Forbes Indonesia Magazine - February 2017

In this issue

This month’s cover story on Nadiem Makarim and Go-Jek holds some valuable lessons for Indonesia’s business community. For one, it is simply a classic and impressive story of the power of the lone entrepreneur to persevere when faced with limited resources and modest success—it was four years before Nadiem saw Go-Jek really take off. It also demonstrates the potential of Indonesia’s vast market to create major tech firms, demonstrated by Go-Jek now sporting a billion- dollar valuation, earning it the right to be called a unicorn. Thirdly, Go-Jek is about technology’s transformational power to reshape what had been an large, but informal, industry of ojek drivers into a huge important business that created enormous value for its investors, its drivers and users, and, ultimately, the economy. In prophetic words, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt in 2012 favorably compared Go-Jek’s potential to that of Amazon, during a GEPI event in Bali in which Go-Jek also won an award.