The Indo Tekno podcast is hosted by Alan Hellawell, who is the founder of Gizmo Advisors and a venture partner at Alpha JWC Ventures. In this episode, Alan talks to Leontinus Alpha Edison, co-founder and vice chairman of Tokopedia.
Tokopedia’s Leontinus Alpha Edison joins the podcast with a wealth of anecdotes from the company’s hari-hari awal (in English, “The Early Days”). Now a massive marketplace with more than 90 million MAU (Monthly Active Users) and roughly 9 million merchants, Tokopedia’s rise maps the evolution of e-commerce from a simple online price comparison tool to an increasingly critical driver of growth to the Indonesian economy.
Edison offers a refreshingly candid account of the ups-and-downs of building a platform from scratch. From the dark days of massive database outages, to the excitement of being the first to market with new payments solutions, the Tokopedia story is one of intense humility, dogged persistence, and ceaseless experimentation.
Edison himself is currently largely focused on cultivating the company’s future leaders. He concludes by detailing what Tokopedia has done to support the small merchant in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, offering some of the most profound examples of Tokopedia’s renowned sense of mission.
Listen to the full podcast here.
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