Returning to Indonesia – Updates from One Year Later

One year ago, after living for seven years in Europe and raised a family in the Netherlands, I decided to return to Indonesia for good. One common thread that I hear from people I've met this past year is the question "Did you ever regret making that decision?" This is my thoughts after one year of reintegration to Indonesia.

It was a warm afternoon in South Jakarta. I was sitting at a rooftop cafe in the Kemang area while a light breeze twirled around my face. Around me was a couple of dozen colleagues from Bukalapak, some engaged in an animated discussion with our guests, others jotted down notes about product ideas and pain points.

We were in Bukalapak's quarterly merchant meet-up session, and our guests were a diverse group of merchants that we fly in from all over Indonesia. In front of me was Ade, a merchant from the Pandeglang regency. (a semi-urbanized region, home to 1.2 million people, located about 100 km east of Jakarta) Ade excitedly shared how he manages to sell locally made sports shoes on our e-commerce platform and how most of his customers came from Jakarta, even though it took several days before the product arrives in the capital city due to the distance involved.

Most importantly, Ade shared about how he made a living for himself and his family through becoming a merchant at Bukalapak, something unthinkable for him just several years ago. He has since then taught a dozen others in his hometown to sell their products at Bukalapak.

However, Ade's stories are not all being shared through a rose-colored glasses. Ade shared his gripe that Bukalapak has a bottleneck in some of its manual process, and a couple of times he had to wait for some days before the issue was resolved. One of the product managers nodded attentively and wrote this down in her notebook; I can almost see the gears turning inside her mind as she mulled over translating this pain point into actionable stories.

It is easy to forget about people like Ade among the hustle and bustle of Jakarta, where economic growth remains one of the highest in the world despite some slowdown or setbacks in the past year, but uplifting the lives of people like Ade is one of the major raison d'être of our entire company. At our current scale, Bukalapak handles US $1 billion in annual transactions, with huge portions of those going to merchants in non-urbanized regions like Ade's, helping nearly two million Indonesians in earning a living.

As I reflect back on the journey that we have together at Bukalapak in the past year, I was reminded of the excitement I had when I just moved back to Indonesia a year ago. I was excited about the macroeconomic growth numbers: about how the data shows that Indonesia is one of the highest growth regions in the world, how e-commerce in Indonesia is poised to grow into a $46 billion market by 2025, and how more than one million Indonesians are being uplifted into the middle class every month.

Along the way, I realized that those excitements had turned into something else, something very substantial and persuasive. As I sit together with Ade and hear his stories firsthand, I realized that with Bukalapak those growth numbers translate into a powerful positive impact on the livelihood of millions of people in Indonesia. A frisson passed through me the same moment I realized that this is how we can do our part in helping the miraculous rise of Indonesian middle-class and their increasing economic prosperity.

I have always said that e-commerce is both an exciting and incredibly complex field to dive in. We need hundreds of tech talents to realize and unleash the full potential of a massive scale e-commerce in Indonesia, something that we work on continuously and relentlessly. Now I also realize that, with Bukalapak, e-commerce is a field where we can rapidly transform the lives of millions of people for the better.

And this is ultimately why, in that cozy warm afternoon, I knew that I had made the right decision to return home.