For years, doctors in Jakarta met a junior drug salesman called Budi Jonathan. He often waited past midnight to pitch medicines to overworked physicians. What they did not know was that Budi was Jonathan Sudharta, the son of the man who owned the company.
Sudharta had grown up with the label that fathers dread. As a teenager he was a fighter and an average student. At 13 he and friends were badly beaten by students from another school. His father's friends, as Bloomberg later reported, worried he would one day ruin the family business, a pharmaceutical trading house his father started in 1975 that became Mensa Group.
The moment he points to as a turning point came on his first day, at a port.
He went to Hale School in Perth, then studied commerce at Curtin University. He played bass in a band and produced films and concerts for Indonesian diaspora communities. Then he went home and joined Mensa as a trainee.
The moment he points to as a turning point came on his first day, at a port. He handed out small bonuses, 1,000 rupiah each, about ten US cents. He wanted to give an elderly worker more, but a manager stopped him. The man's gratitude for so little stayed with him. 'It was a big slap in my face,' he told Bloomberg. 'That changed my life.'
He hid his surname and worked his way up, spending about 13 years in the company. That is the quiet reveal in his story: the pseudonym. He chose to earn the doctors' trust as a stranger rather than as the boss's son, and the contacts he built, with doctors, hospitals, pharmacies and the health regulator, became the raw material for Halodoc.
In 2016, at 34, he co-founded it. Nadiem Makarim of Gojek encouraged him to start his own company, and advised him to go where people feel the most pain. Sudharta had watched patients wait hours for a short consultation, then wait again for medicine. Halodoc offered online consultations, medicine delivery, home lab tests and hospital bookings. Gojek integrated it into its app in 2017. Mensa did not fund it, though Halodoc rented offices in a Mensa building.
By July 2019 it claimed about 40 million users, 22,000 licensed doctors and 1,000 pharmacies, and the Gates Foundation's investment arm had joined an extended Series B, its first equity investment in an online health platform. In 2023, Astra Digital led a US$100 million Series D.
The lesson is a small one with a long tail. The years of being a nobody in a doctor's waiting room were not a detour. They were the market research, and the only kind that cannot be bought.