Creating a Mission-Driven Environment and its Importance to Future Entrepreneurs

Rachmat Kaimuddin

 

Rachmat Kaimuddin is Chief Executive Officer of Bukalapak. He is a seasoned leader with cross field and industry background, including experience in engineering, management consultancy, and financial institution.

 

Bukalapak is one of the 4 unicorn startups in Indonesia. It is one of the largest e-commerce companies with more than 4 million MSME sellers and 70 million monthly active users. The company was awarded at the 5th ASEAN Entrepreneurs Award organized by the ASEAN-Korea Centre and Maekyung Media Group.

 

The world as we know it, has changed. I have lived through three different crises in my life.

 

The first one was the Indonesian political turmoil in 1998 that coincided with the Asian financial crisis, and the second is when I graduated from college in the United States. Having graduated with an electrical engineering degree, I faced a job market reeling from the burst of the dot com bubble. Even though I was lucky enough to find a job in Boston, the highlight of my second day of work was the 9-11 incident. The third one was when I was about to finish my MBA from Stanford University in 2008. While learning about the Debt Market, we saw the Mortgage-Backed Security crisis unfolded, which brought the Global Financial Crises.

 

When COVID-19 started to gain traction in every country in the world, I knew that this will be another crisis. A serious one. This pandemic that has been happening since the beginning of 2020 has altered plans of so many people, and caused a dent in the world’s economies, but it also transformed businesses quickly than ever before.

 

We have to acknowledge that this virus is dangerous regardless of your age and it also has successfully pushed people to their limit in the name of survival. What I have learned from facing three crises in my life is to always move forward and increase the chance of your survivability. This year is not only about survivability, but it weighs more onto your ability to adapt. To keep an open mind despite the circumstances, and also to be flexible with whatever you are working on.

 

Here is the beauty of survival; It transforms, and it evolves whoever is embroiled in it and that’s what I’ve been seeing in the past six months since the beginning of this pandemic. We’ve been seeing the increase of technology adoption by our MSMEs in the past months. Interestingly enough, this also spurred people to move their space into digital channels and platforms in order to keep their business running.

 

I can see that people are building resilience and toughness as the crisis goes by. There’s always a choice in perspective of how you look at things and I prefer to look at things optimistically. Despite the chaos, we could still find a lot of positives coming out of this. What I’ve also learned is to always believe in the mission. I believe that it’s always important to be mission-driven be it that you are a person or a company.

 

In Bukalapak, we have this important mission; to create a “Fair Economy For All”. We believe technology could transform our society’s life by opening access and opportunities, removing burden on their shoulders, and making their life easier. With technology, we want to address obstacles in doing business particularly for MSMEs and boost their performance by broadening the market, increasing productivity, and to be more efficient in doing business.

 

I am hoping with this mission, we have more opportunities to enable more entrepreneurs, especially the young ones to create and innovate to solve problems that we have now in our country. If Korea can be one of the major players in technology, then I believe it’s time for ASEAN countries to come forward.

position of the ASEAN-Korea Centre.