The Age of Indonesian Entrepreneurs When They Founded Their Company

Earlier when I attended my class at my campus this week, there was this question from my professor: "Most successful entrepreneurs are young entrepreneurs". It was a True and False question, and I answered False which turns out to be the correct answer.

That single question from my professor this week makes me think, does age really represent the rate of success of entrepreneurs?

In most cases, we judge entrepreneurs by their brilliant ideas. In addition to that, we often associated young people have generally better ideas then relatively old ones, hence the prior statement was mentioned: "Most successful entrepreneurs are young entrepreneurs"

So in this piece, I would like to show how old were some of Indonesian entrepreneurs when they founded their company.

The Findings - Age of Indonesian Entrepreneurs When They Founded Their Companies

Before I continue any further, I have to mention that there are more than 30 entrepreneurs in Indonesia, these are only samples that (hopefully) represents the rest of the population.

Based on the findings, these are the 5 youngest entrepreneurs:

• Anugrah Pakerti, 21, founded Avoskin
• Leonika Sari, 22, founded Reblood
• Christianti Indiana, 22, founded Sociolla
• Rama Mamuaya, 23, founded DailySocial.id
• Andi Taufan Garuda Putra, 23, founded Amartha

Other interesting findings on this research also suggest that, even someone that already at their 40s such as Adrian Gunadi (39, founded Investree) and Novistar Rustandi (40, founded HarukaEdu) can still become an entrepreneur and established their own company.

But the main question lies: How can someone become a successful entrepreneur? How can we come up with an idea? Well, there are 5 (five) sources that someone can actually come up with ideas that pave the way into entrepreneurship (based on studies from Harvard Business Review):

1. I experienced a pain point in my life and I want to solve it. In my opinion, this is one of the most popular start-up ideas out there. Let's take Traveloka founder Ferry Unardi. He founded Traveloka because he experienced difficulties that he felt when he want to travel or book flights. Thus he created the company so no one has to experience it anymore. Traveloka is now one of the unicorns in Indonesia.
2. I met someone talented, and we started a company together. This is the case for Anderson Sumarli (founder of Ajaib) who met his co-founder Yada Piyajomkwan at Stanford as an M.B.A. student. So start making friends wherever you are whether at school or at work. You never know - one of them might be the "one" that opens your way to become a successful entrepreneurship.
3. I have a special skill or passion, and turn it into a business. These kind of founders that falls into this category constantly finds unique ways to turn their hobbies into a business. In my experience, most of educational technology companies in Indonesia were founded this way. The founders are really passionate about education and want to provide everyone the same level access of information.
4. After working in the industry for so long, I saw a customer need. The founders that falls into this category spend years working in a certain industry before they finally founded their own companies that falls in the same category of business.
5. I researched many ideas and eventually narrowed it down into one. These founders are the ones that I like to call the "visionary" ones. They conduct a top-down research with the process of elimination to finally validate which is the best course of action. Even most likely to fail, they are persistent and keep finding ways through research before finally make a decision in a single idea.

Summary

I think we can all agree that finding ideas is hard, let alone becoming an entrepreneur. Idea might fail, it might not work. Even 42% products out there failed because there are no market needs.

But these failure serves as a purpose - as a reminder, that although everyone can be entrepreneurs, those who have grit and stamina, determines who will prevail at the end. Don't be afraid to start, be afraid of not giving it a try.

Raw data: https://bit.ly/3miVpZZ