Profiles in Entrepreneurialism: Bram Viktor of Hangry

When listening to Bram Viktor's personal story of achievement as an entrepreneur, Winston Churchill's famous quote comes to mind:

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm."

Bram's enthusiasm and entrepreneurial vigour are indeed infectious. He self-deprecatingly attributes his unquenchable desire to build and innovate in his early years to a mix of "stupidity and self-confidence." It is however very clear that many more factors came into play in building one of Indonesia's first fintech companies, Taralite, a P2P lending SME lending platform purchased by Fintech leader Ovo early last year.

Bram eventually moved on from Ovo to launch Hangry, Indonesia's first multi-brand virtual restaurant company, late last year. Bram reflects on the importance of mentors in his drive to become a better entrepreneur and better leader. Tokopedia Founder William Tanuwijaya has played such a role in Bram's career. He also describes the best VC's as those who are willing to give "a slap to our right and left cheeks to wake us up when we're not looking at things right". A good VC however is a partner who can also empathise, unlike those who might see entrepreneurial investment in a strictly transactional way.

When asked what elements that tech ecosystem needs in order to to become more robust, Bram believes that participants need to become more comfortable with taking risk, and learn to treat failure, and those who fail, with "respect and admiration."

Bram's final advice to aspiring entrepreneurs: 1) be absolutely dogged in your search for product-market fit, and 2) think about sharing more of the upside your company with your colleagues; it could be through a more generous ESOP plan, or by other means...but do the right thing,

We hope you enjoy the first instalment of our "Profiles in Entrepreneurialism" series, whereby we seek to interview Indonesia's growing crop of serial tech entrepreneurs.