Since April 2010

The biggest startup community in Indonesia.

#StartupLokal is where startups, investors, media, developers and people working in IT meet each other and find something to build together. It runs workshops, talks and networking evenings, and the meetup itself has fallen on the first Thursday of the month since 2010.

It began as a Twitter chat. In April 2010 a handful of people using the #StartupLokal hashtag agreed to meet in person, and on 6 May thirty-three of them sat down at the Starbucks in fX Sudirman. Nobody has charged for a seat since.

There is no membership, no application and no fee. The community has never owned a room either: for sixteen years somebody has lent it one, month after month.

By the numbers

Counted from the archive on this site, not typed into the page. They move when the community does.

123

meetups held

years running

214

people who have spoken

3,475

photographs in the archive

693

companies in the directory

How we got here

Sixteen years of meetups, two books, a trip to Ireland and the first startup incubator in Indonesia.

2010
A hashtag, then a table at Starbucks
The #StartupLokal hashtag was already circulating on Twitter in April 2010 when a chance meeting at the Starbucks in fX Sudirman, between Natali Ardianto, Rama Mamuaya, Dondi Hananto, Aulia Masna and Sanny Gaddafi, turned it into a plan for a monthly meetup. Meetup v.1 followed on 6 May with thirty-three people. Danny Oei Wirianto of Kaskus presented the SparxUp Award, and Rama Mamuaya of DailySocial offered the working definition the room used that night: Indonesian-owned, less than three years old, twenty staff at most, under a billion rupiah a year.
2010
The room fills up
Meetup v.2 ran alongside TechCrunch's fifth-anniversary meetup a month later and drew ninety-seven people. William Tanuwijaya talked about a marketplace called Tokopedia that had launched three months earlier, Satya Witoelar about Koprol and Selina Limman about Urbanesia. The Indonesians who had just been to Echelon, the Asian startup award held in Singapore, reported back on what they found there, and Leonard of AdMob presented on the mobile advertising industry. By August the meetup was pulling about a hundred and fifty.
2010
Eight meetups in eight months
The first year ran to eight meetups and grew from thirty-three people at a Starbucks to about two hundred at Microsoft Indonesia: mobile in July, media and publicity in August, finance and investment in September, gaming in October, education in November, brand image in December. Startup Pitch began at the third, when Didiet Noor of Mijix showed the room Gedego, a real world mobile game built on location based services, and it has been part of the format ever since. Nokia signed on at the sixth and paid for a year of meetups. The community's own introduction from that year names four initiators: Natali Ardianto, Nuniek Tirta Sari, Sanny Gaddafi and Aulia Halimatussadiah.
2011
What Ireland does with a university
Enterprise Ireland, set up in 1998 to incubate startups inside every Irish university, invited the initiators over to look at how it worked. They spent the trip at the NDRC, The Digital Hub and the Synergy Centre at ITT Dublin, and came home with the idea that became Project Eden.
2011
Digital Heroes Go Global
The first anniversary, on 9 April 2011, was a full Saturday at fX Plaza where the initiators reported back from Ireland and launched a book of the same name. Kompas, Bisnis Indonesia, Indopos, DailySocial and Yahoo News all covered it.
2011
#StartupLokal Kita
A second book, collecting the stories of eighteen entrepreneurs and the routes they took. Most of them had spoken at a meetup first.
2011
Investor Idol
An all-day meetup at the Jakarta Convention Center, part of PPKI Business Connect, where twenty selected startups pitched a panel of investors for money and a place in the incubator. Arsanesia, Bumble Games, Buzz Spot, Happify, Localbrand and Movieo.net were among them.
2012
Project Eden
The Irish idea came home as the first startup incubator in Indonesia, initiated by Bernhard Soebiakto, Aulia Halimatussadiah, Natali Ardianto, Calvin Kizana, Kevin Mintaraga, Megain Widjaja, Andi Sadha and Nuniek Tirta Sari. Marissa Mayer brought the Google team to see it.
2014
A borrowed room at Telkom
Telkom Indonesia opened the sixth floor of Menara Multimedia and kept it open for thirty-five meetups, the longest run at any one address. New Jakarta Digital Valley took over afterwards. The eighth anniversary in June 2018 filled the Telkom Landmark Tower with eight speakers, among them Fajrin Rasyid of Bukalapak, Ken Ratri Iswari of GeekHunter and Norman Sasono of Bizzy.
2019
The count pauses
Meetup v.88 in December 2018 closed the original run of numbers. The meetups did not stop: they carried on as the Indigo x #StartupLokal workshop series, and then as webinars once nobody could gather. The first of those, in April 2020, was about scenario planning for a business heading into a pandemic.
2021
Back on the count
The numbering resumed at v.111 on 17 March 2021 with a session on setting OKRs. The lockdown events were folded back into the sequence in date order, so the count runs straight through rather than skipping the years nobody could meet in person.
2021
Telunjuk becomes Compas
Telunjuk was founded and incubated at Project Eden in 2012, then backed by Venture Republic, Venturra and Lippo Digital Ventures. In 2021 Diamond Food Indonesia acquired it, and it trades today as Compas.co.id. It is the clearest line anyone can draw from a meetup to an exit.
2024
Meetup v.121
Skystar Ventures hosted the hundred and twenty-first meetup at Universitas Multimedia Nusantara in Tangerang, on personal branding for founders. Fourteen and a half years after the Starbucks, the format had not changed much.
The archive, rebuilt
Every meetup, its speakers and its photographs were pulled back out of Flickr, meetup.com, Instagram, Facebook and the Wayback Machine and put on this site. The community's own record now lives somewhere the community controls, which is the whole point of the exercise.