Preview Mode Links will not work in preview mode

Skydeck


Skydeck is the HBS alumni podcast series that features interviews with HBS alumni from across the world of business, sharing lessons learned and their own life experiences.

Dec 15, 2020

Welcome to the second episode of our Skydeck mini-series “Out of the Valley.” Today’s episode starts in Jakarta, Indonesia, in the late 2000s.

The city looked nothing like Silicon Valley in those days. There were very few VC-backed startups and not much of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. It was what author and venture capitalist Alex Lazarow would define as a “frontier market”—a place where entrepreneurs face significant constraints on funding, infrastructure, and talent. A place where the Silicon Valley model of moving fast and breaking things—an early Mark Zuckerberg mantra—just doesn’t work. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.