Entering the unicorn playground

I immersed myself in the world of venture capitalists in Indonesia for a month. I interviewed over 20 people, from fresh hires to senior VCs. Here's how I went about doing it.

Huh, it’s quiet up here.

I was sitting in a meeting room within one of the skyscrapers that decorated the skyline of the Sudirman Central Business District, more commonly known as SCBD. It’s an area spanning 45 hectares located in South Jakarta, Indonesia, which hosts many of the country’s big companies, including local branches of international corporations such as Google and Microsoft. It is a bustling hub of office buildings, hotels, shopping malls and entertainment centres. Additionally, it serves as the country’s financial district, with the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) located on its premises, home to 951 publicly-listed companies with a total market capitalisation—the aggregated value of companies traded on the stock market—of US$755 billion as of January 2025, according to data from the IDX.

I was invited to conduct my interview with a senior director of a venture capital firm at his office in SCBD in June 2024. We had met about two years prior, during my time as a journalist covering the Indonesian startup landscape. This time around, I approached him to be part of my anthropology research on venture capitalists (VCs)—investors who fund early-stage businesses. As I waited for his arrival, I looked around the room and walked over to the sight that had captured my attention the first time I walked in: the window view. Rows of high-rise towers glimmered in the golden hour light. What a lovely scene. I glanced down to assess the traffic situation below. That’s not so bad. I went back to my seat, and, in an attempt to keep myself occupied while waiting for my interviewee, I found myself wondering, “What is it about the quietness of this space that startled me?”

It dawned on me that hours ago, as I was preparing for this interview, working from the room I was renting for this fieldwork, I found my attention constantly getting distracted by the sounds outside—there were the usual call to prayer from a nearby mosque, which you would hear just about anywhere in the city, five times a day; neighbours chatting; the sound of manual labour close by; and, of course, of the traffic the capital city is infamously known for. I was reminded that this was just the reality of working in Jakarta. It’s a noisy city. You can expect that from a place located within the world’s most populous island, Java.

Jakarta, as seen from the window of my rented room. I was on the third floor of a co-living building located in South Jakarta. Photo by me.

But a few dozen floors above ground, the day-to-day sounds that make up the city don’t travel far up enough. Up here in this office, there are no noises. Just the pretty view.

I took many more of these meetings in the span of my one-month fieldwork—I spoke to 26 people in total between 20 May to 26 June 2024. They are either working in VC firms or are working closely with them. Four of these conversations were informal. They were aware I was researching about venture capitalists, but I did not record our conversation. They serve more as background information on the latest happenings within the VC world.

From the other 22 informants, 15 were working in venture capital firms, 3 were ex-venture capitalists, 2 were working on building startups, 1 was an investment banker, and 1 was a fund manager at a family office. Of my 22 informants, 6 were people I knew before conducting this research, the rest were new connections—5 were made through LinkedIn, 5 were referrals from people I had spoken with, and 6 were people I met at networking events. My conversation with these 22 informants lasted anywhere between 30 minutes to 1,5 hours. 6 were done online, 3 in offices, and 13 in coffee shops or restaurants.

For most of those whom I met in person, I let them decide our place of meeting. From these 13 in-person coffee chats, 8 were done in SCBD, of which 6 were at ASHTA, one of the newer malls in Jakarta. I also attended a total of six events—two dinner gatherings, two networking events and two live pitching sessions. Depending on the size of the crowd, I had spoken and exchanged contacts with as few as three to as many as 25 people within a single event.

In meeting with my informants, one thing became obvious to me. These offline establishments—the malls, upscale coffee shops and restaurants—have become a microcosm of modernity and affluence. Although, not one that reflects Indonesia. At least not yet. One of my informants, a young VC managing a new fund—let’s call him Yeremia—made the following remark: “We’re in SCBD but this is not Indonesia. This is more like Singapore.”

Most of my VC informants’ offices, if they have an office (not all do), are situated in SCBD. The mall ASHTA is within walking distance of their office spaces. That’s worth noting, considering Jakarta is not known to be a walkable city. Efforts to make Jakarta a more pedestrian-friendly city have only occurred within recent years—starting in 2019, under the leadership of then Jakarta’s governor Anies Baswedan.

As someone who was born and raised in Indonesia, I found myself making a similar remark to Yeremia’s as I walked around the district and frequented the dining areas in SCBD.

“We’re in SCBD but this is not Indonesia. This is more like Singapore.”

Indonesia has long been associated with imageries of a holiday getaway, not of a metropolitan life. And yet, at ASHTA—which I would visit a few times a week to meet my informants—the crowd is that of office people and professionals wearing neat smart casuals, some with lanyards carrying their office access cards hanging around their necks.

In a country in which the economy is built on the back of producing goods, these lanyards have become a status symbol. Whereas, the cafes and restaurants in SCBD have become extensions of the office spaces. They are cafeterias for those working in nearby buildings, as well as go-to places to take meetings, whether in a one-on-one or a group setting, evident by the lingering crowd of working professionals on the dining tables way past lunchtime.

That’s also where I met Yeremia, at one of the fine dining restaurants in SCBD, a spot that he chose.

There seems to be a degree of deliberateness from these VCs in choosing to be situated in places like these. Places that are meant to be distinct; to stand apart from the broader context of Jakarta’s messy public spaces and Indonesia’s growing middle class. By that I mean, a conducive work office in one of these tower buildings and being able to eat out every lunchtime at a nice restaurant does not reflect the reality of the majority of the Indonesian working population. It’s an aspirational gap, as Yeremia would argue. One he tries putting to good use.

Dita: Why do you choose to meet people in these places?

Yeremia: We sort of want to create the illusion, right? VCs are salesmen. Where we meet is a sales point. We sort of sell them the dream, you know.

D: To the founders?

Y: To the founders. When you’re just starting.

D: What dream are you selling them?

Y: That you can have a big office in SCBD. Who doesn’t want that? It’s basically a higher life, in a way. A higher socioeconomic status.

To Yeremia’s credit, the restaurant where we met did have a nice ambience.

At the beginning of my fieldwork, I briefly negotiated for access to the offices of these venture capital firms, wanting to practise the participant observation method the discipline of anthropology is known for. (Participant observation is a research method where the researcher participates in the day-to-day activities of a group they are studying to gain a holistic view of the group’s cultural viewpoints, values and practices.) However, it became immediately clear that that kind of access would be difficult to acquire. VCs deal with sensitive and confidential data. It makes having a researcher on-site following people around not an ideal arrangement for them.

I kept the participating and observing element alive by going to events where VCs were present, but eventually, most of the insights I gathered came from the more intimate, in-depth interviews. Within the field of anthropology, interviews have long been assigned a secondary position to participant observation. Ethnographic research wants to document not only what people say but also what they do, and the two usually differ, which makes relying on insights gathered from interviews less than ideal. But from the process of carrying out my fieldwork, I found that in the context of VCs, interviews are great tools of ethnographic inquiry.

I noticed halfway through my fieldwork that in interviewing my informants, I was not just listening to them explaining about the work that they do. I was listening to how they make sense of the (venture capital) world as well as their place in it. I was observing how that sense-making gets translated into how they carry themselves and deliver their sales pitch. In other words, while the relationality established during these meetings was that of researcher-informant, it seemed to be the case that from the venture capitalists’ perspective, this was just another work meeting where they would have to network, present themselves, and share their expertise.

In a sense, in doing these interviews, I was not taking these venture capitalists out of their social field, I became embedded in it. It was also a more intimate way of “being with” my informants compared to the networking events I attended. In the networking events, conversations were short. The primary goal of these spaces seemed to be to get as many contacts as possible of the people one believes to be relevant to one’s work, or to say hi to familiar faces briefly. Arguably, I wouldn’t have gotten as much insight by relying on observing the way venture capitalists network in these instances.

During my fieldwork, I became aware that by catching up with the venture capitalists one-on-one and by allowing them to pick our meeting spot, I ended up becoming situated in places where they would normally take their meetings.

In a way, my interviews became a modality to participate in the world of venture capitalists.

As to what was shared in these conversations, that’s for next time.

Note: As I’m turning my dissertation into a series of newsletters, I’m getting back in touch with the informants of my research. For this post, the aforementioned senior director and Yeremia have consented to their contribution being published on this newsletter.