Studentpreneur Hangouts UWIKA University, Surabaya.
Last November, I was invited by Studentpreneur magazine, Indonesia’s largest business magazine for young people, to speak at Universitas Widya Kartika Surabaya (UWIKA), along with Radik Kriolampah from Elven Games and Taufshwara Diasriandaru (or Ufan for short) from Jelasin.com. The theme of this session of talks is From Creativity to Innovation, and the objective is to provide a source of inspiration and motivation to the UWIKA final year students at this casual meetup.
Be yourself. Investors are unpredictable; anything can be their reason to fund your startup.
Radik first shared about his role as a COO, and his game development company Elven Games which has produced numerous popular games.
For Radik, finding the right people for the job is one of the most important factor for a startup. As for securing his initial capital to establish his game company, he took small steps at the beginning. Once he has found the right investor to trust his startup company, he explored and undertook bigger projects. In his experience, investors don’t always see and understand who you are or the people in your team. It is therefore important to just be yourself, and adhere to your original goals and objectives.
Establish a strong network and engage the right mentors, they shape your thoughts, ideas, and inspirations
Ufan from Jelasin.com stressed the importance of securing a good network and the right mentors. For the students, who they will become five years down the road will largely be shaped by the influences they get from the people around them today. Back in college, Ufan was known to his lecturers and school mates as the animator because of his passion in animations. This led him to become one, and achieve what he has today. Another advice from him for the students is “to always love what you do, and do what you love”. For Ufan, Jelasin.com was born from his love for making animations.
As the third and final speaker, I shared with the students my experience as a community manager at Nulab, working independently in Indonesia and remotely with my co-workers who are spread out across Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan. As a literature major in college, getting internship opportunities before and after graduation has been extremely helpful in my transition to working in the tech industry. The students were also enthusiastic to learn about Cacoo – its background and how it can be easily used for diagramming.
All in all, it was a wonderful privilege and experience to speak to the students of UWIKA. I also had the luck to run into Septi, a journalist from Jawa Pos – one of the biggest newspapers in East and Central Java regions. Thanks for the feature, Septi!
