After Kaskus, Indonesia’s ‘Action Jack Barker’ joins new startup

“Action Jack” Barker, Pied Piper CEO in the TV show Silicon Valley.

In 2013, Indonesia’s massive online community Kaskus was in trouble. People were increasingly using the forum to buy and sell all kinds of goods and services – including illegal ones.

It was a moment like Jack Barker sweeping in to save Pied Piper.

Kaskus needed “adult supervision” and more experienced leadership.

Sukan Makmuri, an IT industry veteran who’d been working in the US at companies like Bank of America and Symantec, was hired first as COO and soon took over as CEO. Ken Lawadinata and Andrew Darwis, the original co-founders, stepped down from their CEO and CTO roles but remained part of the company.

It was a moment like in the HBO comedy Silicon Valley when Jack Barker sweeps in to save Pied Piper. It was a huge deal in Indonesia. Changes were set in motion at Kaskus. The goal was to grow it into a mature ecommerce marketplace with better content controls.

However, Sukan never got to see the transformation through to the end. He had to return to the US due to a “personal emergency” in 2014, he told Tech in Asia in an interview. Kaskus was left to be managed by Martin Hartono, CEO of GDP Venture, the firm that acquired a majority stake in the online community in 2009.

Jack is back

Sukan Makmuri, once in charge of Kaskus, is now CTO at Kudo. Is he Indonesia’s “Jack Barker”?

Now, “Action Jack” is back in the country, and he’s taken on a new role as CTO of another startup: Kudo.

Kudo tries to bridge the gap between the online and offline world. It’s an app that aggregates products from various ecommerce stores and displays them on a simple interface.

Technically, everyone can download the app and buy things with it, but Kudo has a specific use case in mind: it puts the app into hands of people trained to make online purchases for others.

In smaller cities or rural areas, where residents are less familiar with online tools, these “Kudo agents” make online shopping as simple as going to a convenience store. Of course, agents get compensated for their sales on a commission basis.

See: Kudo helps rural residents shop online

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