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09 November 2010
Indonesian Grows His Fortune and His Country’s Future
Washington — Goris Mustaqim of Bandung, Indonesia, is a young man in a hurry.
He caught the entrepreneurial bug in college and afterward launched a technology company with classmates that now employs 35 people and has 10 billion rupiah — $1.1 million — in revenue.
A foundation he created in Garut, his West Java hometown, grooms young people to launch their own businesses. His work with farmers to find a cleaner way than burning kerosene to distill oil from a prized grass crop got him invited to the U.N. Climate Conference in Copenhagen.
He’s won a shelf full of young entrepreneur awards and was part of Indonesia’s delegation to the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship last April in Washington, where he shook hands with President Obama.
Sandiaga Uno, 41, the founding partner of the private equity company Saratoga Capital and one of Indonesia's most successful young entrepreneurs, mentored Mustaqim in college. The protégé is “simply amazing. I saw him early on his sophomore year and he was relentless in getting more information from me,” said Uno. “He simply doesn’t take no for an answer.”
But the 27-year-old Mustaqim has still bigger ambitions, including expanding his Asgar Muda Foundation to work with youth in half of Indonesia’s provinces, creating more businesses and landing on the list of Indonesia’s most wealthy.
His rush stems from a desire to make his fortune and accomplish these goals by the time he is 40, so he can enter politics. He says he wants to help people escape poverty by pursuing business dreams of their own. “I want to leave a legacy. I want to change the culture” of Indonesia, said Mustaqim. He also wants to take time out to earn a master degree in business administration at a U.S. university to “learn more and create other businesses.”
At the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship, Mustaqim shared the stage at a panel on “Catalyzing Youth Entrepreneurship” with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Shahid Ansari, provost of Babson College in Boston.
Mustaqim earned a degree in civil engineering in 2006 from prestigious Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), where he headed the student government. A scholarship from a foundation that grooms Muslim leaders opened doors and opened his eyes to the world of entrepreneurship.
“In the beginning I just thought I would graduate from ITB and start looking for a job,” said Mustaqim, the son of a retired civil servant and youngest of five children. But he decided he could do more good for himself and for Indonesia by creating jobs.
PT Resultan Nusantara, the technology company that he and five friends opened, struggled at first but attracted capital from angel investors and now turns a profit. It jumped into the field of radio frequency identification (RFID), or smart cards, that its clients, including schools and municipal agencies, use to track attendance and parking spaces. The company’s name now is PT Barapraja Indonesia.
His Asgar Muda Foundation has 500 members and operates a learning center in Garut, where young people ages 18 to 30 are taught to write business plans and get enterprises off the ground. The foundation also exposes budding entrepreneurs to mentors and potential investors and helps local artisans sell their crafts and gets them microloans.
Mustaqim established his environmental credentials by leading an effort to convince the government and PT Pertamina, the state oil and gas company, to build a geothermal plant in Garut for farmers to use clean, renewable energy instead of burning kerosene to distill fragrant oils from the grass they grow, called akar wangi or vetiver. Garut is one of the few places in the world that grows this valuable crop, but the local farmers’ livelihood was threatened by rising costs for fossil fuels. Mustaqim helped produce a feasibility study and worked with a local company on a pilot project that he says demonstrated the efficiency of switching to alternative fuels.
That earned him designation as one of the British Council’s International Climate Champions and the trip to Copenhagen last December for the climate change conference. He was also among 25 finalists for BusinessWeek’s Asia’s Best Young Entrepreneur Award in 2009.
Mustaqim believes that the work of his business and foundation fits into a larger picture of economic development and social progress in Indonesia. “I have a vision of Indonesia as the bridge between the U.S. and Muslim countries, especially in Asia,” he said. An entrepreneurial spirit — his own and his fellow citizens’ — undergirds that bridge.
(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)
