Moving to Jakarta Part 3: The 30 Reflections
Time flies. Over a year in Indonesia already!
Three weeks ago, I turned 31. 😱
My birthday also happens to be my one year anniversary of moving to Jakarta! I celebrated my 30th birthday on the first day of my 10-day quarantine (the height of the Delta wave… ugh what a rough time).
In honor of having spent my 30th year around the sun in Indonesia, I thought I’d share 30 learnings from the past year. Thinking through what to write in this post was a nice reminiscent journey for me, so I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.
On adjusting to moving to Indonesia
Chaos is not something to be avoided but rather something to be conquered. One of the first things I noticed about Jakarta was its hectic energy, which I’ve talked about a bit. This, combined with moving to a totally foreign place without friends, family, or job, threw my life into total chaos. But looking back over the past year, I’m now a big believer that chaos is an incredibly powerful positive force — when we can create a healthy relationship with it. Wrestling the chaos into some sort of order is how we realign our lives towards our highest priorities. Personally, it’s focused me on taking calculated career risks that push my comfort zone while achieving balance in life.
Authenticity and genuineness are universally appreciated. At Stanford GSB, we are taught to be authentic and genuine. This means always acting in a manner that is aligned to your values without shame, being truthful to each other even when it’s hard, and being humble enough to recognize your own imperfections. It can be a little… utopian at times, but I’m fully bought in. And while I was initially worried that this idealistic new-age philosophy would merely alienate me, I quickly came to realize that it actually allowed me to bridge cultural gaps and find connection in the most unlikely people and situations.
Driving made me more self-aware? When I first started driving in Jakarta, I was abruptly forced to learn the exact dimensions of my car in order to shimmy through the many tight spots and sticky situations on these Jakarta streets. In the same way, adjusting to living in Jakarta has forced me to learn the exact dimensions of my mind. I’m more aware (and therefore can be more intentional) of how I’m perceived, how my words could land, what I can or cannot do here. I suspect this increased self-awareness is a key benefit of any long-term traveling or relocating, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone.
Routine helps during big transitions. One of the first things I did after moving to Jakarta was to get into some productive habits. Mine were swimming and reading. When you’re not sure what tomorrow will hold and the doubt starts creeping in, it’s reassuring to know that at least you can look forward to swimming and reading.
To begin to understand a culture, start with the most basic expressions. I started taking bahasa lessons about two months into living in Jakarta, and the biggest benefit was a better understanding of the Indonesian psyche. Super basic words like “aja” and “gimana” may translate broadly to “just” and “how” — but the way “aja” is used to convey a huge range of emotions, or the way a single “gimana” can replace pretty much any English sentence that begins with “how” or even “what” — provides a window into how a language shapes a culture.
Differences are beautiful. From my point of view, there are many ways in which Indonesians are different than Americans. One big difference is their sense of community. For example, I’ve noticed that Indonesians are very much into social proof: they’ll really gravitate towards things other people like (such as certain restaurants, vacation spots, or even investment ideas) and put a lot of weight on friends’ recommendations. But this dynamic also makes Indonesians more family-oriented, more engaged in the lives of people around them, and ultimately, more generous. Indonesians have big hearts for each other, and observing that has made me really appreciate this way of life.
On career exploration and its resulting growth
There is always beauty in the struggle. Since the beginning, I spent a lot of time trying to craft the perfect career for myself (which, of course, doesn’t exist) in Indonesia — I’ve written about the plentiful struggles of my soul searching in the past. Even after I started the next phase of my career with Reku, entrepreneurship has come with its own unique plentiful struggles. But in hindsight, the times I’ve felt the greatest sense of purpose were during those times of struggle. Bringing that hindsight to the present allows us to discover its beauty in the now.
Networking shouldn’t exist in anyone’s vocabulary. One of my big tasks upon arriving here was to “build my network”. As much as people like to talk about networking, I never saw it as anything more than making friends and being interested in what others do or think or live. And I am sure that this more human approach to “networking” allowed me to be more effective in my goals while having more fun.
Dopamine is a currency? While I was doing my soul searching, I came across a Huberman Lab podcast episode that really opened my eyes to some interesting neurobiology. Quick synopsis: dopamine is a powerful neurochemical that drives motivation and pleasure; dopamine is a limited resource, and having too much today results in having less tomorrow; not all activities that produce dopamine are equally productive (scrolling endlessly on TikTok vs. spending quality time with your family). So manage your dopamine like the expensive currency that it is. Choose to indulge in less cheap pleasures and more meaningful ones!
The most important negotiation is with yourself. Finding the balance between your tyrannically-productive side (“it’s torture, but I’m going to work hard while I’m young so I can have a good life later”) and your hedonistically-naughty side (“today I don’t feel like going to work, so I’m just not going to”) is important. You don’t want to be complacent, but you also don’t want to unnecessarily burn yourself out. Treat these two sides of yourself as an active negotiation and you’ll find yourself better aligned and more self-compassionate.
Allow space for serendipity. I never planned to meet my wife in business school, let alone move to Indonesia upon graduation. I had no idea who I’d meet here or what I’d be working on. I’ve found that a lot of good happens when I go into situations with an open mind, ensuring I stay nimble enough to recognize life-changing opportunities from unexpected places.
Don’t force things when your gut isn’t fully aligned. Did you know that there are over 100 million neurons in your gut? Sometimes, our brain struggles to make clear decisions but not our gut. I’ve found, especially in highly uncertain situations, that it’s important to really listen my gut. In hindsight I can see that some of my best decisions (like pursuing entrepreneurship or getting married!) were made when my brain and my gut were aligned.
Think about where you can make the biggest change. My career exploration led me to realize that it’s more valuable to evaluate opportunities by considering what I can give to an organization rather than only thinking about what I can get. What are my strengths and weaknesses, and what situation will best take advantage of my superpowers while allowing me to develop the fastest? Both my personal satisfaction as well as the collective likelihood of success is maximized when I think this way.
“Comparison is the thief of joy.” I wish I could take credit for that wisdom, but it was Teddy Roosevelt who once spoke this. We’re all guilty of comparing ourselves to others, even if it makes absolutely no sense (why would I compare my running ability to my friend who’s been training for a marathon for a year? yet I still do), and this habit is particularly unhelpful in your career. Not just comparing ourselves to others, but comparing ourselves to the ‘ideal’ version of ourselves is also toxic. The only comparison that is worth doing, in my opinion, is with yesterday’s you — what are your own goals, whether they are many or few, huge or small, and how much closer are you to achieving those goals?
On the Indonesian startup ecosystem
Which is it — Indonesia has an exciting future, or Indonesia is already exciting? The short answer is both, but building a company that can ride the wave of macroeconomic development as well as thrive in the current situation is not as obvious. Very generally speaking, companies in sectors such as fintech or consumer goods have an easier time accomplishing both, but companies in sectors such as edtech and healthtech, while having massive potential, may have a harder time finding currently sustainable business models. Some factors that present current challenges include ability to pay, willingness to pay (driven by cultural & psychological nuances), infrastructure (financial systems, logistics across Indonesia’s 18,000+ islands and 1,000+ ethnic groups, access to resources, etc.), literacy, certain regulations, and more. I believe the biggest companies will be built with both the tomorrow and the today in mind.
The tech winter is an undoubtedly good thing. Given how young the startup scene in Indonesia is, very few entrepreneurs here have experienced economic cycles. I’m no expert and also fairly young, but having been an active investor since 2016, I’ve seen how rapidly sentiments can swing from “growth at all costs” to “cash is king”. The current tech winter is forcing founders to focus on sound business fundamentals — and developing this discipline early will create a much more productive tech ecosystem in the long run.
Porting successful business models from other countries to Indonesia sorta kinda works but not really. I’ve had lots of conversations with aspiring entrepreneurs who start their journey by considering porting over the business model of some unicorn from some country to Indonesia. It’s not a bad approach per se — but my hot (maybe merely warm?) take is that for Indonesia especially, it’s better to invest the time to really start from first principles. Understand the history of the tech landscape, do research on what’s already been tried, and focus on the most relevant way to solve the problem. Indonesia’s unique combination of massive opportunity, favorable regulatory and economic factors, psychographic uniqueness, and the sheer number of distinct user segments domestically make copy-pasting less effective here. So for any aspiring founders reading this, my humble advice would be to really do your homework, since I’ve yet to see any recent startup find success simply replicating an existing business model.
Venture capitalists and founders must (and will) find harmony. From my observation, in the Indonesian startup ecosystem, venture capitalists hold the dominant position in the founder-VC power dynamic — and this needs to shift if the startup scene will continue its meteoric rise. VCs are obviously a force for good (as someone who’s worked at two early stage VC firms, I can attest to that!), and a fully aligned founder + investor can be an incredibly productive combo. So I am in no way suggesting that VCs must take a backseat to founders in this ecosystem. However, what I am suggesting is that there needs to be greater founder empathy (which ideally comes from founder experience) among VCs locally. I’m excited for the future where VCs and founders find even better harmony and alignment.
On being married
There’s levels to this! Maudy and I got married in May 2022. One distinct change I felt after getting married was an ultimate sense of unity. I’ve always thought that the best relationships were “together forever” and “me and you against the world”, but I’m learning it’s so much more than that. It’s “sharing the burden, responsibility, and satisfaction of how our collective life turns out”; it’s “no longer fighting just for myself but now for someone else too”; it’s “having the psychological safety that no matter how bad my day has been, there’s someone who’s committed to love and support me always”; it’s “relationships take work, and that work is non-negotiable”; it’s “taking care of my health not just to feel good, but also because I want to live as many moments together as humanly possible”; it’s “knowing that my partner is my one true vulnerability, that her heartbreak hurts me more than my own, that I would be nothing without her, but choosing that vulnerability every single day because she is also the best thing in my life.”
Is that your final answer? Marriage has come with a certain finality to me. Of course, a finality around who I’m choosing to spend the rest of my life with. But also, a finality around truly accepting her for who she is. Pre-marriage, I felt I still had the right to get annoyed if she forgot to turn off the faucet or nagged me about working too much or whatever other little thing. But now, there are no excuses to expect perfection because I’m the one who chose to be with this person forever! And now that I’ve fully accepted her for all of her strengths and weaknesses, it’s actually been quite liberating and joyful.
Being with the right person really ups your game. The old saying goes “behind every successful man, there is a great woman”. I think this is really true for me. My wife is one of the smartest, most intuitive, most talented people I know; she helps me think through problems at work, encourages me to be healthy, and makes me a kinder person. I’ve never felt as supported while encouraged to grow as a human as I have in the last three years with her. I’m lucky that she’s in my corner!
Nothing makes me happier than being proud. I love feeling proud of my wife and seeing her celebrated for all the hard work she does, and since we’ve gotten married, this feeling has only amplified. I think it’s because now, her happiness is my happiness is our happiness, and it’s so much more rewarding to be proud of someone other than myself (especially since I’d never let myself be too proud of me anyway).
“What’s it like being married to a famous person?” People ask me this all the time. I first met Maudy in the classroom, never having heard of her before, so for the first two years of our relationship she was just a “normal” person to me. Of course I was aware of her celebrity-dom, but I’d never experienced personally. When I moved to Indonesia, however, I was immediately educated; between when I landed and when I got to my quarantine room, I must have seen her face over five times in the billboards. You can imagine what a surprise it was for me to arrive in a new country and immediately see my partner everywhere! Before I arrived in Indonesia I was worried that, if celebrities in Indonesia are treated how celebrities are treated in the US, we’d be subject to constant scrutiny. But since then, I’m happy to report that the concerns have been mostly unrealized. Sure, sometimes it can get a bit tiring when we’re often stopped for photos, or a little strange when people make assumptions about us as if they actually know us, but overall, people have been very respectful and for that I’m grateful. So to answer the question of “what’s it like being married to a famous person?”, my answer is “hehe, not as bad as I thought.”
Love is spelled T-R-U-S-T. At the end of the day, the reason our relationship is exceptional is because we have a high degree of trust with each other. We trust that we have each others’ best interests at heart, and we trust that even when we argue we are motivated by the same desire to forge an even stronger relationship. Trust is slowly earned and quickly broken, so we are intentional about treating it as the invaluable asset that it is.
On leading an organization
It’s all about time management. Being an entrepreneur and a leader of a company means there’s a nearly unlimited number of things to be done. So I’ve found that time management and prioritization are incredibly important — there needs to be a clear delineation between things you give your full attention to and things that you don’t, even when they all feel important. But also I’ve found this dynamic to be very freeing. When I could fill 24 hours a day doing only important things, I have to draw the line somewhere. And in that way, I feel empowered to make these hard decisions for what I think is best for the long term success of the company.
Don’t underestimate the room to think. When I first joined Reku, I had to fill my calendar up to the brim every day because there were many things I needed to get done quickly. I was productive, and that felt good. But after many weeks of this on end, I realized that I was not scheduling in the critical thinking time I needed to know where to focus, and that was impacting my effectiveness. Now, I try not to pack my schedule with nonstop meetings and instead slot in more thinking time.
Companies are science while startups are art. Having worked at various established companies, I know that those companies are highly dependent on its precisely engineered standards & processes (science). On the other hand, I now know that early stage startups are an accumulation of the strengths & weaknesses of the founders, and their intuitions around hard questions without any right answers (art). I believe striking the right balance at each moment in time, as an organization goes from art to science, is critical to its success.
Leaders can be servants too. I’ve always said that a company is nothing more than its people. While I don’t have the hard data to prove it, I bet the long term success of a company is most correlated to the quality of its team, how the people are supported throughout their careers, and how inspired they are. If this is indeed the case, my role as a leader should be to be to serve these people: to find the best people, give them the resources for success, and constantly empower them. And this is exactly how I will continue to lead.
No one (including you!) has the right answers. Knowing what you know: that’s straightforward. Knowing what you don’t know: that can be stressful, but at least you can create a plan (like studying the crap out of a textbook for your chemistry final). Not knowing what you don’t know: now that’s where the magic is. It’s in that quadrant of the 2x2 where the most anxiety, mistakes, yet growth happens. I’m lucky that my ‘superpower’ has always been being a sponge that soaks up new information and translates it into actions, since I’ve found myself in this magic quadrant the vast majority of my time at Reku. Being a leader is never easy, but I believe the key is to embrace this quadrant, become comfortable in the uncertainty, discover personal and professional growth from it, and know we’re not alone in the journey.
On looking ahead
Thanks for making it all the way here, I hope you’ve gotten something out of reading the 29 insights above. At the very least, I hope I’ve shown you just how much my mind has expanded over the past year. Now I’ll leave you with one final thought:
We don’t live forever. No really, we don’t live forever. There was something about turning 30 that made me really grapple with the transience of life. I realized that I had lived my whole life assuming, implicitly, that I would live forever, foolishly spending my time in ways that belie its scarcity. This realization hit home one day as I was scrolling on TikTok: I came across a series of videos where the creator ranked the hundred most beautiful places in the world, flaunting gorgeous pictures of each. I was first in awe of the majestic landmarks, but that awe quickly turned to sadness as it sunk in that I’d never see the majority of these in my lifetime. In that moment, lying on my couch with my phone in my hand, I feared my future regret.
Perhaps we are too short-sighted to see that we’ll pay for today’s complacency, complacency in going after the life we truly want, with tomorrow’s rue. Or perhaps we are too scared to admit that the life we truly want may require a lot of work and changes. Or perhaps we are too idealistic, hoping that life will fall perfectly into place such that we’ll have the exact right amount of time, energy, and resources to live our true lives later.
We only have a finite amount of time on Earth, and therefore only a finite number of times we’ll do anything. A finite number of times we’ll see a majestic landmark, a finite number of times we’ll eat our favorite foods, a finite number of times we’ll hug our parents. In fact, for many of us, over 90% of hugs-with-our-parents are already behind us, with less than 10% of the total hugs-with-our-parents in our lifetimes still remaining. This is almost certainly the case for me.
I find myself thinking a lot about what I want in this short journey we call life. What’s a life worth living as defined by me and me alone? Am I getting closer to that or not? 31 is not old, but it’s not young either. Am I making good use of the time I have left?
Let’s always keep in mind just how precious life is, and how easy it is to let it drift by aimlessly! Maybe only by embracing its fleeting nature will we appreciate it to the fullest.
More from Going Southeast:
If you want to be featured on Going Southeast or want to contact me for any reason, please email me at imgoingsoutheast@gmail.com or reach me on LinkedIn here. I would love to hear from you!
