About me
Everything here is my own. Not my employer’s, not my clients’.
I started out as a musician. At 21, my band Puppen put out our first album — self-produced, self-distributed, self-financed, because there was no other way to do it in Bandung in the mid-90s. The second album, Puppen MK II, had “Atur Aku” on it, a song that later made Rolling Stone Indonesia’s list of the 150 best Indonesian songs ever, published in their December 2009 issue. That whole experience of building something with no infrastructure and no budget taught me more than anything that came after.
In 2006, the British Council shortlisted me as a finalist for the International Young Music Entrepreneur of the Year award. In 2014, I won the British Council Young Creative Entrepreneur Award in Live Music, representing Musikator. That came with a curated tour of the UK’s live music sector, including three days at The Great Escape festival in Brighton.
After the band years I moved into corporate roles, launched a digital marketing consultancy, taught at a university for a stretch, and founded a couple of startups: Musikator, a music and content aggregator that eventually became a podcast, and Konserama, a B2B creative travel agency. I also spent time advising on music industry mapping and development planning for Indonesia’s Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy. Along the way I picked up a Magister of Management degree, with a thesis on entrepreneurship.
In the summer of 2018, I moved to the United States. Since then I’ve worked alongside teams at Meta, Google, Amazon, and Tesla, and contributed to smaller companies like Trove, Protein Simple, and Hyve Solutions. Same instinct throughout: find the most interesting problem, figure out how to work on it.
This blog is where I think out loud about music, tech, WordPress, video production, and what it’s actually like to build a career across two countries and several industries. No particular agenda. Just the stuff I’m working through.
I’m based in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area.