It is better to be feared than to be loved
Right after I graduated, I had a belief that I have to "love" the company that I work at, "love" my manager, and "love" my job. It didn't help that the only company that I have ever worked in was a Swedish
I accomplished nothing today and it is probably ok
Most days at work is straightforward. An email arrives, and it will take me a few minutes to respond. Another minute and a colleague will have a question that involves a spot decision with guidance. Then there are days like today where there isn't an obvious answer to
Fuck correctness: I made my money through porn
I would not be who I am today if I had listened to what people have preached to be the "right thing". When I was 15, my mom caned me for using the computer all day. I would run home right after school so I could play Diablo
How I had my second company stolen. Also, bonus office scandal
This is my story of how I lost ownership of Unifide, my second company. I began my entrepreneurial journey in 2015 with Spawt, a Foursquare for Food. Spawt was my first full-time venture as a naive, fresh graduate. Like every virgin entrepreneur hopelessly hooked to startup porn, I believed with
I am not the CEO anymore
With the Bitcoin crash of 2018, NuMoney was at the crossroads. Do we persist with the vision of building the largest cryptocurrency exchange for Southeast Asia, or do we move on? These were decisions I had to make as the CEO of NuMoney. Putra is the CEO of NuMoney Indonesia,
I hate startups
Paul Graham's definition of a startup is a company designed to grow fast. But I hate startups, where do I begin? Let's start with Crystal Horse Investments (a venture capital firm). Crystal Horse invested S$25,000 for equity in Spawt around seven years ago at
Once, I got a girl's number on the bus
(She didn't turn out to be the one, this girl in the picture did) Back when I was 15, my delinquent friends and I would go to our favorite mall to "fish" for numbers from cute girls. It took guts and a thick skin. Usually, if
fundraising
I was all for bootstrapping until I raised 500k
(Picture above shows Putra, who is CEO of LandX, and I incorporating the company in Jakarta) I am bad at fund-raising. A backchannel source told me that I am uninvestable because I look like a person who will rip my investors off. Then I raised half a million dollars for
The database is corrupted, what do we do?
He came sheepishly to me and told me he corrupted our Postgresql database, what do we do now? Ok, time to backtrack. A while ago, we built Kloudsec, a CDN product with a vision of the CDN operating as an operating system on the edge, not unlike what Cloudflare is
Tutorial: How to crawl LinkedIn with Python and `requests` library with code examples (Part 2)
This is a two-part series on crawling LinkedIn at scale. In an earlier article, we studied why LinkedIn is a hard target to crawl. In this follow-up, I will dive deep into a technical tutorial on how you can crawl LinkedIn at scale with demo code. In this tutorial, I
Why is it hard to crawl Professional Social Network in scale in 2019? (Part 1)
This is a two-part series on crawling Professional Social Network in scale. In this first part, we study why Professional Social Network is a hard target to crawl. In the follow-up part two, I will dive deep into a technical tutorial on how you can crawl Professional Social Network in
Nubela Corp, 5 years later
Nubela (Corp) will be 5 years old this year