Bukalapak Co-Founder Shares Tips on Winning Investor Support with UNU Jogja Students

Yogyakarta, Indonesia - Bukalapak co-founder Fajrin Rasyid shared tips on winning over investors with UNU Jogja students who are starting their own businesses. Beyond technical expertise, communication and teamwork skills also play a key role in determining business success.

Imagine this: you are a university student with a brilliant idea who is starting a business, and you happen to be in an elevator with a top global investor such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, or Elon Musk. You have only one or two minutes before they step out to present your business idea and capture their attention. What would you say?

This is the elevator pitch method that Fajrin shared as one of the strategies for getting a business noticed by investors. The former President of Bukalapak was the speaker at the talk show “From Data to Pitch Deck: How Investors Evaluate Business Proposals,” held at The Forum, UNU Jogja Campus, on Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026.

“So, articulate your business vision and your proposition to investors clearly. Beyond technical skills, the most important soft skill for winning over investors is communication, or storytelling,” Fajrin said.

Second, Fajrin emphasized the importance of teamwork. Investors also assess an entrepreneur’s ability to work with different people.

“That’s why I encourage students to actively participate in organizations and committees while they are still on campus,” he said.

According to Fajrin, university is an important place to start a business. This is based on his own experience of founding and developing Bukalapak with two colleagues at the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB).

Since then, Fajrin has honed his business skills and gained extensive experience both in the corporate sector and the investment world. Drawing on that experience, he identified four things that need to be prepared when starting a business: an idea, a team, capital, and execution.

“All four need to be done in sequence. Capital comes third, after you have a strong idea and have found the right team with complementary skills. Equally important is executing that business idea,” he said.

Once a business is up and running, Fajrin advised entrepreneurs not to become constrained by their existing business and previous achievements. This is a common situation among many companies. In some cases, a company’s largest source of revenue may even come from a product that is not traditionally associated with the company.

“A simple example is Microsoft, whose largest revenue does not come from Windows, but from its cloud services,” he explained.

However, Fajrin stressed that a business should also create a multiplier effect that generates a broader impact. As an illustration, he shared his experience as Director of Digital Business at Telkom Indonesia, where he developed PeduliLindungi, an application designed to help prevent the spread of Covid-19.

Meanwhile, during his time at Bukalapak, the platform received appreciation from its sellers—known as pelapak—for helping many small businesses grow.

“Developing a business is not easy, but if we keep working to make it happen, more people can be lifted up and move up the ladder through our business,” Fajrin said.

As someone who is now an angel investor in 20 companies, Fajrin also views business potential from an investor’s perspective. He said three things receive particular attention when entrepreneurs make a pitch: the ability of a business to identify a problem and find a solution, the capacity of its team, and the existence of tangible evidence that the solution works.

“You don’t have to build a business from scratch. You can simply look at problems around us, whether in agriculture, logistics, or many other fields. Meet the people experiencing those problems and understand what they are facing, develop a solution or a simple intervention, and then go back to them to test the solution,” he explained.

Today, various tools to support business development are readily available, particularly with the support of artificial intelligence. However, Fajrin said there is one crucial ability that young entrepreneurs must have to continue growing—one that technology cannot replace.

“That is the skill of learning new skills. It is not about the technology itself, but the adaptability to learn new technologies. You have to be adaptive, have a growth mindset, and become a lifelong learner,” he said.

For this reason, Fajrin sees universities as playing a major role in nurturing and encouraging a new generation of young entrepreneurs. Campus life provides an ideal moment for young people to try new things.

“If you fail at a business project on campus, the worst that can happen is that you get a bad grade. But if you fail in the business world later, you could lose money or get fired. So when you have the opportunity, just do it. The failures we experience today will eventually become stories. But if we never try, they can become a source of regret for years to come,” he said.

The event was attended by 2025 cohort students of the Management Study Program, Faculty of Economics, UNU Jogja, as part of their Data Analysis and Professional Business Communication course. During the talk show, moderated by Management Study Program lecturer Firia Dhia Salsabila, students enthusiastically asked questions about various tips and strategies for developing a business.

Earlier, in her opening remarks, UNU Jogja Vice Rector for Business Cooperation and Creative Funding, Ian Agisti Dewi Rani, encouraged students to gain as much knowledge as possible from the speaker.

“Mr. Fajrin has extensive and comprehensive experience, from being an entrepreneur who started Bukalapak from his boarding room, to becoming a top executive at Telkom and eventually an investor in dozens of companies,” she said.

Management Study Program Head Novi Diah Wulandari also said the event provided an opportunity for students to learn directly from an expert while serving as an initial catalyst for starting their own businesses.

“Hopefully, this event will inspire new entrepreneurs and founders to emerge and follow in Mr. Fajrin’s footsteps,” she said.

Reporter : Arif