micro-entrepreneurs
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Arip Tirta and the value of coming home
He left Silicon Valley to build in Bandung. From property data to Evermos, Arip Tirta has kept returning to a practical question: what would help more Indonesians take part in business?
RateS
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
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.