Sidedoor Podcast

Kevin Mintaraga is one of the most successful startup founders in Indonesia. His journey started with a digital marketing agency that was acquired by WPP. He then went on to found a bridal business that was acquired by ecommerce giant, Tokopedia. There, as CMO, he guided the company to a successful IPO. Now, he's back at it, building, using AI to change the creator economy. Kevin sits down to...

Mario Gaw is a YC alum and founder/CEO of Jutsoo. Jutsoo is AI-bookkeeping software, that's designed to save your team hours with its automated tasks, powered by artificial intelligence. Jutsoo is a pivot from Bananas, a quick commerce, grocery delivery app. In this episode, Mario and I discuss his startup journey, building product, pivoting, and getting into YC. Jutsoo: https://www.jutsoo.com...

I'm experimenting with a solo podcast today. No guest. Just me, Jesse Bouman, talking about my journey as a startup founder. Earlier this year, Slice, my company, almost died. This is the story of how we turned it around, lessons I learned, and what you can do to avoid this stressful time with your company.

Reinis Simanovskis is a Latvian expat living in Jakarta, building Finfra. As their Chief Product Officer, Reinis is helping build lending infrastructure to help non-financial businesses offer financial services within their platforms. In our chat, we discuss Finfra's early days, how they got passed the chicken and egg phase, P2P troubles in Indonesia, long-term outlook as a founder, and buildi...

Agung Bezharie Hadinegoro joins the pod. He is currently a Partner at Antler and the former CEO of Warung Pintar. Agung and Jesse chat about his journey with Warung Pintar from ideation to exit. The Indonesian tech landscape and he's hoping to see from its growth in the future. Antler: http://antler.co/indonesia Agung’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/agung-bezharie-hadinegoro/

Slice Group CEO and Sidedoor host Jesse Bouman (@jessebouman) is joined by David Nugroho, Founder and CEO of DCT Agency. DCT’s business is expanding but much of their success has come from TikTok and livestreaming with influencers. David shares how DCT came to fruition and what he’s learned building his agency. (This episode was recorded a year ago and things may have changed with David’s business...

Slice Group CEO and Sidedoor host Jesse Bouman (@jessebouman) is joined by Mulyono Xu, co-founder and CEO of Desty Page. Desty Page helps SME entrepreneurs with their digital products in Indonesia. A former VC, Mulyono shares his thoughts on building product and building a growing business. (This episode was recorded a year ago and things may have changed with Mulyono’s business). — Desty Page: ⁠h...

After a hiatus from this pod to work on my startup, Sidedoor is back. I'm dusting off the microphone and interviewing more founders in SEA to tell the stories and learn from their journeys.

Slice Group CEO and Sidedoor host Jesse Bouman (@jessebouman) is joined by Daniel Cahyadi, co-founder and COO of Wahyoo. Wahyoo is a food and beverage enablement company. Daniel shares Wahyoo's origin story, how they pivoted the business three times, and how they have grown while keeping food quality standards consistent (and other lessons he's learned along the way). -- Wahyoo: ⁠https://w...

Slice Group CEO and Sidedoor host Jesse Bouman (@jessebouman) is joined by Irzan Raditya, co-founder and CEO of Kata.ai. Kata.ai has been around for more than eight years, longer than most Sidedoor guests. He's experienced his fair share of ups and downs, including laying off 90% of his staff. However, he managed to pivot the company and create a product around conversational chatbots and AI,...

Slice Group CEO and Sidedoor host Jesse Bouman (@jessebouman) is joined by Fresh Factory’s co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer, Widi Nugroho. In a past life, they were colleagues at Mindshare, now they’re both tech entrepreneurs. Widi explains what Fresh Factory does and how they reached product market fit so quickly. He shares the story of getting into YCombinator and some lessons he learned...

Sidedoor host and Slice Group CEO Jesse Bouman (www.twitter.com/jessebouman) chats with Jeth Soetoyo, CEO of Pintu to discuss how Pintu earns users' trust and champions a growing crypto industry in Indonesia.    --  Links:  Sign up for Pintu: https://pintu.co.id/ Check out Presenting Sponsor Slice: https://slice.id/  Listen to the Sidedoor Podcast on Spotify: www.sidedoor.xyz Watch the episode...

Sidedoor host and Slice Group CEO Jesse Bouman (www.twitter.com/jessebouman) chats with Dr. Timothy Astandu, CEO of Populix to discuss how Populix helps companies of all sizes with market research.  Links:  Sign up for Populix: https://info.populix.co/ Check out Presenting Sponsor Slice: https://slice.id/

Indonesia is in the midst of a technical renaissance. Within the past ten years, Indonesia has gone from a country confused by tech startups, to a booming industry with multiple billion dollar companies. But as the excitement around tech startups has grown, the strain on the country's technical talent has increased. Supply cannot keep up with demand. Giants like Gojek and Tokopedia bought up all t...

Samira Shihab is the co-founder and CEO of Tinkerlust, a secondhand fashion marketplace in Indonesia. Shihab spent much of her youth in Pennsylvania and then moved to Silicon Valley to get her MBA. After moving back to Indonesia, she started her first company and learned that taking a western concept and applying it to Indonesia isn’t as easy as cut and paste. After living in Indonesia a few more...

Roughly 2% of all Indonesians have insurance. While fintech gets a lot of the headlines, insurance has an equally large opportunity in Indonesia. Cleo Randing is the founder and CEO of PasarPolis, an insurance startup using tech to simplify the process of buying insurance in Indonesia. In this episode we discuss why Cleo decided to pursue an insurance startup, how PasarPolis has grown despite so f...

Today's guest is TaniHub Group co-founder and president, Pamitra Wineka, otherwise known as Eka. TaniHub is on a mission to help Indonesian farmers get more reliable and higher income from each of their harvests. They do this through three core business units: TaniHub marketplace, TaniFund P2P lending, and TaniSupply logistics. In a short amount of time, TaniHub has demonstrated that the farming i...

Today’s guest is Nipun Mehra, co-founder and CEO of Ula. Ula is on a mission to help offline retail shops with their wholesale purchasing. It’s hard getting reliable products at wholesale prices and there are many different people and companies to buy products from, making operations fragmented for these small, low-tech businesses. Ula is developing a marketplace to make the purchasing of products...

Hiro Kiga is the co-founder and COO of Wallex, a B2B fintech company. His career started as a developer at a bank and moved into venture capital before getting the itch to build something. We’ve heard entrepreneur stories here and last week we got a glimpse of VC life last week. But Hiro is the first founder we’ve had who has had experience on both sides of the table. He has early experience with...

Venture capital is both over glorified and misunderstood. VCs are an important part of the tech ecosystem. You need capital to build a business and venture capitalists will invest in highly risky, early stage startups when traditional banks will not. Companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, are all examples of companies that accepted venture capital to grow. But many people, including...

Many times, early employees don’t get the same name recognition as the founders. But their contributions are no less significant. Today I’m talking to Felicia Kawilarang, VP of Marketing and Communications for Halodoc. Felicia was the telemedicine app’s first senior marketing hire and has seen the company grow from 40 employees to its nearly 600 employees today. This is a feat in itself, as we’ve...

In Season 1 of Sidedoor, I interviewed all founders. I love founder stories because they’re just different. But founders are not alone in this journey. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Founders need a strong team. What that team looks like will change over time. So I wanted to start Season 2 by talking to key employees at fast growing startups and understanding...

The final guest of Season 1 is Gita Sjahrir. She’s the co-founder and CEO of R Fitness, a growing health and wellness startup, focused on helping improve the lives of all Indonesians. Our conversation transcends the R Fitness story. Gita is a polymath. You can tell that Gita is a deep thinker and connecting many different dots. While building R Fitness is at the core of our discussion, we touch on...

Today’s guest is Pangeran Siahaan, co-founder and CEO of Asumsi.co. Asumsi is a leading millennial media publication. Founded in 2017, the site has been bootstrapped until recently, when they raised a seed round from East Ventures. Bootstrapping a media company is a battle, getting any kind of traction is a success. But getting the 10 million monthly views Asumsi has is quite a feat. Pangeran and...

Covid-19 has crushed businesses around the world. Especially those in the food, travel, and live events space. Today my guest is Ilya Kravtsov, co-founder and CEO of PouchNATION. PouchNATION is an event-based, crowd management, wearables company. They offer event-goers bands that track admission, facilitates contactless payments, and other analytics to event organisers. As you might be thinking, t...