Vertex Female Founder Series | Nelly Nurmalasari: From charting her own path to bringing the light to 100 thousands of blue collar workers in Indonesia

In light of Pintarnya’s successful fundraise in July, I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to sit down with CEO Nelly Nurmalasari and hear about her inspiring journey. If you watched our video conversation, you will see that Nelly carries a soft-spoken, humble disposition, yet exudes an aura of intellectual brilliance and drive.

In continuation of our International Women’s Day 2022, and part of our monthly Vertex Female Founder Series, we are sharing beautiful, untold stories of our female founders overcoming the odds and obstacles to build businesses that are disruptive, yet transformative to the lives of many. Today we are proud to feature Nelly Nurmalasari.

The Best Option

Her father was a steel factory worker and her mother was a teacher. Born to a middle-lower class Indonesian family, Nelly Nurmalasari had always been taught to take the well-trodden path when growing up.

This was not to discount the virtues of ambition, as Nelly always strove for the ‘best option’ in both education and career, between being a consistent top performer in school, and first choosing a prestigious career in management consulting, where none but the brightest students may tread.

Even if she had stuck to her goals, Nelly could very well have been an outstanding corporate employee all her life.

However, never in their wildest dreams would Nelly’s parents have imagined the scale of their daughter’s ambition as she would one day co-found a venture-backed tech startup. Based in Indonesia, Pintarnya is a one-stop platform for blue collar workers to seek employment and for the many underbanked among them, to access trusted financial services. The company recently raised US$8 M from prominent VC firms such as Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India.

Nelly spent her childhood and early adolescence growing up in a small city in the Banten province of Indonesia. With her parents’ encouragement, she decided to chart her own path at 15, determined to be schooled at the best possible high school institute in a bigger city eight hours away from her parents, living all by herself. Her courage, brilliance and hard work paid off. Nelly graduated top of her class, and managed to clinch a place at the prestigious Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) with a scholarship. ITB is known as the “MIT” of Indonesia.

As she continued to display academic excellence in university, Nelly eventually became one of only two graduates in her cohort to be awarded an opportunity to join BCG, one of the most well-known consulting firms. At the time, she chose this career in consulting largely because she noticed that the brightest students tended to do so. Again, after spending four and a half years at BCG, Nelly embarked on a MBA programme at the Wharton School of Business sponsored by BCG. There, she developed a passion for tech and entrepreneurship, and eventually experienced a change in her perception of what the ‘best option’ is.

The Best Option

During her time as a management consultant at BCG, Nelly got engaged and married. She was just 24 when she had her first child. For many of her peers, it was a young age to be married as she was merely at the start of her career. She would often be asked, sometimes disapprovingly, even mockingly: “When are you going to quit?” - that consulting was not suitable for her: a married woman with children and family responsibilities.

In the midst of deep-seated gender bias, Nelly had long observed that career opportunities and progression left much to be desired for women in Indonesia. Speaking with many other wives and mothers who took jobs with little chance of progression and purely to put food on the table, Nelly developed a conviction to help these women advance their skills and earning power, and chart out more meaningful career paths.

While serving her scholarship bond at BCG, Nelly had her first exposure to entrepreneurship, as she started her salon and spa business, employing female employees. When she decided to start this business venture with her husband, she was not nearly as concerned about profitability as she was about providing women with career opportunities and development.

She wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Traveloka and the Big Step Forward

At the same time, Nelly avidly studied the tech landscape, and with the completion of her bond, she eventually found herself at Traveloka, where she rose the ranks to lead a 600-strong business unit as an Senior Vice President in 2020.

Nelly noted a dramatic shift in her risk appetite transitioning away from management consulting into tech:

“If you think of anyone in management consulting, you think of having to manage risk, and the rewards are limited - the upside is constrained. But, joining a tech company, you pilot stuff, experiment, take bold steps, be innovative and launch a new product. Even if the risks are there, the rewards are also there.”

It was during her four years in Traveloka while running her home business when she finally decided to take the dive into entrepreneurship, seeing it as her ‘best option’ despite the risks. With her founding team comprising fellow Traveloka and ex-BCG executives, Henry Hendrawan and Ghirish Pokardas, she recognised the pertinent pain points among blue collar workers and employers in Indonesia, which she and her team would venture to solve. Such formed the genesis of Pintarnya.

Pintarnya

Having personally experienced difficulties with seeking blue collar hires at her salon and spa, and bearing witness to the various financial concerns faced by her employees, Nelly and her co-founders' mission at Pintarnya is simple: enable Indonesia’s rising working class to get employed, become more employable and access better financial services - and they have shown incredible traction thus far. Just three months after launch, Pintanya has already acquired almost 170,000 users.

As a tech-enabled job-seeking platform, Pintarnya speeds up and streamlines the blue collar employment processes on both employer and employee fronts. Nelly explained, usually, after a job seeker makes an application, it may take a week or even longer before they hear back from the hiring company. With Pintarnya, the time between application and first contact is cut to 2-3 days.

In addition, Pintarnya aims to be a one-stop platform, offering useful auxiliary services, including CV composition, financing, and data-driven worker screening. Specifically in the blue collar labour market where high attrition and turnover is expected, the value that the platform provides to both job seekers and hiring companies is highly accentuated.

The Fourth Child

Expectedly, it is not easy to juggle between running a fast growing startup and raising a family. A mother to three young children, Nelly shares that Pintarnya is her ‘fourth child’ in some sense. She recognises that at different points in time, she may be required to give more attention to either her children or her company.

She is grateful to her supportive husband and co-founders, also fathers, for picking up the slack and affording her the flexibility whenever her attention is needed elsewhere. To her, open communication, mutual understanding and trust is crucial between them to help each other manage their various commitments.

Fostering a Customer-first Culture

Notably, for Nelly, it is not the strong sign-up metrics that are most worth celebrating. What made her feel proud about what Pintarnya has delivered is more so, the strong customer voice of happy users that successfully land job placements on their platform. She recounted that one happy job seeker posted a viral recommendation of Pintarnya, driving more than 4000 new downloads in a day:

“So we were surprised, how suddenly we had our numbers shoot up, and then we tried to trace it back and found it's just because this one individual shared their personal story of how we helped them. And we know that this means we are valuable to our users.”

Nelly’s customer-centric philosophy and approach to building her company and product is truly laudable. As a standard-bearer for her company’s culture, she advocates for her team to be hungry, mission driven and obsessed with serving the customer. Fail fast and learn fast. Work hard and play harder.

Partnership with Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India

As an investor in Pintarnya’s recent seed round, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India (VVSEAI) is excited to be partnering with Nelly and her team as the company embarks on a new stage of growth, serving the needs of more blue collar workers and employers in the region. Nelly describes her short but fruitful partnership with VVSEAI thus far:

“I think we got so excited when VVSEAI was intrigued with our idea of building a one-stop digital platform, and they gave us very good critical inputs and thinking about monetization then. Since we finally cemented our relationship with their recent investment, we got to reconnect again. I value VVSEAI for their thought leadership and hopefully, we can also get to know the other VVSEAI portfolio companies and try to sell our services to them as well.”

Founders, we (VVSEAI) are keen to partner you on your startup journey, feel free to reach out to me, Elise, on LinkedIn.

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