Tech Trailblazer

Nicko Widjaja is considered to be one of Indonesia’s pioneers of tech investing; today, he runs the largest corporate venture capital fund in the archipelago.

ou won’t see nicko Widjaja at many tech networking parties. Nor will you often catch him at superfluous industry conferences where panel speakers spend the whole day pontificating. Instead, this investor is quietly building Indonesia’s ecosystem of start-up founders and funders.

Nicko is always the softest-spoken guy in the room. But those who are savvy about the nation’s tech investment game know that he is at the bleeding edge of it all. You wouldn’t guess it, but the executive, still in his early 40s, is actively inventing the country’s future, one tech company at a time.

Nicko is the CEO and managing director of the archipelago’s largest corporate innovation and venture capital fund under Telkom Indonesia called MDI Ventures. The fund operates in Jakarta, Singapore, and Silicon Valley, with Nicko personally having green-lit capital injections for dozens of new digital businesses in the US, Singapore, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, India, Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia.

As of late 2018, portfolio companies under MDI Ventures have created observable value for Telkom’s digital transformation. The fund has seen some of its investments pay off via mergers and acquisitions in just three short years since it launched. One of its startups even went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

At the centre of all this action, Nicko quietly pulls the strings. Experts will tell you that investing in Internet start-ups is not for the faint-hearted. Because his work requires a high-octane risk tolerance on a global level, Nicko has become very good at negotiating a taut tightrope.

“My life puts me at the extreme ends of two spectrums,” Nicko tells Indonesia Tatler. Some people play sports or relax on the golf course. For me, meditation is the magic that helps me achieve the right balance and make sense of it all. This gets my mind where it needs to be.

“This industry is insanely competitive. People would think venture capitalists get to have fun like Santa Claus, but in reality, the business is widely misunderstood. I basically live in three different time zones each day. Our mandate is to become a digital scout and growth vehicle for Telkom Indonesia. This is why we focus our activities around three locations: Silicon Valley as the centre of innovation, Southeast Asia as the centre of opportunity, and India as the centre of development and engineering.”

Far from the concrete jungle that is Jakarta, Nicko’s formative years took place in the Pacific Northwest of the US. Before earning his undergraduate degree from Oregon State University in 1999, Nicko’s early 20s were spent playing in a grunge band and snowboarding on Mount Hood.

“Oregon shaped my spirit,” says the CEO. “The serenity of the mountains and

the unique culture I grew up in helped me establish a baseline for mental balance that I can always get back to when I close my eyes and clear my thoughts.”

While Indonesia was entering its “reformasi” period after the fall of Suharto, Nicko took a wild and crazy ride on Silicon Valley’s dotcom bubble and bust at the turn of the millennium.

In 2011, he founded Systec Ventures, one of the earliest venture capital games in the country. While many regard the now-dormant Systec as one of the vehicles that brought tech investing into the nation’s foreground, Nicko laughs and fondly recalls the operation as his pioneering effort—a necessary period of trial and error. The same year, he would go on to pen a book called Starting Over: The Story of an Accidental Entrepreneur, which recounts the saga of his own entrepreneurial attempts and never-ending education from the US and Indonesia.

“It has been a long and winding journey that brought me to where I am today. But I don’t believe in coincidences and I know everything happens for a reason,” says Nicko. “The next frontier I can see here in Southeast Asia is better financial inclusion for everyone via technology.”

“My life puts me at the extreme ends of two spectrums.”