Ronald Ishak's Ups and Downs Colored Indonesia's Startup Ecosystem

Since 2009 Ronald Ishak has colored the Indonesian startup ecosystem. Having failed with his first two startups, Domikado and Tasterous, he is now focusing on producing quality digital talents through the online training platform Hacktive8.

Ups and downs of a career as entrepreneur and angel investors giving it the ability to see the startup ecosystem from two different angles. To DailySocial, Ronald talked about the target he wants to achieve to support the growth of digital talent in Indonesia.

Up and down developing startup

The trend and popularity of Blackberry around 2008-2009 gave birth to the idea for Ronald to launch Domikado. Domikado's initial idea was to make it easier for users to buy and sell shares via Blackberry and leave the old way manually.

However, because at that time not many Indonesians were interested in investing in shares, Ronald had difficulty finding the right market. To circumvent existing opportunities, he embeds a variety of information on the platform, from restaurant lists to sports venues.

"I then hired interns as date entry, while the financial features are still under development. To do testing I send link to friends and relatives to start trying," said Ronald.

Ronald was shocked by the large number of Blackberry PINs coming in -- causing the system crash and had to stop temporarily. The great interest from the immediate environment gave him enthusiasm to develop products. However demand For information outside of financial services, their investors, namely Ciptadana Sekuritas, were questioned.

"Looking back Why was the stock buying and selling platform not successful in the past, because timing still very much so way too early for us to build this technology," said Ronald.

After leaving Domikado, Ronald decided to build a startup in a different vertical. He collaborated with Deche Pangestu to build it Tasteful. This platform, which was launched in early 2011, is basically a food hunting game that can be used on mobile devices. The app will show users the best local dishes close to the location.

"Only 8 months into it, we decided to closed Tasterous. At that time, Domikado had been purchased and existing talent was immediately recruited by interested shareholders repurpose company, making Domikado small exit for me," said Ronald.

Ronald also had time to help TADA, loyalty platform and reward, to develop the business until it successfully raised Series A funds. In the early days he served as CTO.

He never regretted the ups and downs of starting a startup. Everything is a life lesson to be enjoyed. Ronald admitted that he had kept a journal since he first founded the startup. There are written the ups and downs and experiences he has gone through.

Angel investors

RMKB Ventures, a angel investor group, founded by Ronald Ishak with 3 friends, namely Michael Cheung, Kevin Sutantyo and Benson Kawengian. Even though the investment amount provided is not large, RMKB has a number of portfolios, namely TADA, Qoala, Printerous, LoginID, Volantio, Little, Hacktiv8, GoCampus and Rebelworks.

The small number of startups at that time made it difficult for Ronald and his team to carry out the process due diligence. They then looked at the personal side of the startup founder for the curation process. Of the 8 portfolios, RMKB Ventures has exit in two startups. One of return from this process hascover some investments.

"Even from the side valuation all startups are good, we always think about it future exit returns. We've got some of those already partial exit," said Ronald.

Due to the busy schedule of each founder, for now RMKB Ventures has decided not to make further investments. Although there are still many offers and pitch deck who come in, they prefer to help these new startups find the right investors by leveraging networking which has been owned.

Increasing the quantity and quality of digital talent

Right now, together Hactiv8, Ronald has a mission to give birth developer the best is getting bigger demand-his. Hacktiv8 is claimed to continue to experience good business growth and has reached the level profitable.

The latest funding Hacktiv8 received was funding Pre-Series A in early 2020 worth $3 million (around 41 billion Rupiah) led by East Ventures.

"Hactiv8 was founded due to urgent conditions, where at that time we lost a team engineer in previous companies that were hijacked by e-commerce companies in large numbers. "Seeing the potential to produce developers in the country, Riza Fahmi and I finally decided to establish this platform," said Ronald.

According to Ronald, the presence of foreign workers enlarging engineer positions in Indonesian startups is a positive thing. Most of these engineers usually have skill and mature insight. Their collaboration with the local team can have a positive impact on development skill local talent.

"Until now and beyond, Hacktiv8 will continue to accompany us. Indonesia has become the most strategic market for investors until startups launch their business. In the future, I see bright potential for the startup ecosystem in Indonesia," said Ronald.