PT TOKOPEDIA: WHEN A LEADERSHIP TAKES A LEAD

On August 17, 2009, William Tanuwijaya and Leontinus Alpha Edison two close friend that worked together to achieve their dream, officially launched the first online platform shop called Tokopedia. Tokopedia held an icon of green owl with big eyes, the owl was the symbol of wisdom and had a great vision into every direction. It means that Tokopedia had holistic point of view for their business start from the company itself, the buyers and the sellers.

At that time, Internet was  forecasted to be the new era of commerce since its inception in the beginning of 2000.  Internet development in Indonesia continues to increase in 2013 (Exhibit 1), there were 74.6 million Internet users in Indonesia (the highest in Southeast Asia), a rising up 22 percent from a year earlier. This figure is expected to exceed 100 million in 2015 (Marketeers, 2014). ebay, Amazon, Alibaba were the e-commerce company that already stable worldwide while in Indonesia the online shop was a new things. The current Internet-based commercial transaction (e-commerce) is an essential element in the business life. With the number of internet users that is about 30% of the total population of Indonesia, Indonesian e-commerce market has a high potential in the future.

Eight years later, Tokopedia was known as the biggest e-commerce platform in Indonesia with thousands of tenants or retails and Tokopedia announced funding of US$100 million from SoftBank and Seqouia Capital (techinasia.com, 2014). The two founders, William and Leon were known as the former electronic entrepreneurs that went beyond their time. This case study explores or explains the factors that made Tokopedia big as we know today . This case study focuses on five entrepreneurial mindset such as creativitiy, collaboration, direction, coordination and delegation that the two founders did along with the growth of Tokopedia.