Michael Saputra: Success and Failure Building a Startup is Part of a Career Journey

After experiencing the ups and downs of his career, Michael Saputra, who was the founder of a food delivery service startup Click eat and ready-to-eat food startups Black garlic is now COO at PasarPolis.

Having had experience working in the Indonesian startup world since 2012, Michael is reluctant to (re)build new startups and prefers to work at established startups such as PasarPolis.

He shared stories of success and failure during his time in the industry.

Not satisfied working in a corporation

When he first returned from studying in the United States, he worked in the corporate ecosystem. The existing atmosphere and routine were apparently not suitable enough passion a Michael. Together with his friend, Willy Haryanto, and other Co-Founders, in early 2012 he founded Klik-Eat.

Klik-Eat is a food delivery service that tries to provide a solution for those who don't want to get stuck in traffic jams, but can still taste the delicious food from their favorite restaurants.

"My experience when I started building Klik-Eat was how the company could be scale-up. "It's true that the resources and ecosystem we had before are still very limited, but we are able to run a business," said Michael.

Apart from its core food delivery business, Klik-Eat also spread its wings by releasing the online catering service Papa Bento. One of the awards that Klik-Eat received was being Indonesia's representative at the 2012 Echelon event. Klik-Eat provides delivery services in the Jakarta, Tangerang and Bandung areas.

Kik-Eat's success was noticed by Japanese companies. In 2014, Japan's largest food delivery service, Yume no Machi Souzou Iinkai (hereinafter Yume no Machi) announced increase in share ownership Click-Eat delivery services from 19% to the majority (above 50%).

Klik-Eat then changed its name to foodspot and held directly by a team from Japan. Michael Saputra and Willy Haryanto, the two remaining co-founders, left the company and founded a new startup called Black Garlic.

Almost similar to Klik-Eat, Black Garlic offers ready-to-eat food products and ingredients delivered directly by the internal team. They work closely with the William Wongso Culinary team -- with Olivia Wongso being the company's Chief Product Officer.

Still a new concept online catering At that time it made it difficult for Black Garlic to develop and be accepted by society. Ultimately the company must close service in 2017.

"I have never had any regrets about the closure of Black Garlic. [..] It seems that what we had to offer was still too much early. "It might be different if we were present now, when the situation and conditions [of the food delivery ecosystem] are supportive," said Michael.

After Black Garlic, Michael joined the platform car sharing with an automatic system specifically for Jakarta residents, Hipcar. Founded by Leo Tanady, Hipcar was launched in 2015 as a transportation service car sharing first in Indonesia. As COO, Michael saw that the services Hipcar offered had great potential.

"Since a long time ago passion I've always been in the technology space. I see that with Hipcar you can create something good with a concept rental cars take advantage of other people. "At that time I believed in the concept and decided to join Hipcar," said Michael.

After two years with Hipcar, Michael decided to join Xiaomi Indonesia as Head of Operations. Having only worked there for 6 months, Michael returned to the startup industry and joined a startup insurtech PasarPolis.

Not interested in becoming an investor

After taking part in developing two startups, currently Michael has no desire to build a new startup. The experience currently possessed is devoted to development PasarPolis. He wants to grow the company and make it a reality profitable.

"I'm not the type of person who likes to do things side projects. When I am involved in something, I will focus 100%. "Ideally it should be like that in order to be successful, namely focusing on one area," concluded Michael.

His position is COO PasarPolis Currently it is hoped that it can complement other C-level ranks in the company. Michael expressed his appreciation to the founder and CEO PasarPolis, Cleosent Randing. According to him, it is very difficult to build a startup with a co-founder, let alone establishing a startup independently. Strong motivation and vision are needed to be able to build and survive.

When most entrepreneur series Many have "moved quadrants" to become investors, Michael stated that he was not interested in following that step. Positioning himself as builders, not as visionary, Michael is more interested in building a startup into a large company and growing positively. However, he continues to open his eyes to new technology and trends, and continues to pay attention to what investors are currently paying attention to.

"If asked if I would be interested in becoming full time investor, the answer is no. Not being passion As an investor, I am more interested in operations and don't really like to predict the next big thing," said Michael.

According to him, the process of setting up a startup then and now is very different. Before the startup ecosystem developed as it is today, the business focus was how to create a platform that could sell products from offline to online. Meanwhile, currently more and more startups want to complete the solution niche and specific to the wider community.

What startup founders do today has greater challenges and risks compared to 2012.

"From the investor side, I also see that more and more investors are coming in to offer large amounts of capital to startups. The money and the stake "It's different from investors in the past," said Michael.