Crystal Widjaja: belief

Transcript context

…Oh man. Okay. Maybe we'll get to that. And we're going to be chatting a lot about consumer growth and a bunch of stuff along those lines. But before you get into that, you have a fairly unusual path and also geography as compared to many of my other guests. And so just to set a little context, could you just walk us through your career path and journey from, I think as an investment banker initially, and then currently as chief product officer at Kumu and then living in Singapore also? So yeah, tell us all about your path. Yeah. I think my path was certainly a nonstandard one. While I grew up in San Jose, the Bay Area, you could see companies like Lyft emerging around the year that I was graduating college. But really it was how do I graduate college as quickly as possible because this is very boring. So I took a Poli Sci major. I am not a math or a computer science major. I didn't know what a consultant was because I was just trying to get out of college. I didn't realize people start looking for jobs before they'd graduate. So the last two weeks of school I was looking on Craigslist, because I was like, "Craigslist is how everyone gets a job." I'm a first generation American student, so my parents could not help me at all with like, "You should look into this company called McKinsey," or, "Here are all of the life paths that you have ahead of you." So I ended up taking an investment banking research job. And my job there was to figure out how to call startups and analyze their potential for VC financing or M&A advisory. And I barely knew what those words meant at the time. I ended up owning a huge Excel database of 130,000 rows, 60 plus columns. And because again, I am very impatient, I was like, "This is a terrible experience. How would I create a customer database?" And so I ended up Google fooling all of the work needed to build a MySQL database, I presented a plan, and investment banking, surprise, surprise, is not very tech forward. So they looked at my plans and they're like, "What is this MySQL thing? Isn't that super expensive? What is open source?" So I ended up leaving that job because I realized that if I wanted to get into something more tech, it would probably not be at a investment bank. So I did took the investment banking strategies that I had learned there and applied the same pattern matching to companies in Southeast Asia. So my family originally is from Indonesia. I thought I have a kind of safety net, I must speak Indonesian really well just by birth, so maybe that's a great country for me to look at. So I took the approach of let's find a company that makes a lot of sense, that I feel I resonate with. And I literally cold called emails some companies. So Gojek being on that list. I literally emailed someone after Googling HR at Gojek and said, "I'm willing to move to Indonesia, take a bet on me." And they actually did. So I got extremely lucky. Five years fly by insanely fast. I went through building out the data team from scratch. When you have all of the data, you know how much fraud you have in the system. So then I ended up building out the fraud and risk team, picked up performance marketing, and then it was like, okay, now we're ready to grow. So you have all of this data now take on growth. Got it. You were very modest about Gojek and the success of that company, and also Kumu where you work now. So just to set a little context for folks that aren't familiar with these companies, can you share how big they are and how big of a deal they are in Southeast Asia?…

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