Beyond Beauty: How This Women Entrepreneur Remained on Top of her Game Former Miss Universe Jakarta Stephanie Yoe shares her inspiring journey

After Stephanie Yoe became Miss Universe Jakarta in 2015, she had no idea about her next step career-wise. All she knew was she was inclined toward entrepreneurship as she had her roots ingrained in an entrepreneurial family. At 19, she co-founded her first e-commerce company and a media company at 21.

To learn about the startup ecosystem, she took on a role in business development at Blibli, an e-commerce startup backed by GDP Ventures. By the age of 24, Yoe held several positions in a host of companies. Being a third-generation kid in her family, she got her first taste of running a company after joining her family's coconut business. Turning away from agriculture, she learned about tech entrepreneurship from mentors like Monk's Hill Ventures' Peng Ong.

Talking about what induced her to start up on her own, Yoe says, "My life goal is to help create a favorable, sustainable, and positive impact to all the people living in Indonesia. Similar to how I view the existence of music and arts entertaining the public and providing sheer joy and warmth, I see entrepreneurship as a creative outlet for me to channel my energy and talent as well."

Yoe entered the tech startup scene with her property service CutBroker. In 2016, she started out her own venture, CutBroker, a prop tech platform. As the name suggests, Cutbroker lets house seekers connect with owners without the need for middlemen. "I realized how middlemen were using consumers to take larger slice of share through their deals, so my idea was to cut their share and help consumers," says Yoe.

What Failures Can Teach You?

The prop tech startup had to roll down its shutters in the Indonesia market due to low demand for houses in country. About failures in her journey, Yoe says, "Unfortunately, we were too early to release it to public cause it was not the right time at all. In addition to that, many of the older generation homeowners do not mind paying the commission to save them from a lot of trouble. They would rather just pay the 3 percent commission fee, rather than dealing with strangers harassing them over messages. However, I do see a huge potential in this idea once the millennials starts buying more homes, and has a more stable financial situation," says Yoe.

She adds, "Fall down seven times, stand up eight – I went faced so many failures and made a lot of bad choices but I never let it deplete my purpose of sticking to my mission. I've also learned that I should take responsibility of my choices and own it. If things didn't go as well as I expected, then it's up to myself on how to fix it."

Move On

Going forward, she joined the Indonesian giant JAPFA to help the group in its digital distribution initiative, which is to build Indonesia's first O2O (online to offline) protein e-commerce store where customers can purchase all JAPFA products on all the e-commerce platforms in Indonesia and get it delivered through our brick and mortar retail stores in less than three hours.

Yoe also invests in startups and personal projects in Indonesia as she now works as a venture capitalist in Fenox Captial, in Jakarta. About her journey so far, she says, "I'm more of an intrapreneur now where I help conglomerate companies and corporations to leverage on their assets and diversify."