the company's origin story, before detailing Populix's attempts to deliver far deeper and more detailed consumer insights compared to the inefficient and problematic offline alternatives that have heretofore prevailed in Indonesia. Measuring "brand health and consumer behavior" are the two most urgent use cases; which moreover span all conceivable industries; from education to diversified conglomerates to automotive to FMCG and beyond. Timothy also discusses how AI has both measurably improved the broader consumer insights space, and specifically allowed Populix to roll out entirely new insights and functionality in this USD80b global market.
Pandu Adi Laras joins the Indo Tekno podcast to discuss age-old working capital challenges amongst Indonesia's ~50,000 SME used auto dealers, and what his start-up broom.id is doing to improve liquidity in the industry through easy access to capital using inventory as collateral. Indonesia’s used car market currently boasts $65B in yearly transaction value. broom.id's digitized solution offers quick approvals for short term working capital, addressing the industry's near-complete absence of data and lack of access to the incumbent banking industry.
Prateek Chaturvedi, Founder and CEO of KitaBeli, joins the Indo Tekno podcast to deliver an extremely comprehensible tutorial on social commerce in Indonesia, both in terms of its similarities with neighbors China and India, and how it is evolving in turn quite separately from other markets. KitaBeli has eschewed Tier 1 markets such as Jakarta, instead choosing to fashion its offering around the unique needs of Indonesia's Tier 2 and 3 markets, where the platform successfully addresses both significantly lower levels of familiarity with e-commerce, unique consumer demands and lower levels of trust than their urban counterparts.
PT Ruma's founding in 2009 marks one of Indonesia's first and most sustained initiatives to digitize the country's unbanked and underserved. Its Mapan platform offers fintech services through Indonesia's unique decades-old arisan, enabling local groups of women to come together and empower each other financially. Mapan CEO Ardelia Apti joins the Indo Tekno podcast to detail the specific workings of Mapan in spreading financial literacy, encouraging healthier fiscal behaviors with the woman of the household, and improving her access to affordable products and services.
Revenue-based Finance (RBF) is a form of financing which already has an established track record in the West, but is only now enjoying broader adoption in markets such as Indonesia. Choco Up is a first mover in the category in Asia, targeting ASEAN's USD300b business funding gap. Choco Up cofounders Percy Hung and Brian Tsang explain that RBF does not require any of the dilution of equity raising, or the complications of traditional bank borrowing, and thus has become an increasingly popular means of raising funds quickly. Such an arrangement, requiring API access to the entrepreneur's business, is useful in the age of mega-sales events such as Singles Day and 12-12), when sellers need significant capital quickly in order to build inventory, etc. RBF generally entails an agreement that the merchant or tech founder covers a one-time fee, and subsequently pays back (daily, weekly, monthly, per transaction, etc) through a revenue share.
A 7.5 year veteran of the Alibaba ecosystem, Desty Cofounder & CEO Mulyono Xu lays out many of the challenges that Indonesian online merchants face trying to operate across countless incompatible systems. Desty seeks to collapse the host of largely unconnected e-commerce marketplaces, payment systems and logistics providers into one dashboard in order to minimize complexity for Indonesia's online sellers. Mulyono shares fascinating insights across topics ranging from his early days building a career in Asia's heart of eCommerce - Hangzhou; to the singular importance of striking product-market fit early on at a start-up.
Technology-based coffee chain Fore Coffee needs to "build trust" continuously with Indonesian consumers, according to CEO Vico Lomar. "Whoever builds that consistency for the people of Indonesia and Southeast Asia" will dominate the otherwise competitive landscape for coffee drinkers. A veteran of the F&B industry since the early-2000's, Vico describes the turn-around that he and the leadership team at Fore have been orchestrating since his arrival two years ago. The world's 40th heaviest consumer of caffeinated beverages, Vico expects the Indonesian coffee drinker to enter the top 15 or 20 over the next several years, thus driving robust consumption growth in the sector over the longer term.
Reynold Wijaya, Cofounder of regional SME lending leader Funding Societies (Modalku in Indonesia), joins the Indo Tekno podcast to discuss the importance of the 7+ years that the company has spent constantly refining its lending services as part of its game plan to enter into neobanking services for Indonesian and Southeast Asian enterprise. An apparent "spoke" to the broader neobanking "hub", Reynold argues that lending is the far-and-away the most challenging of SME-oriented services to master, and will be key to FS-Modalku's emergence as a leading SME digital financing platform in the region, given that few other claimants to the neobanking crown have expertise in lending. COVID brought exceptional pressures to the financing landscape, leading Modalku to recalibrate its credit policy quickly, and recall loans from enterprise clients who were predicted at significant risk of default. This pruning in borrower profiles has led to material improvements in the quality of its portfolio today.
Hiro Kiga joins the Indo Tekno podcast to discuss life as a Japanese transplant to Indonesia. He also reflects on the success of fellow JIS high school classmates who have also come to play major roles in the country's tech ecosystem. Much of the episode he devotes to recounting his fateful leap from VC to founder. Hiro earlier in his career worked at the VC arm of Japanese gaming and social media heavyweight GREE. Six and a half years ago he founded Wallex, a leading cross-border banking player. Hiro discusses Wallex's successful merger with Singapore-based M-DAQ, and also addresses the importance of a proactive strategy with the regulator in winning and, just as importantly, maintaining financial services licenses.
ASTRO belongs to one of the fastest growing subsegments of online shopping: eGroceries. Since its founding 9 months ago, the company has built out 50 "hubs" (dark stores), and has grown 10x since early-2022 alone, on nearly 1 million downloads. Company Co-Founder & CEO Vincent Tjendra discusses an Indonesian e-grocery penetration target of 3-4% within 5 years, from 0.5% currently. He also addresses the hazards of over-investment, the path to profitability, the role of promotions, and common misperceptions around competition.
Some 9 in 10 workers experience burnout in Southeast Asia according to Justin Kim, the Cofounder and CEO of mental wellness coaching solution Ami. Jakarta moreover is a top 5 city in terms of burnout, a market in which Ami's SaaS-based subscription platform is growing rapidly. Having introduced a personalized online coaching service primarily aimed at Indonesia's tech industry, Ami is at the forefront of confronting taboos around burnout and stress in the workplace. The pandemic has added momentum to Ami's growth, given the loneliness and various other stressors that many employees now experience. Justin also discusses Ami's impressively global list of investors. The company is in fact the very first early stage Asia investment of Facebook parent company Meta.
"I'm still bullish Indonesia" declares returning podcast guest David Halpert, Founder of Prince Street Capital. A buyer of Amazon at around $8 when it pulled back in the 2000 crisis, David views Indonesia's private and publicly listed technology leaders as built-to-last, and sees longer term buying opportunities emerging amidst the ongoing correction. David is encouraged by recent messaging from the likes of Uber's CEO, demanding a "seismic shift" in thinking toward profitability. He in this vein hopes to see within Indonesia a cessation in hyper-competition amongst players such as GoTo, Grab, Bukalapak and Sea Limited. David also agrees with Y Combinator's recent advice to early stage tech companies to cut their expenses and focus on extending their runways. "Don't talk about TAM", he urges Indo founders. "Don't talk about GMV. Don't even talk about revenue...try talking about profit".
Indonesian domestic helpers working for employers overseas represent the single largest group of female salaried workers contributing to Indonesian households. A native of Ukraine, Dayana Yermolayeva is CEO and Cofounder of JiPay. She has created a growing family of services aimed at the 70m domestic workers across the globe who do not have access to financial services. Some 50% are entirely unbanked and 60% are chronically in debt. The Indonesian helper tends to send more than half her income back home, and rarely is able to save. JiPay currently offers a card for helpers to purchase groceries on behalf of their employers helping to build trust in households where helpers work. These helpers can also be paid their salary into a JiPay account, save and remit via the app, thus allowing helpers to manage all basic needs in one place.
Interested in supporting the Ukrainian cause? Consider donating to Dayana's favorite charity:
https://www.instagram.com/kiddo.ua/
Reinier Musters joins us to review the latest breakthroughs in online SME lending in Indonesia, including critical improvements in credit scoring. Nikel, a company that Reinier founded in early 2019, has championed “embedded lending”, a turnkey solution which promises to empower a wide variety of platforms with a newfound ability to lend to Indonesian SME’s. Citing a fascinating collaboration with leading hotel platform RedDoorz allowing hotel partners to refurbish their properties through revenue-based lending, Reinier also sees e-commerce sites and other marketplaces as offering important use cases of the Nikel solution.
In our first episode devoted to the corporate venture capital or CVC segment in Indonesia, the CEO of Telkomsel Mitra Inovasi (TMI), Marlin Siahaan, shares a number of examples of value-add that parentco Telkomsel has created in collaborating with TMI portfolio companies such as Finaccel, Halodoc, Evermos and Sekolah.mu. Marlin details TMI's key investment criteria, and also delves into emerging areas such as agritech, blockchain, and ESG. TMI additionally looks for infrastructure plays including IOT and 5G-focused start-ups that can connect with Telkomsel telco assets. Marlin concludes by offering key learnings and leadership advice for other women seeking to create impact within the tech world.
William Li shares with us the genesis of one of Indonesia's largest players in the fintech and e-commerce space, Akulaku. The business originated in early-2014 as HK-based cross-border remittances platform Silvrr E-Commerce. Having borne witness to the rise-and-fall-and-rise-again of China's P2P and broader fintech space, William has combined those learnings, with a keen understanding of legal & regulatory issues, to grow Akulaku's basic consumer financial services toward a full digibank, with a 5-year goal to serve 50m people in 10 countries.
Rifki Pratomo, the Cofounder and CEO of Andalin, joins us this week to discuss the massive inefficiencies that continue to plague the region's multi-trillion dollar cross-border trade. Andalin is a "digital freight forwarder" that is devoted to removing frictions in cross-border B2B commerce. Traditional freight forwarders for instance take on average 101 hours to provide a simple manual spot quote to a customer. Andalin's mandate to digitize and streamline cross-border trade has become even more mission-critical due to the profound dislocations that the COVID pandemic has brought about to global supply chains.
Fresh Factory is one of a growing number of Indonesian start-ups to have gained entrance into the highly coveted Y-Combinator program. Fresh from having completed YC's demo day, company Cofounder and CFO Andre Septiano reflects on his key learnings from the program, which included how to achieve product-market fit, and dealing with failure. Andre also addresses the massive opportunity that Fresh Factory's "hyperlocal" approach to supporting cold chain logistics hopes to capture, an opportunity whose growth has accelerated on the tailwinds of the COVID pandemic.
Wafa Taftazani speaks of his path to founding no less than three start-ups within a three year period. Modal Rakyat extends working capital for startups and SMEs, while VCGamers is a gaming & NFT marketplace, and UpBanx is a fintech & marketplace for brands and creators in Indonesia. The three independent companies come together regularly, whether its Modal Rakyat assisting UpBanx customers in securing invoice financing, or VCGamers helping UpBanx brands and influencers launch Web3 digital assets. Consider listening through to the end of our podcast, when Wafa discusses how daily meditation of life's bigger questions has profoundly impacted his entrepreneurial journey.
In our first episode of Season 3, leading Southeast tech reporter for Reuters, Fanny Potkin, shares with us a number of fascinating anecdotes from her career covering the tech scene in Indonesia, from interviews of social media "buzzers" who leverage technology to influence election outcomes, to local entrepreneurs' humorous comparisons of Alibaba to a "nagging mother" and Tencent to a "passive father". Fanny's biggest prediction for 2022 is that significant new regulation is on the horizon for Indonesia's tech ecosystem.
Alex Rusli is Cofounder of Digiasia Bios. The company offers the broadest portfolio of fintech licenses and solutions across Indonesia's start-up scene. Alex is amongst a small minority of start-up founders with previous big tech leadership experience, having served as CEO of telco giant Indosat before going "full-on founder". Our conversation ranges widely, from the challenges of fintech adoption to the benefits of martial arts amidst the demands of start-up life.
(Podcast Website)
The three lead authors of the annual e-Conomy SEA report join the Indo Tekno podcast to share further color on this seminal report on the state of the Southeast Asian internet economy. Stephanie Davis of Google offers fascinating insights around Indonesia's more aggressive embrace of payments compared to the region, and much higher internet participation from non-metro areas. Rohit Sipahimalani from Temasek delves into drivers behind near all-time high fundraising levels in the region while offering a deeper dive into healthtech, edtech and online investment management segments. Florian Hoppe of Bain discusses factors underpinning the report's significant increases in 2025 forecasts for e-commerce, while discussing candidly what might jeopardize the region's strong growth.
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia | Podcast Website)
Indonesia, an ecommerce market with an estimated 14 million online merchants, will likely grow to about USD80-90b in GMV by 2025. Opportunities thus abound for expert teams to acquire and partner with smaller merchants, in order to drive greater and greater operational efficiencies. Jeff Yuwono, Founder & CEO of "brand aggregator" Open Labs, discusses this massive roll-up opportunity, and how it differs in Indonesia from similar models around the globe.
Asian Development Bank research suggests that half of Indonesia's workforce of 135m is "underqualified for their jobs". Rohan Monga, CEO of leading online education platform Zenius, sees this skills crisis as being rooted in the K12 education system of 45m students. Zenius is helping drive the transformation of Indonesian pedagogy from rote knowledge-based instruction to a focus on greater critical thinking and scientific knowledge.
In this episode, we discuss startup "cross pollination" between local entrepreneurs and their sea turtle (or "pulkam") cofounders returning to Indo from overseas work or study. "Indonesia Only" VC firm Intudo Ventures uniquely operates with founding general partners Eddy Chan and Patrick Yip sitting on opposite sides of the earth; one in Silicon Valley and the other in Indonesia. The goal is to encourage in each investee company an amalgam of top-flight overseas-inspired start-up experience, with critical on-the-ground connectivity and expertise.
(Podcast Website)
Cofounder of leading podcast platform Noice, Rado Ardian, estimates that the pandemic contributed to 3x growth in listenership in 2020. Noice's 3 top shows are comedy-oriented, an interesting reflection of the market's unique tastes. Intense "hyper-localization" of content will be crucial in driving up to 5x growth next year, as Noice strives to offer unique content to Indonesia's many heterogeneous communities. Rado pointed to Noice's extensive use of local "vernacular" programming as key to accessing listeners through their many languages and dialects.
In Indonesia, the Digital Divide remains a stubborn problem. While Indonesians spend around 6 hrs a day online, sadly "almost half of the adult population is still without internet access," a July World Bank report reveals. Barrett Comiskey and Dan Connor, Migo CEO and Indo Country Lead, respectively, reflect on the company's inroads to connecting all parts of the pyramid to internet content through its increasingly ubiquitous "Warung Migo" solution.
COVID-19 has seriously rattled the already inefficient Indonesian blue collar sector, sending unemployment levels to an eight-year high. Leading end-to-end workforce management platform MyRobin targets a 74m large blue collar market which has suffered from monthly churn of 20%. Company cofounder Siddharth Kumar believes that the company has "cracked the code," not by herding workers onto a new purpose-built app, but by meeting them on the social platforms that they already use. MyRobin is thus able to offer a massive "top-of-funnel" of 2.6m candidates to their target employers in logistics, FMCG and other verticals.
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia | Podcast Website)
Cybercrime is predicted to inflict damages totalling $6 trillion globally in 2021. If measured as a country, it would be the world's third largest economy. Niki Luhur, Exec Chairman of VIDA, discusses the profound dangers of failing to implement more robust solutions around digital identity, privacy and cyber security. Niki argues that with emerging market economies digitizing at breakneck speeds, individuals need the ability to control their most valuable information: their data and identity.
Bukalapak in August became Indonesia's first ever locally listed tech unicorn. Its robust revenue growth in its first reported quarter as a public company offers a compelling alternative narrative to characterizations of destructive hyper-competition across the country's e-commerce industry. Company President Teddy Oetomo points out that tier 2-4 cities, where its "Mitra Bukalapak" service dominates by serving micro and small-sized offline merchants, is actually where a majority of Indonesia's commerce occurs.
Indonesia has soared from relative obscurity just a few years ago to represent more than 40% of Southeast Asia's mobile games market by revenues. Its developmental ecosystem however lags far behind. The country has a mere 1,200 games developers (China has 200,000). Founder of the country's largest game studio Agaté, Arief Widhiyasa, profiles many of the company's initiatives to cultivate a more vibrant ecosystem of gaming studios across Indonesia.
With 73% of deaths in Indonesia caused by non-communicable diseases such as stroke, heart disease & diabetes; co-founder of next-generation healthy food company Lemonilo, Shinta Nurfauzia, describes her mission as using technology to make a healthy lifestyle accessible to everyone. Lemonilo often launches a new product exclusively online, crowd-sourcing feedback from its e-commerce customers, and only then subsequently releasing the perfected product to its 200,000 offline points-of-sales all over Indonesia.
(Podcast website | Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia)
Qoala has played a front-and-center role in modernizing Indonesia's hidebound insurance industry. Company Founder Harshet Lunani however views the role of agents in insurance as remaining key to increasing insurance penetration. Qoala seeks to "Uberise" insurance by removing the tedious complexities of pricing, underwriting and issuance services, and enabling anyone with personal networks to become a modern "agent". Capturing unprecedented digital insights into the customer has allowed Qoala to co-create entirely new families of insurance products with the likes of Traveloka, Tokopedia and others.
(Show website | Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia)
Expert Ajisatria Suleiman joins our first episode devoted to Indonesia technology policy, to explain how policy is synthesised, where current policy priorities are focused, and what we can expect going forward. Having worked with The World Bank, Kominfo and other major institutions, Aji suggests that the public sector should invest more heavily into its own innovation and digitalization in order to achieve more effective policy collaboration with the private sector. Aji also explores major topics of the day such as Digital Identity, Data Privacy and new eCommerce policy developments.
In Part III of our "Hari-Hari Awal" or "Early Days" series, we interview Ajey Gore, Gojek's former Group CTO. Now an Operating Partner at Sequoia Capital, Ajey describes as "largely unplanned" his career progression from his early days in Bangalore to Indonesia's most important engineering leadership position. He instead followed this progression much like "water flows across a floor". Ajey is extremely pleased with how Indonesia's engineering community has evolved since his involvement in the region began many years ago. Not only does it more aggressively embrace new technologies, but the community is now much more "self-organising and self-governing."
While many players in Indonesia's hospitality industry were paralysed by the 70-90% declines in occupancy that COVID brought about, leading tech-enabled hotel player Bobobox immediately began to deep dive into behavioural shifts amongst its largely Millenial customer base. In addition to acting on obvious insights such as improved cleanliness and hygiene, the Bobobox team also seized on the growing imperative to work remotely, rolling out its wildly successful Bobocabin and Bobovan products. Company CEO Indra Gunawan also addresses topics including competition, the advantages of the capsule hotel model, and the mission-criticality of technology.
Indonesia's long tail "fragmented trade" of mom & pop's, warungs etc. can be 50-80% of sales for big CPG companies like Unilever & P&G. However, reliable insights into the "sell-out" of a product to the ultimate customer are nearly impossible to achieve, given the labyrinthine distribution networks and low levels of digitization at the retail end-points. Philipp Stegmann, founder of eyos, discusses how the company; which is the product of a merger with London-based RetailTech platform yReceipts; delivers actual actionable insights at point-of-sale to prevent inventory stock-out's, enable timely promotions, and otherwise drive significant supply chain efficiencies.
Tessa Wijaya, Cofounder and COO of leading payments firm Xendit, details the dramatic shift in payments use cases during the COVID era, away from the embattled online travel segment; and toward other payments scenarios such as crypto exchanges, gaming and edtech. Indonesia's first graduating start-up from the Y-Combinator program, Xendit continues to integrate with leading BNPL providers, SME book-keeping platforms and a host of other fintech solutions to grow both within Indonesia, and increasingly regionally.
Some 18 out of Silicon Valley's 20 largest unicorns have used venture debt in order to reduce shareholding dilution, extend their runway, and accelerate growth with limited cost to the business. Chin Chao and Paul Ong of regional venture debt leader Innoven Capital offer a primer for Indonesian entrepreneurs on this rapidly growing form of fund-raising. Positioned as a "synergistic partner" to their VC counterparts, Innoven commonly connects portfolio companies into the ecosystems of anchor LPs Temasek and UOB.
Originally formed to address the sad fact that air pollution takes 5+ years off the life of the average Jakarta resident, sister companies nafas & aria have achieved renown in Indonesia's tech community with their pioneering work in air monitoring and purification. Cofounder Piotr Jakubowski and team are now aggressively adding features such as a virus risk index for both enterprise and residential customers, as they grapple with the relentless spread of COVID 19 throughout Indonesia.
"At the end of the day, somebody needs to aggregate neighbourhood demand" in order to become the dominant solutions provider to Indonesia's massive small retailer segment, states Ula Founder and CEO Nipun Mehra. Ula is founded on the provocative assumption that "the traditional store actually has a massive advantage over modern retail formats." The successful model will play to these existing strengths, not replace them, in bringing the mom & pop into the modern retail era.
Indonesia has become a crucible for tremendous amounts of experimentation in ecommerce business models. Steven Wongsoredjo, Cofounder and CEO of Super, has combined both the group-buying elements of global category leaders such as China's Pinduoduo, along with several uniquely Indonesian aspects such as agent-based sales. Shirking the "Jabodetabek" focus of most other ecommerce platforms, Super has instead found strong growth in Tiers 2 & 3 and rural markets in the eastern parts of Indonesia. Super estimates this unique social commerce opportunity to be USD200b in size.
Neneng Goenadi, Country Managing Director for Grab, is one of the Indonesian tech world's most accomplished and charismatic female business leaders. Neneng discusses the company's aggressive expansion into new, lower tier markets and multiple other initiatives to help spur economic recovery from the pandemic. She attributes Grab's leadership in part to having built its own in-house tech in areas such as anti-fraud and mapping, which she believes has nurtured the allegiance of all players to its multi-sided marketplace. Neneng also shares her deep optimism over the widening range of leadership opportunities that the tech world offers aspiring women in Indonesia.
China e-commerce GMV totalled a massive RMB11.3 trn in 2020, or 12% of the country’s GDP. Indonesia e-commerce GMV of USD40b meanwhile was less than 2% of GDP, suggesting massive long-term upside on its way to 12% and beyond. Today’s guests, Brian Marshal and Andreas Thamrin, are cofounders of SIRCLO. SIRCLO’s sole purpose is to help small, mid-sized, and enterprise brands to sell online. SIRCLO seeks to help Indonesia's merchants unlock massive efficiencies and growth by mapping them to: a) new ecommerce platforms, b) integrated omni-channel strategies, c) more sophisticated "back-end" technologies and d) unprecedented amounts of big data to drive insights and seller strategies.
Jeth Soetoyo, Founder of Pintu, joins us to examine the widening application of blockchain and crypto-assets in Indonesia. Jeth cuts through the hype to make an easy-to-grasp and persuasive case for the steady growth of adoption of crypto-assets such as Pintu's own Rupiah Token. He describes Indonesia as very "forward looking" in terms of crypto asset regulation. Jeth sees in blockchain the ability to accelerate Indonesia's transition towards an open financial system and increase financial inclusion for the underbanked.
AC Ventures Founder Adrian Li reflects on some of the dramatic changes that have set in to Indonesia's start-up scene since he began VC investing in 2013, from the significant improvement in founder pedigree to the steady rise of Fintech as his favorite sector. He also opines on where a comparison with China can inform successful venture building in Indo, and where it can mislead. Adrian also discusses how he guides his entrepreneurs in pursuing growth-versus-monetization in SEA's largest market.
Visinema Founder Angga Sasongko is the director of some of Indonesia's most celebrated films, such as "Hari untuk Amanda" and "Filosofi Kopi". Angga reflects on a range of topics, from the necessary balance between technology and the humanities in Indonesia's educational system, to the impact of the smartphone on film & entertainment, to collaboration with leading tech firms such as Gojek in his recent work.
The Indonesian Logistics Association recently reported that logistics volumes fell 60-70% from before the onset of COVID-19. e-commerce logistics enablers however grew 40%+ in 2020. Leading Indonesian logistics start-up Shipper delivered a stunning 6X growth last year. Shipper Co-founder Phil Opamuratawongse walks listeners through the company's success in onboarding e-commerce merchants to its technology-enabled "first mile" services. He also shares some intensely personal stories of how the pandemic impacted both him and the company at large.
Indonesians spend an astounding nine hours daily on their smartphones. Country Director for Facebook in Indonesia Pieter Lydian joins us to share insights into the 98% of Indonesia's online population that consultant PWC claims interact with its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms. He also profiles the company's broad-based push to super-charge the country's warungs and MSME's as they make the digital transition. An impressive 84% of MSME's active on FB report generating revenues from the platform, revealing FB’s criticality to SME’s during COVID.
A stunning 90% of S&P 500 Index companies in the US published sustainability reports in 2019, up from 20% in 2011, according to G&A. Gojek Head of Sustainability Tanah Sullivan summarizes the company's own recently released sustainability report and makes many extremely persuasive arguments why all companies need to articulate increased focus on environmental, social and governance (ESG). Listen in to understand the company's ambitious pursuit of "Three Zeroes" (Zero Emissions, Zero Waste & Zero Barriers) by 2030.
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
By November, 2020, around 550,000 Indonesian hotel employees, or ~78.5% of the entire industry, had been furloughed or laid off, according to PHRI. RedDoorz Founder Amit Saberwal reflects deeply on the importance of decisiveness, a culture of transparency with employees & hotel partners, and steadfastness amidst crisis. These factors emboldened RedDoorz not only to navigate COVID, but moreover expand recently its mission statement; it now seeks to become the largest hospitality company in Southeast Asia.
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
According to Hootsuite, 62% of Indonesia is connected to social media. Of this, 64% are on Twitter. Dwi Adriansah, Country Head of Twitter Indonesia, shares with us a range of unique use cases that his compatriots have come up with during the pandemic. Entertainment reigns supreme as the biggest category, and has become ever more popular as users yearn for content during the pandemic. Dwi also outlines the critical role that the platform has served in combatting national challenges, from vaccine disinformation to gender-based violence to even real-time flood warnings.
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
Founded at the very beginning of the pandemic, BukuWarung's meteoric rise to serve more than 5m SME merchants suggests that Indonesia's warungs have accelerated their embrace of digital solutions during COVID. Founder Chinmay Chauhan explains how the company plans to grow 10X this year by expanding from current bookkeeping, payments and ecommerce enablement to a growing menu of MSME financial services.
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
Levi Sani of Nalagenetics represents a new generation of entrepreneurs seeking to apply innovations to Indonesia's beleaguered healthcare sector. A champion of the rapidly emerging "pharmacogenomics" field (the study of how genes affect a person's response to drugs), Nalagenetics has also leveraged its focus on Southeast Asian populations to roll out a number of critical diagnostic solutions in Indonesia's battle against COVID-19.
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
In our 3rd instalment on Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, we survey 20 leading Indonesian entrepreneurs for their most pressing questions around this increasingly popular vehicle to public listing. Jim Perry & Udhay Furtado of Citigroup, the world's most prolific underwriter of SPAC's, and Abhay Singh, founder of one of the region's first announced SPAC mergers (VMAC), answer these questions relating to the potential benefits and pitfalls of the SPAC.
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
Roughly half of Indonesians between the ages of 13-30 are “gamers” of some sort. Jonathan Yuwono, GM of Rebellion Esports, along with Team Manager & eSports influencer Claudia “ClauPaw” Theodora, navigate us through the gruelling daily regimen of a top-notch esports athlete. While Indonesia has fared poorly in most major traditional sports, Jonathan sees tremendous opportunity amongst the country's young professional esports athletes. Claupaw meanwhile details the rich world of influencers and online media that support the esports ecosystem.
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
While the pandemic has turned nearly all aspects of life upside-down, online Home & Living in Indonesia has seen steady and robust growth, explains Dekoruma Founder Dimas Priawan. In its mission to digitize the entire supply chain of Home & Living, Dekoruma grew 3X in 2020. With offline interaction all but impossible; customers, suppliers, contractors and designers have accelerated their move online. Dekoruma's products and services marketplaces allow these parties to collaborate and transact frictionlessly.
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia de sini)
Veteran emerging markets fund manager David Halpert, Founder of Prince Street Capital, reflects on his history of deep involvement in Indonesia, including key early investments in national champions such as Gojek. Indonesia is a key component of Prince Street's unique "digital decolonization" strategy, which David describes in detail. He also discusses important tech-related initiatives such as the ongoing attempt to create a fully integrated electric battery/EV manufacturing chain in Indo.
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
Indonesia unemployment last year surged to its highest level since 2011. GajiGesa Cofounder Vidit Agrawal discusses the concept of Earned Wage Access, and how employers use the technology to address employee financial stress, which otherwise can drive lost productivity and absenteeism. EWA positively impacts retention and the employee experience, and is proving a valuable tool in teaching financial responsibility to low and middle-income workers.
Brankas leads Indonesia's nascent "Open Banking" movement. It seeks to address friction in digital banking, collapse costly layers of middlemen, and change business models on payments, credit scoring and more. Brankas CEO Todd Schweitzer and CPO Mike Dickinson share views on Indonesia's banking and payments systems today, and offer some predictions on the future of Indonesian Open Banking.
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
Kevin Aluwi, co-founder and co-CEO of Gojek, offers a candid, brick-by-brick account of the company's most formative early successes and challenges; from the insights that informed the creation of GoFood, to touch-and-go moments in fund-raising. Join us as Kevin offers his own definition of "super-app", reflects on the complexities of creating a successful development team, and discusses valuable synergies with partners Google and Tencent.
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
"50% of our borrowers are non-Muslim", states Dima Djani, CEO of leading Sharia finance platform ALAMI. Sharia banking's broad appeal to millennials with its "transparency, social impact, and prudent and responsible qualities" should raise its weighting in Indonesia's banking sector from 6% currently to a government target of 15% by 2023. Join us as Dima outlines ALAMI's plans to triple business in 2022 in pursuit of dominance in financial technology across the broader Muslim world.
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
We are in the midst of an impact investing boom. Guest Dondi Hananto of Patamar Capital dispels many misconceptions around impact investing. He argues that intensive measurement of both "bottom lines" (Financial/Operational and Impact) can deliver outsized returns and do social & environmental good at the same time. Dondi shares powerful stories of mission-based portfolio companies mClinica & Mapan/Ruma; and anecdotes of successful female-led businesses Danacita & Sayurbox.
Gabriel Frans, Cofounder & CEO of CrediBook, discusses how his company seeks to modernize traditional cash management amongst Indonesia's 56m SME's. Gabriel describes the benefits of building joint solutions with long time associate Hendra Kwik of PayFazz. He also explains the mystique of his alma mater, leading engineering school ITB. A man of many talents, Gabriel created this week's musical soundtrack.
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini...)
Few internet platforms have the ability to affect change on such a massive scale as Google. The company has trained 1.7m Indonesian business owners (500,000 female), and seeks to support 45m students with their distance learning needs. Randy Jusuf, MD for Google Indonesia, walks us through the company's massive efforts to bring more Indonesians online, support 22,000 school teachers in their educational mission, help industries evolve digitally through the pandemic, and reinvigorate the jobs market.
Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini
In our first podcast of 2021, Sabrina and Sarah Soewatdy, co-founders of leading Indonesia co-living platform Rukita, discuss how they have revolutionized Indonesia's traditional "kost" model. They also reflect on how COVID led to dramatic yet successful shifts in Rukita's customer focus, the blatant honesty between sister/co-founders, and the digital demands of Indonesia's millennial university student and young professional.
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"I would expect Indonesian IPO's in 2021 and 2022," states Delano Musafer, Head of Asia-Pacific Capital Markets for the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange). Delano is joined in the third episode of our “From Warung to Wall Street” series by his colleague Jennie Dong, Head of SPAC’s at the NYSE. Jennie’s insights are very timely, given recent news that Peter Thiel’s Bridgetown SPAC (special purpose acquisition company) may seek to merge with Indonesia e-commerce stalwart Tokopedia in a ~USD10b deal.
As a follow-on to our October 6th Indo Tekno episode on “The SPAC Opportunity” with Andy Tai of Goldman Sachs, Jennie explains the massive expansion in SPAC's in 2020. SPAC fund-raisings stand at roughly 4X last year levels, and they have moreover raised more than traditional IPO alternative in 2020. Jennie expects SPAC’s to “serve the same purpose in emerging markets” such as Indonesia as they have in the US, “allowing high quality companies to go public through a SPAC business combination.” Jennie views the greater certainty around pricing and valuation that comes with early pricing negotiations, and the opportunity to capture additional financing through a PIPE, as some of the many benefits that have driven a resurgence in attraction to the SPAC by entrepreneurs and investors.
The world's largest stock market with USD28 trillion in market cap and USD150b in turnover, the NYSE is the listing venue of 130 Asia-domiciled companies. Yet only two Indonesian companies are currently listed on the NYSE. Delano is optimistic that some of today’s leading Indonesian technology companies will find their way to the NYSE. His most important advice to the aspiring Indo entrepreneur in preparing to list on the NYSE: "Choose good advisors!"
As this is the last Indo Tekno episode of the year 2020, we wish you all a fantastic year-end and a prosperous New Year! Selamat berlibur, semoga tetap aman dan sehat. Selamat tahun baru! Thank you for listening!
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A November Ernst and Young report reveals that nearly a third of those without a car surveyed intend to buy a car in the next six months. They cite the COVID-19 pandemic, originally blamed for a near paralysis in car-buying earlier in 2022, as one of the top reasons for the planned surge in purchase activity. Aaron Tan and Aditya Lesmana, cofounders of Carro, Southeast Asia's largest automotive marketplace, join us to discuss this recovery, the application of AI to the online car industry, and the company's massive growth and diversification plans through 2023.
Digitally native millennials will be the main driver of this recovery in buying behaviors, thus playing well into Carro's online marketplace model. The company however also realises that maintaining offline services such as repair and maintenance will be critical to owning the entire stack of services.
The shorter term 2021 plan is focused on accelerating B2C transactions, growing Carro's wholesale business by 3-4X and expanding gross profit. Aaron meanwhile feels that Carro's "AI-driven retail buying experience" most prominently differentiates it from other online automotive marketplaces.
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"Talent Shortage" is far-and-away the biggest challenge cited by Indonesian tech employers in this year's RGF HR report. Our guest Antonio Mazza, co-founder of leading Indonesia-based recruitment firm WeNetwork, reveals that 80% of hiring managers claim that the shortage of tech talent is so severe that it has negatively impacted speed of product development.
Not surprisingly, Product and Engineering roles are the most common recruiting mandates amongst WeNetwork's clientele. Antonio on the podcast delineates the Top 10 coding skills in greatest demand. On the executive placement side, WeNetwork deals most with leadership mandates in Software Engineering, People, Strategy and Product.
Much of Antonio's prescription to founders seeking to insulate their teams from being "cherry picked" by the decacorns is straighforward: HR teams should overhaul comp packages. Many existing benefits are in fact never even used. While most everyone is expanding their comp architecture from base salary to include more long term incentives, those companies boasting the best retention rates "work for their employees" he says, offering valuable training, mentorship and internal mobility opportunities.
"Virtual hiring and remote working are here to stay" post-COVID, states Antonio. The key is to determine "when virtual is best, and when in-person is more appropriate."
The Indonesian authorities have "done a great job in negotiating with the COVID vaccine suppliers for advanced commitments," says today's Indo Tekno Podcast guest, Farouk Meralli of mClinica. "Where it's going to get very difficult is distribution. This is a logistics effort like we've never seen before."
mClinica is Southeast Asia's largest online pharmacy network. Its all-digital Trade and Patient solutions enable more than 40,000 pharmacies, who interact with 150 million patients, to operate more efficiently and effectively, both in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia. The traditional pharmacy is a center of activity unlike its counterpart in the West: in Southeast Asia, customers visit pharmacies 12x a year, and physicians only 1.2x a year. mClinica addresses the industry's profound fragmentation. Its SwipeRx pharmacy "super-app" solves several age-old challenges for mom-and-pop pharmacies, including: 1) the purchase of pharmaceuticals on discount, 2) access to credit, 3) frictionless payments and 4) direct delivery.
SwipeRx's most popular features involve content and education. It is now SEA's largest education provider for pharmacy professionals. Farouk also profiles on our podcast how the world's leading pharma brands, regional governments and global NGO's also benefit from mClinica's many pharmacy-centric solutions.
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"Our advantage is our people," states George Hendrata, CEO of Indonesian online travel agent (OTA) Tiket.com. The term "people" in fact comes up no less than 30 times in our interview, more than four times as frequently as the average guest on the Indo Tekno podcast. This philosophy, quite common throughout the broader Djarum Group, espouses not just Tiket.com employees, but also the platform's obsession with customer service.
Tiket.com seeks to democratize travel for the average Indonesian, and make it fun and effortless. The company's employee and customer-centricity however has been put to the test in 2020. The recently released Google-Temasek-Bain report anticipates a near 60% decline in the Southeast Asia OTA segment in 2020. Tiket.com has sought to avoid headcount reductions despite the unprecedented headwinds that the pandemic has fanned. George notes that the "green shoots" of recovery have recently sprouted up in the form of a gradual rebound in domestic travel.
Although George views competition in OTA as much more "sane" that in e-commerce and ride hailing, the company has had to defer plans to break-even in 2020 for another couple years due to COVID. But Tiket.com is optimistic around the prospects of industry recovery in 2021 from this year's USD14b, en route to a longer term Google-Temasek forecast of USD60b for the region by 2025.
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Nearly 50% of grocery delivery customers in the past six months had never used such services prior to COVID, according to the new Google Temasek Bain "e-Conomy SEA 2020" report. In this episode, we invite on Guillem Segarra, CEO of HappyFresh. Guillem discusses this radical growth in demand; how HappyFresh as the region's leading pure-play has dealt with an influx of competition from Gojek, Grab and others; and what the future looks like for Indonesia's supermarkets.
Having adopted an asset-light model that connects brick-and-mortar grocery stores to customers, HappyFresh's trinity of priorities is: 1) selection, 2) ease-of-use and 3) value-for-money. The company's marketplace approach enables easy scaling and profitable unit economics, leaving consistency of experience and customer satisfaction as crucial initiatives in competing with its more asset-heavy, vertically-integrated competition.
The 2021 plan is to help deepen the digital sophistication of its supermarket partners, expand geographically and grow its intimacy with the customer through loyalty programs and the like, as HappyFresh pursues a share of what should be a USD10b market by 2025.
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Credit card ownership in Indonesia has risen at an anaemic 2.3% CAGR over the past 10 years, this despite an absolute burgeoning in use cases such as e-commerce and other forms of consumption in the country. JP Morgan for instance last year estimated that there were a mere 0.59 e-commerce enabled debit cards per capita and 0.07 e-commerce enabled credit cards per capita in Indonesia.
Our guest this week is Akshay Garg, Cofounder and CEO of FinAccel, which operates Kredivo, its flagship “Buy now, Pay later” solution. Akshay reflects on the company's dual obsession with: a) improving access to credit for Indo consumers and b) reducing e-commerce payment frictions. Akshay views an early call to build Kredivo's own tech stack in areas such as credit scoring as invaluable to the company's dominance in the space, both as an e-commerce check-out option and across other Point-of-Sale (POS) use cases.
While COVID drove a sudden 50% decline in activity earlier this year, Akshay indicates that Kredivo's business is now at better than pre-COVID levels. The pandemic had slowed regional expansion, but Akshay expects to add 1-2 markets over the next several months, while looking into new lines such as education & healthcare loan products.
Competition in online payments is intense. And while the "buy-now-pay-later" space similarly remains competitive, Kredivo intends to deepen its symbiosis with Indonesia's leading e-commerce platforms as a leading check-out solution, much in the same way PayPal has in the US, or Klarna has in Europe.
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"I try to spend every day...with somebody who is in the tech space," comments Pak Gita Wirjawan. This week's guest to the Indo Tekno Podcast brings to bear insights from a sweeping career which ranges from government service at the highest levels, to extensive involvement in Indonesia's tech ecosystem as entrepreneurial investor and mentor.
Most widely known as Indonesia's Minister of Trade from 2011 to 2014, Gita Wirjawan reflects on the broad tapestry of interests that he began to weave from early youth; from winning golf tournaments while living with family in Bangladesh at the age of 13, to his appearance on no less than 14 albums regaling audiences as an award-winning jazz performer during his stint in the US.
Gita's greatest passion centers on education. His Ancora Foundation has a mission of helping both early stage education and graduate studies for talented Indonesians. Gita also mentors a large number of Indonesia's rising "technopreneurs" on a daily basis. Some of his conversations with young leaders of Indonesia's tech world are featured on Gita's popular podcast "Endgame."
Gita remains extremely optimistic about Indonesia's longer term economic prospects, but differs with some of his peers in his belief that digging out of the COVID crater may take multiple years, not months. Gita is hopeful that the new Omnibus Law will benefit Indonesia's tech sector, and more broadly help lift the country from current levels of $91 worth of FDI (foreign direct investment) per capita, closer those of Malaysia ($270) or Singapore ($19,000).
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While the average Indonesian has always had an appreciation of gold as a reliable investment, the ravages of COVID have driven massive volumes into this "safe haven" asset. The user base of Indonesia's leading digital gold and investment platform Pluang for instance has grown a stunning 20 times since the start of the pandemic. Gold moreover has returned 36% over the past year in Rupiah terms.
Our guest on Indo Tekno, Pluang cofounder Claudia Kolonas, discusses both this exciting corner of Indonesia's FinTech scene, while also reflecting on the many challenges that face the female entrepreneur in Indonesia.
As a student at Harvard Business School, Claudia and her cofounder began on working on a business plan with inspiration from an HBS course titled "Business at the Base of the Pyramid." Pluang's focus is on unbanked, first-time investors in Indonesia and, as such, it collaborates extensively with strategic partners such as Gojek to improve digital and financial literacy amongst these first time investors. The platform enables investment in Sharia-compliant digital gold products. Pluang meanwhile has its sites set on other traditional financial products such as equity indices, fixed income products and mutual funds
With women representing only 22% of Indonesia's tech workforce (far below the region's 32%), Claudia exhorts employers to consider expanding support of working women in the form of on-site daycare and other facilities. She meanwhile counsels aspiring female entrepreneurs to be brave and "outspoken", and to "lean in" to opportunities and be ready to grab what they can.
Indonesia's and China's technology ecosystems continue to interweave and overlap. BAce Capital is a venture firm whose very mission is to connect markets such as Indonesia to China's dynamic tech eco-system. Claiming Ant Financial as its anchor LP, the firm was founded by Ant and Alibaba veterans Benny Chen and "KK" Kshitij Karundia. In this instalment of Sino Indo Tekno, Benny reflects on the many benefits that the Indonesian entrepreneur can realize in working closely with his/her counterparts in China.
The founding team of BAce played key roles in higher profile Alibaba and Ant Financial investments such as Lazada and Tokopedia in Indonesia, and PayTM and Zomato in India. BAce invests in an Indonesian start-up if the partners can easily connect that company to longer term learning relationships with: 1) Alibaba and Ant Financial themselves (China's absolute leaders in e-commerce and fintech, respectively), and 2) some of the hundreds of investee companies within Ant and Alibaba's broader ecosystems.
How do companies in China scale? What are best practices in product development? What are the most powerful ways to leverage big data? Benny profiled a number of activities that his team has arranged for BAce Indonesian portfolio companies such as Printerous and RoomMe. Learning visits to meet industry peers in China helped answer questions such as those above, while focused workshops on Chinese COVID mitigation techniques offered these companies valuable coping mechanisms for the pandemic. In his concluding remarks, Benny suggests that continuous improvements in Indonesian infrastructure and expansion in digital payments & logistics are key to driving further online growth.
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Our guest this week, Pandu Sjahrir, is one of Indonesia's best known tech investors and operating executives. Actively involved in the management of four leading companies, Pandu was also recently appointed Board Member of the Indonesia Stock Exchange (or IDX). He joins us to outline the growing attractions of IPO'ing on the IDX for Indonesia's tech start-up's.
Pandu describes his main mandate as "hunting Indonesian elephants": he is actively encouraging Indo's largest tech companies to list domestically in the belief that, with such valuable precedent, the IDX will be able to eventually develop a thriving ecosystem of listed tech companies. The benefits of listing domestically to the tech entrepreneur he argues are numerous: from valuable MSCI index inclusion (and thus demand from absolutely massive pools of passive moneys), to the fiscal attractions of a 0.1%-0.5% capital gains tax, to a declining corporate income tax and the support of dual class shares.
Pandu views recent recent mix shifts on the IDX over the past year as very positive: retail accounts have doubled to 3.2m and local investors have risen from 45% to 60% of market ownership. He also candidly discusses where Indo's IPO ecosystem needs to mature, in areas such as board membership, governance and transparency of reporting.
Pandu also shares generously other insights from his various current roles as Chairman of Sea Group Indonesia, Managing Director of alternative asset manager Indies Capital, Founding Partner of leading early stage venture fund ACVentures, and CFO of leading mining group Toba Bara Sejahtra.
The pandemic has revealed the real grit and leadership amongst Pandu's most talented entrepreneurs, and punished those with more mercenary intentions. Pandu's advice for the IPO aspirant: now is the time to consider an IPO, but be sure to prepare for scrutiny and other new challenges.
We are pleased to invite back to Indo Tekno studios Andy Tai, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs, in order to explore the SPAC ("Special Purpose Acquisition Company") as a means of bringing promising Indonesian tech companies to the public markets. This marks the second episode of our "From Warung to Wall Street" podcast series.
A SPAC is a company which, at the outset has no commercial operations. It is formed strictly to raise capital through an initial public offering (IPO) for the purpose of acquiring an existing company. Also known as "blank check companies," SPACs have been around for decades.
However, it is only recently that discussions around the opportunity for SPAC's to support the public listing of promising Indo and SEA tech companies have resurged, with the September 24th announcement of the Bridgetown SPAC. Backed by billionaire entrepreneur and VC Peter Thiel, Bridgetown seeks to raise $575 million, and intends to invest the proceeds in "new economy” start-up's in Southeast Asia.
Andy estimates that an astounding 125 SPAC's have been raised in 2020 year-to-date, representing over $40 billion in funds raised. Roughly half of these SPAC's have a tech angle to their story. Please join us while Andy walks us through the opportunities, and challenges, that the SPAC represents for Indonesia's start-up's and the investors that support them.
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FACT: Indonesia spends only 3.0% of its GDP on healthcare. The US spends 17.1%. China spends 5.2%.
FACT: According to the World Health Organization, Indonesia has a mere 0.4 physicians per 1,000 people. The US has 2.6, while China has 2.
Today's guest, Jonathan Sudharta, Cofounder and CEO of leading healthtech platform Halodoc, indicates that COVID has further accelerated the Indonesian government's plans to increase healthcare spend from 2.3% of GDP currently, to a target of 5%. The pandemic for instance has driven up usage of the Halodoc platform by an astonishing six times since earlier this year.
Halodoc's basic mission is to simplify access to healthcare using the latest in technology. Working with over 20,000 doctors and more than 4,000 pharmacies in Indonesia, Halodoc currently boasts about 18 million monthly active users on the patient side. The value proposition for the medical professional is extremely powerful: newly onboarded physicians can consult up to 150 patients a day online.
Halodoc's longer term mission, in Jonathan's words, is "to eliminate and reinvent everything that is not true healthcare (inordinate wait times, paperwork, administrative overhead, etc), around the healthcare itself."
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The term “tenacity” seems to be the one attribute that today’s guest has shown at every major point in her career. Gita Sjahrir, CEO of R Fitness, describes how a debilitating case of rheumatoid arthritis helped inform her decision to become one of Jakarta’s most dynamic entrepreneurs in the health and wellness space.
Tenacity also clearly came into play as Gita navigated no less than 65 rejections on her path to becoming Southeast Asia's first fitness brand to raise VC funding. Eschewing the “Lululemon-wearing girls who can afford anything,” Gita sought to introduce brands that “can be enjoyed by most stratas of society.” Her new offering “Pod”, for instance, is one of the most affordable gyms in all of Indonesia. At only IDR25,000 per hour, the gym also offers Wi Fi, towels and all of the basic needs available at more expensive establishments.
The onset of COVID has “helped us become a better company” says Gita, acting to accelerate R Fitness’ launch of its online business. An active student of languages and voracious reader, Gita does not bemoan the challenges that face female entrepreneurs. “You may have to work three, four or five times harder than male entrepreneurs” Gita says, exhorting female tech aspirants to “think of a marathon…look at all your limitations and see them as a way for you to become better than you already are.”
In our new series “Hari-Hari Awal” (in English, “The Early Days”), we begin to explore companies that have emerged over the years as defining pillars of the Indonesian internet ecosystem. Our inaugural instalment follows the rise of Tokopedia from its very first days, through its path to becoming far and away Indonesia’s most dominant native e-commerce platform today.
Tokopedia Cofounder and Vice Chairman Leontinus Alpha Edison joins us with a wealth of anecdotes from the company’s hari-hari awal. Now a massive marketplace with 90+ million MAU (Monthly Active Users) and roughly 9 million merchants, Tokopedia’s rise maps the evolution of e-commerce from a simple online price comparison tool to an increasingly critical driver of growth to the Indonesian economy.
Leon offers a refreshingly candid account of the ups-and-downs of building a platform from scratch. From the dark days of massive database outages, to the excitement of being the first to market with new payments solutions, the Tokopedia story is one of intense humility, dogged persistence and ceaseless experimentation.
Leon himself is currently largely focused on cultivating the company’s future leaders. He concludes by detailing what Tokopedia has done to support the small merchant in the midst of the COVID pandemic, offering some of the most profound examples of Tokopedia’s renowned sense of mission.
We hope you enjoy Episode 15 of Indo Tekno, and our first instalment of “Hari-Hari Awal!”
Indonesia is the world’s second largest producer of fish. Our guest Gibran Huzaifah and his company eFishery are out to leverage technology in order to disintermediate centuries of inefficient practices and waste that have crept into the industry.
Indonesia has 3.3m fish farmers, many of whom barely scrape by. They are wedged between uneconomical fish feed pricing as their main input on one hand, and margins that disappear as they sell their fish into a labyrinth of downstream middlemen on the other hand. By implementing a group-buying scheme, eFishery can often secure 8-10% savings on the procurement of fish feed. Fish feed ultimately represents 70-90% of the fish farmer’s costs. The platform meanwhile can help the fish seller capture 25% higher product pricing by cutting out middlemen and connecting the farmer directly to restaurants and other downstream customers.
eFishery has deployed tens of thousands of its IoT-based sensors as part of its “Feeding-as-a-Service" business model. The vibration-based sensors detect the movement of the fish to pinpoint when they're hungry or full. A massive amount of data is generated from both from this process of automating fish husbandry, and in assisting the farmer to buy feed and sell fish. Much of the future roadmap for eFishery lies in credit scoring and the provisioning of loans and other financial services.
Gibran also discussed at length the manifold forms of collaboration with Gojek that affiliate GoVentures’ investment into eFishery has enabled; from powering payments across the spectrum to enabling the direct sale of fish to restaurants, hotels and other establishments by leveraging the Gojek fleet and the GoFood ecosystem. Longer term, eFishery sees broad business development opportunities in markets ranging from Vietnam to India, Bangladesh, and Thailand.
We hope you enjoy this episode of Indo Tekno!
Ant Financial’s IPO filing last week revealed that the Chinese fintech juggernaut currently boasts more than one billion annual active users, offering a glimpse into how utterly pervasive online financial services could become in markets such as Indonesia.
Indonesia’s fintech scene indeed continues to grow strongly by most measures, and this week’s Indo Tekno guest, Anderson Sumarli, CEO and Cofounder of Ajaib, is helping to lead this charge. Ajaib is an investing platform that allows Indonesians to buy and sell stocks, ETFs, mutual funds and other retail financial products. The company activated 200,000+ new retail investors in Indonesia in 2019, contributing one-quarter of all new retail investors in Indonesia last year.
The pandemic has moreover served to accelerate further Indonesia’s online retail investment boom. As an example, the daily average number of Indonesian retail stock investors transacting online surged by more than 82% in the four months between March 2020 and July 2020 alone, from 51,000 to 93,000 investors.
The simplest and most powerful component to Anderson’s vision of longer term secular growth in online retail investment is the fact that Indonesia has the largest capital markets in Southeast Asia but perversely has one of the world's lowest investment penetration rates, at less than 1%. There is one demographic that will continue driving the searing growth in this segment: Indonesia's mobile-first, digitally native millennials. They have proven particularly responsive to new "technology-first" trading platforms such as Ajaib. Unlike their parents, this group prefers a stock broker that is branchless, fully online and "mobile-first." As a technology-intensive, asset light online broker, Ajaib is able to offer zero commissions on mutual funds, and the lowest fees in the market for stock trading.
Anderson also addressed one of the most widely discussed transactions within Indonesia’s broader financial landscape this year, namely Ajaib’s acquisition of traditional securities broker PT Primasia Sekuritas, discussing plans around integrating services, personnel and other parts of the two businesses. The most alluring challenge facing players such as Ajaib remains a profound lack of financial literacy amongst retail investors. The platform has built the country’s largest repository of investment content in the Indonesian language in order to tackle this challenge. While Ajaib has an extensive roadmap of new products laid out over the next several months, its longer term mission is to leverage technology for two main purposes: 1) broadening educational initiatives around retail investing while 2) improving affordability to all.
Trucking in Indonesia is clearly ripe for disintermediation: annual logistics spend represents a massive 26% of GDP. The sector moreover is profoundly fragmented: 75% of trucking companies have 20 trucks or less, and a massive amount of the USD38b in annual trucking spend disappears into a labyrinth of middlemen. Tiger Fang, Co-founder & CEO at Kargo Technologies, joins us this week to discuss in greater detail this massive opportunity, and the attendant challenges that come with it.
Having started his career in investment banking, Tiger early on developed an appreciation of the awesome power of "leverage" (financial leverage, technological leverage) in driving profound change into operationally intense industries such as logistics and e-commerce.
Tiger is a veteran of massive platform launches into new markets. He for instance built out Uber in Western China. At one point, provincial capital Chengdu was in fact Uber's busiest urban market globally. He also helped launch Rocket and Lazada operations into Thailand and Vietnam.
Founded less than two years ago, Kargo has already deployed its "marketplace model", which aggregates supply and demand between Transporters and Shippers, initially across the dominant markets of Sumatra, Java and Bali (80% of Indo GDP) and beyond. Tiger believes Kargo to have one of the most robust R&D teams on the Indonesian tech scene, an achievement with which he credits co-founder and CTO Yodi Aditya. The two leaders view preserving a robust culture as critical to ensuring healthy growth going forward.
While truckers are unlikely to become first adopters of cutting edge technology, Tiger has been pleased with uptake of Kargo's platform in Indonesia, and attributes it primarily to its effectiveness in reducing a trucker's down time, improving earnings power and, most importantly, easing working capital challenges for a sector that usually gets paid only 1-3 months after the delivery of goods.
While COVID-19 has led to significant disruptions to the Indonesian trucking sector, Kargo's use of big data has been critical in creating greater market efficiency and liquidity on the platform. Tiger is particularly excited about the steady stream of "financing-as-a-service" offerings that Kargo plans to unveil over the coming months.
Please enjoy this week's twelfth episode of Indo Tekno!
When listening to Bram Viktor's personal story of achievement as an entrepreneur, Winston Churchill's famous quote comes to mind:
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm."
Bram's enthusiasm and entrepreneurial vigour are indeed infectious. He self-deprecatingly attributes his unquenchable desire to build and innovate in his early years to a mix of "stupidity and self-confidence." It is however very clear that many more factors came into play in building one of Indonesia's first fintech companies, Taralite, a P2P lending SME lending platform purchased by Fintech leader Ovo early last year.
Bram eventually moved on from Ovo to launch Hangry, Indonesia's first multi-brand virtual restaurant company, late last year. Bram reflects on the importance of mentors in his drive to become a better entrepreneur and better leader. Tokopedia Founder William Tanuwijaya has played such a role in Bram's career. He also describes the best VC's as those who are willing to give "a slap to our right and left cheeks to wake us up when we're not looking at things right". A good VC however is a partner who can also empathise, unlike those who might see entrepreneurial investment in a strictly transactional way.
When asked what elements that tech ecosystem needs in order to to become more robust, Bram believes that participants need to become more comfortable with taking risk, and learn to treat failure, and those who fail, with "respect and admiration."
Bram's final advice to aspiring entrepreneurs: 1) be absolutely dogged in your search for product-market fit, and 2) think about sharing more of the upside your company with your colleagues; it could be through a more generous ESOP plan, or by other means...but do the right thing,
We hope you enjoy the first instalment of our "Profiles in Entrepreneurialism" series, whereby we seek to interview Indonesia's growing crop of serial tech entrepreneurs.
Indonesian grab-and-go coffee chain Kopi Kenangan has grown to more than 350 stores in less than three years; a scale that global juggernaut Starbucks for instance took 23 years to achieve. Kopi Kenangan's growth moreover has been achieved with consistent profitability at both the store and company levels.
Kopi Kenangan Cofounder and CEO Edward Tirtanata joins the Indo Tekno podcast to walk us through the unique balancing act of blitz-scaling while preserving key elements such as company culture and customer satisfaction. Despite the ongoing challenges of COVID-19, Kopi Kenangan continues to grow rapidly, and profitably, at the pace of roughly 30 new stores per month. Having founded Kopi Kenangan's first outlet amidst three of its biggest competitors, Edward believes that squaring off early with competition is imperative in order to accelerate product-market fit, and ensure the ability to scale successfully.
Having originally risen to popularity in its ability to offer high quality coffee at an affordable price, Edward envisions successively layering new offerings on top of the current menu. Kopi Kenangan's broader mantra is "Product is king...but distribution is God." We indeed expect the company to expand its portfolio of drink and food options going forward as one of Indonesia's most dynamic channels to the workday customer. Edward also touches upon the importance of technology; it has driven order frequency and average order value (AOV), and has been a powerful enabler in customer targeting as part of its new loyalty programs.
Edward wraps up by offering the following useful advice to young entrepreneurs in the consumer tech space: do not compromise in your early pursuit of product-market fit. It is essential in managing customer acquisition costs, and in ensuring scalability longer term.
Please enjoy this, our 10th Indo Tekno podcast!
Welcome to this week’s “podcast on Indo podcasting”. Yes, this podcast is devoted to Indonesia's podcasting industry.
As we established last week with our coverage of the country's streaming video industry, online media is one of the most promising parts of Indonesia's consumer internet. This week, we continue our "Sino Indo Tekno" sub-series with partner Art Dicker of the Shanghai-based Gan Bei podcast to interview Tyo Guritno, founder of leading Indonesian podcasting platform Inspigo. During the podcast, we compare and contrast Inspigo with its counterparts in China, including the massive Ximalaya platform with more than 500m registered users.
China podcasting derives revenues largely from "pay-per" content, subscription plans and virtual gifts. Tyo on the other hand expects advertising to drive Indo podcasting revenues, although early paid trials on Inspigo have also shown encouraging results.
While the initial appeal of podcasting in Indonesia centered on entertainment, the COVID-19 pandemic has led many listeners to seek self-improvement programming (which is China's largest category). More uniquely to Indonesia, mindfulness has become a massive category in the stressful pandemic period. Tyo expects Inspigo to continue to deliver a broad amalgam of content, from "UGC" (user generated content) to "PGC" (professionally generated content).
Successful entrepreneurs, university professors, television personalities and a range of "grass roots" personalities top the charts as hosts of both Chinese and Indonesian podcasting. Our session also included an interesting dialogue between Art and Tyo comparing "content moderation" and censorship techniques to ensure that podcasting does not fall afoul of laws and regulations in China and Indonesia.
We hope you enjoy this latest instalment of "Sino Indo Tekno"!
Indonesia seems primed to leapfrog into the online media age. With only 0.6 movie screens per 100,000 in population (or roughly 1/20th of US levels), consumption of video-on-demand has skyrocketed this year, particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic has kept people at home, and offline theaters have closed their doors.
This week's guest, GoPlay CEO Edy Sulistyo, believes that the premium video-on-demand platform possesses three critical elements in capturing Indonesia's elusive multibillion dollar streaming media crown:
- A deep commitment to cultivating premium local content
- A wide array of new business models in partnering with content owners
- Intense collaboration with Indonesian tech behemoth Gojek
The Indonesian audience will spend a mere $84 per capita on entertainment and media in 2021. This is a tiny fraction of the $2,300 that the average American is likely to spend. As Indonesia's online media spend grows, how does one win outsized wallet share? This is a question that remained unanswered after the recent demise of two major regional streaming platforms.
Edy outlined a number of important strategies. Only 35% of films in Indonesia were locally produced in 2018, versus nearly 65% in China. Edy envisions domestically produced content crossing 50% shortly, and it should climb higher as GoPlay and others work steadily to improve the quality of local programming.
Key to this encouraging growth will also be the various revenue sharing models that GoPlay has refined since being founded in 2018.
One of the single largest blockers to online media consumption has been a lack of viable payment options. GoPlay's surging subscriber numbers owe in large part to its tight integration within the Gojek ecosystem and the convenience of GoPay as a means of paying for content. Just as powerful is GoPlay's ability to leverage big data being generated across the Gojek ecosystem to be able to target users effectively.
We hope you enjoy this, Episode 8, of the Indo Tekno podcast!
Indonesia has one of the world's lowest insurance penetration rates at 1.79%. This situation is set to change, dramatically...
Indeed, Indonesian insurance adoption seems ready to advance rapidly behind the innovations of industry leaders such as our guest this week, Cleosent Randing, and his InsurTech platform, PasarPolis.
PasarPolis and its industry peers are dealing with a totally clean slate, in that Indonesia is largely new to both offline and online insurance. Cleo details how the company has grown to its current pace of 50m policies per month, largely by removing traditional frictions to insurance adoption. For instance, a Gojek driver, Tokopedia customer, or Traveloka passenger can subscribe to any number of "micro-insurance" products with just a few clicks. This ease of insuring even the smallest of products or activities has been key to courting the digitally savvy millennial customer, on PasarPolis' way toward accessing an estimated $3b opportunity longer term. Cleo steps through a number of fascinating examples, from "contextual insurance" products with Gojek, to total loss insurance offerings on the Tokopedia e-commerce platform. in illustrating all of the barriers to adoption that players such as PasarPolis have taken down.
According to Cleo, PasarPolis benefits from three clear tailwinds in driving online insurance adoption:
- First, a positive Indonesian regulatory stance around InsurTech has been key to educating and promoting insurance products to Indonesia's population.
- Secondly, the challenges that COVID-19 has thrown at the offline incumbent insurers allows PasarPolis; with a clear, complementary, partnership-oriented approach in working with Indonesia's offline insurance giants; to move products online, while also creating totally new digital solutions with its many partners.
- Third but not least, is the massive impact that smartphone adoption has had on the immediate accessibility, and the precise targeting, customization and pricing of insurance that individuals have as they step through through their day.
We hope you enjoy this, the seventh episode of Indo Tekno!
"Sino Indo Tekno" is a new collaboration with leading China technology authority Art Dicker and his Shanghai-based Gan Bei podcast. Sino Indo Tekno will air regularly to address the growing interconnectedness of the China and Indonesia technology worlds.
In our first instalment of Sino Indo Tekno, we feature Helen Wong, Partner at leading Chinese VC Qiming Ventures. Qiming is one of China's first major venture investors into Indonesia. Helen compares and contrasts Indonesia today with the early days of the China internet, when internet platforms such as Sina and Sohu first disintermediated the media industry, while their peers eventually went on to change the face of banking, healthcare and other verticals in China. Helen sees a different evolution for Indonesia. She goes on to profile a number of China-Indonesia synergies that have emerged in the internet space, but at the same time Helen expects Indonesia to produce its own champions in areas such as AgriTech, Muslim fashion and Sharia finance.
We discuss with Helen common mistakes in blindly copying China models to Indonesia. Helen also addresses major questions such as: Using China as a guide, when will the Indo subsidy wars end? Will Indonesian consumers become good paying subscribers? Will Sino-US tensions benefit the Indonesian tech ecosystem? Will the Alibaba-Tencent rivalry spill over into Indo? How will early stage Indo start-up valuations trend?
Please tune this new sub-series of the Indo Tekno podcast!
FACT: There are 160 Chinese companies listed in the US, most of them internet companies. They represent roughly USD1.5trn in value.
FACT: From Southeast Asia, we have exactly one internet company listed in the US with a market cap of USD50b. There are moreover zero US-listed Indonesian tech companies.
What important milestones do Indonesia’s tech companies need to achieve in order for the IPO pipeline to begin flowing? How does one define a successful IPO? What are the most viable places for Indonesian companies to list? We discuss these and many other questions with one of the region's foremost tech banking practitioners, Andy Tai of Goldman Sachs.
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
Southeast Asia has embraced eSports with a fervour unmatched by any other region in the world. Indonesia specifically has of recent outgrown its neighbours in eSports. As eSports has gone mobile, Indonesia has leap-frogged from notoriously poor fixed line network connectivity, to the faster speeds of its mobile networks, thus making anyone with a smartphone a potential eSports spectator, or even an athlete!
EVOS eSports co-founders Ivan Yeo and Hartman Harris join us to discuss the eSports opportunity in Indonesia. EVOS continues to add new business lines, reflecting a multiplication of opportunities in the eSports category. From professional team and player development, to "influencer marketing", to merchandising and extensive media licensing, and most recently a budding subscription business; Ivan and Hartman walk us through the ups-and-downs of being Southeast Asia's innovator in eSports.
Tune in for an entertaining discussion of eSports "influencers." Find out how EVOS has responded to the challenges of the COVID-19 era. Compare how the definition of "professional athlete" has evolved in the digital era compared to the traditional NBA or EPL star. Explore issues such gaming addiction and the risks of regulatory restrictions, and listen to Ivan and Hartman as they outline what they see as the future of eSports in Indonesia.
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
The online learning opportunity in Indonesia is simply massive. EduTech now stands as one of the fastest growing areas of investment in the venture capital world, along with Fintech and Healthtech.
The country's basic educational needs moreover are acute: Indonesia is ranked #65 out of 73 participant countries in the PISA math, science, and reading ranking. Only 24% of Indonesian students passed level 2-or-above in math (PISA). This compares to 86% in Vietnam and 92% in Singapore.
In this episode, we interview industry veteran Najelaa Shihab, Founder of Sekolah.mu. Najelaa addresses a number of topics; from the basic application (and frequent misapplication) of technology to pedagogy in Indonesia, to the intricacies of how the private sector works with the public sector in improving access to learning resources across Indonesia.
We explore the issues and inequalities that the COVID-19 has laid bare, while also discussing signs of traction in STEM training (science, technology, engineering and math) across Indonesia's school system. Najelaa also profiles encouraging initiatives to reform Indonesia's educational system.
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
Indonesia is the heaviest user of mobile apps of the world's 20 largest markets. Smartphone owners in Indonesia on average spent an astounding 5.5 hours per day on their mobile apps in the month of March, according to global mobile app analytics leader App Annie. Their peers in markets such as the US and Germany meanwhile spent a mere 2.7 hours and 2.4 hours on their phones, respectively.
We in fact view the mobile app as the single most powerful driver of Indonesia’s ongoing "leap-frog" into the digital age. In this episode we interview Junde Yu, VP Sales and Support at App Annie. Junde offers fascinating proof-points of the successful evolution of "superapps" Gojek and Grab, while offering deep analysis of mobile app categories such as Gaming, e-Commerce, EduTech, Ride Hailing and Travel. He also addresses surprising market share trends in various mobile app segments.
Junde's big prediction: Indonesia's mobile Fintech space will boast very promising innovation and growth going forward.
Please join us for this, our second instalment of the Indo Tekno podcast!
Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia: https://www.indo-tekno.com/transkrip
English language transcript: https://www.indo-tekno.com/transcript
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
We’ve chosen as our first topic of discussion the largest part of the Indonesian internet economy, e-commerce, and the mission-critical enabler to its growth, logistics. The Google Temasek Southeast Asia Internet Economy Report estimated that the region’s e-commerce market hit USD38b in Gross Merchandise Value (or GMV) in 2019. Indonesia e-commerce GMV alone likely topped USD21b last year, suggesting that it is over half of Southeast Asia’s e-commerce business.
In this episode, we interview e-commerce and logistics expert, Arne Jeroschewski, Founder and CEO of Parcel Perform.