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April 20, 2021
Indonesia is in the midst of a technical renaissance. Within the past ten years, Indonesia has gone from a country confused by tech startups, to a booming industry with multiple billion dollar companies. But as the excitement around tech startups has grown, the strain on the country's technical talent has increased. Supply cannot keep up with demand. Giants like Gojek and Tokopedia bought up all the talent with large compensation packages, leaving smaller startups desperate for talent. Enter Ha…
April 13, 2021
Samira Shihab is the co-founder and CEO of Tinkerlust, a secondhand fashion marketplace in Indonesia. Shihab spent much of her youth in Pennsylvania and then moved to Silicon Valley to get her MBA. After moving back to Indonesia, she started her first company and learned that taking a western concept and applying it to Indonesia isn’t as easy as cut and paste. After living in Indonesia a few more years, she got the inspiration to start Tinkerlust. She and her co-founder bootstrapped the company…
April 5, 2021
Roughly 2% of all Indonesians have insurance. While fintech gets a lot of the headlines, insurance has an equally large opportunity in Indonesia. Cleo Randing is the founder and CEO of PasarPolis, an insurance startup using tech to simplify the process of buying insurance in Indonesia. In this episode we discuss why Cleo decided to pursue an insurance startup, how PasarPolis has grown despite so few people having or understanding insurance, and how he has been able to scale his skillset as the …
March 22, 2021
Today's guest is TaniHub Group co-founder and president, Pamitra Wineka, otherwise known as Eka. TaniHub is on a mission to help Indonesian farmers get more reliable and higher income from each of their harvests. They do this through three core business units: TaniHub marketplace, TaniFund P2P lending, and TaniSupply logistics. In a short amount of time, TaniHub has demonstrated that the farming industry can be streamlined and become more fruitful for the hard working farmers of Indonesia. For …
March 16, 2021
Today’s guest is Nipun Mehra, co-founder and CEO of Ula. Ula is on a mission to help offline retail shops with their wholesale purchasing. It’s hard getting reliable products at wholesale prices and there are many different people and companies to buy products from, making operations fragmented for these small, low-tech businesses. Ula is developing a marketplace to make the purchasing of products significantly easier and more reliable for offline retailers. Nipun and I discuss why Indonesia, h…
Feb. 23, 2021
Hiro Kiga is the co-founder and COO of Wallex, a B2B fintech company. His career started as a developer at a bank and moved into venture capital before getting the itch to build something. We’ve heard entrepreneur stories here and last week we got a glimpse of VC life last week. But Hiro is the first founder we’ve had who has had experience on both sides of the table. He has early experience with the Indonesian tech ecosystem, as he was one of the investors in Bukalapak’s Series A round at $700…
Feb. 16, 2021
Venture capital is both over glorified and misunderstood. VCs are an important part of the tech ecosystem. You need capital to build a business and venture capitalists will invest in highly risky, early stage startups when traditional banks will not. Companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, are all examples of companies that accepted venture capital to grow. But many people, including entrepreneurs, don’t really understand how the business of venture capital works. Today’s guest is …
Feb. 9, 2021
Many times, early employees don’t get the same name recognition as the founders. But their contributions are no less significant. Today I’m talking to Felicia Kawilarang, VP of Marketing and Communications for Halodoc. Felicia was the telemedicine app’s first senior marketing hire and has seen the company grow from 40 employees to its nearly 600 employees today. This is a feat in itself, as we’ve discussed before on the podcast, the employee traits from 1-10 differ from employees 50-100, and th…
Feb. 2, 2021
In Season 1 of Sidedoor, I interviewed all founders. I love founder stories because they’re just different. But founders are not alone in this journey. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Founders need a strong team. What that team looks like will change over time. So I wanted to start Season 2 by talking to key employees at fast growing startups and understanding what building a startup is like from their perspective and how it differs from a founder and how i…
Dec. 29, 2020
The final guest of Season 1 is Gita Sjahrir. She’s the co-founder and CEO of R Fitness, a growing health and wellness startup, focused on helping improve the lives of all Indonesians. Our conversation transcends the R Fitness story. Gita is a polymath. You can tell that Gita is a deep thinker and connecting many different dots. While building R Fitness is at the core of our discussion, we touch on the philosophy of life, unconscious biases and their role in business, and why mental health is su…