Our Professional Network

We discuss project management fundamentals with Thomas Arend, formerly at Airbnb, Google, Twitter, Mozilla, and Facebook.

Thomas gets deep with Bukit Vista about how to become a successful product manager. We examine the pitfalls that can confound product managers from all companies, big & small.

Thomas brings us to the first principles of testing a hypothesis before actually building a product and setting up thought experiments and 'painted doors', a low-cost, high-insight technique that speeds up the correct product-market fit.

Thanks to Douglas! In this professional networking sessions with Douglas Atkin, we have a better understanding on how to build a community beyond its traditional belief. Communities will reach their best when they are driven by the same purpose: the mission itself. In that sense, purpose must come first in order to create a long-term investment.

Then, what is Bukit Vista mission? At Bukit Vista, we want to inspire delight to our guests, partners, and our employees.

We’re glad to have this conversation with Douglas.

Our very special mentor today is Jabu Dayton, a Silicon Valley HR legend. She's worked as the founding HR lead for three super-growth startups: Airbnb, Shyp, & TaskRabbit.

Jabu saw the growth of these companies from dozens to hundreds of employees. We network with Jabu today to talk about growing cultures, avoiding pitfalls & finding our way through one of the most challenging aspects of startup growth.

We're proud to say we found a lot of great answers from this session. Watch this if you're want to simplify your hiring strategy.

We speak with Dayu Susani today about brand integrity & the mindset behind luxury labels. Dayu has worked for a decade in some of Bali's most luxurious resort brands, including Alila, W Hotel, and St.Regis. Ibu Dayu speaks to us today with candor & humor, and we learn about the evolution of 5-star brands through the COVID-19 crisis.

For our 20th Startup Masterclass tonight, we've brought in Ferdi Anggriawan to speak about digital marketing strategy and sales funnel optimization. Mr. Ferdi comes to us as the recent Head of Digital Marketing, Growth, & Intelligence - Merchant at GoJek. We begin our discussion about the utility of data to drive user acquisition strategy & collecting key user experience data to optimize growth. We explore different marketing automation strategies and the management of sales teams. Our discussion concludes around multi-channel sales & applying Pareto's law to marketing channels.

We've found a very helpful mentor today to improve our understanding of social media strategy. We sit today with Lauren Novak, a director of strategic partnerships with over 10 years of social media management experience. She guides us through Instagram strategy and the right approach towards experimental templates, funnel analysis and proper optimization. The Bukit Vista team learn more about balancing paid vs organic campaigns and the correct top of funnel strategy. We come across a few surprises & a lot of key insights.

We have the happy opportunity today to speak with Osbert Poniman, the head of Paid Search Marketing at Traveloka. Osbert comes from an interesting background - having started his career in electrical engineering with half-a-decade of experience at Qualcomm & Micron as a test engineer. He talks about the transition into search paid marketing & the systematic, data-driven approach towards analyzing marketing data. It's a super insightful perspective and fairly unique. We are delighted to find engineering talent in marketing and gained valuable insights about search algorithms, campaign management and setting the right expectations for long-term marketing.

From our discussion, I learned about the differences in Chinese & American entrepreneurship. I gained insights about Chinese consumer behavior and predictions for when Chinese outbound travel will pickup again. Rob spoke at length about the correct expectations of hiring a Chinese workforce & also the 3 stages of the short-term rental industry. I'm happy to call Robert a friend of Bukit Vista & look forward to more constructive conversations again soon. Robert is also a co-founder and runs HYPE Asia, a team of Venture Builders helping startups and founders win.

The discussion with Sławek Smyl propelled our momentum as a data-driven company as he shared mindset in processing data on top of the theoretical foundations. There are various real-life scenarios on the implementation of ML that I learned from him that I either confirmed, or would never been able to learn merely through textbooks.

We have the rare fortune to speak with Kim Pham, an entrepreneur based in Hanoi who has accomplished much in his career. Kim is a pHD educated search engineer with a degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In college, his professor was good friends with Larry Page, founder of Google, and Kim dedicated his studies to mastering search engine design. Afterwards, Kim worked at Google on the Search team as a software engineer and then at Airbnb on Smart Pricing, Search and other key features. We're happy to have him here with the BV team today for our Startup Masterclass.

We connect with Conner Welch, ex Airbnb program manager in Customer Operations & Strategy Lead. Conor explains a few critical concepts about how to scale a customer service program. We discuss the foundational value of a knowledge base to preserve tribal knowledge within the organization. We expand into the topic of correcting guest expectations & guest reality. We delve into the triumph of providing finality to a difficult guest situation.

We visit a local hotelier, Michael Gaehler from the Six Senses Uluwatu resort. Michael was educated at the University of Zurich in the Hotel Management School. He's worked in Italy, Taiwan, Thailand and most recently Indonesia. His ascent to becoming a general manager was an inspirational journey guided by great mentorship, innovative thinking and a lifelong appreciation for learning and personal development. He joins us as our September mentor in StartUp MasterClass and shares his personal wisdom from the world of luxury hospitality.

We speak with legendary architect Gary Fell this evening regarding tropical design and visit his stunning collection of tropical homes. Gary found his way to Bali as the project architect to the Four Seasons Sayan in Ubud and since then, he's made exciting & pioneering inroads to design & architecture. His projects span Sri Lanka, Thailand & Bali and are some of the most desirable properties seem in the world. We're proud to have him as part of our Trusted Community.

Training and development has one of the highest impacts on positively changing employees. At Bukit Vista, we're still in our early days for training and development, so we want to learn from experts with experience. Our journey brings us to find Citra Made, who works at Hard Rock Hotel in Bali on a training team that serves over 700+ employees. Ms Citra Made is passionate about presentation & teaching and we absorbed a lot of wisdom in this call. We explore the hiring & selection process and examine the mechanics of a great training program. We learn the importance of testing & observation to ensure great training has happened.

Our journey today brings us to the world of SEO, search engine optimization. Finding good SEO advice is very difficult, and there's a lot of noise out there on the internet. Instead of approaching the topic by reading a sketchy blog post or YouTube video, we went straight to a domain expert with proven experience in the travel industry.

We dive into the very new and exciting world of PR with our first mentor, Candini Candanila, a Senior Public Policy & Government Relations at Tokopedia. Ibu Candini has a degree in International Relations at the University of Indonesia, and a Master's Degree from Sciences Po. She improves our understanding of the pillars of PR. We approach exciting new understanding about the fundamentals of commercial & government cooperation. This was an eye-opening session about how well positioned GR/PR can impact startup growth.

Mina has worked 3 years at Airbnb & 2 years at WeWork in Japan leading communities of entrepreneurs. She shares with us today tips on successful community management and the special mindset it takes to effectively scale a community. We are delighted to have her as our guest and look forward to absorbing wisdom & learning from Mina tonight.

We listened to Sandra Comas extensive wisdom today in leadership development & team building. We explored how great teams are built around three pillars: Autonomy, Purpose & Mastery. We examined the place of faith as an uncomfortable yet powerful force in leading teams. Our company gained new insights about compensation & recognition innovation. Sandra was remarkably articulate & generous by sharing her wisdom with us.

Our guest today is Nataly Bonato, an inspirational lady who's been pioneering the role of community management for decades. Nataly worked her way up to leading enormous Airbnb host communities in Brazil from the very beginning of the home-sharing movement in Latin America. Her story begins with a zero budget event where Nataly put together a borrowed projector and a bedsheet for her first community presentation. Her natural flair & strength can inspire delight to all entrepreneurs struggling to get their first users & customers.

Thank You Nataly for agreeing to take this session public.

We sit down today with Ricardo Ramos Soto, a community manager at Airbnb. In his own words, Ricardo engages and activates Airbnb Hosts at the local and regional levels in a wide variety of advocacy work, political and legislative solutions, healthy and sustainable tourism, and corporate decision-making.

From this episode, we walk away with a crucial take-away. We learn how to evolve from pushing 'the elephant' from behind to 'getting the elephant to move itself'.

Our mission at Bukit Vista is to inspire delight through hospitality innovations that positively transforms our employees. To learn more about positive employee transformation, we brought in Fabricio Bustos today to discuss leadership & employee development. Fabricio brings us through the innovative & fast moving culture at Uber, where a huge emphasis was placed on leadership development & diversity/inclusion programs. We explore the right way to setup HR teams that leads to inspired employees.

We travel to Latin America on our StartUp MasterClass today to speak with Juan Jose Zevallos. Juan began life as an engineer from the University of Texas at Austin, and currently works as Region Head of Human Resources - Asia Pacific for Alcon. Following a change in career shifting from engineering to HR, Juan has worked almost two decades in Human Resource positions at Hilti, Kraft Foods, and Alcon. He shares his incredible philosophy of how to hire, develop and retain great teams.

Our local hero for today is Gino Andrias, a marketing manager at one of Bali's largest surf brands, PT Quicksilver Indonesia. Gino has over two decades of experience in the lifestyle industry in Bali, working at brands such as QuickSilver, Oakley & The Beat Bali. He brings us through the world of building brands organically - and connects the dots between community development, CSR, marketing & sales. We explore the dynamic growth of the skateboarding & surfing communities both on the beaches of Bali and in the urban cities of Medan & Jakarta.

Today Ritesh Agarwal joins us from Uber's Data Science Infrastructure team. Ritesh's specialty is building massive databases to warehouse & serve various teams at Uber. His research touches upon database caching & gaining efficiencies in data storage & information retrieval. We hang out with Ritesh to get some advice on how to set up our data infrastructure & we learn some surprising but uncomfortable truths about machine learning.