Two Startup Co-Founders Announce Resignation: Modalku COO Iwan Kurniawan and Octopus CMO Hamish Daud

Top officials at startups Modalku and Octopus, namely Iwan Kurniawan (Chief Operating Officer) and Hamish Daud (Chief Marketing Officer), recently announced their resignations.

In fact, Iwan has given up his position as COO since June 2023, but will continue as Advisor until October 2023. Currently, Iwan is known to be taking a Master's degree in the US. From his LinkedIn page, Iwan is also listed as a colleague (fellow) Owl Ventures, a VC from the US that focuses on investment EdTech.

"After almost eight years starting and leading Modalku (2015-2023), I am taking a career break to explore passion new. Since last year, I have started to pursue my long-standing interest in education and human resource development, starting by taking a Master's degree in Education at Harvard. I invested time to understand human learning really effective," he wrote on his official LinkedIn page.

Iwan was one of the founders of Modalku with Reynold Wijaya in 2015. Modalku managed to improve employee efficiency last year, then pocketed additional loan facilities (debt) amounting to IDR 117 billion from Norfund to expand access to funding for MSMEs. His party is also encouraging the quality of financing amidst the high level of bad credit in the P2P industry.

In its journey over the last 8 years, Modalku is recorded as having distributed a total of accumulated funding of IDR 7,24 trillion to borrowers since it was first established until now (year-to-date). Meanwhile, total outstanding loans as of the end of January 2024 amounted to IDR 120,6 billion.

Meanwhile, Hamish decided to leave Octopus for personal reasons after his company was hit by a late payment case last year.

"For the past four years, I have been involved in Octopus to have a positive impact on the environment. It is with a heavy heart that I announce today is my last day as CMO/Co-Founder. I am stepping down from my position at Octopus for personal reasons. I believe the company "This will bounce back and have a big environmental impact again in the near future," he wrote on his personal Instagram account.

For information, Octopus is an aggregator platform for collecting waste from scavengers and collectors for recycling which was founded in 2021 by Dimas Ario, Hamish Daud, Niko Adi Nugroho, and Moehammad Ichsan. Octopus was a selected participant in Batch 4 Grab Velocity Ventures and Batch 1 of the "Google for Startups Accelerator: Circular Economy" program.

In December last year, Octopus went viral after allegations of delays in employee salary payments were tweeted by its employees on the X platform. Octopus management only clarified the news in January 2024, stating that the delay was caused by the transition of the company's business focus to B2B.

Quoting the news TechInAsia, Octopus CEO Moehammad Ichsan revealed that, "This transition caused a decline in the B2C business segment and impacted cash flow, causing delays in [employee] salaries."

DailySocial.id I tried to contact Moehammad Ichsan to find out more information about this transition. However, according to the representative, his party will only explain the transition and development of the Octopus business after the 2024 election.