Welcome to the Wild West: How to Fail Upwards in Indonesia’s Startup Scene
Fail fast, spin harder. Learn how Indonesia’s startup founders keep rising, even after fraud, collapse, and unpaid wages.
Welcome to the elite circle of startup founders who’ve cracked the code... not of business success, but of failure so spectacular it’s practically a resume booster. In this alternate universe, it’s not about competence or ethics, but how convincingly you can spin the ashes of your collapsed company into the foundation for your next big pitch. Bankruptcy? Fraud? Abandoned employees? No worries. It’s all part of the charm.
In Indonesia’s startup scene, these founders are thriving. If you can talk about “scaling rapidly” or “disrupting the market,” you might as well have your venture partner nameplate engraved already.
This isn’t a glitch in the matrix; it is the matrix. A system where fraud can be spun into “learning experiences” and unpaid wages into “unfortunate growing pains.” So here we are, wondering: is this relentless positivity the cost of innovation, or have we collectively swapped our moral compass for a valuation spreadsheet?
Fail Fast, Fail Often, and Get Promoted
The rallying cry of the startup world: “Fail fast, fail often.” It’s meant to inspire resilience and experimentation, but it’s become a moral get-out-of-jail-free card. In most industries, failure sparks reflection, if not an outright job search. But in startups? It’s a badge of honor, worn proudly by those whose “learning experiences” conveniently overshadow the trail of unpaid wages, ghosted vendors, and burned-out employees they leave behind.
In Indonesia, this fetishization of failure has reached almost absurd levels. A founder could squander the company’s budget on a wellness retreat in Bali, forget to pay their staff for six months, and still be celebrated as a “resilient leader navigating adversity.” Investors don’t flinch; they just nod sagely and write off the implosion as “part of the journey.” Because in this world, failure is romanticized.
The line between honest mistakes and reckless hubris has been blurred beyond recognition. Market forces crushing your idea? That’s one thing. But inflating KPIs to lure in more funding or slapping “innovative disruption” on outright mismanagement? That’s another. Yet, it rarely seems to matter.
The secret to success after such a debacle is audacity. Rebranding is key: you weren’t “in over your head,” you were “pioneering uncharted waters.” Investors, desperate to justify their faith in you, will happily play along. And before long, you’ll have traded your floundering CEO gig for a shiny new title: “Venture Partner.” Because nothing says “scrappy underdog” like convincing people to bet on you again, despite having sunk the last ship you captained.
In this upside-down ecosystem, accountability is optional, and reinvention is a given. Why fix your mistakes when you can pivot your way into another opportunity?
The Unblacklist-able Founder
In most professions, serious ethical violations like fraud, theft, or even something as basic as lying about your credentials would land you in the unemployment line, or court. But in the startup world? Here it’s a part of your origin story. While regular folks get blacklisted for missing a credit card payment, startup founders can commit acts of financial and moral gymnastics, only to find themselves comfortably shortlisted for their next venture or a high-profile VC role.
Imagine your startup crashes and burns after you’re caught inflating your CV with a fictional MBA, but instead of facing public disgrace, you’re christened an “Entrepreneur in Residence.” That’s right; you failed, but you’ve also proven that you’re “resilient under pressure.” It seems the bigger the scandal, the better the story, as long as you can repackage your misdeeds into something resembling a TED Talk lesson.
In Indonesia, this problem reaches absurd heights thanks to a trifecta of enabling factors: a cultural aversion to confrontation, an investor class hypnotized by charisma, and a media cycle with the attention span of a goldfish. Whistleblowers are painted as troublemakers, employees owed months of wages are gaslit, and anyone demanding accountability might as well be shouting into the void.
The result? A system where well-connected founders are the untouchable aristocracy. The ecosystem is playing an elaborate shell game, where the same players recycle themselves under different titles. Forget “disruption”; the real innovation here is in dodging consequences. And as long as investors continue to bankroll these comeback narratives, the cycle will keep spinning. Accountability? That’s so pre-Series A.
Investors: Enablers or Victims?
It’s easy to blame the founders, but let’s spare a moment for the puppet masters holding the purse strings: the investors. These are the folks who keep writing checks to the same cast of characters. In theory, investors are the gatekeepers of the ecosystem, but in practice? They’re more like ushers, eagerly showing questionable founders to their next round of funding.
The root of the problem? FOMO. Investors are so terrified of letting the next unicorn slip through their fingers that they’ll happily overlook glaring warning signs. Did the founder fudge their KPIs? Inflate their user base with bots? Misappropriate millions for “team-building” at five-star resorts? Who cares.
Some investors, faced with the embarrassment of backing a dud, will go to extraordinary lengths to protect their reputations. Rather than cut their losses, they’ll double down, giving failed founders a second (or third) chance. Advisory roles? Check. “Stealth mode” startups? Why not? It’s the startup equivalent of rehiring the Titanic’s captain to pilot your next luxury cruise.
These investors wrap their decisions in the language of innovation. “We believe in second chances,” they’ll say, as if they’re championing some noble cause rather than clinging to the hope that this time, against all odds, their golden child won’t blow up another venture.
Investors like to call themselves “visionaries,” but many are just as susceptible to shiny packaging as as the rest of us. And as long as they keep enabling bad actors, the cycle of unchecked failure will march on, bankrolled all the way.
A Startup Blacklist: Innovation’s Necessary Evil?
What if we took the startup world’s obsession with disruption and applied it to accountability? Introducing: the Startup Blacklist™, a simple, no-nonsense database that tracks founders’ histories like a credit score for ethics. Lied about that Harvard MBA you didn’t get? Misappropriated Series A funding for a beachfront villa? Left your employees hanging without salaries for months while you launched another round? Congrats, you’ve earned a prestigious spot on the list!
Of course, some will clutch their pitch decks and cry foul. “But failure is part of the process!” Yes, failure is indeed part of innovation. But let’s draw a clear line: failure means your app didn’t scale, not that you siphoned funds to your offshore account. There’s a world of difference between a founder who faced genuine market hurdles and one who left a trail of unpaid wages and vaporized investor dollars.
The Startup Blacklist isn’t about penalizing risk-taking; it’s about finally calling out the worst offenders for what they are: grifters. Imagine an ecosystem where founders think twice before forging a degree from MIT, knowing their name could end up immortalized on a permanent list.
Such a list serves a practical purpose: protecting employees, investors, and the ecosystem from repeat offenders who hop from one failed venture to the next, leaving destruction in their wake. It signals that the startup world isn’t some Wild West where anything goes.
Wouldn’t it be refreshing to see accountability in action? To watch as founders realize they can’t simply rebrand as “visionaries” after torching another company? That’s the kind of innovation the startup ecosystem truly needs.
Indonesia’s startup scene is brimming with potential. But if we keep giving standing ovations to bad actors while ignoring the trail of unpaid wages, fraudulent degrees, and creative accounting they leave behind, we’re only fostering a parody of innovation. At this rate, the ecosystem isn’t so much a meritocracy as it is a stage for audacious charlatans who’ve figured out that failure is a profitable strategy.
Now, before someone accuses me of crushing dreams, the solution isn’t to discourage ambition. We need audacity; we need bold thinkers. But audacity without accountability is chaos. A startup blacklist is about protecting the ecosystem from people who treat it like a personal ATM. If we don’t enforce some level of accountability, we’re underwriting the next high-profile implosion.
So, what’ll it be? An ecosystem that rewards visionaries, or a revolving door of Teflon founders who leave messes for others to clean up? The choice is ours, and the clock’s ticking.
At StratEx - Indonesia Business Advisory we help companies build leadership, culture, and governance that actually works. Contact us to ensure accountability doesn’t get left behind.