Indonesia

I have spent four days in Jakarta living in a kampong inside Benhill, pestering amazing entrepreneurs and inspiring local businesspeople with stupid questions in insanely bad phrasebook Bahasa to discover what the opportunities are here. I’m so excited that I can’t sleep, although it’s 27c at 1am and the broken aircon doesn’t help.

What are we all doing with our digital media companies, Meerkats and Cloud architectures when there’s actually real, life-changing, insanely difficult and scary technology problems to solve?

How do you give 200 million of the most entrepreneurial people in Asia access to capital when they don’t have a bank account?

How do you reach the largest emerging middle class in the world when less than 2% of them have a broadband connection but there’s well over 100% mobile penetration?

How do you bridge anything online with offline when the population of 250 million is spread over 6,000 islands and speak 700 different languages?

How do you give the 80 million women in emerging middle class families financial independence in a relatively conservative culture?

How do you alleviate the notorious, incessant traffic in Jakarta when 29 million people live in an area 4 times bigger than London?

How do you get smartphones into the hands of the 80 million people who suddenly find themselves with the means to acquire one?

Above all, how do you build technology for Indonesia where the scale, challenges and culture are so markedly different from anything anyone’s done before?

I met some people who have built solutions — possible solutions — to these problems. Go-Jek and Nebengers and IDR 1m (£50) Android phones as well as others too early to talk about.

In the developed world we’ve all had our solutions to our equivalent problems for decades, we take them for granted, but somebody needs to invent them and build them for the 4th most populous country in the world, because copying Amazon or PayPal is just not going to work here, no matter what the Western moneymen say.