A Personal Update

This month is my one-year anniversary of having long COVID.

I count myself fortunate because the virus only affected parts of my sensory nerves, specifically the vestibular nerves that transmit the balance nerve signals from my inner ear toward my brain.

COVID-19 can manifest its long-term effects in many ways. The virus seems to have a tendency to inflame and damage nerves, and I have heard stories where motoric nerves got inflamed so badly that debilitating injuries and mobility issues occur.

My case, fortunately, is not that severe. The impact manifested as vertigo—intense dizziness that hit me instantly during an online meeting in June last year and drove me to the ER in a panic because my wife and I thought it was a stroke. A couple of MRIs later, we are glad that no signs of a stroke or anything scary like a tumor showed up in the scans. The next few weeks were marked by a slow recovery, and the vertigo effect gradually intensified in the following months.

Several months later, during an offsite retreat for our company's tech leaders, I told our engineering heads that I wanted to resign, focus on my health, and prepare one of them to succeed me as our next CTO.

That was seven months ago. It took us six months to plan, organize, appoint, and execute a succession handover. My last day as the CTO will be next month, and I'm looking forward to resting and diverting my focus towards my health journey and recovery.

What does the transition process look like?

Any senior management will tell you that the transition process for any leadership is fraught with risks, especially when our organization manages 200+ tech talents building half a dozen tech products for millions of active users.

Rewinding on how it was during the offsite retreat, I'm proud to say the process we took reflects our cultural values of openness and transparency.

We started with a willingness to be open and vulnerable (me sharing my medical situation), then progressed towards having a transparent discussion between all the engineering heads on their long-term aspirational goals and whether they feel ready to step up for the CTO role.

I pride myself on building a resilient tech organization for our mission. I consider any of our engineering heads more than capable of stepping up to be the CTO had I been hit by the bus. (Hopefully figuratively!) Ultimately, all the heads in our tech organization, our leadership team within GovTech Edu, and our governmental stakeholders are aligned with our shared decision to appoint Muhammad Ghifary as our successor CTO.

Ghif, as we call him (it rhymes with GIF), also has a stellar leadership background. Before joining us, he was a senior vice president for the digital division of one of the largest state-owned banks in Indonesia. We feel fortunate to have someone among our ranks who can balance planning with bureaucracy and executing for our users.

So, what's next for GovTech Edu?

Some context might be needed here. GovTech Edu, the organization where I have served as the CTO from its founding days up to its current 400-person scale, was formed years ago as an experiment to bring industry best practices in building user-centric scalable tech and apply them to building tech for parts of the government of Indonesia.

We have built some of the highest-rated and widely used government apps in Southeast Asia. One reaches a 70% all-organic TAM penetration within 12 months and is used by 2.5+ million monthly active users at a 55% stickiness ratio. (higher than Netflix!) It earns a 4.8-star rating from 178K reviews in the Play Store.

One driving force behind our team's strong execution is always the overarching value that the mission to serve the nation underlies the core essence of our existence. Years ago, when we laid down the team's foundation, we made a conscious decision and committed that this mission is so much bigger than any of us.

Instead of designing a top-down organization, where decisions flow downwards, and creating a culture where the team heavily relies on their leaders to decide what they need to execute, leaders here position themselves as servants supporting their team for success and giving them large degrees of trust in their day-to-day operations.

This enables an incredibly robust organization, where each layer of management is empowered to decide and resolve issues on their level and can escalate for support when they encounter deadlocks or blockers. This means leaders here are not irreplaceable, and most of them can step up to shoulder higher responsibilities when needed.

Thus, I have complete confidence in the team's ability and Ghifary as the new CTO. Our tech organization has set a high standard in its mission to build user-centric government apps for millions of Indonesians, and I look forward to more amazing things from them in the future.

And what's next for you, personally?

I'll start with the good news: my vertigo is slowly easing up. Six months ago, I couldn't even walk straight with my eyes closed, and each step felt like I was walking over wobbly ground. Now, I can walk unaided for quite some length of time, but I still need to take a break and lie down every couple of hours or so.

The bad news is that my progress has plateaued in the past couple of months. I went to more doctors and found I have intermittent airflow blockage during sleep, which means my brain is occasionally starved for oxygen when I'm unconscious, and this probably contributes a bit to slowing down the nerve regeneration and why some instances of vertigo still persist.

In the past couple of months, I have started thrice-weekly fitness sessions, converted a corner of the house into a home gym, and hired a personal trainer who can help me exercise better and more regularly. All this is in the hope of reducing my excess fat and improving my sleep situation. Improved cardiovascular circulation may also help my vertigo ease up faster.

Unfortunately, all these constraints mean that my next options are limited since I won't be able to work in an office for the foreseeable future. Working from home should be fine since I have set up a powerful rig for my home office, with a redundant dual-link connection to the Internet and (most importantly) a day bed next to my work PC to take occasional breaks whenever my vertigo occurs.

Thus, I have decided to take things easy and focus primarily on my health for the foreseeable future. I will probably do some angel investing or open up some advisory consulting services for tech startups, but that will be more to keep my mind busy and engaged. I still have enough runway from my last startup's equity to sustain myself for a year or two while still retaining enough hope that my health condition will improve way before that.

If you're still here, thank you for going through what turns out to be a 1,200-word personal update. Hopefully, with more free time, I can write more posts and share more things I learned from others or through my tech & startup journey. Stay tuned!