Building Conviction

I was still a clueless kid when I first entered university (in some ways, I still am). Over the past four years, I’ve developed a clue on several things, and have yet to develop them on others. As I bring a close to my university years, I wanted to reflect on the big strokes that painted my journey throughout, and what it taught me about building conviction in your life’s decisions.

This post was not made to show off the more glamorous parts of my story, but rather as a way for me to reflect on a recurring trait I observed throughout university which has rewarded me with things I couldn’t even think of previously. I don’t mind if this post barely has any readers. If I were so lucky for it to resonate with someone that was in a similar position as I was in back then, I would be extremely grateful.

The Bet That Started It All

I entered university without having any clear idea of what I should do with my life. I’ve tried a bunch of stuff during high school, but at that point in time I didn’t really find anything that stuck with me. In particular, I only tried programming when I entered high school. I didn’t took it seriously at the time, as I was still exploring what I wanted to do, like what many high school students also did throughout their school years.

On a random day, I picked up a yellow book titled Zero to One from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. After reading the first chapter, I was sold on the vision of capitalism, and on technology companies driving the world forward, solving (and sometimes, also creating) societal issues along the way. Having went through hundreds of books later, I don’t see the world as black and white as I did back then. But the book did provide a novel insight in how markets, capitalism, and technology work together to shape society.

This was my only guiding compass in making the university decision. Fully (naively?) convinced that the next 100 years of progress will mostly be driven through technology (whether in the form of health-tech, ad-tech, fin-tech, or climate-tech) and driven by 0 → 1 innovation (instead of 1 → N via globalization), I picked UI Computer Science as the my option for the SNMPTN, the non-test (GPA-based) university selection, back at the time.

I had zero backup plans. No “second options.” And no trying to “game the SNMPTN system” with picking multiple universities and major combinations (as what many students did at the time). I placed my full conviction on the one major I think would position me to shape the future better than alternative paths. This particular trait of me would appear again in future decisions, as we’ll see.

My bet worked. On a random afternoon, I had gotten admitted into my dream major. Of course, I didn’t blindly took a leap of faith. I also attended tutoring and studied on weekends for three years straight to maximize my grades throughout high school, which was an important factor for the SNMPTN process. That gave me a head start and confidence to place my chips on one bet, because if I fail this bet, I know it wouldn’t be the end, as I was pretty much battle-ready for the subsequent test rounds of SBMPTN from months prior. A bold move wrapped in careful planning and preparation would prove to be a recurring theme in my journey.

A Random Walk Across Optionalities

With the new semester still three months away, I was bored of not having things to do. I found an opportunity online to join a volunteering organization to help educate students on soft skills and develop their career-preparedness. I also joined several other organizations and volunteering efforts with multiple themes, from writing advocation to church service efforts. While this may seem super serious for a high school student (or not... some peers who later got into top universities abroad were already doing these from the first day of school), I find them to be fun as I get to meet new people while also developing myself at the time.

As someone who had not even graduated high school, I was already interacting with interesting peers on their third or fourth year of university, allowing me to absorb their accumulated insights throughout their university years during the months I was involved in these organizations. When freshman year started, I already had a sense of what I’m trying to aim for throughout university. Spoiler: that “aim” was actually management consulting.

My environment back then was full of many peers who were gunning for, or had already went through several internships at both regional and international consulting firms. Seeing so many smart and great people walking down this path, from computer science students to international relations majors, my reaction to this was to perceive consulting as the “correct” path for ambitious university students.

Indeed, consulting was (and still is) seen as a prestigious and highly lucrative career move by society. Many students were sold by looking at the glamorous logos and offices, the many exit opportunities, and valuable network waiting for them after a two year stint at the biggest firms. I thought consulting was the right path for me and later switch into tech (a common plan held by many students going into consulting). Heck, even industry names such as Thiel and Naval started from Big Law and MBB consulting before they both founded their own startups/businesses. This gave me the perception of “keeping my options open” for high impact opportunities in tech.

When the second semester began, I was dead set on getting a consulting internship for the summer. One reason was to prove to myself that I can. Another equally strong reason was to prove myself to others that I can (which is not a good source of motivation to draw from, but I didn’t knew better back then). I took on leadership experiences at multiple student organizations in parallel, while also immersing myself in building decks for case competitions and doing mock case interviews with several peers. All while taking extra course load for the semester. As you might guess, it was six months filled with a hell lot of stress.

Turns out, my GPA nosedived while doing this, as I learned the hard way that while you can do anything, you can’t do everything, not all at once. When the semester ended, I was one step away to reaching my goal of having an MBB consulting internship on year one, as I ended up in the final interview call alongside students who had a much larger head start in life (to paint a picture: all but one of the interviewees in the breakout room were Indonesians studying in ivy-league universities in the USA). We did the joint case interview for almost two hours, as we did two tough case rounds where we broke down problems under pressure and presented our findings to the group right after.

Weeks later, I got news of not passing the final round. I was devastated at the time. I had thought I was on the “right track” for getting on the career highway, and demotivation lingered for several weeks after. I didn’t let that keep me down forever though, as I got back to cold emailing every tech recruiter you could find on LinkedIn. Throughout a span of four weeks, I had built a pipeline of 200+ recruiter leads from various companies.

Within a month of my prior rejection letter, I had landed a product management internship at Amartha, a late-stage startup which helps Indonesian female-led MSMEs gain access to productive loans. Product management was unique role, as it offers the intersection between business and tech, which forced me to utilize the business knowledge I built throughout my freshman year and some of my technical knowledge from my CS degree. The funny thing was, this internship position didn’t even existed prior to me joining, but we’ll save that story for another blogpost.

Rolling Up My Sleeves To Work On Product

Amartha was the first of my many stints at product-based, startup companies in Indonesia. Two of those I worked as a product manager intern, two others as a software engineer intern. These stints gave me a unique perspective on technology companies, how products are built from the inside, and the sobering truths of the Indonesian startup ecosystem in contrast to those in markets such as the United States.

At Amartha, I helped my manager, which was a senior PM at the time, to build and launch an internal risk management tool for risk and operations teams to screen borrowers’ risk profile. Then, I helped to build an internal automation tool to automate bank statement reconciliations which was a 3x speed up over existing processes. Between third and fourth semester, I interned at another startup named Transfez (a YC-backed company) where I helped build a stealth consumer product revolving around money transfers and led a project in revamping their internal voucher engine from the ground up.

Working at Amartha, and followed by Transfez as a PM gave me direct experience of delivering products to customers (both internal and external), coordinating work across domains, and communicating concepts laterally (e.g. with engineers and business teams) and also vertically (e.g. with senior management). PMs often play a role as the glue that connects different parts of the organization towards a common goal. I am grateful to have gained the product perspective of building products, something which I still carry in my work today.

Something Wasn’t Right

My product experience gave me a high-level perspective on delivering products and to manage stakeholders from various domains, all of which I am grateful for. However, after two internships under my belt, I started to think deeply about whether PM is the right role for me to be in the long term. There were several points which drove me into reconsidering my career plans:

1. I found that as a PM, I didn’t get many chances to build deep, specific knowledge on a discipline

2. I realized that PMs, as a role, are needed specifically when organizational complexity grow large, in contrast to other roles which drive the business on all stages (i.e. early-stage startups are staffed with mostly engineers (who builds) and salespeople (who sells) and not PMs)

3. I got tired of the helpless feeling of having to depend on other people (engineering, design, etc) each time we needed to build something (i.e. I wanted to have the capability to build cool stuff on my own)

Let’s dive into these points one by one.

1) I wanted to build deep, specific knowledge early on in my career, not only breadth

The PM role is well known to be a generalist role. Your day to day can vary drastically one week to the next, as you might be handling customer support tickets on one day, and jumping into system architecture discussions on another. While the PM role exposed me to many roles and functions in an organization, and taught me how to become a generalist in the context of a technology company, I soon found out that I wasn’t happy with the fact that I didn’t develop any meaningful depth in a skillset.

Being so early in my career, I realized that I wanted to build depth on several skillsets rather than become a generalist (which is something that’s easier to do, relatively speaking, even as you get more tenured). My view on the generalist vs specialist debate is that you shouldn’t bother picking a side. Instead, you should become a generalist with a specialization in one or two important, high leverage domains. Only by combining the breadth of vision that generalists have, with the wisdom and depth of understanding that specialists bring (where the combination of both results in your “specific knowledge” which is unique to you and only you), only then can one become a high impact individual.

What do I mean by a “high impact individual”? I use such term to refer to a person who can bring purposeful, quantitatively important solutions to whatever problems they see interest in. It could be a salesperson who can close deals 3x faster than others in his company, it could be an entrepreneur who can orchestrate a team to bring a product to market with better quality as their competitor in half the time, it could be the engineering manager who can design an effective solution to an important business problem, and can drive a team of people who may be smarter than them to realize that vision.

I couldn’t accept a long term vision of myself that didn’t mold me to become a high impact individual. To achieve that, I realized I must spend effort on building knowledge in something that is both valuable (i.e. the world has demand for it) and meaningful (i.e. it can be applied to problem spaces that are important in our time). I also knew that I would later regret not trying to develop depth early on in my career, and being only halfway done through university (I was in my fourth semester back then) convinced me that I had enough runway to pivot.

2) The thought of playing the role as the “glue” for an organizational complexity did not suit me well

I learned that the product management role existed to solve an organizational problem. Problems arise when organizations get large. Engineers don’t want to coordinate directly with legal and marketing while also having a stack of JIRA tickets on their plate. Non-technical personnel often lack the technical depth to problem solve effectively with engineers and designers. The PM role was constructed to fill in such gap in the organizational chart.

While I was initially ecstatic about playing the role of “the glue” within an organization, I realized that this wasn’t something I wanted to do in the long run. I wanted to get into the heart of the action, and not become someone who coordinates the action itself. By labelling oneself as a “glue” to solve a problem caused by organizational complexity, you restrict yourself to organizations which has that characteristic.

As someone who considered working on early stage startups (whether as an employee or owner), I wanted to position myself in a role where I can operate on any type of organization (big or small). In addition, I wanted to make sure that I was deep in the weeds, becoming someone that drives the action which has a direct influence on the success or failure of an organization.

3) I realized I wanted to build things more than I wanted to manage stakeholders

Probably the most important reason why I decided to pivot from product is the fact that I had an inner desire to build things of my own using my two hands, more strongly than I wanted to manage projects and stakeholders. I wanted to build solutions for causes that I strongly believe in. While that is not impossible to do as a generalist (any meaningful endeavor requires a team, and within a team there are those who drive the vision and those who execute on said vision), I was more attracted to the idea of becoming someone who can build such things myself.

This point is more personal compared to the other two, but it was strong enough to be a key driver in my decision making at the time.

Building Conviction to Pivot

You might be wondering, why all the fuss? Isn’t this just some college kid who’s trying to figure out what he wants in life? In a way, yes, that is similar. But from what I observe, few undergrads actually think deeply about what they truly want in life, and even fewer actually manages to systematically execute a multi-year plan towards such vision. This is not meant to diss people who do such things, though. A randomized approach might work for them, but I was sure that it wouldn’t work for me.

By the time I decided to pivot to engineering, I had already established a strong head start in the product management field, with two internships at fast growing companies under my belt. Pivoting to another role meant leaving everything behind in product management, and starting fresh from square one.

At first, it was tough. Why give up the head start you worked so hard to build in the first place? I was again, one or two steps behind in reaching my dream at the time (the next logical step was to intern as a PM at a top startup, then applying to multinational tech companies). But when I considered what I really wanted in this life, coupled with the realization that I am never getting any younger than I am back then, I decided that a pivot was the right move forward.

I decided that I would start from scratch and climb up the progress ladder during halftime. This was, of course, easier said than done. The opportunity cost was quite high, as I was already getting multiple opportunities to become either a full time PM at a top startup and several other firms. So many people who I thought were committed builders in their respective field (CS, bio, engineering) fall into the lucrative offers from the top firms. That’s what happens when you give people a ton of money and prestige straight out of college. Such decisions are rational when you look at it that way.

Building conviction to make a change was not easy, nor was it instantaneous. It was something I did over years with many “smaller wins” helping to build my confidence; brick by brick until it became something rock solid. Across two years, I participated in hackathons, winning some, did internships, and built projects of my own. I challenged myself to learn new concepts that I initially thought was “too hard” for me (hint: it always looks “too hard” at first, until you try it). I applied to roles I was far from qualified from, taking hundreds of rejections over months of applications as feedback for my growth. As I set these challenges, and eventually exceed them, it became clearer and clearer that this pivot was not an impossible task, and I realized that I might be moving in the right direction after all.

Zooming out, I also think this is a good way to perceive how we make major life decisions. You should start with why you are making such decision, and then approach the problem in an iterative manner, obtaining small wins that eventually lead to you having full conviction in the decision. Conviction is something that is developed over time; not something innate. It is completely okay to feel moments of doubt; however, by starting with the why, one will not forget why they decided to take such decision in the first place.

Building conviction to pivot marked a recurring theme in my life where I believed strongly in something so much so that I couldn’t envision doing anything else and be content with it. It was when I decided to go all in on something I fully believed in, taking significant risk and dropped all backup plans. Throughout, I faced real risks of failure and “falling behind” (whatever that means) if my efforts didn’t work out, which was especially important amidst the tech winter we were facing throughout the past 3 years.

Fast Forward

Come April 2025, and I finally landed a software engineering role at GoTo Group (Gojek/GoPay). This exact role was actually what I’ve been targeting from the year prior, as I had made a list of things I wanted to achieve for 2025. I specifically mentioned the role as I was already a longtime customer of Gojek/GoPay, and I knew this was the place where I can make the most impact to the Indonesian tech ecosystem as an engineer, where my code works for the benefit of millions of people and merchants across Indonesia.

Several months into my team, I feel like I’m riding the steep learning curve at a rapid pace. I am committed to learn and absorb as much knowledge as I can from this organization, as fast as possible. I’m grateful to be part of an organization that takes learning and growth very seriously. Not to mention, working at a mature company does bring a positive impact in the non-work aspects of your life, compared to say, working at an early stage startup :)

The road ahead is long, with lots of turns, and will difficult. I wrote this post so that on the days when I feel like I’m losing, I’ll remember what got me started, and how I got here in the first place.

I wanted to end this post with a quote I found that really resonated with my story; on embracing risks and taking a leap of faith for things you believe in:

“What I listen for is someone who really wanted something that could be obtained only through taking the risk, whether that risk was big or small.

It’s not even important that she managed the risk skillfully; it’s only important that she knew it was there, respected it, but took it anyway.

Most people wander through life, carelessly taking whatever risk crosses their path without compensation, but never consciously accepting extra risk to pick up the money and other good things lying all around them.

Other people reflexively avoid every risk or grab every loose dollar without caution.

I don’t mean to belittle these strategies; I’m sure they make sense to the people who pursue them. I just don’t understand them myself.

I do know that none of these people will be successful traders”

-The Poker Face of Wall Street