My story

01Where I come from

Long before I knew the word “startup,” I was living inside one. The second floor of my childhood home wasn’t a bedroom — it was where my father and his team built a hospital management system. While other kids played with toys, I was prying open early software to find its hidden features, and his colleagues would turn to a small boy and ask, “How did you do that?”

Then a downturn forced the office to close, and the house went quiet. That silence left me with a question I’ve carried ever since: can technology really help us if it can’t sustain itself?

02A principle that stuck

I grew up as the youngest son of a modest family that never demanded much from me — which, strangely, is exactly what planted a sense of sincerity. The idea that shaped me most came from an ustaz in my school years, a teacher who gave his time freely to kids like me he’d never even met. He taught me that privilege is a trust to be spent well, not a prize to be enjoyed.

The best people are those who are most beneficial to others.

I’ve tried to organize my life around that sentence ever since. It’s why I learn the way I do, lead the way I try to, and why “success” has never quite fit inside a job title for me.

03Learning by helping

That belief followed me to the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), where I studied Industrial Engineering. I learned faster by telling myself a simple story: if I understand this hard thing first, I can help my friends with it later. It brought good grades, but more importantly it made the work mean something.

Outside the lecture halls, I led the assistance program for our ethics coursework — coordinating hundreds of volunteers and reaching more than three thousand students a year. I watched some of them go quiet and teary in a session, as if they’d finally found something they’d been looking for. That’s when it clicked: real change tends to start from sincere leadership and a community where people carry each other.

04Falling into marketing

I graduated into the pandemic and, with few doors open, took one that led somewhere unexpected: a marketing team, in a field I knew nothing about. What saved me was an engineer’s habit — the itch to understand the whole system before touching any single part.

Asked to write my first-ever press release, I didn’t wing it. I read every release the company had ever published, gathered the performance data, and reverse-engineered what made some land far better than others. That obsessive, systems-first approach became my signature. I carried it into paid media, brand, and eventually product marketing, grew through a series of roles over about four years, and was fortunate to be recognized as a top performer along the way.

05A lesson in foundations

Somewhere along the way I learned a humbling truth: growth without foundations is fragile. For a long time I optimized for the numbers that look impressive on a dashboard — reach, acquisition, conversion — and paid too little attention to the quieter ones that keep a business healthy over years.

I also learned that sincerity alone isn’t enough. Good intentions need rigor, data, and the courage to push back when something isn’t right. That realization didn’t discourage me; it redirected me. I started digging into the analytics and economics beneath the marketing — the parts that decide whether growth actually lasts.

06What I’m building toward

That’s what’s taking me abroad next: a Master of Commerce at the University of New South Wales, focused on business and marketing analytics. Not for the title — for a specific set of tools. I want to help Indonesian tech businesses grow in a way that’s both beneficial and durable, built on data-driven stability rather than borrowed momentum. If the platforms my country builds next are going to matter, they’ll need firmer ground to stand on. I’d like to help lay some of it.

07How I think about all of it

If there’s a single thread running through my life, it’s this: when I hit a problem, my instinct isn’t to find a shortcut — it’s to understand the system behind it. I’d rather admit what I don’t know than pretend I’ve arrived, and I’ll take an uncomfortable truth over a comfortable lie every time.

Put plainly, I’m trying to become someone who can carry greater responsibility — and I genuinely enjoy helping other people do the same. If that resonates, I’d love to hear from you.