5 reasons why Bandung is a great tech city – and why it really could be Indonesia’s Silicon Valley

When entrepreneurs expanded to Indonesia, most of them would prioritize setting up their office in the capital city of Jakarta. On paper, that makes sense. Not only does the capital host the largest number of startups in the country, it is also where a lot of business deals are made. But now the neighboring city of Bandung wants to get in on the action.

Ridwan Kamil, the new Bandung mayor, wants to change the capital-first mindset and convince people that Bandung can be a better destination than Jakarta for a number of reasons.

Kamil came to speak at an event in Jakarta a couple days ago about his vision for Bandung. Here are the five points the mayor made in favor of his city:

(See: Why Indonesia is an Upcoming Tech Market That Can’t be Ignored)

1. Bandung has ample human resources for tech companies

Bandung Institute of Technology

With over eight million residents, Bandung is Indonesia’s third largest city, behind Jakarta and Surabaya. What makes this place even better is how young and tech-savvy the population is. According to Kamil, 60 percent of Bandung citizens are aged below 40 years old, which makes them the optimum age to work. Bandung is also Twitter’s sixth biggest city user-base in the world.

A lot of people come to Bandung to study. The city holds more than 80 higher education institutions including Indonesia’s biggest tech university, the Bandung Institute of Technology. These young people can be great talents, the mayor said, as well as good potential users for any tech companies opening shop in Indonesia. Bandung’s minimum wage is also a bit lower than Jakarta’s.

2. Startup friendly

Being an entrepreneur himself (Kamil is a master’s graduate from University of California, Berkeley, who then set up Urbane Indonesia, an architecture, urban design, and project visioning consultant firm), he understands how hard it is for startups to make it in their early years. Though it’s not yet official local government policy, Kamil wants to help out the startups that make Bandung their home. He cited an example of how he leased one startup an abandoned building as a free office for their first year. The mayor is also open to giving incentives to new companies, such as lower tax.

Some notable Bandung-based tech startups are game developers Agate Studio, Digital Happiness, Nightspade¹, and Tinker Games, as well as mobile developer Dycode, tech outsourcing company Walden Global Services, and property marketplace UrbanIndo. Telkom’s Bandung Digital Valley, women-focused tech community IDGeekGirls, and Bandung tech community FOWAB also reside there.

3. The government is very supportive of tech initiatives

Bandung mayor Ridwan Kamil with US ambassador Robert Blake

Kamil may have just taken office eight months ago, but in that short tenure he has made significant changes in terms of government attitude towards technology use. He mentioned five ‘smart city’ milestones in his work plan: tech infrastructure, tech-oriented governance, open governance, empowerment, and “teknopolis” (more about this below).

In the last eight months, the Bandung government has installed about 5,000 wi-fi hotspots all over the city. Their target this year is to install up to 40,000 hotspots to ensure more Bandung citizens can get online. The team is also preparing “the Google of Bandung public services”, which lets users access various public services online. That includes Bandung’s online procurement system to help mitigate corruption, and also e-Kelurahan, which allows citizens to download public forms online rather than having to go to the relevant departments to get them.

The Bandung government is very open to working with many parties to develop all kinds of online solutions. One such cooperation is how they are working with Indonesia’s biggest information and communication company, Telkom, to develop e-Puskesmas, an online information system management for health practitioners. The government is also using a student-created visual database which showcases Bandung’s land assets.

4. Next stop – becoming Indonesia’s Silicon Valley

5. Good food, good weather