Indo Tekno Podcast
Alan Hellawell
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A podcast devoted to covering major trends that drive the Indonesian tech scene.
Available episodes
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Feb 27, 2023
More Flexible Funding for Fintechs: Camille Krejci of 21yield
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.
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Jan 30, 2023
Neighborhood Commerce Reimagined: Marshall Silver of DekatKita
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.
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Dec 30, 2022
Less Back-Slapping, More Profit-Making: Martyn Terpilowski of BVT
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.
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Dec 19, 2022
Big Data Enhancing the Creator Economy: Raymond Au of TipTip
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.
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Dec 12, 2022
The Tricky Tech-Media Relationship: Kristie Neo of DealStreetAsia
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."
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Dec 5, 2022
Translating Filipino Fintech Excellence to Indo: Mikko Perez & Adrian Lorenzo of Ayannah
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.
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Nov 21, 2022
The "Optics" of D2C: Rama Suparta & Andrew Kandolha of SATURDAYS
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.
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Nov 14, 2022
Defusing a Climate Bomb: Louis Potok of Recoolit
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.
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Nov 4, 2022
Simplifying Banking & Payment Services: Jakob Rost of Ayoconnect
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.
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Nov 2, 2022
The Silver Lining: Stephanie Davis of Google, Wai Hoong Fock of Temasek & Florian Hoppe of Bain
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."
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Oct 24, 2022
The XYZ's of Indo Climate Tech: Jonathan Davy of Ecoxyztem
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.
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Oct 17, 2022
ESG & Tech?...Absolutely! Lauren Blasco of AC Ventures
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.
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Oct 10, 2022
Financing: Indo's Higher Education Bottleneck with Naga Tan of ErudiFi
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.
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Oct 3, 2022
Technology to Lift the "Pemulung" to "Pelestari": Hamish Daud of Octopus
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.
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Sep 28, 2022
A Dose of Payments Positivity: Vincent Iswara of DANA
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.
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Sep 20, 2022
Beef Rendang...Reimagined: Helga Tjahjadi of Green Rebel
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, one specifically embracing Indonesia and Asian roots. 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.
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Sep 12, 2022
Tech & Politics - A Complex Relationship: Farina Situmorang of Pensieve
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.
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Aug 22, 2022
From Engineer to Founder: Ans Syuhada of Delegasi
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' and cofounder Okki Pratama's 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.
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Aug 19, 2022
The Big Picture: Gojek Cofounder Kevin Aluwi
Gojek Cofounder Kevin Aluwi returns to the Indo Tekno podcast in a wide ranging discussion of his personal management philosophy, work-life balance, innovation in Web3 & crypto, and investing in a successful marital partnership when both spouses maintain start-up leadership roles. Kevin specifically addresses his belief in “saying no to great ideas” and the importance of a company “proactively paying its debts”. Having recently wrapped up his role at the successfully merged GoTo, Kevin reflects on the continuing importance of weaving the subtler differences between the two companies in areas such as culture, management principles and even compensation schemes, once the post-merger "heavy lifting" has finished.
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Aug 8, 2022
Do You Really Know Your Customer? Timothy Astandu of Populix
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.
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Aug 1, 2022
Liberating Auto Dealers of Working Capital Constraints: Pandu Adi Laras of broom.id
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.
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Jul 25, 2022
The Tier 2 & 3 Social Commerce Opportunity: Prateek Chaturvedi of KitaBeli
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.
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Jul 18, 2022
The Arisan Renewed and Reimagined: Ardelia Apti of Mapan
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.
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Jul 11, 2022
When Equity is Too Precious: Percy Hung & Brian Tsang of Choco Up
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.
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Jul 4, 2022
Seamlessness for the Online Entrepreneur: Mulyono Xu of Desty
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.
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Jun 27, 2022
Grinding Toward Consumer Loyalty: Vico Lomar of Fore Coffee
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.
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Jun 20, 2022
From Spoke-to-Hub: Reynold Wijaya of Modalku
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 to…
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Jun 13, 2022
The VC-Entrepreneur Continuum: Hiro Kiga of Wallex
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.
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Jun 6, 2022
Groceries at the Speed of Now: Vincent Tjendra of ASTRO
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.
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May 30, 2022
Battling Burnout: Justin Kim of Ami
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.
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May 23, 2022
We've Been Here Before: David Halpert of Prince Street Capital
"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".
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May 16, 2022
A Ukrainian's Innovations for the Unbanked: Dayana Yermolayeva of JiPay
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/
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May 9, 2022
A Fresh Take on SME Lending: Reinier Musters of Nikel
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.
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May 4, 2022
Corporate Venturing & "Girl Power": Marlin Siahaan of TMI
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.
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Apr 21, 2022
The Tireless Journey Toward Financial Inclusion: William Li of Akulaku
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.
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Apr 18, 2022
Crushing the Complexity of Cross-Border: Rifki Pratomo of Andalin
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.
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Apr 11, 2022
Fresh & Direct from YC: Andre Septiano of Fresh Factory
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.
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Apr 4, 2022
This Multipreneur's "End Game": Wafa Taftazani of UpBanx
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.
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Mar 14, 2022
Covering the Indo Tech Beat: Fanny Potkin of Reuters
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.
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Nov 29, 2021
From Big & Stable to Small & Nimble: Alex Rusli of Digiasia Bios
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)
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Nov 15, 2021
The "Roaring 20's": Stephanie Davis of Google, Rohit Sipahimalani of Temasek & Florian Hoppe of Bain
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)
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Nov 8, 2021
The eCommerce Aggregator: Jeff Yuwono of Open Labs
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.
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Nov 1, 2021
Upskilling Indonesia: Rohan Monga of Zenius
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.
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Oct 25, 2021
Bonding the Best of Both Worlds: Eddy Chan and Patrick Yip of Intudo
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)
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Oct 18, 2021
The Power of Hyperlocal Podcasting: Rado Ardian of Noice
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.
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Oct 11, 2021
Tackling the Data Divide: Barrett Comiskey & Dan Connor of Migo
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.
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Oct 4, 2021
Solving Blue-Collar Supply & Demand: Siddharth Kumar of MyRobin
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)
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Sep 27, 2021
The Importance of Digital Identity: Niki Luhur of VIDA
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.
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Sep 20, 2021
Fresh from the IPO: Teddy Oetomo of Bukalapak
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.
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Sep 13, 2021
Indo's Got Game! Arief Widhiyasa of Agaté
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.
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Sep 6, 2021
The Online-Offline Path to Health: Shinta Nurfauzia of Lemonilo
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)
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Aug 30, 2021
A Growing Instinct to Insure: Harshet Lunani of Qoala
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)
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Aug 23, 2021
Indo Tech Policy in 2021 and Onward: Ajisatria Suleiman
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.
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Aug 16, 2021
Hari-Hari Awal: Ajey Gore of Sequoia Capital
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."
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Aug 9, 2021
How to Outmanoeuvre a Pandemic: Indra Gunawan of Bobobox
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.
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Aug 2, 2021
Innovation for Indo's Fragmented Trade: Philipp Stegmann of eyos
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.
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Jul 26, 2021
A Proliferation in Payments: Tessa Wijaya of Xendit
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.
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Jul 19, 2021
Venture Debt 101: Chin Chao & Paul Ong of Innoven
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.
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Jul 12, 2021
The Air You Breathe: Piotr Jakubowski of nafas & aria
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.
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Jul 5, 2021
Small Retailer Success: Nipun Mehra of Ula
"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.
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Jun 28, 2021
Indo's Rural e-conomy Momentum: Steven Wongsoredjo of Super
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.
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Jun 21, 2021
Grab's Grand Design with Country Head Neneng Goenadi
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.
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Jun 14, 2021
The Path from 2% to 12%: Brian Marshal & Andreas Thamrin of SIRCLO
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.
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Jun 7, 2021
The "Door" to Crypto: Jeth Soetoyo of Pintu
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.
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May 31, 2021
The Evolution of VC: Adrian Li of AC Ventures
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.
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May 24, 2021
From the Director's Chair: Angga Sasongko of Visinema
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.
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May 17, 2021
Modernizing eCommerce Logistics: Phil Opamuratawongse of Shipper
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.
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May 10, 2021
SME's Front-and-Center: Pieter Lydian of Facebook
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.
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May 3, 2021
The "Three Zeroes": Tanah Sullivan of Gojek
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)
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Apr 26, 2021
Prevailing Against a Pandemic: Amit Saberwal of RedDoorz
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)
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Apr 19, 2021
The Pulse of Indonesia: Dwi Adriansah of Twitter
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)
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Apr 12, 2021
Architecting SME Success: Chinmay Chauhan of BukuWarung
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)
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Apr 5, 2021
Biotech Innovation in the COVID Era: Levi Sani of Nalagenetics
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)
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Mar 29, 2021
SPAC's Roundtable: Jim Perry & Udhay Furtado of Citi and Abhay Singh of VMAC
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)
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Mar 22, 2021
So You Wanna Be A Gamer: Jon Yuwono and Claupaw of Red Bull Rebellion
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)
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Mar 15, 2021
The Riches of Renovation: Dimas Priawan of Dekoruma
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)
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Mar 8, 2021
The Investor View: David Halpert of Prince Street Capital
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)
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Mar 1, 2021
Worker Financial Health & EWA: Vidit Agrawal of GajiGesa
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.
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Feb 22, 2021
Open Banking, Explained: Todd Schweitzer & Mike Dickinson of Brankas
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)
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Feb 15, 2021
Hari-Hari Awal: Kevin Aluwi of Gojek
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)
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Feb 8, 2021
The ABC's and ESG of Sharia Fintech: Dima Djani of ALAMI
"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)
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Feb 1, 2021
Impact VC 101: Dondi Hananto of Patamar Capital
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.
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Jan 25, 2021
Enhancing SME Efficiencies: Gabriel Frans of CrediBook
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...)
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Jan 18, 2021
Impact: Randy Jusuf of Google Indonesia
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
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Jan 11, 2021
The 'Kosts' of Indo Co-living: Sabrina & Sarah Soewatdy of Rukita
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.
Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini.
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Dec 21, 2020
Many Paths to IPO: Delano Musafer & Jennie Dong of NYSE
"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 bu…
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Dec 15, 2020
Cruising Post-COVID: Aaron and Aditya of Carro
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 expandi…
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Dec 7, 2020
Good Talent? Hard to Find!: Antonio Mazza of WeNetwork
"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…
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Nov 30, 2020
The Future Pharmacy: Farouk Meralli of mClinica
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) friction…
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Nov 23, 2020
People as Priority: George Hendrata of Tiket.com
"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 Geo…
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Nov 16, 2020
Transforming Groceries: Guillem Segarra of HappyFresh
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, expan…
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Nov 9, 2020
Credit Where It Counts: Akshay Garg of Kredivo
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 t…
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Nov 2, 2020
The Big Picture: Gita Wirjawan of Ancora Group
"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 conv…
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Oct 26, 2020
Fintech's Golden Opportunity: Claudia Kolonas of Pluang
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
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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 d…
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Oct 19, 2020
Tapping China Synergies: Benny Chen of BAce Capital
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 b…
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Oct 13, 2020
Listing Domestically: Pandu Sjahrir of Indies Capital
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
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 cla…
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Oct 5, 2020
The SPAC Opportunity: Andy Tai of Goldman Sachs
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 S…
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Sep 28, 2020
The Patient is Paramount: Jonathan Sudharta of Halodoc
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
*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 phy…
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Sep 21, 2020
Tenacity: Gita Sjahrir of R Fitness
(Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia di sini)
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 t…
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Sep 14, 2020
Hari-Hari Awal: Leontinus A. Edison of Tokopedia
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…
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Sep 2, 2020
Upending Aquaculture: Gibran Huzaifah of eFishery
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…
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Aug 31, 2020
The Online Investment Boom: Anderson Sumarli of Ajaib
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 a…
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Aug 17, 2020
Modernizing Trucking in Indo: Tiger Fang of Kargo
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 L…
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Aug 10, 2020
Profiles in Entrepreneurialism: Bram Viktor of Hangry
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 willin…
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Aug 3, 2020
Grab and Go: Edward Tirtanata of Kopi Kenangan
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 c…
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Jul 30, 2020
A podcast...on podcasting! Tyo Guritno of Inspigo
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, th…
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Jul 20, 2020
Streaming Media in the Spotlight: Edy Sulistyo of GoPlay
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 tha…
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Jul 13, 2020
Indonesia's Massive InsurTech Opportunity: Cleo Randing of PasarPolis
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 st…
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Jul 6, 2020
Sino Indo Tekno Special: The China relationship with Helen Wong of Qiming Ventures
"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 Sha…
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Jun 22, 2020
From Warung to Wall Street: Indo Tech IPO Prospects with Andy Tai of Goldman Sachs
*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.
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Jun 15, 2020
eSports in Indonesia: A Conversation with Ivan Yeo and Hartman Harris of EVOS eSports
(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 "infl…
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Jun 8, 2020
Technology and Democratizing Education: Najelaa Shihab of Sekolah.mu
(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 STE…
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May 27, 2020
"Appsolutely" App-obsessed Indonesia: A Conversation with Junde Yu of App Annie
(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 pr…
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May 18, 2020
IndoTekno Podcast: eCommerce and Logistics with Arne Jeroschewski of Parcel Perform
(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.
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