Moving to Jakarta Part 2: The Plan
I talk about surviving in Indonesia, my new company, getting married, and more.
If you missed it, check out Part 1 here.
My plan coming into Jakarta was simple:
- Marry the love of my life;
- Become an entrepreneur.
I knew both of these goals would be much much easier said than done. Not only would these be dramatic personal and professional moves, but making these moves in a completely foreign country… oh boy.
Let me talk about my second goal first, then circle back to the first one.
I started my professional journey in Indonesia by joining AC Ventures as an Entrepreneur in Residence. The reason for this was to get a soft landing into the country, quickly expand my exposure and network while helping the team where I can, and get a better sense of what it would be like to run a startup in Indonesia.
I’ve always wanted to run a company, and now felt like the right time — I’ve had experience as an investor into all kinds of startups, as a venture capitalist as well as an active angel investor, and also have had experience as an employee at two startups. So becoming a founder was a logical next step.
But I knew the leap to entrepreneurship would be like no professional experience before, especially in a place like Jakarta where the ecosystem operates by its own rules and can be a tricky market to crack economically, regulatorily, and culturally.
I gave myself exactly 6 months from starting at ACV (so, until the end of April) to figure out what I was going to do — I was impatient and focused, a powerful combo. With that tight timeline, I jumped head-first into studying the Indonesian economy, “cofounder dating”, and exploring various startup ideas. I was discussing novel things with interesting people, and it was exciting.
One thing I immediately appreciated about Jakarta was, paradoxically, connecting with people on a deeper level. The individuals I’ve met rarely share my hobbies, hometowns, or personalities, but we do share the same “we’re all just trying to figure it out, navigating through the abounding chaos and opportunity” sentiment. In that way, I’d found kinship here that I would never have expected.
In these 6 months I was always busy, and for such a sudden life metamorphosis, I was seemingly making a lot of progress.
But — like a duck that appears to be gracefully gliding over still waters, below the surface I felt chaotic, much like the duck’s frantic paddling underwater. Many expressed surprise at how easily I was adapting to living in Jakarta, how many friends I was making, how much I was learning. But that was on the outside.
On the inside, I was less confident.
For the first time in my life, I was faced with serious self-doubt. Doubt around how I was spending my time — was I taking the right steps to achieve my goals? Doubt about adapting to a totally new place — would I be able to understand the cultural nuances well enough? Doubt even about what I wanted — did I actually want to become an entrepreneur?
You know the phrase “2 steps forward, 1 step backward”? Every day for the first 6 months felt like “4 steps forward, 3.9 steps backward”.
All this emotional grappling gave me the gift of contemplation, however. Sounds obvious in hindsight, but I started to slowly realize that life is simply an aggregation of how I choose to live each day. I often caught myself thinking ‘if only I could find the exact right opportunity / idea / situation, then I’ll have a joyful and purposeful life’; but I’m learning now that if it’s a joyful and purposeful life I seek, the most effective way to that is to pursue joy and purpose every single day.
I also decided that moving in some direction, even if I’m not 100% confident that it’s the perfect direction, is better than to be stagnant, plagued by self-doubt.
So I took a leap of faith.
I explored quite a few ideas in quite a few sectors but time and time again, I found myself gravitating towards an industry I’ve been closely watching: crypto.
It’s a technology that has the power to change the world for the better, not limited by country borders, plus some of the smartest minds in the world are working hard to make the crypto-future a reality. Nearly all of the top global venture capital funds are actively investing in crypto; in fact, Chris Dixon, the head of a16z’s $4.5B crypto fund, the largest dedicated crypto fund in the world, was named the top VC investor in the world. In a landmark deal in August 2022, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with $10T+ under management, partnered with Coinbase to provide its institutional clients direct access to bitcoin. And even before that, industry leaders like PayPal, Microsoft, Starbucks, and Tesla have officially been accepting cryptocurrencies as payment. So it’s impossible to deny the legitimacy and momentum of this industry.
Most importantly to me personally, crypto has been an area that I’ve been watching closely and actively participating in for a long time now.
My journey with crypto started back in 2014.
I had just heard about this thing called bitcoin — apparently invented by some mysterious person named Satoshi — and it had just shot up from $100 to over $1,000 in a matter of a few months. None of my friends really knew what it was, other than that it was making some lucky fools rich (“damn, if only I held my bitcoin instead of buying pizza with it!” was often heard in the streets of San Francisco), and after it crashed down 80% in another few months, I never thought much of it again.
Until mid-2017, when bitcoin started yet another meteoric rise, eventually peaking at $19,000. I had started to learn more about bitcoin by then: it’s a system that is wholly impervious to manipulation or corruption; its design is autonomous and permissionless and future-proof; it might change the world of finance as we know it. At this point I was getting pretty interested, and had managed to get my hands on a small fraction of a bitcoin through some overly complicated process. Back then, and even now, getting into crypto was convoluted and intimidating.
Then another crash, this time from $19,000 to $8,000 in early 2018. The sentiment was grim. The skeptics were very vocal, claiming that they always knew bitcoin was going to die, while the believers hid from public discourse, tails tucked between their legs. FUD ran rampant.
But the truth is, 3 months before bitcoin hit $19,000, the price was $4,000 — barely half of the $8,000 price after the crash. The believers still believed in the revolutionary potential of bitcoin, but we started to realize that the adoption of bitcoin and cryptocurrency broadly would be driven by these big bull rallies + post-rally selldowns. In fact, these cycles are necessary and beneficial for rapid consumer adoption.
I continued to follow the developments in crypto, and when I got to Stanford business school in September 2019, I quickly found a community of colleagues who were even more passionate about crypto than I was. We went to conferences, attended crypto classes, and spent many dinners geeking out about the latest news. And during my summer internship at Playground Global I spent a large chunk of my time developing our firm’s thesis around crypto and web3.
While the price of bitcoin bounced around $10,000 during my first year at school, my friends and I felt that, given the rise of high quality projects, another big rally was inevitable. And indeed that big rally came, from October 2020 to March 2021 where bitcoin absolutely surged from $10,000 to $60,000. Consumer sentiment and adoption had finally caught up to the underlying quality.
The rest of 2021 was an incredibly exciting time: tons of new crypto believers poured into the market (in Indonesia, gross transaction value grew from $4B in 2020 to $60B in 2021 — an astounding 15x — before even taking into account the NFT boom), many new companies launched while many new sub-sectors emerged, and the optimism was contagious. The believers had finally mounted an offensive against the skeptics, and it was working.
As with every rally in the past, however, we’ve seen the price of bitcoin come back down to earth. And as of me writing this, bitcoin is floating around $21,000. But lest we get greedy, let me remind us that this “crashed” price is higher than the peak of the last big boom. Looking at a log chart (which is arguably a more useful view vs. a linear chart for exponential things like worldwide adoption of crypto), the trend is still healthily, steadily upward.
So what?
I’ve talked a lot about the price of bitcoin, and the truth is, bitcoin is only a small part of what makes me excited about crypto broadly. But the price of bitcoin is the single best indicator of consumer adoption (read: excitement) currently: it only goes up when people buy in, literally and philosophically, to the crypto-future.
To me, and to other believers, the crypto-future represents a fundamental shift in how we experience ownership — ownership of assets, ownership of data, even ownership of culture. I won’t go into a ton of detail right now, but imagine this:
- You live in a politically unstable country, and one day the government seizes all your assets without your consent. As unfortunate as this is, the government can do this because you rely on its currency (which is owned and controlled by the government) and because you rely on its central banks to hold your assets. With decentralized currencies like bitcoin, you take back ownership — no one can manipulate any of your assets or the value of those assets without your consent, and every transaction on the network is publicly transparent.
- You decide to change hospitals, so you need to take your medical records (which is currently owned by your current hospital) and transfer them to your new hospital. But when you go to your current hospital, it turns out they’ve lost your medical records — records that should have belonged to you in the first place. With NFTs and decentralized applications built on top of open source blockchains like Ethereum, you take back ownership — you own your medical records and you get to decide how others interact with that data.
- You’re a content creator on YouTube, and suddenly YouTube changes its algorithm such that your earnings are cut in half. Even though you’re a valuable contributor to the YouTube ecosystem, you have no say in what YouTube chooses to do. With DAOs and governance tokens, you take back ownership — you can participate in a democratic election system without reliance on key individuals who may not always work in the community’s interest (or may even be corrupt).
There are so many other examples we could talk about, but suffice it to say: the crypto-future fundamentally challenges many of the ways the world works today, and replaces them with a better system that gives power back to the people. So to the believers, I say keep believing. And to the others, I hope we can surprise you.
So what’s my new company?
At this point, I hope that I’ve convinced you (or at least made some good points) that crypto is an exciting industry. But as I mentioned earlier, one of the key pain points for users is still being able to access the ecosystem + investing in the growth of the industry. Even if users can do this, understanding everything that’s going on is a further challenge.
I’ve decided to join Reku — Reku (formerly known as Rekeningku) is a leading Indonesian crypto exchange, built on the philosophy of providing the most compliant and user-centric platform to invest in various crypto assets, without any of the frills or gimmicks. It offers the lowest transaction fees, with very high liquidity, in a super simple-to-use user experience, on a completely homegrown technology platform that ensures maximum compliance. And for the heavy traders out there, it has the tools and features needed for any technical analysis.
A crypto exchange plays a pivotal role in the ecosystem: it acts as a gatekeeper to the world of crypto. Users inevitably need to go through exchanges in order to access the rest of crypto. And it’s because of this that exchanges have both the responsibility and the opportunity to guide, protect, and empower users through their crypto journey.
When I first met the Reku team, I was impressed by their handle of the ins and outs of their business — how to run the most efficient exchange, how to ensure scalability, how to stay lean. I was even more impressed when they shared their numbers around traction and growth. As we discussed further about how to take Reku to the next level, I felt a great sense of immediate trust and alignment with the team, and I’m excited to help the company achieve still greater success.
In the coming days you’ll be hearing more about us and I’m excited to share what we’ve been doing. We’ve made big moves and partnered with some awesome folks in order to supercharge our growth as well as put innovative new products in the hands of our users. Stay tuned!
And about my second goal of getting married to the love of my life…
I have so much to talk about here, even more than my entrepreneurial goal. The stories of the surprise proposal I planned which ended with me being the one who was surprised; of all the work to win over her parents; of the time my parents and I almost died just days before the wedding; of the breathtaking emotions I felt watching her come down the aisle; of the first steps we took to finally start our lives together… honestly I could write a book!
But this wild journey is one that deserves its own dedicated post, not just a section at the end of another. So until next time, I’ll leave you with this one sentiment that summarizes our journey: true love is worth fighting for!
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