Mentor Corner: Meet Andry Tanusdjaja

Mentor Corner is a monthly feature highlighting the incredible contributions made by our mentor network to our venture community.

At entrepreneurship@UBC, we are privileged to work with a pool of 250+ mentors across the Vancouver and BC innovation ecosystem who invest their time, expertise and insights into growing the early-stage ventures of tomorrow. From entrepreneurial leadership development to scaling venture creation, our mentor network is fundamental to what we do here and we are excited to introduce you to them in our monthly feature, Mentor Corner!

Meet Andry Tanusdjaja.

Andry has been a part of entrepreneurship@UBC’s Mentor Network for the past year and a half, working diligently with founders in our CORE program, like Nava Ventures, RiskMetrics and MeatMe, to help further their journeys as UBC entrepreneurs.

Andry is a serial entrepreneur with a financial and corporate finance background, starting his career in the corporate world through his experience at TELUS, Shell and Teck Resources and obtained his CPA, CA as well as CFA designation from this corporate experience. In 2015, Andry took a plunge into the entrepreneurial world by co-founding MuseFind, a SaaS-based influencer marketing platform with 2 co-founders and helping Fortune 500 companies and startups to scale and ramp up their influencer marketing efforts. Andry has also started to advise various companies through his mentorship role at e@UBC, Foresight Cleantech Accelerator and The Forum focusing on fundraising, forecasting as well as financial/operational perspective. Currently, Andry is building another company as a co-founder of IPEX, Intangible Properties Exchange. IPEX is building the next NASDAQ (exchange) for intellectual property, the undervalued asset class. As an entrepreneur, Andry realized that getting financing and unlocking the value of intellectual properties will become harder and harder as a venture goes through its lifecycle and with IPEX, Andry is building ways to make this process easier and provide more financing options for inventors, creatives, startups and corporations.

Learn more about how Andry works with ventures as a mentor, what advice he’d give to our community and the most important lessons he’s learned along the way.

How did you get into mentorship? What brought you here? What keeps you coming back?

Giving back to the community. Throughout my entrepreneurship journey, there has been lots of investment by other people in the form of time, introductions and expertise that has really helped me navigate the entrepreneurial journey.

What is the most important lesson you’ve learned in your mentorship career?

Listening is a powerful tool and the ability to empathize with the founders goes a long way. Sometimes what they need is not another piece of advice but to really listen to their concern and hear them out.

Listening is a powerful tool and the ability to empathize with the founders goes a long way.

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Working with early-stage startups, you have the opportunity to make a huge impact on the founders you are working with. What impacts have founders made on you?

entrepreneurship@UBC is really focused on problem-driven startups and this has reminded me of how important it is to identify the problems that each startup is trying to fix. At IPEX, this has made me be more critical of the problems that we’re trying to solve as well as we’re talking to potential customers and partners.

“entrepreneurship@UBC is really focused on problem-driven startups and this has reminded me of how important it is to identify the problems that each startup is trying to fix.”

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If you could impart one piece of sage advice for our community, what would it be?

Be firm in your Vision and Mission but be flexible in HOW you get there.

What book are you reading? What playlist are you listening to? What is the app you can’t quit?

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky.

Sunny Day playlist (cause it’s summer).

Medium App to get me inspired and challenge my way of thinking.

Thank you Andry for your expert insights and continued impact on our community!