Kevin Aluwi: commitment

Transcript context

…You talked about how scrappy you've been, and I want to dig into that a little bit more. I think there's like US startup scrappy, and then there's like Gojek scrappy, and it'd be fun to hear maybe a story or 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 we were one of the pioneering companies, one of the pioneering technology companies in Indonesia and in Southeast Asia. And so we came into a environment where a lot of the things that maybe companies or people in more developed economies take for granted, for example, having electronic or digital payments, that was something that actually didn't really exist that much when we first started. And so we had a problem of actually trying to pay drivers because drivers every day we would be paying out incentives or just having customers pay with their credit cards or their store balance, and then we'd have a challenge and getting our drivers to actually be able to take that money out for their earnings. And in the early days, we actually had cash booths. So we actually had physical spaces with a vault and cash sitting in the vault where drivers can show up that, oh, this is my driver ID and this is the balance that I have with you. Please give me the cash. And so we would have these actual physical locations where there would be lions of drivers essentially taking cash. And we eventually figured this out of like, okay, we'll work with a bank and integrate with an ATM network and all that. But in the early days we just did it ourselves of building essentially a mini at ATM network, which I think even that sounds too fancy of what it was it. Because it was literally a booth with a vault with cash in it. And we had at the time already tens of thousands of drivers all across in Indonesia. Another scrappy story that actually Crystal reminded me of recently that we did was at the time there was a lot of fake driver apps out there because we didn't have all of the security investments that we eventually made, things like code obfuscation and better API security that wouldn't allow for these fraudulent driver apps, these basically third party driver apps to connect to our platform. So there were a lot of these drivers using these third party driver apps that were doing things that... So they were kind of doing unsavory things like stealing driver details, some of them even as bad as financial details so that they can then at some point drain driver funds. And the way that they did it, 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 we wanted drivers to be conscious of what was happening on the app, and so we would actually make sure that drivers would push the accept order button. We made sure that that was the only way that drivers could accept orders, but this app had a functionality that would automatically accept orders as soon as they came in. push the accept order button. We made sure that that was the only way that drivers could accept orders, but this app had a functionality that would automatically accept orders as soon as they came in. And so actually it was kind of this interesting situation where they were doing things that were fraudulent and were not safe for the integrity of the platform, but at the same time they were also providing some value to the people who were using them. And so at the time we had to make a decision of like, okay, we need to nip this in the bud and one way that we could have done it, that would've taken time was it really invest in a lot of the technical security aspects of it, but we didn't have the bandwidth to be able to do that. Engineering and security talent is actually super scarce in Southeast Asia at the time, still is today, but at that time extremely scarce. And so we ended up making the decision of actually copying those features. So we actually saw all of these third party fraudulent apps and instead of building a whole system to prevent them from being built or 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 the number of users on these third party apps just by having this mentality of you can't beat them, then join them. And that I would say that wasn't a philosophical decision or a principal decision. Is was actually a decision made out of necessity because we simply couldn't build all the capability to combat these apps at the time?…

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