I am Angkin, just turned 35 years old at the time this was written in Dec 2020.
I’m an entrepreneur with engineering background, specializing in database administration, apps development (backend, front end — basically what you call fullstack nowadays, plus also network server etc), machine learning modelling, and data analysis.
Also having a secondary skill (despite it is actually my given-main-talent) in illustration and animation.
Started my career as a freelancer software/web developer + animator in my hometown in Salatiga, Central Java, Indonesia for clients in Australia and Jakarta.
Eventually went to Jakarta to learn more about the business hoping to know much more about anything and getting more money to find and build my own business. It was exciting to know there are whole lot of people, expertise, knowledge, and businesses related to one another creating a complex network of human civilization.
6 years of corporate life, with my last job was at Oracle, I began to 100% focusing on my IT consulting business specializing on software dev, database, and big data since 2014, after started it partially since 2008.
In the first year, i managed to secure significantly a lot of money, bought properties and like Indonesian dream : make my parents happier.
Then in 2015 I decided to grow / scaling up my business by working together with a partner and put him as CEO, with me as an investor and tech guy (CTO) because i prefer to focus on technology only. Hoping if I can make US$100.000 a year by myself, I can scale it up to US$500.000 if i had a team and a sales guy.
It was a wrong decision which I will share later in a different article, where my company ended up losing US$1.5 million in 2018.
Currently i have just had a rough 2020, I screw up my second company, not just because of Covid, but due to toxic and incompetent co-founders and the employees they recruited, which i should have taken a better decision to not hire them in the first place— this is not me blaming them, the fault is absolutely on me for not wise nor smart enough to hire and keep them, knowing they are way far below my standard and expectation.
After a deep introspective meditation, I found out that I was having way too much inferiority complex since i was a kid, leading to how I always position myself as the one who desperately needs them, when it supposed to be the other way around.
My deepest rockbottom this year, is when i lost all of my confidence as a person, disgusted at myself for being such a wuss, incompetent leader, never had the guts to fire people, never stand up to my ideal, easily compromised, way too tolerant, way too easy to trust people, and stubbornly spending time and effort trying to trust people to achieve my standard, instead of firing them and recruit better people. I was prioritizing the wrong thing : to build the people inside, putting the company survivability as a second priority.
But the silver lining is always there, I was forced to grow myself and learn to be stronger and sharper, by finally (forced to) let go of those toxic people, and re-found myself like the way I was back when I started my business in 2014.
By this “disaster” in 2020 I learnt many lesson my family never told me as they never experienced it.
I finally starting to gain back my confindence, as I remembered that I was capable of doing business, alone, since 2008–2014, and now I have grown a substantial skill of being bold and strong towards people which I never had before.
2020 is a do over for many, myself included. I fired my co-founder and the whole tech team.
As I said, I am now a full time algorithmic forex trader.
I developed a trading robot in 2009, which I stopped using in 2013 to focus on my IT career back then, after a really hard decision to choose IT or trading career. So actually this is not a sudden pivot, as I already an experienced trader since 2008.
2020 Covid pandemic bring this bot to me once again in July, porting it to a newer version, adjust several algorithms, and suprisingly managed to secure a big client in September.
I am now focusing in my robot : Infinium, adding machine learning based modules to automate several part of the market analysis.
For this bold restart, what I will keep in mind is “when you do business, your aim is not to please people, but to bring your business to what you see in your vision”