TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Herman Widjaja, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Tokopedia, recently received the ‘Australian Alumni Awards 2021’ for the Innovation and Entrepreneurship category. His courageous vision of creating change through technology has landed him the awards. This vision was also what encouraged him to return home to Indonesia from his time working and studying abroad after decades.

In the 1990s, back then when Herman was growing up, Indonesians were quite unfamiliar with computer and internet adoption in their daily life. Nevertheless, when his father raised the idea of studying abroad, Herman chose to study computer science and electrical engineering.

After graduating from Monash University and having to work for six years in Australia, Herman moved to the U.S. He worked at the world’s most prestigious tech giants, Microsoft, for over 10 years before he moved to Amazon.

Then, Herman moved to Google, another tech giant, where he was tasked with developing Google’s augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR). Working with some of the world’s leading technology companies allowed Herman to build and explore different platforms. To date, Herman has had 14 international patents in the field of technology.

While working abroad, Herman met many talented Indonesian engineers. This experience opened Herman’s eyes to Indonesia’s great talent pool in information technology and the potential to grow its market.

“When I went back to Indonesia, the market here was promising. However the growth of the market should be balanced with the growth of talent,” Herman said. This was the starting point for Herman to initiate the flagship Tokopedia Academy.

Tokopedia Academy has become a learning ground for sharing knowledge about technology, workshops, partnerships with IT communities and strategic collaborations with universities.

Tokopedia also partners with universities for its digital talent programs, including the University of Indonesia for the Tokopedia UI AI Center of Excellence and Herman’s alma mater, Monash University.

As the CTO, Herman has been driven to put technology at the core of Tokopedia’s innovations and financial growth. In 2019 and 2020, CIO50 listed Herman as one of Southeast Asia's top 50 senior technology executives who were driving innovation and encouraging rapid change in the region. Tokopedia now has more than 100 million monthly active users and more than 11 million merchants selling over 550 million products.

“The beauty of the technology industry is that it’s always developing. People in the 1990s were fascinated by the web and mobile technology that started in the 2000s. Now, technology is moving to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning,” said Herman.

INFO TEMPO