Andrea is the CEO and co-founder of Mailbird, an email tech startup based in Bali. She is half American and half Filipino, but having lived in Indonesia for 11 years, Indonesia is her home.
Credit: www.embassyofindonesia.org
Bali is a place with beautiful beaches, volcanoes, scenic rice fields, great spicy food, and an abundance of adventurous island activities. The Indonesian resort town is a sanctuary with a thriving culture, and the people are some of the friendliest you’ll ever meet. You come to Bali for vacation, to get away, or to get inspired. Bali is also a place to build a startup, right?
Why Bali is a kick ass place for tech startups
“What? You have a tech startup in Bali?” is the typical response when we tell people about the tech startup initiatives we are co-building here, on the island of gods. The world is slowly catching on, but the startup scene itself in Bali is very much an emerging concept that has manifested into great opportunities for growth, learning, building and networking with local and international talent.
Bali is the new fast growing startup scene that people are surprised by. There are many entrepreneurs, IT talent, initiatives, events and startups based on the island. Small teams that work from Bali can easily collaborate with team members in other parts of Indonesia like Bandung and Jakarta. For many tech startups that work in a distributive team, Bali becomes the hub or meeting point where these teams can come together a few times a year to really focus and buckle down on building and developing their businesses.
Aryo P. Ariotedjo is a managing partner of Grupara Inc. which is a startup incubator in Jakarta, which invests in early to seed stage startups. Ariotedjo says:
All the action happens in Jakarta but it is very expensive to run a bootstrapped venture here. Bandung is the home of the top programmers in Indonesia and Yogyakarta is the city of students, the city of right energetic talent. If you want a place to just concentrate and build your product, it is definitely Bali.
This is clear when we start to look at some truly innovative startups coming from Bali. We’ve got the whole gamut of tech startups, from those who want to revolutionize the learning of biotechnology to a productivity platform within an email client for the billions of Windows OS users worldwide.
One of the strengths of the startup community in Bali is definitely the tight knit community here, opening up your network to all the knowledge and resources you need to launch a great IT product.
Mads Rode, co-founder of Vilondo, another awesome Bali-based startup, says:
In general people are very open to share new ideas, successes, failures and experiences, which can serve as inspiration for your own business. People are usually more than happy to help, so if you come across a challenge you can usually find someone with an expertise within the given area who are willing to share their knowledge. As the startup scene grows in Bali, some of this cooperation might turn into more formal business relationships.
As we see the tech startup culture grow rapidly in Bali, more opportunities will arise. More investors are keen on visiting the island, curious about the many cool startups. They want to be the first to get in on great investment opportunities there, in an effort to also stimulate the culture for investment and tech innovation in Indonesia.
Co-working spaces in Bali
So what tech startups can we find in Bali?
Why is Bali the next tech hub?
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