Derianto Kusuma's personal website
To map the systematic barriers to thriving (mechanisms, commons, enlightenment of actors),
and to fix them, so that we all have the freedom to thrive, individually and collectively.
Building & assembling the necessary elements of enabling mechanisms of an ideal society, within the constraints of my ability, in partnership with those who want to participate!
As a society, we have focused on building better tools and leverage (including AI), but we have done a far less good job at organizing ourselves (illuminating a complex field, governing different interests, collective decision making, safeguarding knowledge commons, etc.) to align our newly acquired individual power with the common good.
The challenges we see today in society, from polarization, information disorder, inability to do discourse, to empty online popularity and status contests and shouting match, aren’t “normal”, in that it does not reflect humanity in its normal state. I believe humanity consists of mostly good, genuine people, but our current online environment has for some time encouraged people to express the shallower and worse sides of each of us.
To achieve a good society, we require not only amoral technologies, but also value-laden (values implementing) mechanisms, such as:
- Trustworthy Knowledge Commons,
- Productive Discourse Mechanisms,
- Meritocratic & Effective Decision & Governance Mechanisms,
- and other infra to build Civic Awareness, Agency, and Capacity of Individuals.
We seem to have collectively underinvested in these infra of society because in the free market, it is much easier to profit from hijacking human beings' shallower nature by getting them to make easy yet short-sighted choices, without much regard for the systemic implications to our society.
And to keep the lucrative core business models that causes the systemic corrosion in the first place, and then merely react or compensate for the negative impacts, is not good enough, and is essentially morally conflicted.
Here is a better path to change: 1. Have a holistic understanding of society functioning, including how scalable online mechanisms shape mindsets and behaviors 2. Build purposefully designed mechanisms that drive towards collective good, by design, not by accident 3. Use the mechanisms to build communities, alliances, and gradually shape mindset, attitude, and behaviors, and ultimately 4. Establish and institutionalize better society mechanisms, norms, and culture at large that results in a higher freedom to thrive without corrupting influences.
Per our analysis, we believe that the mechanism for the online Public Sphere is the key bottleneck (the Mechanism Zero) for unlocking and driving the fixes for many other important mechanisms (Public decisions, Governance, Culture, Attention market, Reputation market, etc.) that eventually make collective thriving possible.
Sembly is currently our primary vehicle for building a platform that implements mechanisms purposefully designed for enabling a better public sphere, where productive discourse and knowledge building can be done in a collectively-governed way, at large scale, online.
The Sembly platform is rigorously designed to ensure that its mechanism can truly catalyze participative high-trust discourse and knowledge building, yet also to ensure that it is easy enough to use by broad cross-sections of society, to ensure mass open participation (with meritocratic guardrails) at scale.
Our north stars are not necessarily "what users want" (shallowly defined e.g. from behavioral metrics), but instead, "what users & communities in their best nature would want", appealing to the better angel and collaborative nature of all of us. Therefore Sembly is designed not only to produce engagement, but also to shape & influence mindset, attitude, and behaviors, towards the kind of collective behaviors we, in our best selves, want to see. And we don't entertain suggestions to be more engaging or viral if it means sacrificing our alignment towards the north stars.
I cherish the experienced and globally distributed team of people we have assembled so far, with a diversity of domain expertise and who also truly believe in our mission of fixing our mechanisms on the web. (Careers)
Sembly is a company, a movement, and an R&D center all at once. It is intended to product both Public Goods (in which we will not monetize and will always stay open and participative), and Private Goods (which can help generate revenue by monetizing our technological byproducts and network and expert knowledge access). Contrary to what many believe, there are many creative revenue models for online platforms that are aligned with high trust that don't rely on general advertising. We also intend to work with backers, advisors, and partners who are aligned with our mission.
Designing a robust path to change, and designing robust platform mechanisms that fulfill the needs of our diverse stakeholders aren't trivial and probably aren't accomplishable purely within the context of a private enterprise (esp. a small startup), so want to invite participation in shaping our mechanism design, our trajectory, possible alliances, and for other collaboration in certain R&D and research domains (in which we have present team members dedicated to these), such as:
- Collaborative mechanism design
- Trust & reputation modeling & governance mechanism design
- The use and governance of LLM and other NLP tasks & information retrieval
- Governing our intellectual properties for public participation & defensibility
To this end, let us introduce the concept of open braintrusts: units of people with goals, purposes, or agenda, who discuss, collaborate, and otherwise engage with each other to make progress in getting to the deeper truth, deeper insights, or better solutions together, governed collectively and meritocratically and open to public participation (to appropriate extents).
We believe that open braintrusts are more ideal and productive units of the public sphere esp. when the interests of a diversity of stakeholder are of concern (which are the case across many topics), and therefore the Sembly mechanism-powered Sembly spaces are modeled on an ideal open braintrust.
Early in our journey, we start with partnering with more specialized groups and communities to demonstrate, iterate, and refine the use of Sembly-powered open braintrust model for better discourse, dialog, illumination, collective decision making in niche topics. Gradually, area by area, community by community, we want to prove our value, impact potential, and robustness for tackling increasingly more difficult and complex subject areas.
Given accelerating disruptive trends and the need for society to adapt, we are ultimately interested in powering discourse, illumination, and problem solving in these key areas:
- The future of Journalism & Media
- Climate and Environmental Solutions
- The future of Democracy & Democratic Processes
- AI & The Future of Society — including future of work, of jobs, of broad-based economic contracts, and humanity in general
Nurturing, developing, and optimizing what I can influence in alignment with the greater good, and let the universe takes care of the rest!
You can call me Deri. Born and raised in Indonesia before living in the US and then Singapore, I've been blessed with good health (not to be taken for granted!) and various capacities from nature and nurture (esp. early education in which my parents esp. my mother was very involved), and numerous fortunate opportunities including a full scholarship to study at Stanford and being a part of building Indonesia's early tech ecosystem.
As an individual endowed with youth (still), high energy, and various capacities, I do think I have a lot more to contribute to humanity, so I take the time to ensure good positions of all my infrastructure: strewarding and optimizing my holistic health for peak performance, tools and workflows, baseline quality of life, quality of my information and knowledge diet (my favorite people and thinkers are mostly already dead, I’m afraid, but their influence and wisdoms live on), and robust entity structure and legal compliance for good governance of various endeavors, and effective management of my social and economic capital.
Most of my current knowledge was gained through quite diverse reading & excessive and obsessive independent thinking, influenced by key periods such as my time at Stanford as an undergraduate & the Bay Area, a subsequent entrepreneurship journey till the present, my numerous random projects, and interactions with curious minds and souls along the way.
I like sharpening my knowledge in these domains: Math & Systems (a wild book), Economics, Game Theory & Mechanism Design (an enlightening and funny one), Leadership & Management (esp. this), History of States, Political Institutions & Progress (I often asked ChatGPT to summarize), study of great characters in history.
I wish I have more people around me who are keen in sparring, discussing, ideating in these areas. The online environment we have today doesn’t seem to be conducive in maximizing the cognitive potential of young people though, but I’m sure independent minds are still abound, but are just relatively hidden amongst the noise online.
I've been blessed with an amazing spouse, Jennifer, whom I met in Singapore and got married to in 2022. She has a complex and holistic combination of outer and inner beauty. She loves life and has very high energy, and it's contagious.
If we're later blessed with the gift of kids, we’ll ensure to create optimal environments for their authentic development towards their utmost potential for society.
I cherish my friendships and connections with people of different background across countries - various Asian countries, US, Europe, and other places, some of whom are doing truly idealistic and ambitious projects across for-profit and non-profit entities, doing their own startups, research, government projects, political projects (in Indonesia), etc.
I’ve been lucky to have had the opportunities to visit many places (not as many as my wife though) and live in a few places (Jakarta, SF/Bay Area, Seattle, Singapore), and there are really so many things to love about our existence.
I generally love nature, cooler weather, biking for miles at a time, diverse people and communities, enlightened and authentic culture, culturally liberal places, and cultures that value arts, literature, philosophy, science, design, and generally optimistic cultures that value exploration, discovery, and taking ownership of improving their lots for a better collective future.
I love teaching and I'm semi-regularly involved in guest lectures, panels, discourse across many topics - tech careers, entrepreneurship, ethical dilemmas in online platforms, and government policy topics related to tech.
I'm currently a resident of Singapore and citizen of Indonesia, and culturally probably a bit West Coast American / Asian American. My future citizenship is still up for discussion, as I want to pledge allegiance to a society in which I wholly believe in its values and long term visions that I'm prepared to lay down my life for. I want to be a citizen by choice, not by accident.
Both of us hailing from modest family backgrounds, our family asset today is nearly all derived from the share sale of the previous startup I co-founded, Traveloka, which I have left since the end of 2018.
Financial resources are an important (though not the only) lever of power for shaping society, so I take seriously its proper allocation towards lasting impact that matter, and its proper governance for its sustenance.
I believe in leveraging capital effectively for supporting scalable strategies, esp. in using them to amplify pivotal breakthroughs (usually tech/science related, but could also be about institutional transformation), that however small it may seem today or started by a small team, may have potential eventual large impact (broadly defined) in society.
Here is how I roughly think about our capital allocation. Half of it shall be used for supporting scalable high-efficiency breakthroughs for creating fundamental public goods (e.g. Sembly and other platforms transforming societal mechanisms), and half of it shall be used for supporting scalable high-efficiency breakthroughs for creating market-accessible private goods (e.g. getting closer towards abundance in different industries).
You can feel free to contact me for investment purposes. I'm a long-term, high-conviction investor who bet on determined, competent founders tackling important problems. I generally ignore hypes and noises, and I will analyze any proposed endeavor from first principles and will ask you in depth about your expertise and unique insights in the domain. Send an intro here: bit.ly/startup-intro-deri
For posterity, managing capital post-death needs a proper care to ensure that an effective and mission-aligned reason-based decision making processes will always be in place. To this end I might establish an endowment fund when the time is right with a proper charter and well-designed governance processes. In principle, the allocation decision needs to be based on a proposal's eventual large-scale systemic lasting impact on society, not just "ad hoc" / one-time benefits to certain beneficiaries.
I prefer to make meaningful & significant progress on exploration and discovery in these areas before I die!
My background in music started from my first piano lesson at age 4, with exposure to piano performance, music theory, music history, composition, thanks to my incredible music teachers in the humble yet precious YPM music school in Jakarta, and from other online resources and even some old library books.
I consider myself blessed with the gift of musicality and I have always loved being active in choirs, music groups of different kinds, playing the roles of singer, pianist, arranger, music directors. I still semi-regularly participate in music / jazz jam sessions with friends just for fun.
I've also always been very passionate about music composition. To me music composition is about communicating the magical beauty of existence and human experiences at the visceral level (esp. that musical experience relates to our limbic system). You can find my past composition works at soundcloud. I specialize in soundtrack / instrumental with a touch of classical / jazz and I wish to further explore and develop my signature style of composition in the future.
Another fun project: I built a music improvisation AI (with hand-crafted model informed by music theory) for my senior project at Stanford (on my 3rd year), and I may want to explore using AI to accelerate orchestration in the future! (like a “Photoshop” / smart AI-assisted DAW for music composition. Is anyone already building this?)
Having learned computer programming from a young age (age 10), I still love modeling, algorithm design, and systems design in general, esp. when applied to many different areas in life and real world industry problems.
When I was younger I actively participated in competitive programming (Indonesia national olympiads and IOI, and being a problem author for ACM-ICPC and other national contests), and I have always felt that the problem domains of these competitions can be expanded to more closely model real-life challenges.
Imagine if we have the ability to simulate the environment of systems problems in the real world, including real-time systems, building reliability on top of unreliable layers and ingredients or even in hostile environment, distributed systems with realistic failure modes, data storage design, or other workflow orchestration problems, with a rich multidimensional set of quality and performance metrics to balance. I hope this can help expand the minds of young engineers that engineering can be hard-core and expansive, and is not just about solving simplistic problems using someone else’s libraries.
In the age of machine learning and AI, using GPU instead of CPU, I would argue that systems & algorithm design are becoming even more important to fundamentally explore, for scaffolding and orchestrating the increasing diversity of powerful (yet quirky in their own ways) compute elements and agents. This is still at an inception phase and I shall update you when progress has been made here!
Just like many others, my first creations in programming were computer games (of various types: geometric, action, simulation, strategy, etc.). To me games are about accelerating understanding of the dynamics & emergent complexity of some imagined universes through directly modeling and simulating those universes!
Simulations have greatly accelerated progress of many domains (engineering, biology, other sciences) through reducing testing cost and hence reducing errors and failure rates pre-production.
Given that our key institutions in society are essentially complex systems and mechanisms (market and non-market economic systems, political systems, culture and norms, working of firms, etc.) why can't we also have simulations for various mechanisms in society, precisely and granularly modeled, continuously iterated with open contributions, to allow instantly studying their dynamics in different applications and environments, poking and playing around with its parameters, disrupting and stress testing them, to hopefully enlighten ourselves in designing more robust mechanisms towards the social objective functions we care about, in a way that reduce mistakes from potential blind spots in unintended systemic consequences.
The holy grail is to be able express any society mechanism (institutions, laws, norms, etc.) as code (e.g. parametrized composable models). This is a massive project that may take a lifetime, so I may chew on this slowly!
To me home is a state of being holistically content and being free to be my most authentic self. This state can be enabled by physical factors (e.g. physical spaces and urban environment), people, natural environment and the weather, culture, civic and legal freedom, etc. In this section we will focus on the physical aspect of home for now.
I came from a family of architects — both my parents and my younger sister are architects — and naturally I have at times shown some interest in technical drawing, structural design, interior layouting, and I have always been quite opinionated and argumentative with any interior designer attempting to design my places. From observing my parents, I have an instinct of the optimal heights and sizes of things, and sizing and spacing of spaces for different purposes, including lighting type and direction, air circulation, etc.
To me architecture is a domain that nicely integrates humanities and engineering, both the functional and emotional. It's about comfort and mood shaping as it is also about efficiency, health, ergonomics, and also safety and longevity and robustness from environmental factors.
If we're given a chance, I would love to have the opportunity to design our own house (ideally a landed house which is quite hard to come by in Asia) from the ground up, optimized for the holistic set of metrics we care about, and allowing experimentation with crazier design ideas.
I may also be interested in participating in urban planning discussions, as I have ideated about these in the past.