Skip to content

About

Almost two decades of building things.

Sony Subrata portrait

Born in 1991, I started working at sixteen, initially out of necessity, to pay for my own schooling. The first jobs were small: trading second-hand phones over Kaskus, coding Friendster layouts for classmates, account-boosting in games on the side. It was scrappy work, but it was real, and two things from that period stuck with me. The first was that I didn't need a perfect setup to start. I just needed enough resourcefulness to work with what was in front of me. The second was that trust scales further than capital, and the customer relationship was itself the product.

The work has shifted shape many times since then. A small phone shop in Bekasi. Five family businesses run in parallel: travel, events, catering, cafe, hospitality. A short stint in industrial waste management. The last few years I've been building a gaming ecommerce platform, hands-on across product, engineering, and design, growing and shrinking the team as the work called for it, and learning what staying calm during a tech winter feels like up close.

I'm a builder more than a writer. Most of what shows up here comes from work I've sat with for a while rather than things I picked up secondhand. AI keeps me curious as an accelerator, less so as a topic. Most of how my team and I work today already runs through it, and the part I keep coming back to is the building itself.

Outside the work I read long-form, swap notes with a handful of operators and engineers in shorter conversations, and spend most of what's left at home with my family.

02Things I keep coming back to
  1. 01

    Walk the talk

    I try to write only about things I've already lived with for a while. If something here sounds confident, it's usually because I spent enough cycles being wrong about it first.

  2. 02

    Build with community, not capital

    The work I've done that lasted was usually built on trust and word of mouth long before it had any funding behind it. I keep coming back to that pattern.

  3. 03

    Right tool, not the trendy one

    I pick technology based on what the problem actually needs, not what's popular this quarter. Sometimes that means the boring choice. Sometimes it means experimenting with something new. The decision framework matters more than the stack.

  4. 04

    AI as accelerator

    AI is interesting to me as a way to compound work, less so as a topic on its own. The question I keep asking is where it actually helps us think better.

  5. 05

    Stay lean while growing

    Hard to remember in the good times, easy to relearn in the hard ones. The cycles I've watched up close mostly come back to this one.

03Path so far
  1. 2008 / 2012

    Schoolboy years

    Trading second-hand phones over Kaskus to pay my own way through school. Coding Friendster layouts for classmates. Where I first felt that trust scales further than capital.

  2. 2012 / 2013

    First shop

    Opened a small phone and service shop in Bekasi at twenty. Closed it when the right buyer turned up.

  3. 2013 / 2018

    Family business years

    Ran a portfolio of family ventures: travel, events, catering, hospitality. Mostly learned coordination, keeping five different operational rhythms from stepping on each other.

  4. 2018 / 2019

    Industrial bend

    Business development in a waste management company. A short detour, but a useful one. Regulated industries think differently, and that perspective stays with me.

  5. 2019 / now

    Builder years

    Founder of a gaming commerce platform, focused on tech, product, and design. Most of the engineering and product judgment I rely on today comes from this period.

Roles condensed. Full history on LinkedIn.

Want to keep reading?

Browse the writing, see what's on my desk right now, or send a note.