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She shared her career journey, starting as a Mechanical Engineering student at ITB actively involved in organizations, then working at Unilever for five years, pursuing her Master’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) through the LPDP Scholarship, and ultimately founding Gently in 2022.

Gently is a fast-growing FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) company specializing in baby and children’s skincare products. The company has expanded rapidly with viral flagship products on social media and a clearly defined market segment—Indonesian mothers. Anjani emphasized the importance of building a business by first identifying problems, creating solutions through a minimum viable product (MVP), analyzing competitors, and designing marketing as well as funding strategies. According to her, an entrepreneur must be a problem-solver capable of delivering meaningful solutions to society.

Gently began with a personal investment of IDR 200 million (bootstrapping) before growing into a company with revenues in the hundreds of billions of rupiah. Today, Gently is also developing an in-house R&D laboratory to independently create product formulations, giving it a competitive edge in the FMCG industry.

Beyond the technical aspects of entrepreneurship, she highlighted the importance of combining hard skills and soft skills in building a career. Hard skills are acquired through coursework, while soft skills such as leadership, communication, and team management are sharpened through organizational experiences. She also stressed that cross-disciplinary collaboration across engineering, business, and design is key to a startup’s success in creating high-quality products and effective marketing strategies.

The event also included an interactive Q&A session covering topics such as risk management, digital marketing strategies, and the challenges of scaling up a business. She underlined that digital-based marketing strategies, including the use of e-commerce, live streaming, and user-generated content, are highly effective in expanding market reach.

This Studium Generale provided valuable insights on how to build a highly competitive business from the ground up into a major company in Indonesia. Her journey demonstrates that the combination of education, work experience, risk-taking, and long-term vision forms the essential foundation of entrepreneurship. Her closing message to students was to prepare themselves early, seize every opportunity to learn and join organizations, and foster a big vision to contribute to the nation’s progress through business.