So here’s something interesting about AVCII. Apparently someone has jumped the gun in announcing the venture capital alliance. Andi S. Boediman, head of Ideosource and Ideoworks published a blog post today saying that nothing had really been agreed upon regarding Thursday’s meeting and it was all casual chat over lunch.
Boediman had said in his post,
It’s always nice to have people with the same interest to sit in one table, just to chill out, casual conversation and exchange latest updates, but for me I am not into association or any effort to change policy, collaboration with government whatsoever. My glory days to change the world are over 🙂 Some of you knows me better… I am a pragmatist now
Chill out friends, this is just a casual lunch and no agenda to change the world…..yet…
A number of us bloggers in the Indonesian tech startup media circle received a press release regarding the formation of the VC alliance and everyone hit the publish button. But today’s blog post puts that press release into question, so we decided to dig a little further into the issue and contacted those who were at the lunch.
One participant of the lunch said, “Yes, that was an idea for the invitation. But [we don’t] all necessarily agree to setup an association, so it was an initial discussion. For me, it’s a casual lunch for exploring an idea that might result in more structured way.”
Another said, “It’s true that we were planning to gather for like either an association or a club. We are still in the middle of discussing it…
To add, one of our aims is to ensure a healthy ecosystem among the industry and the meeting [was] to discuss what we can do as a group to realize this.”
A third person said, “We are trying to identify the current situation include the problems that we encountered along the years. Basicly exchanging knowledge to help each other and better future for ecosystem.”
Essentially the spirit of the alliance was there, if not on paper. There was an agreement among the participants that there is still much to do about the technology startup scene. They also agreed that information sharing and collaboration to an extent will help overcome the issues that both investors and entrepreneurs face. However, many of the participants felt that this was an early stage discussion, rather than a formal formation. One told DailySocial that he didn’t realize there was a name already.
The way we see it, whether an alliance was formed or not, it’s clear that the eight venture capital firms are on the same page about the general startup scene in the country and in the future, we can expect them to work together in some way to improve the Indonesian startup scene.
[header image from Shutterstock]
