Fractionalized Art Gallery

I love art. It is a form of expression, communication, and therapy that invokes emotions, triggers thoughts, and reshapes your identity. I have loved painting ever since I was young.

This business opportunity came to me during a conversation over lunch at Billy with Jay, a few years ago. He mentioned he had an opportunity to work with an old man who had an art collection of 800 paintings by Indonesian artisans, with each piece valued between 10,000 to a million dollars.

I really liked the business model. The concept was simple: let's fractionalize a painting and let multiple people own a fraction of it. For example, if you have a painting valued at 10 million rupiah, fractionalizing it allows anyone with any amount of cash to purchase and own a piece of it at a fraction of the cost.

It is very similar to how expensive Pokemon cards have been fractionalized. You can own a piece of the digital version while the real item sits safely in cold storage, in front of a camera and protected from harm. The digital copy is tradable; anyone can buy a small piece, watch the price go up or down, and sell it. It is essentially a buying and selling platform for a digital, tokenized, or fractionalized version of the original item.

I thought bringing this Pokemon card concept to paintings would be super cool. The house gets a big cut per transaction, plus the house gets to keep the asset.

The way I imagined it, our platform would be a website I built using AI, called artpiece.id. Using this platform, we could enable people to own a fraction of a painting. The concept was amazing, and my original thesis was that if the platform owns a painting, the asset value of that painting becomes a property of the company. If you have 10 paintings valued at 100 million rupiah each, your total asset value is already 1 billion rupiah, which raises your book value significantly.

To explore this further, we met the old man in his broken-down office in Blok M. In that office space, we found an amazing collection of paintings. It was my first time seeing a black-and-white painting, and honestly, it was beautiful.

It was a painting of evil fighting, and you could see the bold, powerful, and intentional art style. There were other forms of art, like Wayang, and various unique paintings. The character of these people seemed good—the old man and his two sons, both exploring different types of paintings.

At that point, I was particularly amazed by one painting they showed me. It was painted by Sukarno, the first Indonesian president, when he was exiled after Suharto took over. It turns out that during his exile, he painted about 11 to 12 paintings, and this was one of them.

I was amazed to see the value of such a painting; I was informed it would cost at least 10 to 15 million rupiah to buy. The price itself was astonishing.

A few meetings later, we decided to finalize things. The proposed equity split was: • Me: 35% • Billy (my ex-investor): 35% • Legal and Finance company: 10% • Other partner: 20%

Everyone seemed happy with the agreement initially, but then a few red flags started popping up. I thought the scope was just going to be a collection of paintings, some technology, and a simple showroom. One of the partners mentioned he already had the space, so we would just need to decorate it. I wanted to put a price cap on our spending; I was ready to deploy 50 to 100 million rupiah for the interior.

However, the conversation started shifting toward nonsense topics like building a coffee shop downstairs, hosting events, and various marketing costs. The price started inflating rapidly—from my initial 100 million rupiah commitment to 500 million, then 1 billion. At that point, the total cost became completely unpredictable.

I became hesitant to sign the legal documents because they refused to put a hard cap on the investment. In investor mathematics, a hard cap early on is essential; it sets the actual share price and prevents people from "gorenging" the valuation or making the company seem bigger than it actually is.

I wasn't sure what direction they were taking, but I knew I didn't have the budget to just throw money away. It felt like my two partners viewed this as a side project—something that wouldn't harm them if it failed. I’ve experienced this before: when a business is everyone’s second priority and no one is truly determined to make it succeed, it becomes vague and ambiguous. It ends up like Starship, where no one was actually focused on it.

That lack of focus was off-putting. I liked the other guy, Garrick—he seemed cool, and we discussed the deal over whiskey—and he clearly has a high barrier to entry. His father is well-connected and is a shareholder in the Ayana Resort in Bali. These people have real influence. If a project like this doesn't work out and they lose 700 million rupiah, it doesn't affect their bank balance; they likely make more than that in monthly bank interest. For me, that's a lot of money, especially for something that doesn't generate immediate cash flow.

I decided not to pursue it further. The only real value I saw was the potential for networking, since art attracts wealthy people who love to connect. Being front-facing would have allowed me to build that network, but it would have cost me too much time and focus.

Ultimately, I’m not sure I want to be known as the guy who sells art. I would rather be the guy who buys art. If you buy art in one place, you get invited to other places to buy more. You don’t have to be the seller to gain access to that network.