Final Word: Indonesian Startup and Beyond

Indogen Capital aim to be value-adding partner for founders looking to grow in expand into Southeast Asia market. We typically invest in post-seed stage up to series A companies. We have consistently generated above average returns for our investors through value-creation activities leading to strong portfolio exits. We leverage our key members’ extensive networks and operating experience across various functions and sectors.

Our list is by no means exhaustive. The best companies create their own sectors. As a general matter, the most promising companies (at least from our perspective as investors) tend to share a few characteristics:

1. They are not popular (popular investments tend to be pricey; e.g., Groupon at so many dozens of billions).
2. They are difficult to assess (this contributes to their lack of popularity).
3. They have technology risk, but not insurmountable technology risk.
4. If they succeed, their technology will be extraordinarily valuable.

We have no idea what these companies might look like, only that they probably will share these characteristics. Entrepreneurs often know better than we do what might be enormously valuable in the future.

Often, even great technologies fail to earn the inventors or investors a return (see, e.g., Nikola Tesla). In our experience, it really does matter who runs the business, because the world does not beat a path to the door of the better mousetrap. Shockley Semiconductor, Fairchild Semiconductor, and Intel all successfully resolved roughly similar technical problems, but only Intel truly prospered – poor management consigned the other two to “also-ran” status. Technology matters, but so do teams. A curious point: companies can be mismanaged, not just by their founders, but by VCs who kick out or overly control founders in an attempt to impose ‘adult supervision.’