Starting Over, The Story of an Accidental Entrepreneur

By Nicko Widjaja

Entrepreneurship is the hot keyword of today, both in the developed worlds and developing worlds such as ours. The meaning of entrepreneurship itself has shifted in the past decade. Today, the terminology is closely associated with "high growth" and "innovation".
Almost everybody nowadays wants to be entrepreneur. The freedom to fulfill your passion or to carry on with your vision. Surely, all sound challenging and exciting. But, it's more of a challenge to keep the excitement alive.

This book will share Nicko Widjaja's experience to future young entrepreneurs. He made money and lost money, built a team and disbanded a team. Several times over now. Nicko Widjaja believe there's no single winning formula of entrepreneurial success, but rather a combination of mistakes and correct takes that make you more agile, resilient and sensible in making judgments. Entrepreneurship had changed Nicko Widjaja's perspectives in looking at life. And he believe it'll do the same to you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mosher Publishing
• Release date: Feb 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301099092

Book preview

STARTING OVER:

The Story of an Accidental Entrepreneur

By Nicko Widjaja

~~~

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2012 by Nicko Widjaja

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission from the publisher.

Edited by Dian Hasan

Cover by Thinking*Room

Published by Mosher Publishing

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

First printed edition: November 2012 (English Version) | ISBN: 978-979-17468-2-3

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

-- The Intention of This Book

PART I // CONNECTING THE DOTS

Chapter 1 - Self-Reckoning

-- The Degree of Importance

-- The Misfits’ Miscellany

PART II // REALIGNMENT PHASE

Chapter 2 - Paying the Dues

-- The Second Inspiration

-- Instant Karma’s Going to Bite You

Chapter 3 - The Fallacy of Big

-- Repatriation Period

-- The Accidental Entrepreneur

-- The Early, the Late and the Otherwise

-- The Unknown Factor

PART III // STARTING OVER

Chapter 4 - Breaking the Mold

-- The Organized Anarchy Model

Chapter 5 - People of Purpose

-- I Think...

-- Road of Perseverance

-- Breaking the Chicken or the Egg Paradox

Chapter 6 - The Death of Passion and Her Friends

-- Blinded by Rainbows

-- A Malicious Delicious Dream

-- Opportunities Defined

-- The Interpretation of Limbo

Chapter 7 - Starting All Over Again

-- New Venture, New Hope

-- Growing Pains

-- Hopping on the Value Chain Creation

-- Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

PART IV // THE NATURAL SELECTION

Chapter 8 - Hunches and Intuitions

-- The Tale of Samu

-- Harnessing the Unknown

-- Poker and Intuition

-- RISE: Reversing, Interpreting, Spacing, and Escaping

Chapter 9 - Leadership and Motivation

-- Liberating Education

-- Everybody Wants to be an Entrepreneur

Chapter 10 - The Locus of Success and Failure

-- Know Yourself, Niche Yourself

-- (Change) Reboot the Standard

Chapter 11 - Beginner’s Spirit

-- On the Offensive Play of Entrepreneurship

-- Lesson Learned

-- Rewarding Curiosity

PART V // SHAPE OF THINGS

Chapter 12 - The Emerging Demographic

-- The Demographic Miracle

-- Times They Are A Changing (Or Not)

-- You Say You Want a Revolution?

Chapter 13 - The Shape of Things to Come

-- The Next Frontier .CO.ID

-- Funding Innovation: Systec Group Ventures

-- The Rise of Indonesia’s Next Entrepreneurial Class

-- The So-Called Innovation Movement

-- Here Come the Charlatans

Chapter 14 - And in the End...

-- It’s You Vs. The World

-- Jumping the Curve

-- The Resilience Factor

-- Final Note

Notes

Acknowledgement

About The Author

INTRODUCTION

The Intention of This Book

This book is not for everyone.

I am not a professional writer, nor do I have an extensive writing experience. I’m neither a motivational speaker nor a career coach. I did try writing a screenplay once, and it failed terribly – worse, I had it produced.

English is not my mother tongue. Although I spent over ten years in the U.S there are still limitations to my expressing thoughts on any number of subjects. Moreover, Bahasa Indonesia does not provide a way out of my predicament. Instead it complicates everything I’m trying to convey. While other local authors try to mix and match English vocabularies and idioms to their Bahasa composition, I refuse to fall into such a trap.

It took me more than two years to finish this book. Often, I wasn’t in the mood to write or I was distracted by the routine of life. My colleagues advised me to finish the book by hiring a ghostwriter, but I didn’t feel good about it. I mean, why would you hire someone to write something about you? While I appreciated the offer to collaborate in finishing this book from a few colleagues of mine, I had to reject their offers. I was determined to write this by myself.

While it was thrilling to being able to detail and compile my own experience and that of others into one comprehensive story about innovation and motivation – two of the most misunderstood words within the Indonesian context – I soon realized that the subject of this book had been redundantly written by authors from all over the globe. Nevertheless, I felt there were still many angles unexplored, especially when it came to the entrepreneurial context of the 21st century Indonesia. I felt that an entire new generation was on its way to redefine what entrepreneurship was all about. Enough with the story about the fried bean curd seller down the street, or the supermarket mogul running around the aisles in shorts. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Indonesia will never again find itself in an era such as this one. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Indonesia is predicted to reach its demographic peak between 2017 and 2019, where the 15 to 64 years’ old will most likely be the largest among the groups analyzed. Then, BPS (Badan Pusat Statistik), the Indonesian Central Statistical Agency, released a report establishing that the number of youth between the ages of 15 and 24 was the largest in 2011 – counting no less than 80 million people.

It is quite obvious that we are about to see a significant change in our society as technology and education are now becoming cheaper and more accessible. I can bet that in just less than a decade from now, we will see the emergence of a new breed of entrepreneurs. Those who are sharp-witted, social savvy, fluent in one or more foreign languages and marketing proficient will be the ones who will forge a career for themselves in an emerging economy that will combine technology sophistication and design sensibility to the myriad of opportunities Indonesia will have to offer.

If you’re about to quit your job and start something on your own, you might need this book. Although, I will tell you this: if you think by being entrepreneurial you will get more money, think again. If you think you’ll be happier with your own business, well, that depends how committed to the task you will be. If you think you’ve lost your passion at work and want to do something different, you better not sign that resignation letter and start kissing your new boss’s ass once again. If you’re happy with what you’re doing right now, and just need something of a reading amusement, I envy you. Yet, I suggest you start writing down your career perspective, while listing the things that make you happy (or rubs you the wrong way) and all those issues that you wish to improve in your life. Where will you want to be in five years from now?

I may have used specific stories of my life, but only if they were helping me in building my argument on certain topics I wanted to develop. I started to chronicle and jot down nearly everything that happened during my third entrepreneurial attempt in the late 2009. The first one was okay, but the second one went bankrupt shortly after I opened its doors. So, this is the story of lost and found. Future entrepreneurs need to realize that it ain’t gonna be a smooth ride. Many people have become my inspirations – my former bosses, coworkers, families, clients, business partners, friends, employees, and apprentices.

Although this story is based on actual events in my career, characterizations, timelines and incidents have been altered to suit my purpose. And more importantly, this book explores my personal feelings toward persons, groups, institutions who have contributed to my growth and development of expertise in entrepreneurial businesses. It is a journal of learning, which relates my observation while watching how everyone adopts the idea of entrepreneurship and motivation from many different angles. The characterization is definitely not based on a consensus of any kind.

I’ve been an accidental entrepreneur since 2006. Accidental meaning I was not planning on having my own company. I was a professional since I graduated from college. My last professional gig was working for one large food-manufacturing conglomerate in Indonesia and I was in charge of central marketing for the whole company’s line of products. I was 31 when I was asked to resign from the Company.

Being an outcast is never easy in Indonesia or anywhere else. Especially, since I was enjoying my work. I recall showing my old business card several months after I was no longer working there. Being banished from the CBD (central business district) of Jakarta is one of the worst things that could happen to a professional in his or her early career. Although, I considered myself an outcast all my life, this one was hard to recover from. It was some sort of a post power syndrome type of distress. Only I experienced it when I was really young. When most people are on their way up at 31, I was on my way down.

I’ve come from a family of a jewelry merchant, third generation. My father is the sole proprietor of a diamond jewelry store. Like most of Chinese businesses, everything is connected. I have an uncle who is in jewelry providing supplies, selling equipments and tools to retailers. Another relative is in a diamond wholesale business, and several others are in the jewelry retail business like my father. It’s like a network of jewelry businesses.

However, I didn’t grow up in the store like most Chinese merchant class children. In fact, none of my siblings ever did. Perhaps, my father wanted his children to pursue other opportunities, something bigger than the realm of small business. He envisioned us being directors or Chiefs in large multinational corporations. He wanted his children, especially, the eldest – me – to follow in the footsteps of my elder cousins who are working in banking sector, manufacturing companies, and large multinationals.

Thus, he invested in our education abroad. A pricey one, too. Although I went to Oregon, where everything was relatively cheap, I was not like most sons. It took me six years to finish my undergraduate degree. And if some families have one black sheep, in mine my siblings and I were the three grey sheep of the family.

I learned about diamond businesses when I was writing a dissertation on the diamond business in the U.S. in 2000 for my graduate degree. At that time, my research also covered a growing online commerce in this type of high-end merchandise. I looked into a company called BlueNile.com was the leading company in that category, the Amazon.com of the diamond and jewelry businesses. The company became one of my subjects of my investigation into the new phase of the (more) connected economy. I was fascinated not by the size of the industry (around $3 billion at the time), but by the shaping of people’s buying behavior online, such as how trusting people were in purchasing something at the advertised price without touching the merchandise before it was paid and delivered to their door.

When I shared this knowledge with my father, his response was: That’s something unimaginable in our society standards. Agreed. I could feel his disappointment; his eldest son didn’t work for Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan like the rest of my peers, instead I was working for a small-unknown marketing research company in San Francisco who advised venture capitalists on how to market their portfolio of products and services.

I was never an ambitious person in college. I used to wake up really late. I never asked a raise when I was working, and worse; I didn’t feel I needed to do anything else even though my father is not a billionaire. And yet, here I am writing a book about motivation. I was never involved in any serious organization in school, nor entered any kind of academic competitions, and here I am today judging marketing competitions, and assessing business plans. I skipped class all the time, and now I teach at one leading business school in Indonesia with a perfect attendance. Worse, I never considered myself a business builder or an entrepreneur, but for some reason there are a lot of people who ask me what I can do for their businesses.

My father visited our office a few times. Although, he never asked me how much I made, he knew it was not much compared to what he made when he was my age. He threw out questions like: Is everything okay? every now and then like most concerned fathers.

And I would be very concerned too if I didn’t know what my 30-something-year-old son does for a living. Often times, my father didn’t understand half of the terminology I was using to explain what I was doing. Definitely, I was no longer working as a professional; instead I have now my own office doing something different from the rest of the pack. At least that’s what he was thinking, until one segment aired in the Australian Broadcast Network, where I was interviewed about my work of mapping and profiling the urban youth of Indonesia. He texted me saying how proud he was and letting me know that I was going in the right direction, and how he never understood my way of thinking.

Yet, to me, everything’s a process. It was difficult to understand at the beginning, or even had a patience to wait until it was time to reap the profit of my labor or to feel the pangs of regrets. However, from experience, I can say that once you learned how to do it right, the rest will follow. Many would see entrepreneurship as a way to gain financial freedom, or pursuing passion. (I saw it that way at first) but once I undertook the entrepreneurship path, I see it as neither. Entrepreneurship is a powerful tool to make your world matter; it is designed as a locomotive of change. A change agent in many respects. Entrepreneurship enables you to do many to improve your surroundings, and in the end, make yourself matter in the process.

I hope this book will somehow inspire you to find something... beyond. An exploration of oneself in a form of retrospection that will eventually lead to a manifestation of idea by connecting the dots into one’s past.

This book is dedicated to the next generation of entrepreneurs.

The time is yours!

PART I // CONNECTING THE DOTS

Chapter 1 - Self-Reckoning

"A mind is a terrible thing to waste"

The United Negro College Fund motto, 1972

In 1995, I stumbled upon a TV advertisement for the United Negro College Fund with the motto: a mind is a terrible thing to waste.

It was a powerful ad. That commercial stuck in my mind as I realized that I lacked the motivation to do anything. This happened in 1995, when the Internet was not as knowledgeable as it is today, and my only source of motivation was television.

In 1993, I went to the U.S. and enrolled in Oregon State University in Corvallis. At first, I hated it. I ended up in that college because of some random reason that almost everyone I knew was going there. The school has a good program in engineering, one of the best on the West Coast. And since I was a science major in high school, my next step was to pursue an engineering major, the same thing most of my peers did. I never understood classification at the time: high school social majors were going to the school of economics or social sciences, while high school science majors were inclined to more technical schools.

The university has a long list of famous alumni in science and engineering. I had never heard of them until I searched their names on Wikipedia. Paul H. Emmet is known for his involvement in the Manhattan Project when he developed a technique for the separation of Uranium-235 from Uranium-238 (materials to make an atomic bomb). Phillip Emeagwali is known for his use