Welcome to Fantasy Island Where Indonesian Startups Are Worth More Than Versace
In Southeast Asia an economic fairytale was born. This was no ordinary market. No, this was a place where startups with negative margins, no profits, and a dream to “expand regionally” (read: burn money in more countries) were being valued higher than established businesses with actual revenue, assets, and paying customers. Welcome to Unicorn Country, Indonesia — the Disneyland of delusional valuation, where billion-dollar numbers are plucked from the air and assigned to apps that remind you when to feed your catfish.
Here, the laws of business physics no longer apply. Profits are optional. Cash flow? Antiquated. The only currency that matters is narrative, and the only qualification needed to print imaginary value is a half-decent deck and a GoWork office.
And leading this economic safari? Grown adults with terminal degrees and LinkedIn profiles that read like a resume mating ritual. MBAs, CFAs, and partners at respectable “emerging market funds” all lining up to throw cash at startups with hockey stick charts and a lot of adjectives.
Except, this wasn’t investing. It was performance art.
The Gospel of Growth: Thou Shalt Burn Cash and Call It Progress
In Silicon Valley, there exists a holy doctrine—The Gospel of Growth. It decrees that profitability is for the weak, and that burning through millions of dollars a month is not only acceptable but a sign of visionary genius. “If you build it, and lose money fast enough, they will come,” is whispered like a mantra over almond milk lattes and cap table spreadsheets.
Indonesia adopted this creed with missionary enthusiasm. The nation’s tech ecosystem wasn’t just growing—it was ascending, spiritually, into Unicorn Heaven. The chosen ones? Gojek. Tokopedia. Bukalapak. Traveloka. Ajaib. Xendit. eFishery. Kopi Kenangan. Each one a testimony to the transformative power of venture-backed bravado.
There was only one small issue: the businesses didn’t actually work.
Most were hemorrhaging cash. Unit economics were so deep in the red they needed scuba gear. Logistics were fragile Rube Goldberg machines made of motorcycles, Google Sheets, and unpaid interns. And customer retention strategies? Let’s just say if you stopped giving discounts, users disappeared.
And yet, these companies were christened “unicorns,” not by wide-eyed teenagers, but by serious adults. Zoom calls were filled with phrases like “platform moat,” “super app potential,” and “SEA TAM expansion.” No one mentioned profit. That was gauche.
Then came GoTo—the fusion of Gojek and Tokopedia—an unholy marriage of two unprofitable giants. The market valued it at $32 billion, proving once and for all that if you combine two money-losing companies, you can indeed create a larger money-losing company. Which, in venture terms, is apparently the same thing as success.
Venture Capital: The Art of Lighting Money on Fire for Sport
This wasn’t an economic miracle. It was performance art, starring venture capitalists with too much money, too little time, and a deep emotional need to believe that the next decacorn was lurking somewhere between Jakarta traffic jams and Bali coworking spaces.
See, after the 2010s gifted us with zero interest rates and infinite liquidity, VCs found themselves drowning in cash they had to deploy. Emerging markets became the new Vegas. A place to gamble big, lose with dignity, and maybe win something that could be spun into a Medium post about “disruption.”
Indonesia was irresistible. The pitch was intoxicating:
270 million people!
All glued to smartphones!
Young, unbanked, and ready to be digitally colonized!
And look, someone just downloaded TikTok in Medan!
So naturally, in a country where most people still pay cash for groceries, a digital bank became a hot investment thesis. Why not?
The funding rounds came fast, bloated, and completely unhinged. Series B rounds had the swagger of IPO roadshows. Due diligence was less about business models and more about the founder’s LinkedIn vibe. Did they speak fluent "scale"? Great! Write the check.
Valuations became a parody of themselves:
$50M for 5% equity? Boom: unicorn.
Never mind that liquidation preferences basically guaranteed VCs got paid first — whether or not the business survived.
What was the startup doing? Oh, selling iced coffee. But with an app, so it was obviously fintech.
Everyone was chasing “the next Grab.” Unfortunately, no one stopped to remember that the current Grab still isn’t profitable. But in VC land, reality is optional, and term sheets are eternal.
Building Empires on PowerPoints: The Birth of the PowerPoint Billionaires
At the core of Indonesia’s unicorn boom were the founders — charismatic, well-groomed, LinkedIn-optimized individuals with just enough real-world experience to be dangerous. Many were ex-McKinsey, ex-Google, or “ex” something prestigious enough to slide onto the first page of a pitch deck. Their true skill? Not building companies. Building decks.
Their PowerPoints were masterpieces of speculative fiction, blending delusion with design thinking. Every slide was a promise. Every graph pointed up and to the right. The Total Addressable Market (TAM)? Always $100 billion minimum, even if the product was fried tofu delivered on demand. These were not founders, they were storytellers.
Some of the greatest hits included:
“We’re transforming traditional aquaculture with AI-driven feed automation.” (Translation: we put a timer on a fish feeder.)
“It’s Stripe for Southeast Asia, but with local nuance.” (Translation: our payment gateway doesn’t work outside Java.)
“We’re building Uber for warungs… on the blockchain.” (Translation: even we don’t know what this means.)
The product? Often half-built. The revenue model? Largely theoretical. But the vision? Crystal clear. And so, companies like Kopi Kenangan reached a $1 billion valuation because it dared to dream of becoming Indonesia’s answer to Starbucks… but venture-backed.
Then there’s eFishery, the high-tech aquaculture darling that scored $200 million and a $1.4B valuation digitizing the noble art of fish feeding — before being caught in a scandal involving “financial inconsistencies”, which is startup code for creative math.
But when your empire is built on PowerPoint, all you need is belief, buzzwords, and a really confident font choice.
Reality Bites: When the Music Stopped and Everyone Was Still Dancing
By the time 2024 rolled around, the startup party had begun to look a lot like the morning after a particularly wild wedding: the DJ had packed up, someone was crying in the corner, and nobody could quite remember why they thought dancing on tables was a good idea. Enter the cold, unfiltered light of public markets, where dreams go to be audited.
Suddenly, all those glorious unicorns had to do something they’d long avoided: show their work. Numbers were no longer abstract concepts in investor memos — they were now on earnings reports, quarterly filings, and balance sheets that had fewer “growth synergies” and more “existential problems.”
GoTo, once paraded around with a $32 billion valuation, found itself gutted, trading around $5 billion. Bukalapak, whose IPO was heralded as a milestone for Indonesia’s digital economy, promptly halved in value. Meanwhile, eFishery disappeared, with rumors of number-fudging floating around.
And the buzzwords shifted. “Growth” was out. “Profitability” was in. “Visionary founder” became “cost center.” “Strategic headcount optimization” quietly replaced “we’re hiring.” The vibe went from TED Talk to tense boardroom in about six months.
VCs, once happily handing out $100 million checks like party favors, were now squinting at spreadsheets and muttering things like, “So… when do we make money?” For many of these companies, the answer was: never. There was never a plan, never a margin, never a sustainable model.
There was only the dream, the deck, and a belief that if they just grew fast enough, maybe no one would notice the fire in the kitchen. They noticed.
Indonesia’s unicorn era wasn’t so much a tech revolution as it was a collaborative hallucination. A mass suspension of disbelief. This wasn’t about building the future — it was about building belief, preferably one with an eight-figure cap table and a BCG slide showing explosive “SEA Growth Potential.”
Let’s be clear: nobody was actually duped. The VCs knew. The founders definitely knew. The media, analysts, and LinkedIn influencers? They knew too. But the incentives all pointed one way: keep the story alive. Keep the headline unicorn count climbing. Ask no difficult questions and reap the sweet, sweet rewards of pretending this catfish-feeding app was Southeast Asia’s next Alibaba.
Indonesia didn’t break the system. It just played it with flair. It gave us PowerPoint billionaires, iced-coffee moguls, and agricultural SaaS-for-fish founders all basking in billion-dollar valuations while actual businesses, ones with customers and profit, quietly chugged along in obscurity.
But don't worry. The hype train never stops. Web3 didn’t work? AI will fix it. Sustainability? Add blockchain. Just wait. The next trillion-dollar idea is already being pitched. Probably.