When Tokopedia Proclaims a Culture of Sharing Knowledge

Like the science of rice, the more it contains, the more it bends down. This philosophy may have inspired Tokopedia to enter its decade to introduce Tokopedia Academy, a platform to spawn new digital talents specialized in technology, product management, product design and data.

There are four pillars that Tokopedia Academy wants to emphasize, namely conferences, workshops, partnerships with universities and the government. The initiation in each pillar has been gradually introduced since last year.

For example, a partnership with the University of Indonesia for AI Center of Excellence. Then, the technology conference START 2020 which was held for the first time on Saturday, (22/2) in Jakarta.

Tokopedia's Senior VP of Engineering Herman Widjaja explained, Tokopedia Academy is a form of company to return to contributing to the community. So far, the community has played a very important role in the development of the company.

“Tokopedia Academy is like umbrella of all initiations, where we can give back for digital talent in Indonesia. For the START conference, we want it to be regular every month on a smaller scale. We will also ask technology infrastructure practitioners to share,” he said.

In the workshop, it will routinely be filled with various intensive training classes filled by Tokopedia people for the general public for free. The duration of the training will be flexible depending on the needs of each topic.

"After completing the training, we hope that participants will not only be able to Knowledge from our team, also when on-the-job training” added Tokopedia VP of Engineering Aswin Tanu Utomo.

Minimal technology-only conferences

Tokopedia Co-Founder & CEO William Tanuwijaya explained, over the past decade, more and more digital startups have grown in Indonesia. However, the current conference events are more focused on business potential.

In fact, for technology companies what is needed the most is the power of innovation by the humans themselves. The backbone is in the technology team that needs to be scaled up.

“Tokopedia can grow because there are teachers. The mistakes we make become the best experience. This knowledge can be utilized by people who are creating startups or corporations that are on the way to transformation, by taking the essence of our experience so that they don't have to make the same mistakes, "explained William.

He gave an example, when the Tokopedia site down before global investors step in and provide knowledge transfer, the solutions taken are very conventional and often rely on information obtained from Google. When these solutions are tried, they often fail until they look for subsequent solutions.

Some of the investors behind Tokopedia are Sequoia, which is an early investor from Google; and Softbank were early investors of Alibaba. As soon as global investors came in, reinforcements came with best practices from their portfolio. The transfer of knowledge was so felt, that it was able to make Tokopedia where it is now.

Co-Founder & Vice Chairman of Tokopedia Leontinus Alpha Edison added, technology conferences are still a rare item in Indonesia. Abroad, activities like this are often held by well-known technology companies, such as Google with its Google I/O and Facebook with its F8.

It contains sharing sessions that are very useful for skill escalation and can be applied directly to work. Most of the speakers have a lot of experience and are willing to share their mistakes with people around the world.

This culture needs to be encouraged in Indonesia so that more technology companies will emerge in the future. According to him, developing the digital economy cannot be done entirely by the company alone, it requires talented talents.

“Now is the time for collaboration. This academy is for our sharing session for Tokopedia, the impact of doing this is definitely long term and does not have an immediate impact. It does not matter. In my opinion, the technology problem in each company is different, so it can't be played copy, said Leon.

Print generation "PayPal Mafia"

William and Leon's statement was quite understandable. A special conference for engineer in Indonesia has never been held independently by a local technology company on a large scale. So far, similar activities have been held by communities and associations related to scoop smaller.

Abroad, this activity is also an event ShowCase the latest technology successfully developed by the technology team. Meanwhile, training activities engineer In fact, it has also been done by various global companies, such as Google and Apple.

Startups EdTech as Coded even dedicating himself to creating an IT ecosystem with its supporting pillars. There are other companies Gojek via Go-Academy. The concept is more or less similar to Tokopedia, it's just that it hasn't held a large-scale conference yet.

Leon continued, Tokopedia's participation in contributing to the technology community is a form of his desire to create the next generation of "PayPal Mafia" that can provide significant benefits for the country.

PayPal Mafia is a nickname for former employees and founder PayPal founded and financed tech companies such as Tesla Motors, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Pinterest and SpaceX. They have had a huge impact on digital developments globally.

William also added that he wants all Tokopedia employees who are successful internally to be given the opportunity to get promoted or build other startups that are having trouble finding digital talent. According to him, Indonesia needs more technology companies and adapts more new technologies. In line with Tokopedia's next focus after passing through the first decade.

Currently, Tokopedia has more than 7,2 million merchants, around 86% of whom are new entrepreneurs. Then 250 million products sold, more than 90 million monthly active users (MAU) or the equivalent of a third of Indonesia's population at least visit Tokopedia once a month.

The Tokopedia application has been supported by more than 12 thousand types of devices. Equipped with dynamic features so that all devices can download it. This feature contains the basic functions of Tokopedia, the amount of capacity will increase according to the additional functions they use. Not only marketplace, Tokopedia has other verticals, namely digital products, fintech, travel and entertainment.

Also mentioned, the company accommodates more than 1 petabyte data, equivalent to 1 million gigabytes. There are more than a thousand engineer who joined Tokopedia, the number has doubled from the previous 1,5 years, only hundreds. In the past three years, there were only tens of people.

The entire technology team at Tokopedia is now working with the concept microservices. There are more than 300 microservices here. Microservices is a type of architecture in building applications by teams developer which divides existing services into smaller and interconnected parts.