Giri Kuncoro: Choosing GO-JEK Over Silicon Valley
When Giri Kuncoro realized that his one line of code can change the life of million Indonesians, he knew it’s time to come home. After working in Silicon Valley for two years, Giri followed his callings to sit in the front row as an engineer who develops the technology in this archipelago country.
Previously working as an engineer for VMware, a subsidiary company of Dell Technologies, Giri had the chance to collaborate with the giant tech companies, Google and Pivotal to work on Kubernetes distribution called Pivotal Container Service.
I was honestly amazed when Giri told me about it. However, that was only the beginning of his awesome story.
Turns out, way before Silicon Valley, Giri has two patents granted under his name and his counterparts when he was still working in Japan. One of his projects was to develop a distributed system for charging electric cars / vehicles.
After 3,5 years working in Japan, Giri moved to United States to pursue his master’s degree in one of Ivy League Schools, Cornell University. We all know that getting into Cornell is difficult enough, but Giri managed to get the academic excellence award during his graduation. Can he be more awesome than this? Well yes, he can.
Upon graduation, he moved to Silicon Valley and tried to conquer it. During his time there, his Indian roommate invited him to come to India for his wedding.
His trip to India was an eye-opening experience for him.
He discovered that street vendors there accept payment via mobile phones. He didn’t realize how Fintech plays a big role when it comes to financial inclusion in India.
In the wake of that moment, he realized that he had to contribute and be among the first engineers who make a big Fintech impact in Indonesia.
So, when the opportunity knocked on his door, Giri didn’t think twice. He packed his bag, left the biggest tech capital in the world and moved back to Jakarta after living abroad for almost eight years. What a ball move!
Giri agreed to be one of the system engineers at GO-PAY because he’s never seen a bunch of highly passionate engineers working together to solve interesting problems in Indonesia before. A mentorship from Ajey Gore, GO-JEK group CTO also intrigued him to broaden his knowledge in software and system engineering.
Giri admits that all the problems he found at GO-PAY is in the level of global scale. He is sure that he wouldn’t stumble upon this problem if he had stayed Silicon Valley.
GO-PAY was recently mentioned in United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Advocate annual report because it facilitates thousands of previously unbanked GO-JEK drivers and other GO-JEK partners. It gave them a chance to join the formal financial system. Now GO-PAY has become the fastest growing digital wallet platform in the country.
That is one example of big social impact created from one of Giri’s line of codes.
In his daily life, Giri enjoys the small direct impact that he found every time he goes to work with GO-RIDE. When the drivers found out that Giri is one of the engineers, they usually compliment him that his team has done a great job for the app and it has changed the driver’s life.
For the long run, Giri has a vision to create GO-JEK’s open source projects that can be impactful to people outside the company and can also help to solve their problems as well. Just like GO-JEK in the first place which always tries to improve many Indonesians’ quality of life. Giri also aspires to share his knowledge or research in renowned tech conferences.
