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  • Billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has  

  • just made his first investment inSoutheast Asian e-commerce start-up.

  • It was incredibly fortunate and  a huge fan boy moment for me.

  • But it's not one of the region's  billion-dollar unicorns.  

  • It's a mom-and-pop shop start-up that's  been around for less than two years.

  • If I look at last month's numberswe've grown more than 200 times.

  • And it just so happens that some of the  founders are Bezos' former employees.

  • I wrote a memo, which is a very Amazon  style thing to do. You don't send a deck;  

  • you send a written note. Wow, so taking a leaf out of  

  • the leadership book from Jeff Bezos seems to have  

  • paid dividends there. It's inspirational.

  • Indonesian e-commerce start-up Ula  is a wholesale marketplace aiming  

  • to modernize the country's millions  of mom-and-pop kiosks, or warungs,  

  • by providing inventory and logistics  services, as well as financing.

  • Founded in January 2020 by CEO Nipun  Mehra, the company has thrived under  

  • a pandemic-induced shift to digital, so  far raising over $117 million in funding  

  • from big names like Tencent and  Lightspeed Venture Partners.

  • One among them is Bezos Expeditions,  

  • whose billionaire owner was told about Ula  by one of the start-up's early backers.

  • In a region where Amazon has limited  presence, Jeff Bezos's investment  

  • of an undisclosed sum through his family  office can be seen as a vote of confidence.

  • Nipun previously worked at Boston Consulting  Group and Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart,  

  • but he started his career assoftware engineer at Amazon in 2004.

  • If you'd have asked me at that time that there  would be a day, you know, 15 years later,  

  • where this moment would come, I would  have probably been like it's a dream.

  • Despite never meeting Bezos, Nipun yearned  to be an entrepreneur, just like him.  

  • It was during his time as an investor at Sequoia  India when he saw an opportunity to adapt the  

  • traditional business-to-consumer e-commerce model  for a new market: small food kiosks in Indonesia.

  • The B2C angle, the typical AmazonFlipkart, or here, in Southeast Asia,  

  • we have Shopee, Lazada, Tokopedia and so  on, it has been more on the non-food side,  

  • primarily. Foods is a very different way of  running things. Usually in emerging economies,  

  • their income profile is such that they have  to buy frequently and in small baskets.  

  • And the moment you get into that dynamic, the traditional way of doing e-commerce doesn't work,  

  • because you can't deliver a three-, four-,  five-dollar basket to somebody's home and do  

  • it profitably and sustainably, so you  have to find other ways of doing it.

  • Indonesia, with its vast population  and fast-growing economy,  

  • is seen as a huge opportunity  for entrepreneurs and investors.

  • Central to that are the country's  millions of neighborhood kiosks,  

  • which sell fast moving consumer goods, like drinks  and packaged food, as well as household items.

  • They're an integral part of society,  

  • especially in the smaller cities and  provinces outside the capital Jakarta,  

  • accounting for almost three-quarters of the  country's $47 billion consumer goods sales.

  • Many rely on traditional means  of replenishing their supplies  

  • by shuttering their stores when they  visit wholesalers to stock up wares.

  • Abheek Anand, a managing director at Sequoia  India, one of Ula's investors, explained more.

  • They are essentially run by one or two peoplewho act like consumers. They own the business;  

  • they need to procure things for themselves  to sell. And for them to actually  

  • tap into offline supply chains is actually very  inefficient. They have to go to the local market,  

  • spend hours figuring out what  to buy, where to buy it from.

  • Nipun wanted to simplify that process by  creating a business-to-business platform  

  • that would enable stallholders to  order stock at competitive rates  

  • and have it delivered to  their store for a small fee.

  • So, he called on his contacts in the e-commerce  space to help him realize the vision.  

  • His former colleague from AmazonAlan Wong, Riky Tenggara from Lazada,  

  • and Procter & Gamble executive Derry  Sakti rounded out the founding team.

  • The traditional store owner, they're  on YouTube, they're on TikTok,  

  • they're spending time on WhatsApp. They're  digital. They're more digital than many of us.  

  • So how do we bring that advantage and say  okay, we've learned all this stuff in Amazon,  

  • we've learned all this stuff in business  school. How do we bring some of that  

  • into this little smartphone and help them both  make more money as well as save more money?

  • The business got off to a steady start. But  within months of launching in January 2020,  

  • the pandemic hit, making demand  for services like Ula more urgent.

  • Lockdowns made it harder for stallholders to  source goods from wholesalers, even as customer  

  • demand for daily essentials grew. That caused  many mom-and-pop shops to pile onto the platform.

  • The need in the market just  completely switched. In lockdown,  

  • your first priority is to get your  food, is to get things that you consume.

  • The founders responded quicklyonboarding tens of thousands of  

  • stallholders and expanding their team of 15  to 400 across Indonesia, Singapore and India.

  • That rapid growth caught the eye of investors,  

  • helping them to attract their first  round of investment within six months.

  • To Nipun's credit, he's been able to get  a lot of momentum very early and clearly a  

  • lot of other investors are seeing that. The most  exciting addition to the company is Jeff Bezos,  

  • who's invested, which is obviously nice validation  for the business. But there are a number of other  

  • really smart people who have  joined us along the way.

  • To date, Southeast Asia is  home to 35 billion-dollar  

  • startups, of which three-quarters (76%)  are from Indonesia and Singapore. Of them,  

  • 26% are in the financial technology sector,  20% are in e-commerce and 11% are in logistics.

  • In October 2021, Ula closed its  Series B round, raising $87 million.  

  • Nipun said the cash will go towards expanding  its existing marketplace offering, as well as  

  • launching a so-called buy now, pay later service  to provide stallholders with small loans.

  • What is to come is what we call the working  capital problem. That's something which we  

  • are building. Working capital helps  you expand how much you can keep in  

  • your store and therefore you will not run  out when the customer needs something.

  • The foundations are there, the  customers want the service.  

  • What we need to do now is continue to build on it.

  • Within the next 18 monthsNipun hopes to quadruple  

  • the number of merchants Ula works  with from 70,000 today to 300,000.

  • He also hopes to help merchants  expand into new categories  

  • such as apparel and technology, with the  ultimate goal of doubling their income.

  • Why restrict yourself to the items  that are in your store? Why can't  

  • you order everything that your customer  needs? Why can't you be that channel?  

  • And those are tougher problems to solve  and will take longer. But, in my mind,  

  • that is what will lead to a new form of retailNot something which we have seen in the U.S.,  

  • not something which we have seen in China. It  will be an Indonesia-specific, unique solution.

  • It's a bold goal for any entrepreneur, let  alone one building in the midst of a pandemic.

  • There will always be uncertainty in life, there  will always be risk in life. You just have to  

  • say I'm going to try this andwill deal with whatever comes

  • And I'm sure that if you'd known thatpandemic was a few months around the corner,  

  • you might not have started this  time either but you still managed

  • That is true too. That is true too. So  in that sense the timing was perfect

  • Perfectly bad, but it seems to have worked out. Perfectly bad, correct.

Billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has  

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