How TES Was Born: Building Indonesia's Entrepreneur Community

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The Entrepreneurs Society did not begin with a vision board or a five-year plan. It began with a problem I couldn't stop thinking about, a small group of people who felt the same way, and a willingness to try something without knowing whether it would work.

That was more than a decade ago. What followed — 12,000+ members, 400+ events, hundreds of ELITES graduates, and a community that has produced real businesses and real leaders across Indonesia — was not the plan. It was the result of staying committed to the problem long enough for the solution to reveal itself.

The Problem That Started Everything

The thing I kept seeing, early in my career, was how isolated Indonesian entrepreneurs were — not from each other socially, but from each other meaningfully. People were going to networking events and collecting business cards. They were attending seminars and taking notes. But they weren't finding the peer relationships that actually matter when you're building something: the people who understand your specific situation, who will tell you the truth, who will hold you accountable and celebrate with you when something works.

The communities that existed were either too transactional — pure networking, optimized for deal-making — or too passive — masterclasses and content consumption with no real relationship-building. Neither model created what I believed was the most important thing: trust deep enough to survive honest feedback.

I'd experienced what deep peer community felt like in other contexts. I knew what it could do for people. And I was increasingly convinced that the absence of it in Indonesia's entrepreneurial ecosystem was one of the most underappreciated constraints on growth — for individual entrepreneurs and for the ecosystem as a whole.

"I wasn't trying to build an organization. I was trying to solve a problem that I kept running into and couldn't find anyone else solving the right way."

The Early Days — What We Got Wrong and Why It Didn't Matter

The first version of TES was imperfect in almost every way that a community can be imperfect. The programming was inconsistent. The vetting process for members barely existed. The events were sometimes excellent and sometimes mediocre. We had no clear theory of what made a member a great fit and what made them the wrong fit.

What we had was a clear commitment to one principle: the room matters more than the content. If you put the right people in a room together and give them a reason to be honest with each other, something valuable will happen regardless of what is on the agenda. Every structural decision since — the application process, the cohort model, the retreat format, the peer accountability structures — has been built backward from that single conviction.

The early wrong turns were important. They clarified what we were actually building. We were not building a training company with a community attached. We were not building a networking platform. We were building a community where real entrepreneurial development happened through relationships — and everything else was in service of that.

What 400+ Events Taught Us About What People Actually Need

After running more than 400 TES events across Indonesia, patterns emerge that you simply cannot see from the outside. The events that produce the most lasting value are almost never the ones with the most impressive speaker lineup. They are the ones with the highest quality of conversation in the room.

The event format matters far less than the question design. Getting someone to share not just what worked but what almost didn't — what they would have done differently, where they genuinely weren't sure — is worth more than ten case studies of clean success. Real learning happens in the discomfort, not the highlight reel.

We also learned that consistency is an underrated community value. Members don't just need good events. They need a rhythm — a reliable cadence of interactions that builds the familiarity and trust that makes deeper conversations possible. TES has worked to build that rhythm deliberately, because without it, a community is just a list of names.

The ELITES Program: Where the Real Work Happens

If I had to point to the part of TES that has produced the most transformative results, it is the ELITES program — our intensive mastermind cohort for serious entrepreneurs who are committed to growing in a structured, accountable environment alongside peers at a similar stage.

ELITES works because it combines things that almost never exist in the same place: genuine peer accountability (not cheerleading, but real accountability with real consequences for not following through), honest mentorship (not polished advice, but frank engagement with specific situations), and a long enough time horizon to see real change.

The alumni of ELITES have gone on to build businesses that matter. Not because of a curriculum or a framework they received, but because of the community they became part of and the version of themselves they developed inside it.

What TES Has Confirmed About the Original Thesis

More than a decade in, the original thesis has held up better than I expected and been humbled in ways I didn't anticipate. The thesis — that what Indonesian entrepreneurs most needed was not more information but better community — has been validated repeatedly by what we've seen members build with the support of the TES ecosystem.

What I underestimated was how long trust takes to build — and how much that timeline matters for what becomes possible inside a community. The most valuable things TES has produced didn't happen in year one or year two. They happened in years five, six, seven — when relationships had been tested enough to be genuinely trusted, when people knew each other's real situations, when the history between members meant something.

Building a community for the long term requires patience with timelines that don't fit quarterly planning cycles. It requires a commitment to the mission that survives the inevitable periods when growth feels slow and impact feels invisible. That commitment — to the original problem, to the long game — is what TES has been built on.