Shinta Witoyo Dhanuwardoyo is one of Indonesia’s best-known entrepreneurs, having founded one of the country’s first Internet companies, Bubu.com. In an exclusive interview from her company’s Jakarta office, she tells Borderless News Online that the country’s Internet economy has massive potential, and is rapidly ramping up. She also added that Indonesia’s Internet policies need to catch up with the technology.
“I think there’s a huge potential in the Indonesia digital economy. As we know, the Indonesia adoption of digital technology is quite rapid,” she said, referring to the fact that Jakarta sends more Tweets per day than any other city on the planet.
The country, with a population of 250 million, is a massive market for social media, and is Facebook’s 4th largest customer worldwide.
“The society is very much connected and well-informed. We’re actually always ranking in the top five on almost all social media that we’re in,” she said.
“Even though we lack some infrastructure, but I believe our potential is really huge, being that we’re 255 million in population, and then 5o percent of the population is under 30 years old. So that is a key ingredient,” she said.
When asked how the rapid growth of the digital economy will impact the country’s startups, she said: “Now, every time I visit universities, or I visit different events, I see more and more young people coming up to me and giving me their name cards and saying ‘hey I have a new startup,’” she said, explaining that there are hundreds of tech startups now in the country.
She added that the growth of startups is “very dynamic” now in Indonesia.
She added that challenges for startups include the difficulty of finding highly skilled talent that can take companies to the next level, as many promising Indonesian startups are getting highly skilled talent from India or Eastern Europe.
It has also been difficult for startups to find financing, she said.
She also said she’d like to see Indonesia be a major player in the Internet industry, in addition to being a major market for and users of social media.
She added that government policies around the digital economy are outdated and need to be updated at a time when technology is moving at lighting speed.
“I would love to see how government can create policies that right away fit into the technology nowadays. Because we’ve seen different situations where the technology and the applications are booming, and the policy needs to kind of fit in,” she said, explaining that often the policies have to catch up with quickly moving technology.
“So maybe they could have a working team that could think about how the policy could be more progressive toward the new technology,” she said, adding that this is a problem is a number of other countries.
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