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in the early days of gojek there was a lot of resistance to our services the most common form of that resistance in the early days was actually by motorcycle taxi mafias so you would have like these areas that are essentially
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controlled um through Violence by specific you know area mafias and when we start having drivers pick up orders and pick up passengers these people uh would actually physically assault our drivers um you know we've had everything
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from like bricks thrown at uh our drivers to you know knives um and machetes being brandished at them and I think it would have been easy for us to see like hey you know you know they're uh they're all contractors they're third parties like you know let
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them let them kind of just sort it out but instead we uh we actually hired private security so we actually work with private security companies to help our drivers in those situations you know to help to help kind of like you know
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extract them out of these these sticky situations and so we actually ran a fairly big Private Security operation uh for a fairly long time [Music] welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their
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hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products today my guest is Kevin alui Kevin is the co-founder and former CEO of a company called gojek which I've always been fascinated by you may recall a
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former guest Crystal wajia who was head of growth at gojek and I've always wanted to get more of the story gojek is Infamous for their scrappiness their unique approach to Ops and growth and as being one of the first and most successful super apps in the world they've also long been maybe the biggest startup in Indonesia and all of Southeast Asia Kevin and the story of gojek have a lot to teach Founders in the US and all over the world and so I
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was really excited to sit down with Kevin to dig into the story he did not disappoint you'll hear all kinds of wild stories about them having to hire a private security team to protect their drivers having to build their own cash
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distribution centers to pay their drivers plus how they won in large part thanks to their early investment in brand why it's important to do the hard things as a startup also why super apps are surprisingly overrated and much more
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enjoy this episode with Kevin alui after a short word from our sponsors this episode is brought to you by Coda you've heard me talk about how Coda is the doc that brings it all together and how can help your team run smoother and
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some of my favorite spreadsheet templates to Rose go to rose.com Lenny to check them out that's rose.com Lenny foreign welcome to the podcast thank you thanks for having me Lenny uh We've we've finally made it happen after a few weeks
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or months of going back and forth yeah I'm really excited to finally meet you and to dig into a bunch of stuff I think this is going to be a really unique episode I don't often have Founders on the podcast especially founders of
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companies that are not based in the US in this case Indonesia uh Crystal wajia who is on this podcast previously one of my favorite guests is just like Lenny you gotta get Kevin on your podcast and so here we are I'm glad to be in a in a
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small group of uh category of people that you invite thank you I'm a huge fan of what you do thanks man I really appreciate that and just redirect to you you are the co-founder of a company called Go Jack many people listening
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have never heard of gojek especially people in the US so just to start can you just like describe what is Go Jack what do you all do and then also I think more interestingly is just like the scale I think people in the US they're
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mindful blow and stay here the scale you reached with this company they probably hadn't heard so gojek started as a motorcycle taxi uh based service so it's a kind of a uniquely Indonesian thing where uh we have millions of motorcycle
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taxi drivers in all the urban centers in Indonesia and so we started uh with a very local problem and the first product was a on-demand super app if you will where you could ask someone on a motorcycle to give you a ride send a
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package for you or buy something and deliver it to you this then evolved over the years into you know a more General on-demand consumer super app that also included you know car drivers and other services ranging from the ones mentioned
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to grocery deliveries and payments and financial services and today we took the company public about a year and a half ago after we merged with uh with Indonesia's top e-commerce platform and we've managed to also expand outside of
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just Indonesia where today we have about uh 2.7 million drivers across southeast Asia we've completed about three billion orders uh last year so that's three billion orders so the scale of our region is is often under underappreciated
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um where we also have about 15 million Merchants um doing you know General e-commerce but also you know restaurants at our food delivery service um and on that IPO um you know we were pretty proud to say that you know it was
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Indonesia's largest uh IPO uh of all time where we raised over a billion dollars at something like 27 28 billion dollars in terms of valuation and these numbers you shared 2.7 million drivers 30 billion orders or even three three billion how
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would that compare to like an Uber or live I don't know what the what what their latest numbers are but just in terms of the numbers of people and the numbers the number of activity I would place our scale among the largest U.S
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companies that's pretty wild that there's this company out there that a lot of people didn't know about that is basically of the scale of uber in terms of you know volume I would say that we're up there with Uber uh globally and
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definitely larger than than Lyft I don't remember how many drivers are in the US but but it's definitely we definitely have more drivers in the region than all of the all of America just to kind of like check this chair box you said it
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was a super app what are all the things that go check does just whatever you want to share all the things that you can do from the point when we had the most Services we had everything from um you know ride hailing to package delivery to food delivery to grocery deliveries we had Moving services on you know uh you know trucks and vans we had on-demand massages cleaning services you could get your hair done um on on on gojek you could order movie
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tickets uh you could get a loan you could pay for things I think at our Peak we had something like near 30 different Services uh all in all in one app I think it's like you're officially a super app if your founder can't even
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remember all the things that you do right now yeah yeah definitely uh definitely I I I I would challenge anyone uh within the company to be able to name all of our services that we've ever had on the app because it was pretty wild at one point
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and I'd love to kind of talk a little bit about my thoughts on on super apps at some point during this uh during this session because I definitely um have some mixed views over it as a product strategy uh as you know as we've
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gone through that whole cycle it might be actually a good time just to jump into it I know that I was actually saving that for later but this might be a good time and part of the reason I think this is really interesting is if
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you open up Uber these days it's like like 40 things that they're offering now Elon Twitter's talking about turning Twitter into a super Outlook payments on communication messaging all these things so I think it's like a really
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interesting Trend that continues to pop up here in the US and I would absolutely love to hear your perspective on super apps okay I'm gonna come off a little strong on this but I I am kind of annoyed at how much it's being mentioned
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these days it's it's really popular in VC consultant analyst uh uh circles because it it sounds really great on a strategy deck because all of the things that are really really appealing they will talk about you know lower customer
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acquisition costs you know higher attach rates to different products talk about you know higher you know retention across different Services um the ease of you know cross-selling and upselling you know all of these things sound great but in reality a lot
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of those benefits don't pan out and and one probably really good example that I like to reference is that I remember one of our products uh was mobile um you know phone uh top up and recharge uh you know in Southeast Asia a majority
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of people are on prepaid platens instead of post-paid plans so everyone basically buys their minutes and their data plans um up front in the beginning of the week or the beginning of the month um so we had a product which was a
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Mobile Top-Up uh product and so the reason I mentioned this specific product is as a really illustrative point on super apps is that it's a product that 95 plus of our customers need because they're all on you know prepaid plans so
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it's a very very relevant product and we had our ux research team actually look into why the engagement and the product wasn't as high as we thought it should be so one of the questions uh that that our uxr team asked their customers was
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like hey do you know uh that you could top up your Mobile minutes and buy data on the gojik app and only about 40 percent of our customers like 30 or 40 percent of our customers knew that this product existed and that completely
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blew our minds because one it's a product that is relevant for all of our customers two it was literally there like on on one of the six buttons in like on the on the home page and I think the the Insight that we got here was
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that there kind of needs to be a unifying concept across all of your services within the app for your users to be able to think about your product in a sensible uh uh way you know and and for us the way that our customers thought about us was that was they thought about the driver and so when we launched you know when we went from ride hailing to package delivery to food delivery to grocery delivery your customers really understood that and and
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we didn't have to sell this idea to our customers that you had all of these Services under one app because they thought about the goji driver that made sense you can easily cross saw somebody from a ride-hailing customer to a
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grocery customer or a food delivery Customer because they understood the unifying Factor there being the driver but then when you start doing other things that don't have that unifying factor in terms of you know the concept that a customer has when they think
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about your service it starts breaking down so you know one one other fun fun uxr uh uh Insight here was when we launched massage services so you know we had at one point though we've already we've shut it down a few years after we
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had massage services where you can you know order a masseuse to come to your place and a a question that many of our customers asked was that oh is the driver gonna come into my house and give me a massage and for us like that was
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insane like of course not like you know this our drivers are not trained masseuses but that was the question that people asked because they thought like oh this app is an app for these driver related services so if there was a
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massage service I'm assuming it's that same man who's going to give me a massage and so you know I think this kind of illustrates the importance of having these unifying uh Concepts that are easy for customers to think about the
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multiple different Services it's not it's not as simple as just saying like oh we have a lot of Engagement we have a lot of eyeballs out of service and then you have a super app that makes sense for customers and so that whole Nirvana
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of like high of lower CAC higher retention uh that are on these great strategy decks often don't pan out because you kind of have to then resell this idea of like oh this is another service and you can use and and that's
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another a bit of investment that you have to actually put in in terms of advertising and customer education that increases those customer acquisition costs and it also leads to design constraints because there's only so many
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ways you can display a whole bunch of different Services uh that actually have little to to do with each other which is why when you see super apps a day it's kind of like this giant menu or this giant grid which does limit uh the the
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design decisions that you can make which is unfortunate because you know if you kind of actually um I think it's it's an unsolved problem at this point it's hilarious story about the massage product sounds like a lot of startups
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are gonna have some issues scaling to new products and trying to become a super app I want to shift a little bit and talk about brand I did a little research on you ahead of this chat I was watching I watched your like Marshall graduation
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speech and a few other interviews it did and something that came out of your previous writing and talks is just how much you care about brand and how much value you put into brand and they just have a lot of opinions about the
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importance of brand and to to me and to most people brain is this like really squishy thing and it's hard to know what exactly to do to build your brand when to prioritize it how to prioritize it amongst other things you're doing
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especially early on so I'd love to hear your advice for Founders that are listening and just like what should I actually do around brand what's your advice for how to tactically do something about brand and also just you
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know why do you think it's so important I I do agree with you that it is kind of the squishy thing that you know most people see as an afterthought May because it is kind of this squishy thing that that's hard to hard to Define but I
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I'm a I'm very a very very big believer that the two most important things in a consumer business are product and brand in that order and I don't think I need to sell the idea uh especially to to your audience um that product is absolutely critical
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and probably the most important but yeah the Brad is an afterthought is is definitely one of the areas where I think there's a giant missed opportunity for for Consumer Tech businesses and I almost you know I get why we kind of
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opened the session by talking about the size of the business uh to give an appreciation of the scale for audience members who might be unfamiliar with us or with the region but I wish I did have to start there because we actually started as a very Scrappy company where we were by far the underfunded player and and without bran um that you know we probably would have never gone to escape velocity beyond that Scrappy uh stage uh We've
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maintained our leadership in Indonesia and I through a lot of the things that we we actually did uh uh on the on the brand uh side to give you a sense of you know how Scrappy uh we had to be in in in competition you know for the first
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six months after launching our app you know we had only raised about two million dollars and our regional competitor had already raised 250. so they had literally like um more than a hundred times more Capital than we have
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so it's easy to kind of talk about you know what we built as this kind of you know giant business but we came from a place where we were seriously underfunded and I think a big reason why we got we survived uh was that we built a great
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brand for for our consumers that are for our drivers and for our merchants and I'm I I think that great Brands create associations in their customers Minds that transcend the typically transactional or utilitarian one that
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most people have with businesses they become part of uh one's identity I think some of the best in class examples of these are probably you know all the Apple Fanboys and fan girls uh Nike sneaker heads you know for for these uh
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individuals you know the brand becomes really part of their a big part of their identity and and their loyalty towards the the products of the company you know go beyond just like hey you know what uh uh uh go beyond a a relationship that
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can easily be swayed uh just through discounts or or other or more features that that that other competitors might have and so I'm I I I'm a really really firm believer of how important this is because you can see it if you step out
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of the tech bubble uh for a second you can see that there are so many great companies out there uh that that you know really rely on the strength of their brand um to to build these you know fantastic businesses and to create great
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experiences for for their customers and you ask you know what are kind of the things that one can do um uh I think for us you know we we invested a lot in uh in our brand uh across multiple areas and I think one one specific area that I think is really really important is that you create consistency across all customer touch points and so you know branding is not just you know a cool logo cool advertising um you know fun fun imagery uh but it's
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it's it's it's really about you know the impression that a customer or a user has uh with your product and with your with your business so having that consistency across all customer touch points is is really important so you know how you
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write copy and advertising and in the app uh how you've even designed the app uh but we were the first company of scale to kind of have ads that don't take ourselves too seriously uh you know we make fun of ourselves we make fun of
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uh um you know our cultural observations of Indonesia and again to kind of just build this overall field and like hey we get you we are you know we are part of the the overall culture of of Indonesia and I think even going Beyond you know
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the the the the the more aesthetic or um communication oriented Investments we also leaned into cultural artifacts um uh in our product teachers uh to kind of you know really uh you know build this this brand that is part of you know
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day-to-day culture one of my favorite cultural artifacts is that in in Asia it's fairly common uh to send food as gifts to your loved ones or or maybe people you're interested in dating so people would send over like food as
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gifts uh uh to you know their their their romantic interests and and so when we launch our food delivery service a lot of people are actually using it for this like you know I'm gonna send it to um my uh uh uh my boyfriend or my
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girlfriend uh or the person that I'm interested in dating and so it became this whole cultural phenomenon of like sending go food uh uh for for these people and we kind of lean into it in our product feature where all of our all
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the other uh players uh in the Market at the time basically only allowed you to deliver food to your home or your office but we actually a lot we actually created a feature that allowed you to choose a delivery point that was far away from where you were
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um there's a lot of there's a lot of reasons why other companies didn't do didn't allow it at the time because it's like oh you know it might be used for fraud and and and and stuff like that but we leaned into it we leaned into it
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and and a lot and actually created features that allowed to put your pickup Point far away from where your actual location was and then we kind of just you know had fun with this whole idea of go food dating and so yes it's kind of
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part of branding but but thinking about branding Beyond just like marketing communication but but actually be as you know being relatable and being part of the culture and being sensitive of of of of what that culture is
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um I think this was something that you know we did really really well in the early days that allowed us to continue maintaining leadership in spite of the fact that our competitors had more money which meant that they could offer more
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discounts they could offer more incentives to drivers but we we really kind of lean very hard into you know being not just a utilitarian commodity which is what a lot of people would say is uh uh is the nature of our business to some level of accuracy so just to get even more concrete um one takeaway from what you just shared which is interesting is the first part of figuring out how to approach your brand is what are like what's like
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the personality of your product for you you said it was like we're just like of the people were like you we're here to help you make your life easier and then that informs the copy the messaging be a little uh I forget how you described it
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but just like almost like bad grammar and stuff just because it like relates more to people yeah and then some of these product launchers that connect to that uh so maybe if there's anything else you want to add there that'd be
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interesting and then what's like I don't know one or two moments that most help build the brand I know you're kind of famous for like having helmets and jackets on the drivers that help spread the gojek brand is there anything
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else that just like wow this was really effective to build this brand that ended up dominating Indonesia yeah the jackets and helmets piece I think is really really important for two reasons one the more obvious reason which is that
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because they were just all over the streets of many cities in in Indonesia you know people were familiar with the imagery and the name but I think it's also really really important that people saw what was happening so you know you if we just if we were like I
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don't know an airline and we branded a bunch of people on the streets with you know our brand it's yeah sure you know that might help with you know brand recall and people might know about uh the name but what was really really
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powerful um was that when people would be seeing uh these uh drivers with their jackets and helmets they would be seeing passengers on the back seat as they were stuck in traffic right so I'm stuck in traffic and I'm
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seeing these people whiz past me uh with this you know with with this imagery on them and immediately I I get that Association like oh I'm stuck in traffic but I could be out there cutting through traffic on a motorcycle or you see them
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like carrying packages or delivering food and you immediately get like oh like these are guys who uh who can deliver food or deliver packages for me and so it was like this beautiful combination of you know one just having
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that imagery and and having that uh visual everywhere as a reminder of the brand but more importantly it was also a a physical kind of it was it was a physical reminder of the service of what we do and of how we can help you um and so looking for these
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opportunities where again customers can kind of make that connection between you know the the logo and the colors and the name uh with actually what the service is I think is is are the opportunities that that I would say uh people should
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look out for they're rare they're admittedly they're they're quite rare uh which is why um in my opinion it the laziest uh uh kind of branding tends to to to be the most popular um you know just put your name and your
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you know copy on a billboard or uh on a CPM or CPC campaign uh but there are these opportunities I think on on being able to reinforce the the value proposition of your business uh in a way that is you know beyond just kind of
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visual recall and I think that that I think was was why you know that specific anecdote is something I like to talk about because it was really really one of those special uh things that reminded people uh on on why we're here
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yeah I think he tweeted that it was one of the most important things you ever did as a company is decide to put these logos on the helmets and jackets reminds me of lifts pink mustache which went away but felt like a really important way for them to differentiate no totally totally totally you talked about how Scrappy you've been and I want to dig into that a little bit more I think there's like U.S startup Scrappy and then there's like go Jack
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Scrappy and uh it'd be fun to hear maybe a story of two just to illustrate how ridiculously Scrappy you were as a company early on especially one thing that we did in the early days that was absolutely crazy was that you know we we
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were one of the pioneering companies one of the pioneering technology companies in Indonesia and in Southeast Asia and so you know we came into a environment where a lot of the things that maybe companies or or people in more developed
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economies take for granted um for example having electronic or digital payments that was something that actually didn't really uh exist that much uh uh when we first started and so we had a problem of actually trying to pay drivers because
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you know drivers you know every day we would be you know paying out incentives or or just having you know customers pay with you know their their their credit cards or their store balance and then we'd have a challenge and getting our
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drivers to actually uh be able to take that money out for for for their earnings and in the early days we actually had cash booths uh so we actually had um physical spaces with like a vault and uh a cash sitting in the vault where
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drivers can show up you know show that oh I'm this is my driver ID I'm uh and this is the the the the balance that I have uh uh with with you please give me the cash and so we would have these place these these actual physical
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locations where there would be lines of drivers essentially taking cash and we eventually you know figured this out of like okay we'll work with a bank and integrate with an ATM Network and and all of that but you know in the early
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days you know we just did it ourselves of of being basically both building essentially a mini ATM network um which is a I think you know I I mean even that sounds too fancy of what it was it was it was literally like a boost
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with a vault with cash in it and and you know we had like at the time already you know tens of thousands of drivers uh all across Indonesia another uh Scrappy story um that uh actually Crystal reminded me of uh recently that we did um
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was at the time there was a lot of uh fake driver apps out there um because you know we didn't uh we didn't uh have uh all of the security Investments that um we eventually made you know things like code obfuscation and and better API security that
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wouldn't allow for you know these fraudulent driver apps these basically third-party driver apps to connect to uh to our platform so there were a lot of these drivers using uh these third-party driver apps that were doing things that
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the so they were kind of doing unsavory things like you know stealing driver details uh you know getting some of them even as um that is like Financial details so that they can then at some point um you know drain driver funds and the
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way that they did it uh the way that they convinced drivers to actually use these apps was that they actually added some features that at the time we didn't allow so things like um uh you know we want our drivers to be to be conscious
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of what was happening on the app and so we would actually ensure we would actually make sure that drivers would you know push the accept order button we we made sure that that was the only way that drivers could accept orders but
30:32
this app had a functionality that would automatically accept orders as soon as they kind of came in and so they actually it was kind of this interesting situation where they were doing things that you know were fraudulent and and
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and and you know not safe uh for for the Integrity of the platform but at the same time they were also providing some value uh uh to to to the to the people who were using them and so you know at the time we had to make a decision of
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like okay we need to we need to nip this in the butt right and one way that we could have done it that would have taken time was it really invest in a lot of the technical uh security aspects of it and but you know we didn't have the
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bandwidth uh to be able to do that you know engineering and security Talent is actually so super super scarce in Southeast Asia at the time still is today but at that time extremely extremely scarce and so we ended up
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making the decision of actually copying those features so we actually saw all these like third-party fraudulent apps and instead of like you know building a whole system to kind of prevent them from being built or or preventing them
31:38
from being worked for preventing them from working on the platform we just said hey let's take their top two or three features and let's build them into our app and that actually significantly reduced uh the number of users uh on
31:51
these third-party apps um just by kind of you know having this mentality of like you know you can't beat them then then join those and so uh and that I would say you know that wasn't a philosophical decision uh or or a principle decision it's actually a
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decision made out of necessity because we we simply couldn't build all the capability to combat these apps at the time are you hiring or on the flip side are you looking for a new opportunity well either way check out lennysjobs.com
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33:03
these are hilarious stories uh that you have to compete with these like rip-off jailbroken apps and then you have to build a cash box Network all over the all over the country that's amazing I knew there would be good stories in this question
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and I'm glad you delivered there's also this like feeling of uh within gojik of just like doing the hard thing and not like you just shared a couple stories of this versus like the simple like a lot of startups are like let's do the simplest thing feels like you guys lean into the hard thing why is that where'd you where'd that come from and then is there any other story of something that you did that was like we'll do it the hard way
33:41
I really don't like the idea of moats again one of the concepts that uh gets thrown out a lot by by strategy type folks of having you know what's your what's what's the moat of your of your business or or your product
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um and and usually people are looking for an answer of like oh look at this uh this capability or look at you know this feature or look at this distribution uh uh partner or you know all of all of those kind of things and I don't believe that any
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modes are durable over time eventually with enough time all modes can be crossed um and and I think one you know so-called moat that doesn't get talked about enough is the fat of is the fact that um you're able to do hard things uh
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because hard things are hard um and just simply doing things that are hard as long as they prove they create value to your customers um actually is a position that makes it harder for for your competitors uh to be able to win over your customers because
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it's hard to do those things and probably another example of of doing something that sounds you know very difficult um was that in the early days of gojek there was a lot of resistance to our services and and one of the one of the forms of that resistance one of the more common most common form of that resistance in the early days was actually by motorcycle taxi mafias um so you would have like these areas that are essentially controlled through
35:21
violence uh uh uh by specific you know area mafias and when we start having drivers um pick up orders and pick up passengers these people uh would actually physically assault our drivers um you know we've had uh you know everything from like bricks uh thrown at uh our drivers to you know knives um and machetes being brandished at them to you know just you know physical uh uh altercations like you know literally like um mobs of people
35:56
um getting into these brawls and there was like a lot of these kind of things that actually happened on this in in the streets of Jakarta at the time and you know I think it would have been easy for us to say like hey you know you know
36:08
they're uh uh they're all contractors they're third parties like you know let them let them kind of just sort it out uh but instead we uh we actually hired private security um so we actually work with private security companies to help
36:23
um these situations to help our drivers in those situations you know to help to help kind of like you know extract them out of these these sticky situations and so we actually ran a fairly big Private Security operation uh for a fairly long
36:39
time you know until it became common to have gojek drivers you know do all these things across uh cities we actually worked we had we ran this you know very operation intensive thing uh just to make sure that you know our drivers
36:54
could be as safe as as as possible and it showed our commitment uh to the driver Community it showed our commitment that you know we cared and again you're going again going back to that earlier Point around you know having that branding Association you
37:08
know drivers uh knew that hey you know we were we weren't just a platform that just kind of let that didn't care you know we we we actually cared about their safety um and and that helped build that Goodwill even as competitors start
37:23
coming in and paying more money uh you know we still had a lot of loyalty uh within the driver Community because of things like that how did you actually have a security person on a motorcycle were they like pretending to be the
37:34
rider and then just like get out and punch him in the face uh a minority of of of of of situations were like that but a lot of that was just like hey having like uh an on-call service where they could just you know dial a number
37:50
um and somebody within a you know five ten minute distance would actually show up um and so we would have these like these these Patrol patrols effectively in in specific hot spots where you know if there was uh uh a situation Brewing that
38:07
you know they would they would instantly or almost instantly show up uh to the site and help um diffuse it I love that you have this like super app that's doing all these things for people plus within the company you've built all
38:19
these mini businesses like a whole Bank to pay people private security company is probably some other yeah Crystal shared a story of you guys rented out a stadium for drivers to collect all the drivers and give them phones uh yeah
38:32
okay this is great yeah that I think is kind of like a probably one of the Hallmarks of of of this region in general where um you know I have no doubt that you know what we were building and what we are today as a technology company but I
38:51
do think that in the early days you do have to be a lot more operations heavy um and then I think that that lends to that scrappiness uh because there are a lot of things that you know to solve elegantly and and technically will take
39:10
a lot of time and there and and it just kind of over focusing uh on on those type of solutions I think would would be doing your your customers a disservice because there are opportunities uh to make things a lot better
39:26
um just through um probably more innovation in in operations to kind of uh kick start things uh until you have the more elegant scalable uh technical or product solution that reminds me that you held tons of different roles throughout the
39:43
time you were there you were obviously co-founder your co-ceo on point de facto CPO at one point ciocf I heard that you were writing like push notification copies right yeah driver at one point is to keep things running uh
39:59
so feels like another good example of exactly what you're talking about of just doing the hard thing in the operational component I mean yes actually you know I I did have a stint as an amateur uh performance marketer in the early
40:11
days of project you know I would I would you know write copy I would upload ads onto Facebook and and Google and try and do my best in kind of optimizing our our online marketing spend but um I I think I did all of those things
40:26
not because I wanted to be Scrappy necessarily but uh I do think that as and this is probably most relevant for Founders less for executives but you know I think we're as a as a Founder I do think it's really important to understand the work
40:44
um that needs to be done in order to see what Excellence looks like um and and for us again we we came from an ecosystem where the availability of experience Talent was relatively low um and so for for me it was very hard to
41:01
be able to say like oh like let's hire a person X from organization y with you know job description z uh and we know that they probably can deliver because you know again that the talent availability was really low and so a lot
41:17
of times I needed to I felt like I needed to understand okay what is this job um what exactly does it entail what is and and seeing how bad I am at it uh allowed me to understand what good looked like um and so I I held a lot of those roles
41:32
just because you know I wanted to understand um every part of the business as best as I could in order to then find somebody who could do it you know orders of magnitude better than than myself I would say that is true for all of these
41:47
roles except for being a driver uh I think being a driver you know I wasn't trying to understand um uh uh what Excellence does a driver look like uh obviously the drivers do a really challenging job and and I think I
42:00
just wanted to understand uh what that role was like to kind of build a lot more empathy uh towards the uh the job and make sure that our product was catered towards what those needs were so when we first launched our car uh right
42:16
healing Services I think I was the first actual driver um on uh on the app and and yeah and I I would every now and then would be a driver and and I remember in the early days um when I actually picked up the customer you know was this lady
42:35
um and she she put in her destination as a as a mall and so you know I went to her I went to this house um you know and I knew that okay I needed to drive to this mall but then this lady comes out with this like giant bag
42:47
um and so I had to like hop out the car take this giant bag you know put it in my trunk um and then you know off we went and in the middle of the the drive she's like hey you know um I need to drop off and do my laundry uh on the way to the mall
43:06
and you know I just had to okay cool like we took a detour you know I lugged this giant bag out of our trunk and and helped this lady do her laundry and then we went to uh I went to the mall and I got very little money out of
43:23
that experience and and you know it wasn't instant but this this is kind of eventually what led to I think the a lot of the support I gave to our driver teams when they were pushing for hey we need more waiting fees uh we need to add
43:36
you know multiple stops uh uh in order to make sure that hey a lot of this extra work was actually compensated and you know it was something that you know I obviously um experience personally and and it was something that something that I I definitely uh was excited about as a as a set of you know product features and principles uh when it came to building our driver app it feels like having to do that ends up being a feature as you
44:00
said that you actually experience a lot of these challenges and you said the really good point about knowing what to hire and what these people are going to actually do yeah that is uh that's interesting how that often turns into a good thing
44:11
I know you also have a pretty interesting journey into Tech what can you share on that so I am basically a failed Finance professional um you know I wanted to I I didn't really know what I wanted to do in my life and in you know 2000
44:31
2005 uh which is when I um entered College you know the hot sexy thing to do was finance and I guess that was what I wanted to do um and you know I went you know studied finance and then the crash of 2008 happened and I graduated 2009 so it's
44:49
probably the worst time to be a fun or try and be a finance professional and so I went through a really challenging time there but eventually I got a job at a boutique Investment Banking firm and that was I thought like okay now I'm I
45:02
was set for life you know I got the job that I wanted I'm working in finance um but I then uh long story short uh I was not very good I was not very good uh my my um my bosses thought I was underperforming I didn't feel like I was
45:22
performing and I kind of left uh that that field that field that I thought I was I built my my entire I guess future dreams and identity around um and you know after I I did that I decided to take a bet in in Indonesian technology
45:40
because you know this was like two you know when all this was happening was around 2010 2011 and it was you know starting to see uh the the development of the current technology Giants in the US uh at the time and I I thought that you know it
45:55
would be it would be pretty cool if Indonesia ever had a technology industry to be part of it uh at the ground floor so I moved back in 2011 uh and you know it was super early it was really really early at the time
46:10
uh where you know the level of talent the level of funding the level of product Market fit the number of people who transacted on the internet was was also still super low people still saw the internet as a place for you know
46:21
chat apps and social media and so the level of belief that people had in the space at that time was was was was pretty low people didn't think that real businesses um and real valuable products could be built um especially be built locally
46:38
um and so taking that bet uh was something that I I think you know it really panned out for for for us to kind of be really really early uh in this space uh which you know today has become very very vibrant to the scene in Southeast Asia has become you know I think one of the most exciting uh um spaces in in technology in the world today but at the time it wasn't obvious and and being able to see that development uh I think was something
47:06
that was really really important to me because um it really shows you what's possible in a very very short time and I think it's something that probably people in technology in the US can relate to the people who've been working in the space
47:19
for like 20 30 years but being able to see those early days for me is was just you know really really valuable and I think uh was an experience that I you know definitely definitely cherished it's really hard to just build a company
47:33
outside of Silicon Valley and it was even harder back then uh like covet and remote work almost made it the easiest it's ever been yeah sounds like a lot of the fact that you were so far away from the Bay Area informed the way that you
47:46
built this company the scrappiness that you that you talked about I'm curious if you have any advice for a Founder who's trying to build a company now outside of say the Bay Area or just us in general based on your experience yeah look uh it
48:00
was it was super hard back then um because it was particularly hard because Indonesia is such a valuable Market Indonesia I would say primarily Indonesia just because of its scale but I think overall southeast Asia was just
48:15
it's such a valuable Market uh and it was interesting for global companies to want to win it um so we had we competed with global and Regional companies but the local talent and funding ecosystems were really underdeveloped so that that challenge of
48:31
like having to compete with the best in the world you know for for customers in the market while also not having all of the resources available within the market to be able to build products and companies that can compete uh was the re was I would say one of the most challenging parts of building um and probably in markets that are atypical uh or or outside of Silicon Valley and maybe some of the other kind of Technology Centers in in the world
48:59
like China and India so some of my learnings uh probably there on you know that you know that I would you know take going forward um is I think we talk a lot about being Scrappy uh in the beginning you know we were a lot more Ops heavy than Tech
49:16
heavy and and doing the things that don't scale uh uh through other means I think is definitely something that is absolutely necessary uh if you're building outside of these main technology hubs another thing I would say is
49:32
you need to get good at remote work really early and I think today that's kind of become a lot more you know prevalent uh as as more and more uh people have experience with with remote work you know for us uh we build an engineering center in
49:50
Bangalore in 2015 and this allowed us to compete a lot better uh uh with the global Giants because we had access to you know a really deep uh Talent Market in India at the time but we were really early in this whole remote work thing uh
50:04
because it wasn't common uh for for people in our region but also globally to have um so much talent concentration outside of headquarters um and I do believe that companies who want to compete against world-class
50:17
competitors outside of you know these Technology Centers like South and Valley need to be become good at remote work really fast uh because uh you're getting that Talent um probably means uh having offices that are or or or or individuals
50:34
who are outside of uh Your Home Market or your headquarters um and probably the final um I would say tip here is you know don't just copy um because gojek was not like an Uber clone uh uh even though that was kind of how you know some investors or analysts talk about us uh you know we were focused on a solution that was uniquely an Indonesian phenomenon the motorcycle taxi driver and this led to both product and you know branding Innovation
51:07
um on the product side you know we were an on-demand super app uh because we saw that you know a human being on a motorcycle could do a lot of things and so we built a product around that idea and hence we ended up with a super app
51:21
even before super apps were really a thing and then that branding point that we talked about a little earlier about giving our drivers you know jackets and helmets so people could see them zip around town which actually doesn't make
51:35
sense if you're a car ride healing service uh because you know it's not very easy to Brand a car and you know the drivers are inside the car but all of our competitors at the time uh when they first entered the motorcycle uh ride hailing space didn't brand their uh their drivers because they came from a car-centric view um and so again understanding you know your unique market dynamics is also really really important if you're building uh outside
52:04
of um you know these these uh these Technology Centers we've been chatting about Indonesia and Southeast Asia I'd love to hear just like what should people know about that market um we've chatted about what you guys have built and a few other companies
52:19
here and there but like what a company should people be aware of what's happening what's the latest what's exciting yeah I I think on specifically Indonesia Indonesia's most people don't know the Indonesia is the fourth largest
52:30
country in the world and that southeast Asia holds almost 10 percent of the world's population wow but beyond you know the macro uh uh picture I think it's also you know we've experienced a a pretty unique uh level of um pace of adoption for for products uh with great product Market fit um so you know products with great product Market fit grow tremendously fast uh in this part of the world in 2015 for example you know when we launch
53:03
our app you know we grew more than a hundred percent month on month for the first 16 in 18 months um so we've more than doubled [Music] um every month for more than a year that is insane I've never heard of that no and
53:19
you are our investors at the time uh Sequoia is one of our investors at the time told us that this was the craziest the craziest growth story that they've ever heard of uh in in the world um and it's I wouldn't say because of our necessarily because of our
53:35
Brilliance uh uh it was a combination of how you know in in in Indonesia and Southeast Asia there are a lot of these things that are obviously broken and could be improved with with better technology and better products but also
53:50
you know we also have in this region a very young population who are excited to try new things um and so if you find a solution that really resonates with a lot of these common day-to-day problems the adoption curve is is just absolutely insane
54:06
um and I think it's one of the things that are definitely unique um to developing regions like like this one um one company uh uh that that's really really interesting for example just to give a flavor of um the type of Off the Wall seemingly
54:25
Off the Wall uh um product or or company being built in this part of the world there's a company called e-fishery um and what they do is they basically create a closed-loop ecosystem for fish farmers and currently I think they're
54:42
only operational Indonesia or they're recently expanding Beyond Indonesia you know they help farmers uh feed their fish through this um uh this iot smart device uh that helps you know measure the amount of like fish feed that needs to go into uh
54:56
the ponds but they also then help farmers do things like get financing and also sell their their produce out to local or or even Regional or Global markets and it's a company doing like something like a quarter billion dollars
55:12
in revenue and it's it's profitable and it's basically a fish farmer a closed-loop ecosystem and you know it's pretty wild that something like like like this exists um but it does it does speak to I think again what I earlier what I said earlier about the hunger that uh the population have for you know better Solutions and if you can find these better Solutions you can really build companies of the very meaningful scale uh very very quickly
55:42
so at this point you've stepped down a CEO you're you've stepped down from the board what's next and uh how does how does it feel yeah I'm still kind of on this journey honestly of like how you know how does it feel
55:55
um I think that you know it is you know like building gojek is by far the most important professional experience and and frankly one of the most important life experiences I've had it's you know made me a a way way better person actually
56:15
and now that I've I've stepped away I am not as bored or as aimless as people would expect after having such a kind of all-consuming thing um uh uh be be part of my life experience um what's next honestly Lenny I don't know
56:39
um I I don't know I don't have a plan uh uh at this stage uh I I do some Angel Investing on the side I you know work with other Founders to be able to you know maybe just share you know some of these experiences that I um that that I share today
56:57
um and and just kind of figuring out you know um whatever I guess figuring out what makes me happy and what kind of you know what are the kind of activities that I find rewarding I don't know you know maybe I'll start
57:10
another company uh at some point I think that's my default uh but I think right now I'm just kind of taking things easy and and and and trying to figure out you know what my another problem I guess that I could kind of be obsessed about
57:25
you've earned that time to explore and look for new problems is there anything else you wanted to touch on before we get to a very exciting lightning round now lady I think I think we've we've covered a lot uh uh today and um yeah I just wanted to thank you for uh for the time amazing it's absolutely my pleasure uh and with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round I've got five questions for you are you ready yes let's go what are two
57:51
or three books that you've recommended most to other people what you do is who you are I think that was the second most popular Ben Horowitz book but I'm really uh I'm really obsessed with building interesting and engaging uh cultures so
58:05
I think that that was that's one another is um a classic marketing book again we talked a lot about branding today so um there's this book called How Brands grow by Byron sharp um I think it's a I don't agree necessarily with everything
58:18
in it but I do think that uh it's a it's a great primer on on how to think about branding in in marketing favorite recent movie or TV show favorite recent movie uh the menu uh and favorite recent Tv show uh Netflix show is a cyberpunk uh
58:35
27 7 uh Edge Runners oh wow I haven't heard of that one oh yeah it's super cool check it out favorite interview question that you like to ask tell me about a subject or activity you've been obsessed with for a long time what do
58:51
you look for in an answer that's like okay this is good I want somebody to basically almost pitch to me an obsession they have that makes it me uh interested uh uh in in knowing more into that subject and I'm the more obscure uh
59:08
the better and the more Pat the more passionate they are about an obscure thing uh even better and I think you know it shows people's capability to be really passionate about something and and and sell something and and think
59:21
about something in a very uh structured and detailed way one what are some products that you love and have recently discovered two products I think right now that I've I've that I've found absolutely delightful uh one is the art browser uh
59:37
I know that it's it's it's uh gaining a lot of traction out there but I'm a a very chronic tab hoarder my my Chrome Tabs are just all over the place um and I love that they've uh figured out an up they figured out I would say the best
59:53
approach to kind of tab management um and there's just a ton of little delightful like awesome design details of the in the uh the app that I I think is really really cool and it's a browser like when's the last time there was like
1:00:04
a really really cool browser that came out um so I also love the ambition that the company has um second product uh steam deck I'm a huge gamer and I I think it it is probably I would say the best game platform to actually build on the vision of of truly
1:00:23
portable mobile gaming I love your reporting with Arc for uh tab hoarders I also used to have a lot of tabs and I love it just Auto deletes them I just disappear and it forces you to lose your tabs and it works out surprisingly
1:00:37
final question I'm curious what comes up for this one what's something you've recently changed or that you've heard of someone in code check recently changed in their product development process that was maybe minor that had a
1:00:49
tremendous impact on the ability team's ability to execute one relatively minor thing that I thought had a lot of impact with execution is being very clear that whoever is accountable for the result should also be the design the decider uh
1:01:06
I found that a lot of literature out there says that product teams should be this communal best ideas come from everywhere Group which I think is well intentioned and absolutely everyone should contribute ideas but I think not
1:01:17
having it be super clear who is accountable and and who is deciding often slows down execution a lot and I think you know when we switch to making it really clear that who was the decider for any kind of product development
1:01:32
process I think our execution definitely improved significantly amazing Kevin thank you so much for being here gojek is such an interesting and important story and I feel like most Founders can learn something from the story so I was
1:01:46
really excited to bring you on and to hear a lot of these uh wild stories that you shared um two final questions where can folks finding a lion if they want to reach out learn more and how can listeners be useful to you
1:01:57
I am at uh kalui K alui on Twitter that's also my email kalui gmail.com um we'll always be happy to chat about gojek or or just generally anything uh technology related um again I'm not I have nothing I'm working on at the moment so I just would
1:02:20
love to jam with with cool people amazing thank you again for being here thanks lady thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode