Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Niki Luhur: We Cannot Go It Alone

Episode Date: March 17, 2021

The pandemic, new technologies, and growing awareness of data privacy have created the perfect storm for the next wave of "tech awakening." How do we ensure that this time it can bring Indonesia closer to an inclusive society for decades to come? Niki Luhur was the CEO of Kartuku between 2006 to 2015. It was the first company in Indonesia to successfully integrate the country's major banks and several large retailers into a fully supported payment network. Now the chairman of the Indonesia Fintech Association (AFTECH), he is a prominent figure in Indonesia's fintech industry. His latest venture, VIDA focuses on empowering people with access to secure and easy-to-use digital identities. -- Endgame​ invites you to explore the perspectives of the people who shape the narratives of today and the future. A collaboration between the School of Government and Public Policy Indonesia and Visinema. Also subscribe: https://sgpp.live/youtube​ https://www.youtube.com/VisinemaPictures

And I think the more open we can be and encourage healthy levels of competition, right? Healthy levels of competition and get people to aspire and dream bigger and invest back in the community to help hold people's hands in this initial journey to give people those initial opportunities to do things they never thought they could do and let them, you know, throw them in the deep end. and then realize that, hey, they can swim. Hi, friends. Today were visited by Nikki Luhur, one of the founding fathers of Indonesian FinTech.

He founded Kartuku and opened its pathway to become a prominent financial technology company and payment service provider in Indonesia. Nikki also chaired FTECH, Financial Technology Association, believes that the FinTech industry will play a prominent role in Indonesia's economic Also, for those of you listening to this podcast for the first time, Endgame is an Indonesia-based podcast presented by the School of Government and Public Policy Indonesia and produced by Viscenema.

Enjoy this episode. Endgame. Hi, Nikki. How are you? Great, Bagita. Good to see you. I've noticed you've grown some beard and mustache. Is it COVID-related or it's related to something else? Well, it's the beauty of work from home, right? You get to be a little bit more relaxed. All right. Let's start off with this talk. I want to just hear more about how you grew up. And I know you ended up majoring in psychology and philosophy at a really great school.

But talk about your early days. So you were born in Jakarta and then you went over to the U.S. and all that good stuff. Yeah. I think, you know, born in Jakarta and, you know, grew up up until around and then high school was in the U.S. in California. I went to a small boarding school there. And I think ever since I was a kid, I was pretty obsessed with computers. It was honestly gaming that got me very obsessed with computers and very competitive with friends

and how I started using the internet was actually just to play games online against friends. So I mean, I remember. you know playing on a 1200 BPS modem or and then a 14K modem and really you know dealing with the pains of connecting with that that beautiful screeching sound of the the day-dong-dong and yeah all of that good stuff so for for me it was it was gaming that that really got me you know and really a lot of strategy and first-person shooters that made really competitive and got me looking into how do I overclock my processor, how do I upgrade my

GPUs, what do I, how do I upgrade my RAM and my memory, just to get that extra little edge on your frame rate. And in the end, and then of course, as things went online, understanding how to network and how do you reduce your latency on the network. And in the end, I didn't even realize that it was, you know, it was a really about competing from you. It was just about gaming. It was about beating my friends at the game. And that was the real motivation. At the expense of your school time, of course. Oh, I did.

So that was actually something my parents did very well. They managed to incentivize my good academics with getting gaming upgrades. So they figured out a cycle. So I would work hard in school so then I could get those PC upgrades. and then enjoy my games even more. Okay. And you went to college and studied psychology and philosophy. Did you plan to study those before entering college,

or you sort of like figured it out after taking some classes? Actually, I went into college very determined to study genetics, actually. Wow. Fascinating. In high school, I was very much an engineer. It was about math, everything, you know, about mathematics, everything through calculus to, you know, to, of course, all the sciences, physics, chemistry, biology. And it was really in, those were sort of my forte. And where it really got me interested was in biology and in specific.

specifically in genetics and studying fruit flies and the thought of being able to map the human genome was absolutely fascinating, which at that time, obviously have been done, but in a very slow way, but not in a personalized human genetics. And I think the advancement of genetics, especially married with computing power, just advanced the field tremendously. And then I went into college very determined to study genetics and very much the idealist of wanting to find the cure for cancer. And it was very obsessed with telomeres specifically in how to understand cell decay at a most fundamental level. And actually looking at the abstract phenomenon of cancer of how actually it's the telomere malfunctioning that causes. growth, but technically reversing cell decay, but ironically, killing someone because of overgrowth. So the simple concept was if we could really understand the mechanics in a lot more detail,

perhaps there's a way to unlock the secret of decay and aging in life. And that was a simple, you know, simple hypothesis, highly oversimilar. I'll caveat that. But you know, as they say, cancer is the worst perversion of genetics. Because it replicates, right? Exactly. Sorry, I cut you off. Go ahead.

I think, you know, I went in very determined in college, and I was assigned an advisor, and it was quite an experience. I remember my first day meeting him. meeting him, Professor Daniel Dennett. He has this huge white beard and his bellowing voice. And it was an extremely well-renowned professor of philosophy. And frankly, I had done a lot of advanced placement in my sciences.

And where I was lacking was in my humanities. So he convinced me to take his class. And I found it fascinating. and concepts of consciousness and intelligence. And ultimately, what we would call now of not only intelligence in living things, but is intelligence achievable in computers and the concept of what's now called singularity.

But back then was very much his theory of consciousness. And I found that absolutely fascinating. And hence, this field of cognitive science was sort of a mashup between philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, computer science. So it definitely had a lot of science behind it as well, but it was much more abstract back then. And I think that's where it got to be really interested and fascinated.

And on the flip side, I placed into some advanced genetics courses in my freshman year. And to my dismay, I found that I was assigned to doing another fruit fly experiment where twice a day you would have to knock out and count these fruit flies and breed six generations of fruit flies. And I found a lab work very tough. And it was more of a question of, you know, is this the life that's cut out for me, a life of academia and research? As much as I loved it intellectually, I thought the rigor that, academic rigor that's needed and the persistence and discipline, I say I have to tip my hats to all of those PhDs out there that have, I'm sure, spent thousands, if not tens of

thousands of hours to perhaps come up with, you know, very, very minimal results and you have to keep trucking along and that, you know, and then hope for that break for it. And I think that's an incredible amount of patience. And I learned that I don't have that patience. And so I started exploring different areas and very much inspired by Professor Dennett. And he opened up this whole new field that I had never explored. And I just became fascinated and then obsessed. and never really thought about what I would do with it.

So it was very much an idealistic view of studying what you find interesting and study what you love and hopefully it'll all work out. You probably know this, but some of the earliest geneticist was actually a philosopher by the name of Aristotle. Yes, yes. He was one of the earlier guys who basically, theorized about the theory of genetics, how we carry hereditary qualities or attributes. And the field of psychology was also born out of philosophy.

Exactly. So a lot of common roots and I think it's very interesting and not only got exposed to the science side of it but also the political science, I also found quite fascinating. Okay. Sounds like we're going to have a lot to talk about. about today. But who would have been your coolest philosopher? I still to this day believe it's Professor Dennett. No kidding. Wow. The courage of computing and the concept of, you know, what we would call

artificial intelligence today was really what, you know, as growing up as a sci-fi geek, for me, that that was the cool. thing. On the other hand, I would say, you know, probably most influential philosopher of all time for me would be Socrates. And for me, it's the fact that you can read the, you know, the Republic, which is written by Plato, but all of Socrates's teachings, of course. And the fact that it felt deeply relevant in the context of our time today. Oh, yeah. to think that someone wrote that 2,000 years ago. How about 2,500 years ago?

Even more amazing. So prescient. And the evolution of political science, the evolution of governments and being able to have that level of foresight by understanding fundamental human behaviors and drivers and drivers. in the dynamics of a community at different scales and different stages of evolution, I found absolutely fascinating. That to me was probably the most mind-blowing.

You're just like, wow, how is this text still deeply relevant today? Yeah. That if you, if anybody could be called an oracle, I would say, you know, Socrates and Plato vis-a-vis that. Both of them would definitely deserve that title. Although I got to qualify, the quality of some democracies that we're seeing today are not as per what some of the founding fathers of democracy would have envisioned,

including what Socrates was envisioning, you know, almost 2,500 years ago. I think we've crossed the line a little bit, and we're going to talk a little bit about this later, you know, in the context of data democratization. But I don't know. What are your views? Well, there was a period of, you know, a potentially dark period that he also wrote about in the Republic of, you know, one of the downsides of a democracy is a diffusion of responsibility fundamentally.

And a lack of civic engagement, a lack of civic duty. And as a result, with this power vacuum, the rise of tyranny, the rise of the strong man of the war guards, as he would put it back then, or the oligarchs. Or the religious elements. These are the two sort of factions that, you know, and beyond that, you know, in a few other philosophers since then, I have very much focused on it. Smith for sure had to bring quite a lot on this. And I think that's unfortunately what we are seeing elements of today. And I think the heart of it comes down to that civic engagement.

And I think that is a big part of what I hope. I hope not only we can do something about to encourage more engagement amongst not only our communities, but for future generations to come. You know, you seem so intimate. being part of your endgame, so I love that, so being supporter of your podcast. Thank you, thank you. Look, I mean, you, you are interested in genetics, philosophy, psychology, and all those sciences, right, that you've gone through, including artificial intelligence.

How do you stay focused on what you're supposed to be doing today? Or you see those different dimensions as being very, very supportive and complementary or even enriching of your very focused, you know, assignment. So I definitely see the philosophy at the end of the day is my why. It challenged me to think of why and who I am and what is this kind of life I want to live? And I think the psychology helps me understand not only how to understand how, what are the people, the drivers overall in society,

but more importantly, if we wanna build an organization, how to create impact, not by just yourself, but mobilizing, mobilizing a team in the beginning to a tribe, to maybe at some point even what it would be called in terms of a company size, a nation state size of a company. And I think understanding organizational dynamics is, and psychology specifically, an organizational behavior is really just an extension of psychology and social psychology is extremely critical to being able to drive a certain direction.

through the right types of frameworks of values. And I think that's where the psychology piece comes in. The artificial intelligence, honestly, I'm more of a fan than I am, I would say, you know, an expert in the area. I luckily have team members who are experts in the area and are much deeper on cryptography and machine learning. And that's something that for me is find the right people. but ultimately my job is to build the team.

So I think this, in a very surprising way, I think philosophy and psychology has taught me a lot about leadership and an organization and ultimately then leadership starts with being authentic with yourself. Oh yeah. No, no disagreement. And we're hearing more and more as of late about about how some of the coolest CEOs put a lot of emphasis on empathy. And I think empathy is a thick part of the psychology of team building, managing,

whatever it is. You mentioned nation states, companies and all that. And the companies could be in social enterprise, public enterprise, or even, you know, social enterprise. All right. You were thrown into the Kartuku situation, right, with the sole mission of repurposing and turning it around into a much better company, which you succeeded after a few years. You checked out in 2015. Did you begin that mission with all that stuff that you've mentioned, you know, fusing the psychology, the philosophy, the science, and all that stuff? So honestly, no. Honestly, what happened was Kartuku was actually founded before me. And it was founded as a debit card network. It was aimed to be a Nets of Indonesia, if you will.

Right. And my father was one of the angel investors in there. And frankly, it was a last-ditch attempt on a sinking ship to see if anything could be done, if anything could be salvaged. I just graduated college and he gave me this chance. And I was always fascinated by the business model of building out payment networks. I found it incredibly fascinating. I was very obsessed with networks in general. And actually initially was more about proliferating education via, you know, by virtual classrooms and sort of a hybrid model. But that's maybe for another day. So we're very obsessed with the concept of networks. And that was, so this was just a financial network. It was a niche network, if you will, and specifically a payment network. So it was within my sort of area of deep. interest but frankly I just graduated and I knew nothing and it was it was get

thrown in the deep end and see if you sink or swim and and I realized it was a very daunting exercise but I worked hard and I googled and Wikipedia it a lot and had to learn on the fly. And I think, you know, with all things, ultimately it comes down to motivation and the why. And I was very motivated to, A, I love this business, and I was thrilled at the opportunity to be leading a company at the age of 22. I mean, that is just unheard of. And of course, it doesn't make sense if that company's well-run.

I mean, who would let a 22-year-old run a well-run company? It's only the defunct ones that, you know, you get thrown in as a last-ditch effort. But I realized, you know, it was, I was very scared. But it was almost a position of what do I have to lose? I have nothing to lose. And I sort of live by the mantra of what I lack in a case. experience, I will make up for an energy. And it was just sheer brute force. Share brute force, sheer hours. I was working about 100 hours a week back then.

Okay. And just poured in the time. And it was an obsession. It was an obsession to pass one of these almost impossible, you know, tasks. But I was determined that at least I'll put in everything and if it doesn't work out i know that in the end i'll i'll be okay with knowing that i really gave it my shot and and at least i can tell my father hey at least i i'm giving you back somehow here for all the decades of generosity and here i'm giving back to you and don't say that i haven't come back to help no that that statement is going to be an inspiration for a lot of people out there. And you know, at the time I felt I was quite mixed about it, but at the same time, I did feel a duty as I was not forced or compelled. And in fact, it made it harder. If my father had

told me in a forceful way that I had to come back, I probably wouldn't have. But he made it so inviting that it was my choice when in reality it was pure inception. And, It's called parental creativity. Yeah, something I'm going to have to learn. But yeah, after one year, got the company to break even and then could start breathing and then could start being creative. Just worked hard and figure out cash flows. There was, it was pure, it was a pure numbers game and kicking every tire and figure out what was monetary. how to deploy the assets we had to generate cash and how to cut the ones that didn't.

And it just had to be just really, really forceful and get it done, make it happen. And that was the year that actually was one of the most painful years in my career, but one of the most rewarding because that was a year I realized I could do a lot more than I thought I could. That would have been how many years after you checked in? That was one year. Wow. You got it to a break-even situation in one year. One year. And you felt pretty good, right, about the future? I felt pretty amazing. And it was super scrappy. I had to do a lot.

I think clean up a lot of messes. But hey, it came down to just having to be, take a ruthless view on the numbers and and just and a lot of clients who you know potentially had lost faith and heard that cartu Kaltukula guitariknafastra here and I was like oh very hard to hear that it was very heartbreaking but just saying well we're here now and I'd love to you know prove it to you that I can do it differently and and if you give me a bit of trust I will prove it that's and I think that's it was a sheer brute force and I think that's the beauty of being 22 well you've grown and aged since then unfortunately I don't have that same level of energy now as I did

I did before but yeah that's when we started saying okay now we're we're afloat and then I called up some of my I thought who the smartest people I know and and two close friends who are like brothers to me from boarding school. We had dreamt of building up a startup in a garage and build this network. And I called them and I said, hey guys, well, I've got a garage and I've got a company,

got a startup and we're building a network. So why not? Come on down and let's see how it runs. And next thing you know, It was a 14 year. Well, here I am about 15 years later, but we ran that for, I ran that for about as a CEO until 2015,

early 2016, actually. So ran it for 10 years as CEO and then stepped up, then stepped back to be chairman, which is actually when I felt I really became CEO and I realized that I had been letting go is I had not let go enough. And then in 2018, we exited to Gojek. Yeah. A lot of people don't know that you laid the foundation for what is today known as GoPay.

Right. What made you want to check out? I think, you know, we on, and kudos to the Gojerk team, I think the amazing job of hyper-scaling and blitzscaling and probably the example of blitzscaling in Indonesia in arguably Southeast Asia. They did an amazing job in terms of growing and kudos to Nadine and Andre and Kevin. I mean, they've, they've, done a phenomenal job there. I think for me it was it wasn't so clear actually. I think what I wanted to do is I needed to make it clear that you know as we went through an acquisition process that the things my fiduciary responsibility to the company came first and foremost that I was representing the interests of

Katuku right shareholders so I wanted to make sure that that was clean and clear first. Until an acquisition was completed, I told the guys, I said, hey, and I know I have confidence that Gopé is going to be going to huge heights and definitely helped with the team in sort of figuring out some of the early strategy and how, of course, practical could be a part of it. But at that point in time as well, I also looked at, you know, where where things were going and as big of a rocket ship that they have over there, I also had my sights on something on financial inclusion that I had been working on these branches banking initiatives

that were quite a different flavor. As much as just go pay is driving financial inclusion, I was really looking at an infrastructure player. And I was quite obsessed with biometrics, actually. We had started playing around with biometrics since 2007. And from there, some microfinance solutions that we ran out with some branches banking teller solutions, where they could bring a fingerprint device into the white market to serve SMEs.

and really this underserved segment. And I think that felt like an unfilled mission to me because we had done some successful projects with some microfinance institutions. We had done some successful projects even on doing social welfare distribution or Bansos, Bantu and social with a few of the PEMPRAF banks, the BPDs,

but it never hit the scale that I wanted it to or expected it to. We managed to reach to, you know, a few million end users, but in the context of 50, 70 million unbanked and even more 100 plus million underbanked, he just felt that it wasn't enough. And to me, I got inspired along the way by some of the people, the work that was done in India, specifically with Adhahar, and I saw how this biometric digital identity, this unique identity, was harnessed to over almost eclipse in the span of just less than five years to generate more than 300 million accounts for unbanked and deliver social welfare to that many

people so rapidly. And that was inspirational because sort of the model we had been using before with these terminals, there was a company also in India, a company called Fino, which is also a big early inspiration for us. They managed to bank 30 million people in India, 40 million, if I'm mistaken, up to 50 million using 20,000 agents. So we had this agent model that we had been pursuing But then when I saw these numbers and we looked at it, I thought, there's a much more scalable approach. And that idea kept nagging at me, whereas I kept thinking about, hey, the go-paid team has some incredible leadership. You know, it was a few payment companies, a few friends who I really respect a lot, fantastic leaders. And I looked at it and I said, how much more of an impact am I going to make being over there?

As much as it's an exciting role, there's a huge amount of resources that could be under disposal, versus solving some fundamental infrastructure problems, which at the end of day, Kartuku was really solving some fundamental infrastructure problems. And the theme of shared infrastructure and open networks was always there. and this was almost just the next generation of that, which is very different from this B2C world. And that's where I thought that I just frankly just had unfinished business. I see.

And had amazing opportunities through the FinTech Association. I think while I was trying to let go and do some succession, I had to keep myself busy. So friends had signed me up to try to, try and help build the FinTech Association, which is now Aftek or... Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're the co-founder of that association. My co-founders.

You're still chair? Still chair. Okay. But I hope to pass the baton over soon to some friends or to some new blood for sure. I think it's due time. But yeah, I think we also managed to do quite a lot there. And frankly, my motivation was to try and push an agenda of interoperability and infrastructure interoperability, specifically in payment networks back then.

But it turned out that everybody else and a lot more of the B2C companies wanted to push an agenda of KYC and KYC in digital signatures. And that was because that was affecting their customer conversion. And so, you sort of made a pact to say, okay, these are the most important agenda items. Let's band together. Let's create a list of agenda items that we all believe in. And we all get behind all of these priorities together. And we move together. Hang on. I want to pause a bit.

Take you back to the Cartucco situation. I mean, Gopay has done a kick-ass job, right? but I smell, and correct me if I'm wrong, a bit of a fatigue within you at that time. Now, I'm just asking, with the benefit of hindsight, have you had state, you think you would have done or could have done a better job until today with that platform

as compared to what Gopay would have done? I think what they've done has been phenomenal. Yeah, I'm not questioning that. But if you had state, You think you could have brought it to a higher level? I'm not entirely sure. I'm not entirely sure. And I think the way that I work best is perhaps in a smaller team environment.

Got it. And I think that would have given me, I mean, today where I am, I think I'm optimized for my creativity. Whereas I think with the go pay team, there's a lot of variables and a lot of teams to manage and a lot of coordination. I think it's very challenging. It's very challenging to align, especially,

it was actually a merger of four companies, four payments, I mean, three payments companies and Gojak, all at the same time. So, you know, I think some of those achievements have been fantastic. And I'm not sure if I would have been the best person to handle some of those challenges. And frankly, I had been doing Cartucou. I've been in Cartagou for 12 years. That's why I said fatigue.

Could that not have been a factor? Yeah, I think part of it was I never had a blank canvas. Okay, got it. And I think there was parts of where Kartuku had gotten to that had its limitations in the business model. It was quite physical asset heavy, a lot of CAPEX, a lot of physical devices. I think we did a great job in terms of deploying and offline. But building out all of that physically is quite challenging. We had to support 156 cities logistically in terms of support.

Rolling out to every alpha mark across the country was a logistical nightmare. So I think some of that was definitely where I felt that it had its limitations. and as much as in definitely the future, for me, it was much more about the bits over the atoms and software. And I felt that because of how much that we had already done in the history of the company, it was not as easy to move on to some of the next generation. And there was a lot packed in under one company.

And I felt that at one point, one of the big mistakes I'd made was not accounting for the amount of management overhead and founder mentality needed to get something off the ground and trying to, in the end, spread a management team and founders too thin. So I had thought about in the concept of entrepreneurship, I said, oh, it's like a startup. It's just in within one umbrella. But frankly, it doesn't, it didn't really work the way I had planned. And I think the number one X factor that was missing was the sheer amount of founder attention and focus. And I couldn't focus on those areas as much as I wanted to because the cash flows were coming from other business lines. Right.

And I think that's some of the areas that it was some of the biggest mistakes trying to do too much. And realizing, hey, there is no making it like a startup, if I want to do it seriously, just create a lot of startup. And I think that's the sort of aha moment. Actually, when I exited, I really just wanted to take a break. I wanted to take a bit of a sabbatical, to be honest. But I was pretty deep in policy work at Aftac, that especially around some of the things that were very much committed to delivering on KYC and digital signatures,

which thanks to Chief Rudiandara and HOMINFO team, they really got it across the line, especially around digital signatures and certificate authority. I mean, really, really salute to them. to championing some of the latest infrastructure that we can take advantage of today to take us to the next level of a digital economy in general. So actually it was at that point, and it was at a crossroads of seeing the birth of a new industry and wanting to have taken a break, but then seeing that this actually could fulfill an unfulfilled

mission. So how long of a break did you take? Two days? Six months. And I was tempted to take a much longer break, but that's pretty damn good to be able to take six months. It was the first I mean if those ideas are like burning in your head, right? It'd be tough, man, to disengage. it's right so I'm glad I had the break I definitely did it I've definitely still believe I could have taken a longer break but when opportunity comes and opportunity strikes I think that's the point where I said hey this is something I've talked about a lot this is something that I said is very much core to my personal mission and here's the opportunity am I not going to walk talk. So as much as, you know, I don't think timing will ever be perfect, you're not going to have

your cake and eat it too. So I said, okay, let's go for round two. Which is why you got the number two on your t-shirt. Is that it? Two years. So this is... Oh, okay. Okay. I thought two means your second company. second. So that's, I've only had two companies in my entire career. This is the second. I wouldn't complain about it. You've done okay, man. Yeah. And, you know, I think having the free hand this time, you know, and I, and I don't regret what has been done. I think at 22, you give me a blank canvas, I wouldn't know what to do. But now. I don't even I don't even recall what I knew when I was 22.

But yeah, finally, I kind of had my own clean slate and the ability to really put this, put a vision, a mission, a team, and have the why and the how clear from the beginning. Not so much the what. I think the what was clear, but more importantly, the why and the how. Let's peel the onion about the why and the how.

So when I look back at Kaktuku, especially when I was on my sabbatical, I finally did some solo travel, which made me feel like I was just graduated from college. I was always envious of my friends who, you know, in between jobs, got to travel, got to go here and there going to move and live in another country and and I felt I never had I missed out on some of that so there was definitely some formal but once I traveled and was doing the things that I thought I had missed out I ended up spending a lot of time in introspection and just actually almost peeling the philosophy onion back again and and reading some of my you know reading some of my favorite philosophers and having that downtime and asking myself the very hard questions

again and even harder now because okay there is you know you can have a lot of lofty goals and say okay no i want my financial freedom first i need to have my my tools i need to get my tools and my toolkit ready first but then when it's there and the set of experience then the became clearly, well, there's a lot of things I can do right now. Or there's a lot of nothing I can do as well. And don't get me wrong, it was very tempting to go and move to Bali and enjoy the sunset every day and live a more carefree life for a period of time at least. But I think this quest for inclusion just kept

kept being in the back of my mind of constantly nagging and this being able to drive financial inclusion through branches banking through you know latest generation identity technology whether it was biometrics fingerprints back then to then facial recognition now right i just saw there was a perfect storm of convergence of technology that was happening and and I was in a position to try and do something about it. And it became, after working on the policy front and collaborating with a lot of brilliant folks at the World Bank, they have a special unit called Identity for Development.

And it was very much linked to the sustainable development goals. And it opened up my eyes that identity, you know, biometrics. It's not just about financial inclusion, but it could lead to access to education. It could lead to access to healthcare. and fundamentally give that basic foundation for people to live their life's potential. And this digital leapfrog in technology could really proliferate access. And at the same time, if not done well, could actually leave a big digital divide.

So to me, it was the same calling in a different form. And if anything, the vision grew much, much, much bigger. And almost to the point where, I am I absolutely insane for trying to do something like this. But, and, you know, I was tempted to even consider a career path into the venture capital world where could be supporting entrepreneurs and go from, you know, sort of narrow and deep to sort of that helicopter view of being able to get all the intellectual stimulation of working with a bunch of entrepreneurs. I also found that really exciting. But I just felt that I, you know, this wasn't, I just hadn't given it my all yet. And I thought that if I don't do it now, I don't think I'll

ever do it. You know, I thought, I know that how much energy and sweat, blood, and tears goes into a startup. This time, I'm not so blind to that. I was very cognizant and a five-year commitment isn't going to cut it. You know, it has to be at least 10 years. And the question, for me, am I, what do I want to dedicate 10 years of my life to? What do I want to commit 10 years of my life to? How about 25 years? At least. Yeah, this is how I look at you, right?

I mean, your early stage would have been really taking financial inclusiveness from a low level to a higher, if not much higher level. Box checked. You've squared the circle. stage two would be, I don't know if you want to call it regulating the financial inclusion dimension or even embellishing it even further by way of those biometric, you know, capabilities. I mean, you want to make sure that people that are actually being included financially are the right kind of guys, right? Yeah.

But I think it also is an enabler, right? of those that would have been disabled or unable. And I see that more as an augmentation as opposed to a regulation. And I think it is contiguous and continuous from your early stage of financial inclusion play. 100%. And the proudest achievements for me

when I look back at Kartuku, as much as we rolled out an innovative sort of unified payment processing model with Car4 and McDonald's and we had 23 financial institutions. We had Bank Mandibir and Citibank as clients and we're very proud of that. But actually the most proud moment for me was working with Bank Bekahi and being able to roll out Bansos. Yeah. Those who really needed it. And it was a lot more emotional. And I think those were the tear-jerking moments that at the end of the day, I felt more a lot more meaningful and still unsolved,

and still unsolved at the large scale, in the grand scheme of things. So then being able to look at other countries that deal. effectively solve it. And that's where, and you can't say India, it doesn't have the same infrastructure challenges in India. We share a lot of infrastructure challenges. Dude, I lived there for three years, so I know. I lived in India for three years. So, look, I got lots of questions popping up in my head, but I want to drill on this. If we take a look at the payments in China. Okay?

Last year, it was at a staggering $26 trillion, which is double the GDP of China, right? I mean, if we use that as a benchmark, I mean, that's the kind of potential. The 2x of GDP is the kind of potential that we're likely to see, you know, in payments in a country like Indonesia that's hugely domestically consumptive

Right? And that's pretty staggering, man, if we can anticipate payments amounting to $2 trillion, which is $2x of our GDP. And we're nowhere near that. And I think it only underlines the importance with which we want to make sure that the right guy gets to be included financially. the more you can play a role with your second act of Vida. What do you think? Well, and I think that's where now, I think the question of growth, of whether or not adoption is going to be there is no longer a question. Everyone clearly sees and believes it, whereas once upon a time it was a concept. I mean, I remember in 2006 people were talking about mobile money already.

It's a long time to finally take off. But now there's more eMani subscribers than there are mobile phone subscribers in Indonesia. So the critical mass has hit. And as you pointed out, I think there's still a long way to go because the real enemy is not other eMoney, but it's cash. Right. It's the conversion of cash and there's still a long way to go. But at the same time, I think today, the concern is not about growth, but it's about the risk. A risk of, as this grows to be a bigger and bigger pie, how do you make sure that it's sustainable? And at that core of it, I believe, is trust.

Yep. How do you ensure that the actors in this ecosystem, that the integrity of these actions are maintained and that the trust in the system is preserved? And I think that's where the, you know, part of it is definitely, you know, learn from my background in payments. But it's definitely gone further and it's much deeper into information security and cybersecurity. And today, the biggest issue in trust is, frankly, there are account takeovers by fraudsters, by cyber criminals that literally managed to do some, not even that sophisticated social engineering attacks. So getting an OTP and taking over your account and stealing, you know, people's hard.

harder in money. So I think that's the challenge today is especially with actually the pandemic. I mean the rate of digitization is just gone, it's just skyrocket. The challenge today is come with that comes the threats of digitization. And even prior to the pandemic, the World Economic Forum had listed the top 10 risks over the next 10 years. in economic growth globally was about cybersecurity. Cyber, cyber, yeah. The theft and account takeovers. Those are two of the biggest issues.

And I just read an interesting statistic that 85 to 90% of login attempts on e-commerce sites are using stolen credentials. No kidding. 90%. No kidding. The amount of, and when we. we look at it. Is that globally or locally?

That's globally. Wow. Okay. So when I look at some of these issues and ultimately I look at some of the lessons learned from Kartuku, which, you know, there was a lot of hardware involved, which had its pain points of physically moving things around. It was very painful. from a security point of view,

when with hardware back security, we luckily, and you know, didn't have ever a security breach, we never had a breach. And it came down to the architecture. It came down to think today's design of the internet was driven by, you know, resilience of a communication network, right?

And I think it was designed, off the initially off the premise of being able to preserve communications in wartime events, right? Of if you knock out a communication town, that all the communications will go down and it's distributed communication. So you want to accept communications from as many places as possible and that was understood. I think what ended up happening somewhere along the way is that the network was a trust everything model. Whereas I think the evidence, I think the evolution of where it needs to go today, especially in financial networks, in networks that need protected, is it needs to go towards a zero trust model.

Sure. That before you're allowed in, you better prove that, hey, you're someone that's legitimate and you're authorized to access before you can walk in that door. And even then, there should probably be a series of doors, not just a single door. and it shouldn't just be an open field where everyone can gather, but a little bit more than medieval times of let's build the moat, let's build the drawbridge, let's build multiple layers of walls, and that's good defense.

It's not about a single layer of defense. It's about building multiple layers of defense. And I think the concept of your trust and defense in depth is gaining a lot of traction. And these are not new concepts, but I think the threats have hit a critical mass to the point where the demand and the need for more sophisticated cybersecurity solutions is now here. You know, there's a lot of companies, globally speaking, that don't have the necessary chief worry officers, right? And, you know, even if there was one,

I'm not so sure if cyber is on top of the list on many of these accounts or companies. Right. On one hand, it presents a real challenge. I think on the other, it presents a ton of opportunities for your play. Right. And I'm just curious, and I want to go deeper now into Vida. How are you positioning Vida vis-à-vis some of the others that are you know, in this dimension.

I think you raised a really fair challenge is that understanding security, let alone selling security and convincing someone to buy security is difficult, even in the physical world. Usually something has to happen really badly first and then people buy security. So I think security is something that is always a challenge and it's always this. cat and mouse game. I think the way we saw it is how do we not position this entirely about security? How do we think about some of the fundamental problems that necessitate good security,

but the problem is more about onboarding a customer and customer acquisition? If you talk to a business owner and say, hey, I'm going to improve the amount of conversion you get of how much traffic you get walking the door to how many actually become your customer and paying customers, that's a different story. Everybody can relate to the revenue side of things. Right. And there's an operational piece of cost cutting that is definitely more top of mind now and as many industries are in tough places and have to tighten up the belt and I think those are also valued but for us and frankly it's almost a bit of a perfect storm with the work from home and now having that work for and adopt digital means but i think from us it was it was actually the way

i saw it and the way i had approached this was by trying to solve an industry problem first and the industry problem arose at the fintech association and it was about k yt it was about hey i don't if i'm doing a fully digital service, asking someone to go meet me face to face is just going to, it's going to kill my conversion. And that was really the basis of it. There was a clear commercial justification and the clear cost of, even if you send an agent, even if you send, let's say, a Gojek driver, there's still costs to that logistics. You know, that's already a lot more efficient now than it used to be. But that was, you know, and how do we resolve this? And when we think about it, when you go into a bank branch, what do they do? Right? They ask you for your ID card. They eyeball

the photo on the ID card and they eyeball you and say, okay, this person looks, yeah, that's pretty good. Pretty good. Or they'll make a joke that, hmm, used to be a lot skinnier, huh? But, you know, beyond that, I would say, then the next thing they say, okay, well, here's the terms and conditions to being our customer. Do you agree? And you say, oh, yeah, yeah, I agree. And you sign. Use a pen and you sign. And that wet signature is an artifact of your consent.

That I agree to the terms and conditions that you present me to providing your service, your financial service. Now, I think these two points have always required to be done in person because it is important that it's done properly. It's important that we manage the risk and increasing risk around money laundering, around terrorism financing, around, you know, whether or not somebody was appropriately informed and is this legally, you know, valid because you need to have, you know, it should be done, you know, with a certain level of information. should be transparent. So as we progress along these issues, I wasn't even planning a startup, to be honest. It was just about, okay, how do I help here

and work on a few policy fronts and bring the community hopefully together and a united front? And selfishly, I wanted to push my payment interoperability. So it was something there that in the end, I realized that this is actually a really big problem, especially if we're facing businesses. And that's where the solution necessitates good security because you need a digital signature, but what is a digital signature? And if you need to verify someone's identity, how do you do that

effectively remotely? So the product requires strong levels of security and technology before the legal assurance levels can be met. And thankfully there is global standards. And thankfully we have a very supportive and progressive regulators and ministries that could actually push some of this next generation policy into place that allowed for this next generation technology to be leveraged.

So and I think it was just that perfect storm. So. Yeah, it's a combination of compliance, technology, threats, evolution. And at the end of the day, you know, the industry wanting to adopt the sort of the next wave to fundamentally remove friction and drive more adoption. Now, philosophically, do you believe that we ought to embrace a GDPR kind of concept here? or more of a liberal, you know, type of embrace like what we're seeing in the U.S.? I think the principles of GDPR are extremely good. I think it comes down to his implementation.

Okay. And I think the tension is the belief that if we implement GDPR, the data is going to stop flowing. And if data stops slowing, then the digital economy stops flowing. And I think that is the delicate balance that needs to be achieved. And this is where we don't believe that these things are mutually exclusive. The same way that there was always a paradigm in the past of the more secure you make something, the less user-friendly it is. Or the more user-friendly, then you sacrifice security. And there's always a trade-off.

And I don't think it is a trade-off. I think you think about new architectures. Sure. And I think this is where with GDPR, I believe we're at a stage now that we have the technology that can allow for transparency, that can allow for consent and make it clear that the accountability of that consent, not only on the person or the business or the relying party using the data, leverages it for the intended purpose and only limited to those purposes that have been declared. But also that the end user is held accountable, that yes, they did consent.

So don't backtrack on saying you didn't consent. Now at the same time, allowing for flexibility that sometimes people make mistakes. And one of the basic things of the right to be forgotten, this is something that's quite difficult to implement. But with the latest, I think, at the basis of this, I think is really about consent before I go into any other areas. And if we think about back to the analogy of what is the artifact of consent, and if I go to a bank branch, how do I demonstrate that I do consent to the terms and conditions? It's a wet signature.

And now you can leverage a digital signature. So the proliferation of digital signatures, I believe, can assist, can help in some of this implementation. It's almost an inevitability, right? Yes. And I think it's important. I think data privacy and consent is now very top of mind, right? I think there have been areas of big data breaches. There have been areas of personal information being shared to third parties that, you know, at some point could.

you know, influence an election, or on another side, you know, be used to, you know, target market you in ways that you... And influencing elections results are not uniquely in developing economies or countries. They've happened in more developed economies or countries. So I think there are these genuine fears because we have seen these genuine risks. And I think it's only a matter of time that we do have to act and just ensure that, again, not to stop data from flowing. Data needs to flow, but make sure that the reasons of how it's getting used, what it's getting used for are clear and that someone agrees. I don't, you know, if you say, am I okay with sharing my location data,

is not a clear yes or no, right? If I'm just on a, you know, unknowingly walking around, maybe not. But if I'm trying to find a place and I want to use Google Maps to find that place and help me navigate, yes, by all means, use my location data. Otherwise, how am I going to get there? Right. So it depends a lot on context. And I think that's what ultimately, you know, we need the technology to assist.

I think we're at a point now that there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff. also working in the space on privacy-related tech that can help us get there quickly. I think, you know, early days of GDPR implementation in Europe, you know, check into hotel, and now this, you know, the receptionist can no longer scan my passport. They can't photocopy my passport. So the poor guy has to handwrite every, you know, only the limited data allowed. And as a result, I'm there waiting for him to handwrite every single detail as well. And a bunch of people behind me.

So I think if it's not implemented well, it can slow things down, and that is something we need to be cautious of. But if you deploy the right tools, we can have the best of both worlds. There's this theory or argument that, you know, the Europeans tend to be a little bit more strict with their GDPR concept because they're not beneficiary. of the tech space as big as perhaps the United States would have been in terms of job creation, in terms of monetization, and all that good stuff.

So would you or I could argue that it's economically driven, it's not data security driven? I think there is definitely a lot of truth to that. At the same time, I think the level of breaches are at scale and the consequences of those breaches are reaching new heights today than they ever did before. Whereas in the United States, I think it's only a growing level of concern over data privacy, even in the light, right?

Even in California, especially in California, in fact, where arguably they've harnessed the, you know, probably some of the greatest wealth creation from that. But there is now, I mean, they are very much most, one of the highest levels of concern in the United States is coming from California. And it's coming directly. So I think it, you know, just like any sort of level of innovation, it tends to be a pendulum swing one way and then to the other. Yeah. I think we're starting to see it swing back to this other area. of concern and hopefully it doesn't swing too far that things stop.

Right. I think that's something that we want to be conscious of. Am I okay with sharing my address? The question is for what? If I ordered something online, yeah, of course. You better send the logistics guy my address. Otherwise, the package is never going to reach me. Right?

So just making sure that, okay, the person that needs to know that information for that reason, it's fine. Yeah. But let's make sure it doesn't just go. to anyone who decides it or someone who wants to pay for that information can get it and use it for, you know, a lot of potentially malicious motivations. Yeah. And that's, and I think that's the concern, right? And I think we are at a day today where,

you know, controlling information transmission is almost impossible. And, you know, from an information security data security point of view, The answer is encryption. The answer is crypto. And just encrypted. And you don't have, and the key, no pun intended, is actually who stores the key. Sure. And how do you hold the key?

Sure. And these keys can be effectively given to each individual manage in an easy enough way and you don't have to think about all the security and all the tech behind it. But if they can be effectively controlling that access a lot more effectively, and that clicking a button, yes, I agree. I agree. Can only be clicked by me and not someone else. I think we can find that solution.

You just got to be able to check off the boxes, right, on measurability, accountability, and responsibility in terms of who gets to hold the key. Right? But going back to the earlier point, It's just very tempting to hypothesize that at the rate that places like Indonesia or Southeast Asia are going to be a great beneficiary of the tech movement in terms of job creation and monetization, I'm willing to bet, if not hypothesize, that the policy posturing is going to be less restrictive than the kind of GDPR that we're seeing in Europe.

for the time being. And as you suggested, there is going to be this pendulum swinging from one end to the other, incrementally or substantially, depending on, I think, the economics of things. But you got to draw the line very, very carefully and create the necessary balance between data security and the economics. Well, and I think this is going back to, I completely agree, it's a unique balance. you need economics, you need the market forces to drive these behaviors. And I think very simply put, if consumers care and businesses say the same way that,

how do you store my money, are you doing this in, you know, under your mattress? Are you doing this in a vault? And if you show me a vault, I'm like, hey, I trust this guy who has a vault, versus the other guy who's putting it under his mattress. And ultimately, I think the more progressive businesses have an opportunity to develop a higher level of trust with their consumers. And understandable, it is an investment in his mistakes and change. But I do believe that the ones that make that change earlier can preserve their trust with their customers and the credibility. And if you're playing the long game, I think that's where the difference will show.

The same way that, you know, there was hundreds of banks in Indonesia before, right? And now, why would one person choose one bank over the other? And it comes down to trust. It comes down to, hey, you know, a year from now, if there's a financial crisis, am I just going to disappear in the thin air? right? And obviously you need regulations and there's other, you know, checks and balances that have been devout to try and make the industry, you know, make sure that consumers stay protected. But ultimately, I think the onus is on the industry. And if the industry takes the long view

and is able to take the long view, I think those players will be rewarded, especially seen as, hey, this is transparent, this is fair. I get it. I understand. Does it mean I have to read a legal document? No, just show me what data I need to share and what you're using it for and we're good. I don't need to read a bunch of legal jargon. I want to have the option to, and I want to make sure that you're held accountable to all that legal jargon that you put in these agreements and then hopefully regulators make sure that that legal jargon is okay.

But ultimately, you know, is your average consumer going to end up reading the fine print? Maybe not. But I would appreciate it just the way today, if I'm going to be installed, you know, an app, there are permissions. And they said, hey, would you like to grant this app, you know, your location information all the time, only while you're using the app? There's easy ways to communicate and provide this transparency.

And it's already being done by Google by Apple. And there are user-friendly ways to achieve that. So, again, I don't think that this is rocket science. right? I think the solutions are there. The question is, is the will there? And if consumers care and are more demanding, or if somebody is willing to put a bet that they will care, and people gravitate towards that, then I think that there will be a natural evolution in industry. And the ability to take the long view. And unfortunately, even in some developed economy, some of the large players,

are still not able to take the long view. And that, I think, is a mockery. It's not a very good example for countries like Indonesia where I think we need to get more and more industry players to be able to take the long view. Hopefully entrepreneurship and startups, right, as disruptive as they can be. And it helps keep the whole industry on their toes.

And, you know, I can understand changing legacy can be very costly. And that's where hopefully fresh blood from fresh entrepreneurs can help solve these problems in new ways and hopefully move us along. All right. Now, you know, this dichotomy between what's happening in the entrepreneurial space and in the policymaking space, we know it, you know, we know that the policymaking space is not being compensated as well as the entrepreneurial space, right?

and as a result of which we have seen and we're likely to see continuing linearity of progress on a policy site vis-a-vis the exponential progress on entrepreneurial if not private space. How do we fix this, you know, imbalance or dichotomy? I think it comes back to the long view. And I think that it's not about, A, you know, obviously education, socialization, getting regulators and up to speed is going to help. But I think ultimately it's about the industry itself. And the industry, at least key players banding together to take the long view.

That they want to preserve trust. And in things like FinTech, in things like cybersecurity, that's the currency of your business. Yeah. And you would be foolish to neglect it. And I think sometimes it does take a few incidents to happen. And it may not happen to you directly because you are, you know, you yourself have been looking after your interest. You're doing it well for your own company. You're implementing the right, you know, risk mitigation, you know, policies internally and you're deploying the right, you know, investments to make sure.

that you can manage the risks, but sometimes, you know, somebody else out there, a cowboy can blow up. And the ripple effects, the shockwaves, you realize after a while will hit you, even if you hurt everybody. Hurts everybody. And that's where I think at a certain level of industry maturity, at least I would hope, and I think this is the beauty of what happened at at AFTAC, at the FINSEC association, we decided, hey, guys, we got to work together. We got to work together. We can help come up with the right kind of policy recommendations and help shine the light on how other countries do it, what are global industry standards, what we can implement,

and what effectively, as an industry, our de facto standards, we're all following anyways. and how do we just make this all more efficient and how do we all take our part? Let's not expect the government to do everything. Let's, in fact, take this opportunity to help and in the end help ourselves. But again, you take the long view. And doing it on your own, I think,

is very costly and very expensive and very time-consuming, you know, you're researching on white papers and benchmarking. But if you band together and pool our expertise together, and we pool our resources in the private sector together, we can come up with very effective policy recommendations, and as long as it's been done professionally, and we have it vetted by independent management consultants who benchmark other views in other countries and give it,

you know, you say, hey, you do your own research, this is our thesis, this is what we believe, you can challenge it, you can bring up all the, the good, bad, and the ugly of what we're saying, but please give a fair and professional view. And I think once we manage to do some of that heavy lifting of homework and identify when we say cybersecurity, what does it mean? Right. If we say, okay, we need to improve authentication. Okay, are there standards? Yes, there are global standards to all of this. And let's pull out those frameworks. We don't need to reinvent the wheel. And let's help guide that along and present

the facts as fairly and as clearly as possible to make the decision-making process at policymakers a lot easier. Yeah. As a devil's advocate, would you agree to the notion that such body that would be responsible for making the policy recommendations ought to be as inclusive as possible as to include non-industry players as to reduce the bias of policy recommendations. You may want to include academicians. You may want to include, I don't know, NGOs that you think, or we all think,

could be stakeholders in what matters. And I think that is something that we do. And it's something I firmly believe in is making sure there are independent views that are there. But I think at the first and foremost of being able to untangle what the industry needs to unpack growth should come from the industry constituents. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Right. And I think aligning the priority of that agenda. But then validating and verifying is that agenda a fair agenda and ensuring that there isn't too much bias?

There will always be bias. But make sure that there isn't too much bias and involving. you know, professional third parties, whether it's, you know, from the world of academia, we often do involve, for example, we work together with quite a few universities that have, that are strong practitioners and advocates of cybersecurity to help, you know, chime in on these cybersecurity frameworks. Are these fair or not? And both not only in Indonesia, you know, respected institutions, academic institutions, but also abroad. So we try and balance us out. We, We also are fortunate to get a lot of help at the FinTech Association.

We get a lot of help from the Gates Foundation as well, which helps connect us to a little bit more of the international community. We have people at the World Bank help chip in their views as well. So there's a lot of different perspectives. What we try and do is try and help distill it and simplify it, but at the same time,

be transparent and say, hey, you can talk to all these experts, You can engage them. Here are the people that we believe have a strong level of expertise and knowledge in each respective domain. Seat them out. And maybe they'll consult with you directly. That's fine. And we just want to create as much transparency. Our policy papers are all published.

They're all online. So everyone can feel free to read them, to critique them, to give your comments and do it as a, an industry as a whole and beyond the industry as a large community. So I think it's, it's been a tough mission. If anything, it started off a little bit more like a think tank that, you know, as an industry association. And I think there's still a lot of work to be done. And ultimately, you know, it relies on a lot of people to take the long view,

a lot of entrepreneurs to take the long view to volunteer their time. Yeah. and expertise and to take a fair view. So it's not easy, but I think this is where we've been lucky to have, you know, a good, a really solid group of, you know, of a lot of working groups, which actually self-form and people that naturally step up

and volunteer to take the lead in a way that is very much volunteer-driven and it's very much been, built on this long view. So I think it's hard to get and expect that from every industry. But to me, that's, you know, ultimately, if you talk about technology standards, you really do need the industry practitioners to highlight a few. But there are other professionals, especially certification bodies who audit and create course standards that can be consulted at our part of these groups for us as well.

So we try and mix it. It is not always the fastest to mobilize, but we try and make sure that it's as fair and transparent that when recommendations can be made, that they can be taken seriously. Stuff like this requires patience. And it's okay if you're willing to take the long view. I want to ask one more philosophical question before we get to the more mundane questions. You know, we started off with your mentioning of the Republic, right? And I did mention about data democratization. And I've been making the point a few times earlier in other discussions about how data democratization has not really yielded the kind of equality of opportunities, welfare, and all that good stuff, as we would have envisioned.

And that is troubling at many levels, to me at least, and to many others. Part of that, I think, and I'm hypothesizing here, could be attributable to the fact that data democratization has not related or correlated with the democratization of ideas. We have seen the de-democratization of ideas in thriving democracies. I'm not going to mention country's names there. And I think the inability for people to democratize ideas, while at the same time we're trying to democratize data, it's sort of like getting jammed in a door where we're supposed to get through that door as to create level playing field, if not more equality of opportunities and welfare. I'm curious as to what your views are.

So I think it depends, obviously, on the territory and industry. I think in financial services, especially if you point towards Europe and the European markets, I think the concept of data democratization is very clear. and I think the concepts of, especially in financial services, of open banking and making sure that all of my banking history that basically forms a form of credit history should be portable and should be portable to my financial institution of choosing, right, as a consumer to open up choice, to prevent the downside of locking, right? And I think a lot of types of technology have started to enable these types of democratization, right? I think at a fundamental level, things like open source, right? And what all those movements have done have created a lot more democratization of technologies. And I think today there's not only the technology which is being democratized through these open source movements.

But beyond that, there are new architectures of decentralization that are also recurring. Now, decentralization of security is something that you almost would say is an oxymoron for a lot of the time, right? And I think one of the, you know, the controversial topics that is now prevalent everywhere is cryptocurrency. Sure. Cryptocurrency, as much as I won't talk too much about cryptocurrency, it's more to just demonstrate that the decentralization and democratization of security is there today and is evidenced by cryptocurrency. So the ability to hold a digital asset that has value is already proven at scale today.

Now, it's applied to an asset that is considered a currency, but to me, that same type of technology can be applied to data. Now, that is not as simple and as straightforward, because then you have to think about data exchanges, how does data flow, consent frameworks, et cetera, need to be thought out more carefully. So it's not exactly plug and play. But the concept of democratizing the ability to and decentralizing the ability to own a digital asset is already at scale today. How do you apply those same concepts to data? I think it's not so far away. And it does rely on, I think, regulators and, you know, I think governments to take a correct. view and get their heads around this, but more importantly is industries that need to preserve

that trust. And I think, you know, not only as I've referenced a lot around financial services and obviously I have a big FinTech background, so I'm clearly biased there. But if we look at healthcare today and we think about what are some of our most sensitive data, it's probably our medical records. And there's definitely, and there's a lot of red tape, there's a lot of bureaucracy to try and change anything there and rightfully so because it's very sensitive. So there's a lot of points to consider. I think one of the silver linings of this pandemic is it's forced us to evolve and force us to think differently.

And the next sort of big buzz that's happening today is the concept of a vaccine passport, which is effectively a digital. medical record. Yep. Now, if you can already start achieving and cracking through some of those barriers of understanding how to exchange very sensitive data like medical records and these types of frameworks start to get established, other data like financial services seems a lot of easy.

Right? So it's at a point today that it's out of necessity, right? And I think, you know, famous quote is always, you know, necessity is the mother of all invention, right? And I think we're at that point today. Some would say desperation is the mother of all invention. Right. So. Let me push on this, Nikki.

I'm only making the point, or trying to make the point, that democratization of ideas is not. happening as much as we're seeing democratization of data. And I take your point on crypto. And, you know, two reasons why cryptocurrency is just skyrocketing, right? Because it's so finite. The amount of money that you can mine is finite. It makes it quantifiable. While at the same time, paper money just keeps getting printed on a daily basis. It keeps getting more infinite. And that makes it a lot more difficult to quantify, which makes it difficult to assign value to a paper, money. And the second reason is simply because it's the most uncorrelated asset class you can find for hedging purposes or diversification purposes. But going back to the idea of ideas not

being democratized well enough, I think it correlates with our continuing inability to create equality, you know, of opportunities and welfare. And I think, you know, you're going to play a big role, dude, in data democratization and making sure that, you know, all the barricades and whatever are there. Just, I want to plant this in your head that it's got to correlate with our continuing ability to democratize ideas because the democratization of ideas will ensure that it's not,

not just the few that have access, the many have got to have access. Right. And we've seen how the social networking platforms have basically, you know, shrunk, you know, the funnel within which ideas flow from one and to the other. To the point, we're seeing only two obvious eco-chambers, as opposed to many eco-chambers. And each eco-chamber is not communicating with the others. Right. And that, I think, is a factor as to why we're not seeing, you know,

declining genie coefficient ratios in developed economies and developing economies. No, I definitely agree about the polarization of these scaled networks is something that actually kind of went against. the initial premise of, you know, of being able to create more ideas and connect with people. Yeah. And it is, it is something that was a surprising consequence, and I think few expected. But I do see that today, if I were to talk about how would I, the first thing that came to mind when he said democratization of ideas, I think fundamentally comes down.

to entrepreneurship today as being some of the ways that you can democratize. And hopefully through what you're doing, for example, with this podcast here, inspire other entrepreneurs to share their story and hopefully someone else picks it up. Absolutely. I can do that too. The big reason why I started this podcast was to get going with the democratization of ideas. Yeah. And I want smart people like you to be exposed to those who want to be like you or those who could be better than you, right? I think it's pretty amazing. Well, you know, I learned so much from you, Pagita. Hey, this is your show, dude.

It's, I think, a combination of, and what I think the endeavor model did really well is a combination of, you know, building an entrepreneur. entrepreneurial ecosystem, but also having this mentorship funnel down and the spirit of paying it forward. And I think going back to that, take the long view, right? Absolutely. You got to pay it forward, man. And you have. You have started. And I see you as somebody who's going to continue paying forward. And the reality is I feel like I get so much more back in ways that I never. Absolutely. And it's truly wonderful. And I really think that, you know, hopefully the democratization of ideas will come down to the democratization of the ability for everyone to, you know, take their hand in creating their own vision.

Yeah. Whatever that is. And bring new innovation, bring new ideas. I think, you know, as much as there has been a concentration, you know, with some of these networks, I believe there will be space. and pockets for new innovation, right? I think you look at the history of companies as they involve, and arguably today there's definitely some concentration amongst the tech companies.

But that same technology can be harnessed. And as long as I think leaders of industry continue to embrace this open philosophy of collaborating and laying the foundation for future generations is to build off and improve more. I think that this is the value ecosystem that we really need to invest in and perpetuate. Look, you were mentioned in Alamanda's book, right?

And Allah is on a mission of creating coding experts, right? She was not a believer from the get-go of setting up a company that would be the coolest app or whatever. She was more interested in creating, you know, new talents that could venture into different dimensions. I want to try to align her mission with your mission, right, by asking you the question, where do you see Indonesia in the next 25 years in the context of singularity? Right? Because for us as a society to attain singularity, we've got to be really cool in knowing IT, knowing tech, knowing artificial intelligence, and for that to intersect with biological science, we've got to make sure that there is enough talents in Indonesia, you know, in the know with respect to biological science. before we can even start conversing, much less executing singularity in the next 25 years.

How is that for a mundane question? Do we have another hour? You know, I told you I got lots of questions popping up in my head, but, you know, I'm being cued by my guys, you know, you only have a few minutes left. We may have to do another session, but this is getting really, is getting really interesting. I think ultimately, yes, we have to invest in the education and, you know, we need people like Allah to push the envelope of non-education only in academic institutions, but in vocational

area where people have the opportunity to learn and frankly, I think online education and the source of information is there. right so you can go on you know to a plenty of online sites to pick up world-class education today so there's no question about i think access to information i mean access to practitioners to help you get to help mentor you to help you help you grow as an individual i think is very critical I think beyond that, it's just hopefully getting enough leaders to set the right values and inspiration to get the next generation to say, this is the future and this is what I want to invest my time into. Because the information is there. The access to it is there. You can, you know, Google can access, you know, the world's information.

And if you're clever enough about how to look for something, but more importantly, if you know why you want to look for it and what it means to you and you're willing to spend the hours, you're willing to burn the 10,000 hour mark to develop some level of mastery on a subject, I think that's what it takes. So where are we going to be in 24 years from today? with respect to singularity, I think ultimately, you know, I do believe that we need to really definitely invest a lot more, I mean, practically speaking in the short term, into the sciences, into STEM education, and to hopefully promote those subjects

as being really a lot more, you know, sexy. And it's not just the tech geeks, but this is the professions of the future. And I think it is already starting to happen, right? And part of it is market dynamics. And seeing these big tech companies grow and having unicorns and having these huge financial numbers, at least create a level of monetary aspiration,

I think it can start. But in the end, I think it's about having enough leaders give back and invest in the community to build that, you know, that this is not just a pipe tree. You can get it. And whether it's through a vocational program, through Alas Binar Academy, to you to help, you know, move you along in that direction.

But ultimately, I think it comes down to, you know, good leaders encouraging, you know, at least for me personally, I think the mark of my sense, success is if I think about if I'm successful or not, it's not about me. It's about did I spawn a generation of other leaders that can take help and build new things? And the same way that, you know, in in the valley, it was the PayPal mafia or before that, right? Even before that, you know, but people more familiar with the PayPal mafia and what has what has grown from there. And I think it's amazing. And I think Gojerk could be the PayPal equivalent for Indonesia.

I would hope so. And I think that's where... Or arguably Kartuku could be the PayPal. Well, I don't know. I think Gojek was probably more the PayPal Mafia than PR. I don't know Kartuku is, but maybe, you know, Let it not be the case in 10 years time when other countries would have been able to produce more developed humans. Yeah. In science and, you know, empirical science and biological science. Well, I think here we are not getting engaged in the conversations, much less the execution of things. Well, and I think that's where, you know, the transfer of knowledge can happen in a number of ways.

And I think being more open and even open to having, you know, experts from abroad and being able to learn from experts from abroad as well is something that can definitely help move us a lot. Right. And I think there's, I can understand that there's definitely the fear of, well, that, you know, who's going to end up capturing the value that's created. But to me, you know, if we... That's another episode, man. You know, I've spent a couple of episodes on that particular topic, but we could, yeah, you're right. I mean, it's, I think it's misplaced, that sort of insecurity.

Yeah. And I think more and more, you know, this corner of the world, Southeast Asia is undoubtedly going to be. be a hotbed of economic growth and digital economic growth specifically for the next 20 years. Yeah. And I think the more open we can be and encourage healthy levels of competition, right, healthy levels of competition and get people to aspire and dream bigger and invest back in the community to help, you know, hold people's hands in this initial journey, to give people those.

initial opportunities to do things they never thought they could do and let them, you know, throw them in the deep end and then realize that, hey, they can swim. And I think that building that ecosystem, and I do believe Indonesia has a very strong spirit of entrepreneurship. I think that's the one of the biggest things in our culture that we do have, that is extremely powerful. and it just needs to be channeled in a direction of the sciences and hopefully will help make that grow a lot more exponentially. Yeah. I think your generation and even Generation Z are going to play a big part

in entailing a greater degree of open-mindedness for Indonesia as a country and nation. Hey, Nikki, we've spent 106 minutes talking about, you know, mostly philosophical ideas and concepts. But this has been fascinating. Anything else you want to add to this conversation? No, I just remember now the name, as you said, to PayPal Mafia. I just want to add and chime in here. I think Gojax the PayPal Mafia

but Kartaku is arguably Fairchild semiconductors There you go There you go We hope that we We give seriously as an inspiration And thank you Pagita For

For doing this podcast For helping to marketize these ideas And I And getting the word out there I think it's so important What you're doing And really appreciate Thank you

Thank you And I wish you all the success for Vida and you. And stay healthy, man. Yeah? You do, Bagita. Thank you. Okay, thank you.

Tremant, that's Nikki Lukur, founder of Vida. Thank you. Endgame is a podcast by the School of Government and Public Policy Indonesia. The first Indonesian policy school to offer a full-time master's program in English and is a production of the cinema

of Indonesia's award-winning entertainment and technology company. company. Oni Jamhari and Angad Wima Sasonko are our executive producers. Ahmad Zaki Habibi and Jimmy Kuntoro are our supervising producers. Hannah Humayra and Farah Abida are producers. Bobby Zarqasi is our director. Aditya Dema Pratama is our director of photography. Video editing by Felicia Wiradia.

Alvin Pradana Susanto is our sound engineer. sound engineer. Ratri Prati and Vera Rahmawati are research assistants. Aulia Septiadi and Ferbizal Optama are our graphic designers. Transcriptions and translations by Isfi Afiani. The song you're hearing is by Neil Giuliarso, Ferdinan Chandra, and Philippus Chahadi, mixed and produced by Gibran Wiriwaiiwai. The production of this episode adheres closely to the local authorities' health and safety protocols. follows.