CEO/Founder of Bubu.com and Angel Investor
A tireless creative mind and visionary entrepreneur, Shinta entered the tech industry 24 years ago when the word “internet” was almost unknown in Indonesia. Since her first breakthrough with Bubu.com, Indonesia’s leading digital agency, she has sowed the seeds of dozens of pioneering tech enterprises, and is an angel investor and a mentor for high-potential startups.
When Shinta founded Bubu.com in 1996, it never crossed her mind that she would be one of the only women in this nascent tech industry. “I did not know anything about gender gaps when I started: I just fell in love with the Internet”. Her encounter with the World Wide Web happened just two years earlier in a computer lab at Portland University, where she worked as a graduate assistant while pursuing a MBA in business management. After studying architecture, she found that designing websites was much more disruptive/appealing to her than drawing building plans. At the time she set up the web design enterprise, Internet Service Providers and Internet Cafes were just emerging in Indonesia, and she knocked on every door as she built her own network. 20 years later, Bubu.com is a leading force in the digital marketing industry and Shinta now liaises with other world-renowned tech icons, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Wozniak and Sheryl Sandberg.
Driven by her eagerness to disrupt the industry, Shinta always ignored gender stereotypes or segmentations and embraced her passion for both tech and fashion. Today, her first venture Bubu.com designs bespoke mobile applications for Indonesia Fashion Week and has handled Manchester United’s Social Media planning and strategy in Indonesia and Malaysia for the past 8 years. When she is not busy with new business ideas, Shinta enjoys scouting around for new batik textiles and shopping online – she actually envisioned and made one of the first e-commerce platforms, Telkom’s Plasa.com (now it is known as Blanja.com), before it attracted eBay’s joint venture and investment. Survival video games startups and techwear labels are among the Indonesian enterprises she propelled on the international scene.
With a mission to “put Indonesia on the world technology map”, Shinta kicked off various initiatives to nurture the next Indonesian digital trailblazers, including a pioneering venture capital firm, Nusantara Ventures. When it comes to investing, Shinta looks at the capacity of a enterprise to create sustainable value and monetize good ideas that prevail. “I look at the entrepreneur as an individual, not as a man or a woman” she says. Shinta also launched a new venture called Startupindonesia.co – an online platform to connect all the startup ecosystems in Indonesia, with the aim to democratize networks and knowledge for the national tech startups, especially those with a strong socio-economic impact.
Yet, Shinta also sees the need to deconstruct the image of the tech industry as a “boys’ club”. This year, Indonesia’s biggest technology conference that was founded by Shinta, IDByte, will focus on women in digital, and introduce a new incubation program for senior female University Students called Supergirls in Tech. It will also be the launchpad of a women-focused Tech Conference. “More female role models in the sector will help to unlock talents and reveal passions that women did think possible before”, she believes.
