For years, William Tanuwijaya spent twelve hours a day in an internet cafe. He was not there to play. It was a part-time job that paid for his degree at BINUS University, and it lasted until he graduated in 2003.
He came from Pematangsiantar, a town in North Sumatra, born in 1981 into a middle-income family that supported his schooling. After graduating he moved through ordinary jobs: software developer at Telkomsigma and Sqiva Sistem, game developer at Bolehnet, then IT and business development manager at Indocom Mediatama in 2006. A decent career, steady, safe.
The US trade office listed it as a notorious market over counterfeit goods.
In 2007 he started building something else. The itch was simple. A person in a small town could not reach the products that a person in Jakarta took for granted, books for instance. Technology, he thought, could close that gap. He asked his friend Leontinus Alpha Edison to join him. The name was a mash-up of toko, Indonesian for shop, and encyclopedia: a store for everything.
What almost nobody mentions is what else was happening that year. Around the same time his father was diagnosed with cancer. The company was being born under the shadow of family illness, which says something about how much a salaried job was worth against a dream still two years from launch.
Tokopedia launched on 6 February 2009 and opened to the public on 17 August. The first money was small: Rp2.5 billion from PT Indonusa Dwitama. East Ventures, CyberAgent and SoftBank Ventures Korea followed. In 2014 Sequoia and SoftBank put in US$100 million. Then Alibaba led US$1.1 billion in 2017 and another US$1.1 billion in 2018, valuing it around US$7 billion.
Growth came with scars. A data breach in 2020 reportedly exposed 15 million user records. The US trade office listed it as a notorious market over counterfeit goods. In 2021 it merged with Gojek into GoTo. In December 2023 TikTok agreed to buy 75% for about US$1.5 billion, and in 2024 around 70 staff were laid off.
The pattern for founders: a cafe seat, a small-town frustration, and one friend willing to join. Scale came later. The founding impulse was personal and specific, and it survived a family crisis.