From showbiz to tech biz: Christian Sugiono on acting, MBDC, and new investments

Christian Sugiono, co-founder and CEO of MBDC Media.

“I’m actually not the type of serial entrepreneur who likes to build ventures and let other people run it. I am kind of a possessive type of person,” explains Indonesian actor Christian Sugiono from his hotel room in Tokyo. “I love dreaming up the coolest thing I can have, and then just going for it.”

Sugiono is the co-founder and CEO of MBDC Media. Last week, his company grabbed headlines when it announced a new round of capital investment from Rebright Partners and 500 Startups.

Christian Sugiono is a name that most Indonesians will recognize. Since 2005, the tall and handsome Sugiono has starred in local television shows and films all across Southeast Asia. His work features movie titles like Dunia Mereka (Their World), Akhir Sekolah (Final School), and Tipu Kanan Tipu Kiri (100 Lies to Hide a Wife). Sugiono’s career also includes modelling for Hai Magazine and serving as the Indonesian ambassador for brands like Hewlett-Packard and Close-Up toothpaste. He has also contributed extensively as a journalist to Trax Magazine on behalf of MTV Indonesia.

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But Sugiono is not just a pretty face. He is quickly building a reputation as one of Jakarta’s serious tech founders. The star of Jakarta Undercover is also a nerd-by-night computer programmer, who knows how to code fluently and earned a Bachelor’s degree from the Technical University of Hamburg in Germany. Today MBDC Media is the parent company of Indonesia’s popular humor site MalesBanget.

Homesick for humor

MalesBanget can be traced back to 2001, when Sugiono was still studying in Germany. While abroad, he used IRC (internet relay chat) to talk to random Indonesian people around the world, and claims this is how he met fellow co-founders Aryo Sayogha and Arianjie Az. He explains:

We often talked about what was happening in Indonesia, what the current trends were, popular jokes […] The IRC channel was named #malesbanget (in English: very lazy) and became semi-popular. Finally, in 2002 we bought the domain malesbanget.com and together with other members’ IRC channels, we created a website with Indonesian-style humor content. Arianjie and I wrote lots of articles at the time. Aryo often took pictures, and there were a few other friends who helped to code and design the website.

Sugiono claims MalesBanget later became a well-known portal among Indonesian college students abroad. Its taste and silly articles comforted students feeling homesick. However, he adds the company limped along with only moderate success as no one was properly taking care of the site. Sugiono says he and Sayogha became sidetracked by another project, Subtube Studio, a web development company. As a result, MalesBanget died from a lack of content in 2006.

With Subtube, Sugiono and his team spent several years developing websites for other people, but still craved a fun and entertaining media portal of their own. “That’s when we thought that resurrecting MalesBanget from the dead was a good idea,” he says. In 2011, Sugiono and his co-founders established PT MBDC Media to act as the umbrella company for Subtube, MalesBanget, and any other projects they wanted to pursue in the future.

A focused audience

Investors take notice