Reinventing leadership: Insights from former executives turned startup founders

The recent East Ventures Summit 2024, held in July this year, brought together over 100 experts and leaders in the Southeast Asian tech, startup, and business landscape to share their nuanced insights in more than 30 simultaneous panels. 

Four former business executives sat together in a panel to tell stories about their experiences transitioning into entrepreneurship: Alvin Kumarga, Co-Founder and CEO of Cosmart, Ghirish Pokardas, Co-Founder of Pintarnya, Christian Suwarna, CEO and Co-Founder of Diri Care, and Raditya Wibowo, Co-Founder and CEO of MAKA Motors.

Moderated by Sinarmas’ Executive Director, David Audy, the conversation highlighted the founders’ motivations, challenges, and visions for their respective startups. 

Raditya, former Chief Transportation Officer at Gojek and long-time motorbike rider, shared his experience launching an electric motorbike company in Indonesia. He emphasized the significant opportunities he identified within the electric motorbike market in Indonesia, particularly the need for better products tailored to user demands.

Meanwhile, Christian, the ex-CMO of Traveloka, discussed the stark differences between marketing strategies for large corporations and startups. He noted that while foundational marketing principles remain constant, startups must focus on building brand awareness from scratch. His approach at Diri Care, a clinical beauty startup, involves engaging directly with consumers to refine messaging and positioning. 

Ghirish, who transitioned from a senior investment role at KKR to founding Pintarnya, spoke about his motivation, which was driven by a desire to address employment and financial service gaps in Indonesia. For Alvin, though transitioning from finance to e-commerce involves significant challenges, entrepreneurs must unlearn practices from past corporate backgrounds to thrive in the startup environment.

Read the edited transcript of the panel discussion below to delve deeper into their insights.

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David Audy: In this session, we are going to discuss the panelists’ shift from C-level executives to entrepreneurs, especially their journeys, stories, and reasons. The first question goes to all of you. What was the specific moment that triggered the decision to start your own business, and could you share your vision for the company?

Starting with Raditya, who used to be GoJek’s Chief Transportation Officer and now owns an electric motorbike company. What were the significant opportunities that you identified during the transition, and why did you decide to stay within the motorbike sector?

Raditya Wibowo: I think it’s definitely been a long journey. I’ve been riding motorcycles since high school. Actually, my co-founder and I were neighbors in high school. So, we would go to school together on my bike every day. And I still drive the same bike up to this day. The bike is 20 years old. I ride a two-wheeler everywhere since it’s faster to get to meetings. 

So, why am I not driving my own bike yet? My team hasn’t let me take it out yet because they don’t want people to take photos, but I have tested our own bike for a couple hundred kilometers. My co-founder and I joined Gojek together and worked with the drivers for seven years. We know a bit about motorcycles and what the users need. 

One of the things that I started looking at during my last year at Gojek was electric motorbikes because, at the time, I was thinking, “If all the motorcycles are eventually going to become electric, we have such a large fleet of captive users—around 2-3 million drivers. So, how can we spearhead this transition?”

So, we did some pilots with existing products on the market. What we found was that none of the products really worked for various reasons. Either the battery would run out too fast, it’s not comfortable for bringing a passenger, or there’s not enough storage space. The right product isn’t in the market yet, and since my co-founder and I have a lot of experience with motorcycles, we feel like we understand the users. 

We decided to make our own bike three years ago. Apparently, making your own bike is not easy. We kind of chose the hard route by doing our own R&D. There are so many electric motorbikes you can buy on the market today, with 57 subsidized options from more than 20 brands. We are not the first on the market, but we do believe we have the best product. We do believe that it’s very different from anything else out there.

David Audy: What are some of the challenges you face? The automotive industry has always been driven by the “big boys.” How do you cope with this challenge, and what’s your view on competing with large companies?

Raditya Wibowo: Other motorbike startups are also big corporations. There are also a couple of other brands. I think if you look at the whole industry, the total installed base of electric motorbikes was probably around 60,000 units last year, while the total number of motorbikes in Indonesia is about 130 million. So, the penetration is still very, very low, about 0.6-0.8%. 

Additionally, the motorbike market is very much dominated by the big Japanese players. Two brands hold 90% of the market. This is a bit different from four-wheelers, which are a bit more competitive.

Yet, electric motorbike adoption is much slower than that of electric vehicle four-wheelers in Indonesia, especially given that there are Japanese brands on the market that do have EV products. For example, Honda launched their EV product last year, which cost more than Rp 40 million and ranged around 40 kilometers, which we think is not enough for Indonesia. So, it doesn’t seem like they’re pushing hard to be the first mover.

Aftersales is a bit different for electric vehicles because you don’t really have lubricants; you just change the brake pads every once in a while. So, it’s a pretty different business model with different margins. We sense an opportunity to be the first mover there. 

Once we have a bit of a lead, the challenge will be staying ahead. In terms of economies of scale, Japanese companies can make mechanical parts much cheaper than we can. However, electric vehicle components such as the battery pack, the control unit, and the electric motor are not really used in their existing products anyway. Of course, they have more negotiating power as a big brand.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they can buy those parts for an order of magnitude cheaper than we can. I think the goal is really to move fast and come to the market with the right product. We are looking for a product that unlocks the inflection point for electric motorbike adoption in Indonesia.

David Audy: Christian, you were Traveloka’s CMO. Given the critical importance of marketing in the consumer market, what lessons from your time as a CMO have you implemented in your startup, and how did you manage marketing with a large budget before Traveloka?

Christian Suwarna: Marketing for a large and small startup is vastly different. If you look at the digital marketing angle, for example, the fundamental principles of how you do content marketing, paid marketing, SEO, and influencer marketing remain the same. However, as you go up to a higher level and look into the marketing objective and how you utilize all these different channels, you will see a vast difference. 

On the marketing objective, if you’re a new startup like us, you are basically unknown. Nobody knows or cares about you. So, a lot of your marketing efforts need to be focused on finding the right target segment to introduce your product and pique their interest. We did a lot of those in the beginning. 

If you remember the marketing funnel, there’s a journey that a customer goes through. We focus on the top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) and the middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) types of advertising to target them. If you’re at a Traveloka level where everybody knows who you are and what you’re doing, you don’t need to do a lot of that. You focus more on the bottom-of-the-funnel activities, and these will turn into conversions–getting people to be loyal to you and advocacy, being promoted by your users, and getting recurring revenue. 

A little bit of TOFU activities will still happen to ensure that the customer’s recall rate is protected and that no competition can circumvent you. From a channel utilization perspective, we started our company Diri Care by quite heavily leveraging organic media. 

We wanted to engage directly with our customers because we hadn’t found the right positioning in the beginning. We need to talk to them directly and tweak our messaging a lot to see which lens precisely reaches the consumer’s heart. 

When I was the CMO, I remember my organization had a myriad of roles for marketing people, from conceptual marketing to traffic management. At Diri Care, we don’t have the luxury of personnel or resources. 

When it comes to marketing, if you have a lot of money, it’s so much easier and solves about 70% of the problem. But when you’re a small company, you’ve got to find a hustler and somebody who’s a generalist.

And so, when I transitioned from being in a big company like Traveloka to a founder, this is one of the things that I’ve personally had to commit to unlearning from myself. I needed to assure myself that I could be okay without the comfort of a big company and be ready to hustle from the beginning again.

David Audy: Christian, you were a marketing guy before shifting to starting a beauty clinic, a business that’s very female-driven in terms of consumer and behavior. How do you cope with that, knowing that you didn’t come from a beauty care background?

Christian Suwarna: I’ll answer by sharing a little bit about how we started Diri Care. We started Diri Care because of our personal struggles with our conditions. Around four years ago, I started seeing heavy hair fall on top of the back of my crown. At first, I ignored it. When hanging out with my friends, they started noticing it.

The problem is that growing up, I always had thick hair. The moment I realized I was balding, my heart sank. My co-founder, Dr. Devi, also had a similar experience. She’s been an acne fighter throughout her life, so she knows firsthand the experience of being bullied in high school and being looked at differently because you have a lot of red spikes on your face. 

I remember when we were starting the company during COVID, she mentioned something to me in passing, but I thought it was quite interesting, and it stuck with me until now. She said, “I strangely find it more comforting behind the mask,” because she doesn’t have to show her imperfections. To me, that’s very ironic. This is the reason we started Diri Care. 

We are building a company with a focus on clinical beauty. So, we created the first hundred percent online beauty clinic where everybody can get access to clinically proven solutions for all of their derma concerns, such as acne or scarring. You’ll be able to get solutions very easily from there. For me, as a male, I’m lucky to have my co-founders, because in addition to just talking to my customers, Devi is a fighter herself, so she’s in touch with it. We may not look like the traditional founders, but we’re actually quite close to the sector.

David Audy: Unlike other panelists who used to work as C-levels, Ghirish used to be a senior investment professional at KKR, a very big private equity firm in Indonesia and globally. Ghirish, what motivated you to leave this high-ranking position to build your own startup?

Ghirish Pokardas: I’ll share a bit about my story and Pintarnya. Our vision with Pintarnya is to empower Indonesia’s masses with access to employment, income, and financial services. 

I’ll start by explaining why that’s the vision and why we even landed in this space. As you can tell from my background, I’m a commercial person. I will look at things from a numerical perspective.

The reality is that if we look at Indonesia as a market, the numbers don’t lie. Where the big problems, demands, supply, and balances are, that’s where you will see large gross margins, gross profits, and large market caps. And in a country like Indonesia, that sits in the financial services sector.

Financial services are poorly served despite how big our banks are. We felt that we could jump straight in and launch a financial services or lending business, but the reality is that if you don’t actually have a reason to exist, it’s very hard to acquire a new customer. 

That’s where we decided to start with employment. The reality is that most people can’t get a piece of credit, because, typically, when asked where they work, how long they’ve worked, and what their salary is, the answers are all relatively negative. The answers are typical, they work in small to medium-sized companies, they are paid below minimum wage, and their work contracts don’t give any level of permanence. And we said if we can actually solve the employment issue, it’ll actually be our path to financial services. That’s the journey we’ve taken.

Why did I go on this journey, specifically for me? The answer is because of the people I’m taking the journey with, my co-founders. I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur and have had businesses since I was in college. Some of those businesses have lasted until today.

The question for me was when is the right time to do it? And that all depends on who you’re doing it with, right? This is a journey that I don’t think I want to take on my own. After being in the middle of that journey, I’m confident this is not a journey I would have wanted to take alone. The ability to debate and share the ups and the lows with others is just instrumental to actually being where we are today.

My co-founder and I probably spent around nine months discussing things before we even incubated our first idea. After incubating it, it took us time to realize that it was a silly idea to begin with. That takes a lot of guts and challenges. If you’re doing that on your own, you’re either continuously buying your own opinion, or you are not able to actually have any level of conviction on a specific idea.

David Audy: So, you are basically creating solutions for blue-collar workers. To do that, you need to understand the life of the blue-collar, how they live, and what their needs are. As someone who used to be a high-ranking executive, how do you cope with this?

Ghirish Pokardas: The simple answer is going in. You go in with a lot of confidence and conviction because you have always been right your whole life. You learn what you need to do by getting it so wrong the first time you try. 

How did we finally understand blue-collar workers? We just had to stop listening to the data and actually start spending time with them, asking them questions, and seeing their behavior.

As an example, in our early days, the show-up rate for job seekers to attend an interview was extremely low, around 20-30%. So, we asked them a day in advance whether or not they would attend since this was the job they applied for. And the confirmation level is extremely high. They might be thinking about the cost of attending the interviews which could be significantly high. This is the kind of thing you can only figure out once you’re on the ground, as opposed to making assumptions.

David Audy: Alvin, you were a financial product guy before. What challenges did you face when transitioning from a C-level executive to the e-commerce sector? How are you adapting your strategies to thrive in this new industry?

Alvin Kumarga: I spent about 4-5 years in the fintech industry before I jumped into building our e-commerce, Cosmart. 

Cosmart is essentially an online supermarket. Our vision is to help customers in Indonesia reduce their shopping time for recurring purchases from 30 minutes or one hour, be it offline or online, to just five minutes. We do that through many initiatives, features, and technology.

For example, our platform has the most complete selection of 20,000 products, whereas the next best competition probably only has half or a third of that. We also use tech to personalize a lot. So, for each one of you who buys from Cosmart, you’ll see a different section showing your different needs. 

The number one challenge in transitioning from finance to e-commerce is definitely technical knowledge. In fintech, we deal with regulations, risks, interest rates, and default rates, whereas in grocery, we think of inventory and margins. To pick up on Ghirish’s point, I had to unlearn a lot of things that I learned and relearn the dynamics of this new industry. I think that is one big challenge.

Second, coming from a big company as well, resources were one of the key things that I needed to work with. Before, we had all the resources. Now, you have to learn to do more with less. One thing that helped me is the mindset of always being humble and learning. Don’t assume you know things, and don’t assume that just by asking, you can get the right answers. Observe, make assumptions, try it out, and even make mistakes.

David Audy: What are the items that Indonesian households usually buy in recurring purchases?

Alvin Kumarga: They buy a lot of tissues. They also buy a lot of diapers because that’s one of the big segments that we have. Next, they buy a lot of milk. People usually buy them in big cartons. I think the key for players in our industry is choosing a segment and focusing on that.

Know your market and know what to sell using what value propositions to who, because everyone buys groceries. Everyone is going to want cheaper prices, better selection, faster delivery, and better quality. So, you need to know which segment can sacrifice what, and do that in an economically sustainable way. I think that’s the key for us.

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You can learn more insights from this panel by watching the full session below.