RateS was a Singapore-born, Indonesia-focused social commerce platform that let anyone - housewives, students, small shop owners - start an online business with no inventory and no upfront capital. The app sourced products directly from suppliers and handled warehousing, logistics, payments and financing, while its network of micro-entrepreneurs handled sales through their social networks. Spun out of the foreign-exchange startup RateX, RateS grew to more than 500,000 resellers across Indonesia's tier-2 and tier-3 cities before being acquired by e-commerce enabler SIRCLO in 2023.
Garrison John is a chief executive associated with RateS, the Indonesia-focused social commerce platform that turns housewives, students, and small-town hustlers into online resellers. The company began life in Singapore in 2017 as the e-commerce payments startup RateX before pivoting into social commerce across Indonesia's tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Listed on LinkedIn with a Harvard education and based in the New York City metropolitan area, John sits at the intersection of Wall Street financing logic and warung-level commerce, where the whole game is shaving inefficiency out of sourcing, supply chain, inventory, and working capital for half a million resellers.
Xendit is a Southeast Asian payments infrastructure company that lets businesses accept, process, and disburse money across Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and the wider region through a single API. Founded in 2015 and the first Indonesian company backed by Y Combinator, it handles virtual accounts, e-wallets, cards, QR codes, payouts, and fraud prevention for startups, marketplaces, and global enterprises expanding into the region.
Moses Lo is the co-founder and CEO of Xendit, the Southeast Asian payments infrastructure company that became Indonesia's first Y Combinator unicorn. He runs it from San Francisco and Jakarta, and built it after pivoting away from a bitcoin remittance idea six weeks into YC.
Muchammad Rifky is the Chief Executive Officer for Indonesia at Automation Anywhere, one of the world's leading enterprise automation and AI software companies headquartered in San Jose, California. Leading Indonesia operations for a company with over $1 billion in total funding and nearly 1,900 employees globally, Rifky bridges the gap between Automation Anywhere's cutting-edge AI-driven robotic process automation platform and one of Southeast Asia's largest and fastest-growing markets. His career path - from hospitality sales at Jakarta's top hotels to leading country operations for a Silicon Valley-backed unicorn - reflects the kind of cross-domain journey that defines modern tech adoption in emerging markets.
Mei Siauw is the Co-founder and CEO of LeadIQ, a San Francisco-based B2B sales intelligence platform that helps sales teams prospect smarter and faster. Born in Indonesia and educated at Cornell (CS) and Wharton (MBA), she spent a decade at Oracle before co-founding LeadIQ in 2015 with Angelo Huang. Under her leadership, LeadIQ raised $42M in total funding (including a $30M Series B in 2021 led by Cathay Innovation), built a fully remote team spanning 33+ countries, and serves 20,000+ sales professionals globally. A tireless advocate for outbound sales and data-driven prospecting, Siauw has become one of the most prominent voices in the sales tech space.
Tom Pepinsky is the Walter F. LaFeber Professor of Government and Public Policy at Cornell University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. A specialist in Southeast Asian comparative politics, democratic backsliding, and political economy, he is best known for his viral 2017 essay 'Everyday Authoritarianism is Boring and Tolerable,' which warned Americans that authoritarian erosion looks mundane from the inside. Fluent in Indonesian, he has written five books spanning Indonesian and Malaysian politics, COVID-19 partisanship, and global democratic challenges. His Substack newsletter, launched in 2025, continues his two-decade tradition of public-facing analysis at the intersection of academic rigor and accessible political commentary.