MATTHEW BUCKLAND: Jakarta shows how to think outside the Silicon Valley box

It is said that Jakartans spend 10 years of their lives in traffic. The populous Indonesian capital city is a sweaty, gridlocked cacophony of just about every type of vehicle you can think of. It’s a problem that has been tackled by the region’s tech entrepreneurs. To this end, two tech unicorns dominate the ride-hailing market. Go-Jek and Singapore’s Grab are the Ubers of the region. Both have been so successful that they brought the worldwide ride-hailing leader, Uber, to its knees, forcing the San Francisco company to bow out as a stand-alone company during the first half of 2018. This is no small deal. Indonesia, with 260-million people, is the fourth most populous country. The Southeast Asia region where Uber waved the white flag (by closing shop and taking a minority stake in rival Grab) is a market of 620-million people. In this tale is a lesson for tech entrepreneurs in SA. One of the biggest criticisms of tech start-ups is that they create businesses with a "Silicon Valley ...