This guy almost kickstarted the first internet wave in Indonesia, but a riot got in the way

Until yesterday, I assumed internet businesses were just about non-existent in Indonesia before 2000. Jim Yang, a tech entrepreneur from Surabaya, taught me otherwise.

He was part of the first wave of entrepreneurs building internet services for the Indonesian market – in days predating Google. His efforts got thwarted by the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and the political turmoil that followed. “The world froze over,” as Jim puts it.

Shops were looted and goods burned on the streets during the May 1998 riots in Jakarta, which eventually led to the ouster of dictator Suharto. Source: Wikipedia

But that episode was just the beginning. Jim later made millions of dollars by consulting, creating and selling his own startup, and  turning to angel investing. He’s now rearing an unexpected new venture.

Crashing servers in Austin

Jim had been a nerd since childhood. At age 13, he moved to the US – Austin, Texas – to live with his aunt. He remembers ogling hardware at the humble storefront of Dell computers, just before the company got massive.

Still in Austin, he went on to study computer science. It was 1995. “Fun times,” Jim says. Companies like Netscape were emerging. In freshmen year, he met a fellow Indonesian who was equally excited about computers and software. They began tinkering with building search directories, modeled after Yahoo.

“There I made my very first mistake as an entrepreneur,” Jim says. “We thought, wow, there are already five search engines, we’ve got to find a niche for ourselves. We have to build something for Asia. We had no framework for how big search could be.”

They created their search directory for Indonesia, and called it Bimasakti.com (Indonesian for “Milky Way”).

A snapshot of Bimasakti.com, ca. 1999. Source: waybackmachine

“We convinced one of the administrators to give us access to the main server at the university, which runs twenty-four-seven,” Jim continues.

What followed was a breakdown of that server, a scolding from the university, and the realization that they needed to build their own server infrastructure. Jim went shopping at Dell.

Jakarta in flames

Making millions

Selling too early

Unlikely transformation