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. 

Timothy Astandu, CEO and Co-Founder at consumer insights platform Populix, offers an entertaining retelling of the company's origin story, before detailing Populix's attempts to deliver far deeper and more detailed consumer insights compared to the inefficient and problematic offline alternatives that have heretofore prevailed in Indonesia. Measuring "brand health and consumer behavior" are the two most urgent use cases; which moreover span all conceivable industries; from education to diversified conglomerates to automotive to FMCG and beyond. Timothy also discusses how AI has both measurably improved the broader consumer insights space, and specifically allowed Populix to roll out entirely new insights and functionality in this USD80b global market.

Pandu Adi Laras joins the Indo Tekno podcast to discuss age-old working capital challenges amongst Indonesia's ~50,000 SME used auto dealers, and what his start-up broom.id is doing to improve liquidity in the industry through easy access to capital using inventory as collateral. Indonesia’s used car market currently boasts $65B in yearly transaction value. broom.id's digitized solution offers quick approvals for short term working capital, addressing the industry's near-complete absence of data and lack of access to the incumbent banking industry. 

Prateek Chaturvedi, Founder and CEO of KitaBeli, joins the Indo Tekno podcast to deliver an extremely comprehensible tutorial on social commerce in Indonesia, both in terms of its similarities with neighbors China and India, and how it is evolving in turn quite separately from other markets. KitaBeli has eschewed Tier 1 markets such as Jakarta, instead choosing to fashion its offering around the unique needs of Indonesia's Tier 2 and 3 markets, where the platform successfully addresses both significantly lower levels of familiarity with e-commerce, unique consumer demands and lower levels of trust than their urban counterparts.

PT Ruma's founding in 2009 marks one of Indonesia's first and most sustained initiatives to digitize the country's unbanked and underserved. Its Mapan platform offers fintech services through Indonesia's unique decades-old arisan, enabling local groups of women to come together and empower each other financially. Mapan CEO Ardelia Apti joins the Indo Tekno podcast to detail the specific workings of Mapan in spreading financial literacy, encouraging healthier fiscal behaviors with the woman of the household, and improving her access to affordable products and services.

Revenue-based Finance (RBF) is a form of financing which already has an established track record in the West, but is only now enjoying broader adoption in markets such as Indonesia. Choco Up is a first mover in the category in Asia, targeting ASEAN's USD300b business funding gap. Choco Up cofounders Percy Hung and Brian Tsang explain that RBF does not require any of the dilution of equity raising, or the complications of traditional bank borrowing, and thus has become an increasingly popular means of raising funds quickly. Such an arrangement, requiring API access to the entrepreneur's business, is useful in the age of mega-sales events such as Singles Day and 12-12), when sellers need significant capital quickly in order to build inventory, etc.  RBF generally entails an agreement that the merchant or tech founder covers a one-time fee, and subsequently pays back (daily, weekly, monthly, per transaction, etc) through a revenue share. 

A 7.5 year veteran of the Alibaba ecosystem, Desty Cofounder & CEO Mulyono Xu lays out many of the challenges that Indonesian online merchants face trying to operate across countless incompatible systems. Desty seeks to collapse the host of largely unconnected e-commerce marketplaces, payment systems and logistics providers into one dashboard in order to minimize complexity for Indonesia's online sellers. Mulyono shares fascinating insights across topics ranging from his early days building a career in Asia's heart of eCommerce - Hangzhou; to the singular importance of striking product-market fit early on at a start-up.

Technology-based coffee chain Fore Coffee needs to "build trust" continuously with Indonesian consumers, according to CEO Vico Lomar. "Whoever builds that consistency for the people of Indonesia and Southeast Asia" will dominate the otherwise competitive landscape for coffee drinkers. A veteran of the F&B industry since the early-2000's, Vico describes the turn-around that he and the leadership team at Fore have been orchestrating since his arrival two years ago. The world's 40th heaviest consumer of caffeinated beverages, Vico expects the Indonesian coffee drinker to enter the top 15 or 20 over the next several years, thus driving robust consumption growth in the sector over the longer term.

Reynold Wijaya, Cofounder of regional SME lending leader Funding Societies (Modalku in Indonesia), joins the Indo Tekno podcast to discuss the importance of the 7+ years that the company has spent constantly refining its lending services as part of its game plan to enter into neobanking services for Indonesian and Southeast Asian enterprise. An apparent "spoke" to the broader neobanking "hub", Reynold argues that lending is the far-and-away the most challenging of SME-oriented services to master, and will be key to FS-Modalku's emergence as a leading SME digital financing platform in the region, given that few other claimants to the neobanking crown have expertise in lending. COVID brought exceptional pressures to the financing landscape, leading Modalku to recalibrate its credit policy quickly, and recall loans from enterprise clients who were predicted at significant risk of default. This pruning in borrower profiles has led to material improvements in the quality of its portfolio today.

Hiro Kiga joins the Indo Tekno podcast to discuss life as a Japanese transplant to Indonesia. He also reflects on the success of fellow JIS high school classmates who have also come to play major roles in the country's tech ecosystem. Much of the episode he devotes to recounting his fateful leap from VC to founder. Hiro earlier in his career worked at the VC arm of Japanese gaming and social media heavyweight GREE. Six and a half years ago he founded Wallex, a leading cross-border banking player. Hiro discusses Wallex's successful merger with Singapore-based M-DAQ, and also addresses the importance of a proactive strategy with the regulator in winning and, just as importantly, maintaining financial services licenses.