I was born in San Francisco, grew up in Jeddah and built my adult life in Indonesia. This is the long version: where I come from, the jobs that taught me, the people who wrote my base code, and one number from my esports years that still gets its own screen.
01 · Roots
Born in one country, raised in another, at home in a third.
I was born in San Francisco. My family moved to Jeddah when I was young, and I grew up in international schools with classmates from everywhere, of every faith.
I moved to Indonesia to study, and I am still here. It is where I met my wife, and it is home. I live in Bali and work across US and Indonesian time zones, in English, Indonesian and Arabic.
San FranciscoBorn37.77 N, 122.42 W
JeddahRaised21.49 N, 39.19 E
JakartaUniversity6.21 S, 106.85 E
BaliBuilding from here8.65 S, 115.22 E
02 · The cafe
Paid in game time.
Before I had a decent computer of my own, I spent my afternoons in an internet cafe. I played League of Legends, DOTA, World of Warcraft, Battlefield and Call of Duty there. When the cafe's machines broke, I fixed them, and the owner paid me in hours. Best salary I ever had.
At 13 I was running game servers on a computer with 2 GB of RAM: a Minecraft server with plugins I wrote myself, and a World of Warcraft server I never quite got working. At 16 I sold my first plugin.
I did not know it yet, but that was the whole job.
server console, age 13
$ ./start minecraft-server
memory: 2048 MB, all of it
plugins loaded: mine
$ ./start wow-server
error: still not working
$ sell plugin --first
sold. age 16
$
RAM2 GB
03 · The broadcast
Three years on the mic, in Arabic.
From 2020 to 2023 I cast and analysed Free Fire live, in Arabic, on Garena's server for the Middle East and North Africa. I did it on weekends, next to university and night shifts. It taught me to think out loud with a lot of people listening.
The number is the event's. The voice in Arabic was mine.
The peak of concurrent viewers, a world record for esports at the time.
Count by Esports Charts, which leaves out Chinese platforms.
The Arabic stream I called peaked at 136,000.
04 · The degree
Study, cast, work nights. Repeat.
I studied public relations and digital communications at LSPR as a foreign student, away from the language and the culture I grew up in. At the same time I cast esports on weekends, took late night retention calls for a US solar company and helped with the family business. I graduated cum laude.
My thesis was also my first real work with AI. I started on GPT-3.
The best systems do not matter if you cannot communicate them. That is why the degree is in this story.
Degreecum laude
Castingweekends
Retention callsnights
Family businessalways
05 · Solar
Where it actually hurts.
In 2022 I joined Eterna on retention calls for a US solar company, one of the first people in that seat. I wrote the procedures that every hire after me followed.
Retention gave me what broadcasting could not: a clear read on where solar companies actually hurt.
retention procedure, v1
01take the call
02find the cause
03fix the cause, not only the call
04write it down for the next hire
06 · The builder
Same job. Different zeros.
I watched the team run a business on spreadsheets, and I moved from customer success to product. That became Merdeka.AI, the CRM SunPower's sales organization runs on. The team builds it. I lead the product.
The kid who connected game servers now connects the sales to finance stack of SunPower.
Today I run operations at Eterna, lead product at Merdeka.AI, lead technology at NJCP, run Eterna Academy, which I co-founded, and do corporate planning at Tynergy. All of it from Bali.
From gaming kid, to broadcaster, to solar operator, to AI builder, it all comes together in what I do now.
Faith is part of my life, and I carry my family's name with care.
Parts of my childhood were hard. I got through them with a lot of help and a stubborn kind of optimism. If you are reading this from a hard place: where you start does not decide where you finish. I want the next kid in that place to get the help I had.
What I hope for from here: a family, a home near nature, an animal shelter one day.
09 · Contributors
The humans who wrote my base code.
Every system has a credits file. This is mine.
MD
Original founders
Mom and Dad
Wrote the kernel.
JE
My wife
Jesica
Co-author of everything that comes next.
YP
Mentor
Yan Purba
Taught me to think critically, to work a problem methodically and to balance ambition with humility. Showed me how to run a team like an executive, stay positive in hard times and see the opportunity in them.
DP
Mentor
Devie Purba
Taught me to lead by example and to truly listen. A servant leader in the Scrum sense: caring for the team and supporting it, without losing its respect or pushing it too hard.
