Meet the Zalora Mafia ruling Indonesia’s top startups

Silicon Valley brought forth the PayPal Mafia.

Investor Peter Thiel and SpaceX/Tesla founder Elon Musk are the most prominent names, but there’s many more. 500 Startups co-founder Dave McClure and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman also belong to this prestigious group.

Well, Indonesia has its own little mafia and its epicenter is Zalora – Rocket Internet’s fashion ecommerce store.

For some reason, a disproportionate amount of Zalorians went on to fill up important roles in the local startup ecosystem, especially in ecommerce. Their names now pop up as startup founders, c-level executives, and venture capitalists.

Nadiem Makarim, Kevin Aluwi, Sheran Gunasekera

Nadiem Makarim (right), founder and CEO of Go-Jek.

Nadiem Makarim went from managing director of Zalora Indonesia in 2011 to co-founder and CEO of Indonesia’s most-talked about startup, Go-Jek.

But he’s not the only c-level personnel with that trajectory. After all, Go-Jek’s CFO Kevin Aluwi was former head of business intelligence at Zalora Indonesia. And Sheran Gunasekera, Go-Jek’s chief information security officer, was formerly VP of technology at Zalora.

It doesn’t end there. Monika Halim, the VP of user experience design, and Fian Kurniawan, VP engineering are also ex-Zalorians.

Coincidence? I think not.

Hadi Wenas

Hadi Wenas, CEO of MatahariMall (left).

After Nadiem left Zalora for payments company Kartuku in 2012, the position of managing director was filled by Hadi Wenas.

Hadi Kuncoro

Catherine Hindra Sutjahyo

Mario Suntanu

Steven Kim, Krishnan Menon, and Bastian Purrer