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What Indonesia's Last Decade Taught Me About Problems Worth Solving

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Article February 3, 2026

What Indonesia's Last Decade Taught Me About Problems Worth Solving

Let me start with a distinction that has taken me ten years to understand. Intelligence is knowing how to solve a problem. Wisdom is knowing whether that problem is worth solving. In Indonesia's digital economy, we've had no shortage of intelligence. We've built Gojek, Tokopedia, Traveloka, and a thousand other solutions. We've solved problems of transportation, commerce, and logistics with extraordinary creativity. The intelligence was never the question. But wisdom? That's been harder to co

☼ Challenge

3/20/2026 11 MIN READ

The Agent Will Always Call First: How Insurance's Oldest Distribution Model Still Owns the World, and Why That Is a Problem Nobody Is Solving

Let me start with something that took me an embarrassingly long time to say out loud. For most of my career inside one of Indonesia's largest general insurance companies, I believed that the agent was the product. Not the policy. Not the premium structure. Not the claims ratio. The agent. The person who sat across the table from a prospect, who built a relationship over months before a single proposal was signed, who called on their birthday and remembered the names of their children. In a busi

3/14/2026 5 MIN READ

The Infrastructure Mistake: Why Asian Companies Treat Their Best Revenue Channel as an Afterthought

Let me start with a pattern I have watched repeat itself for nearly two decades. A company in Jakarta, or Manila, or Ho Chi Minh City, grows to a respectable size. They have a sales team. They have a product. They have social media accounts managed by someone whose job title contains the word "creative." They pay a monthly retainer to an advertising agency, and they budget for Google Ads every quarter as if it were an electricity bill, a necessary cost to keep the lights on. And then, at some

3/4/2026 7 MIN READ

The Algorithm Knows You're Not Ready: What Google's Trust Framework Actually Means for High-Stakes Brands in Asia

I spent years inside one of Indonesia's largest general insurance companies, starting as a management trainee and eventually reaching a director-level position. What I learned during that climb was not just how insurance works. I learned how institutions think, how they govern themselves, and how they protect the one thing that makes their business possible: trust. I also learned something that nobody in those boardrooms was talking about. While we spent enormous resources building compliance i

2/14/2026 4 MIN READ

The Seven Business Architectures. A Field Guide to Entrepreneurial Landscape

Let me start with something I've learned the hard way. Every business is born with a specific DNA. Not a metaphor, an actual genetic code that determines how it grows, where it's vulnerable, and whether it survives its first decade. In my previous articles, I wrote about the arithmetic of abundance how building became 98% cheaper. I wrote about the difference between intelligence and wisdom knowing not just how to solve problems, but which problems are worth solving. And I wrote about sustainab

2/8/2026 5 MIN READ

What Ten Years in Indonesia Taught Me About the Ideas That Actually Survive

Let me start with a confession. I've had many good ideas. Hundreds of them. Ideas that would solve problems, make money, scale quickly. Ideas that looked brilliant on paper and died within months of touching reality. The difference between those ideas and the ones that survived wasn't creativity. It wasn't execution speed. It was something harder to measure: sustainability. A good idea solves a problem. A sustainable idea solves a problem in a way that can keep solving it, indefinitely, witho

2/1/2026 8 MIN READ

The Arithmetic of Abundance: What Happens When Building Becomes Free

Let me start with numbers. Not abstract ones. Real ones. Six months ago, if you wanted to launch a digital business in Indonesia, properly, you needed a team. Not because you were inefficient. Because the work itself demanded specialization. Here was the math for a single website project: Role Monthly Rate (Jakarta) Duration Total Frontend Developer 14 million 4 months 56 million Backend Developer 14 million 4 months 56 million UI/UX Designer 14 million 4 months 56 million System

For the EyesThat Prefer to Stay Closed