Kevin Aluwi: preference

Transcript context

…That reminds me that at Gojek, you held tons of different roles throughout the time you were there. You were obviously co-founder, your Co-CEO at one point, defacto CPO at one point, CIO, CFO. I heard that you were writing like push notification copy, became a driver at one point just to keep things running. 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 I did have a stint as an amateur performance marketer in the early days of Gojek. I would write copy, I would upload ads onto Facebook and Google and try and do my best in optimizing our online marketing spend. But I think I did all of those things, not because I wanted to be scrappy necessarily, but I do think that as, and this is probably most relevant for founders, less for executives, but I think as a founder, I do think it's really important to understand the work that needs to be done in order to see what excellence looks like. And for us, again, we came from an ecosystem where the availability of experienced talent was relatively low. And so for me it was very hard to be able to say, "oh, let's hire person X from organization Y with job description Z," and we know that they probably can deliver because again, the talent availability was really low. And so a lot of times I felt like I needed to understand, okay, what is this job? What exactly does it entail is, and seeing how bad I am at it allowed me to understand what good looked like. And so I held a lot of those roles just because I wanted to understand every part of the business as best as I could in order to then find somebody who could do it orders of magnitude better than myself. I would say that is true for all of these roles except for being a driver. I think being a driver, I wasn't trying to understand what excellence as a driver look like. Obviously the drivers do a really challenging job and I think I just wanted to understand what that role was like to build a lot more empathy towards the job and make sure that our product was catered towards what those needs were. So when we first launched our car ride hailing services, I think I was the first actual driver on the app and I would every now and then be a driver. And I remember the early days when I actually picked up a customer. It was this lady and she put in her destination as a mall. And so I went to this house and I knew that, okay, I needed to drive to this mall, but then this lady comes out with this giant bag and so I had to hop out the car, take this giant bag, put it in my trunk, and then off we went. And in the middle of the drive she's like, "Hey, I need to drop off and do my laundry on the way to the mall." And I just had to, "okay, cool." We took a detour, I lugged this giant bag out of our trunk and helped this lady do her laundry. And then we went to the mall and I got very little money out of that experience and it wasn't instant, but this is eventually what led to, I think a lot of the support I gave to our driver teams when they were pushing for, Hey, we need more waiting fees, we need to add multiple stops in order to make sure that hey, a lot of this extra work was actually compensated. I gave to our driver teams when they were pushing for, Hey, we need more waiting fees, we need to add multiple stops in order to make sure that hey, a lot of this extra work was actually compensated. And it was something that I obviously experienced personally and it was something that I definitely was excited about as a set of product features and principles when it came to building our driver app.…

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