Startup company Indonesia

At 43 years old, Izak Jenie is still talking about new business ideas and starting projects. He just can’t stop. This is a man who has started more than ten companies in Indonesia, beginning at age nineteen. Most of them failed, but those that survived are renowned companies in Indonesia today and are generating tens of millions of dollars in yearly revenue. Some very successful companies Izak started include Jatis Group, Jatis Mobile, and Metrotech Makmur Sejahtera (MMS).

Coming from an average income family, Izak was hungry for success. His first startup was a computer graphics company launched in 1989 during his university days. Computers were not widely available then and there was no internet. Izak was lucky enough to get a PC at home and he subsequently taught himself digital graphic design. Being one of the first few guys in Indonesia with this skill, he got lucrative projects from advertising firms. He was able to pay his tuition fees with some cash left over to treat friends for meals. However, competition grew and his margins thinned. He got out of the business in its fourth year.

The early web

After graduation, his friends were able to get high-paying corporate jobs quickly, but it took Izak nine months to get a job as a graphic designer because most companies hired based on academic results. He worked for one year but realized that he didn’t like the routine corporate job. While at the office, Izak would often work on other tech projects that interest him. One was called the Free World Dial-Up service, it would allow people to call overseas using the internet and save on overseas call charges. It’s basically exactly what Skype does today, but Izak was working on that concept in 1995.

That same year, he read a book titled Going Digital by Nicholas Negroponte and it made him realize the world was going to change. He quit his job and started an online bookstore. Concurrently, he also started a few other companies with different partners. These startups all failed. Poor timing and partnership disputes were the causes of their demise; for example, the online bookstore flopped because there weren’t many people online in the mid-nineties and almost no one did their shopping there.

Despite failing numerous times, Izak never gave up. Together with Jusuf Sjariffudin and Ishak Surjana, he co-founded Jatis Group, an IT consulting company in 1997.

One of his early employees there said:

Before joining Jatis, I asked Izak why this (Jatis) will be a success? Izak answered nonchalantly that he had failed in so many previous companies and in each failure, he learnt something from it. As such, he had already learnt how to fail. Jatis will not be a failure.

And indeed, Jatis became a hugely successful company. It provides IT solutions to banks, telcos, payment companies and other corporations. Its products include internet banking, mobile banking, and tax systems. At one point, more than 80 percent of Indonesia’s mutual funds traders were using Jatis’s trading platform. The company started with ten employees and eventually grew to over 500 by the end of the third year. In the same year, it also received $10 million from 3i, a well established VC firm from the UK, for it to expand regionally to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines.