Kevin Aluwi: evaluation

Transcript context

…Sounds like a lot of the fact that you were so far away from the Bay Area informed the way that you built this company, the scrappiness 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, it was super hard back then. It was particularly hard because Indonesia is such a valuable market, Indonesia and the rest, I would say primarily Indonesia just because of its scale. But I think overall Southeast Asia was just such a valuable market and it was interesting for global companies to want to win it. So we competed with global and regional companies, but the local talent and funding ecosystems were really underdeveloped. So that challenge of having to compete with the best in the world 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 was I would say one of the most challenging parts of building probably in markets that are atypical or outside of Silicon Valley and maybe some of the other technology centers in the world like China and India. So some of my learnings probably there that I would take going forward is I think we talked a lot about being scrappy. In the beginning, we were a lot more ops-heavy than tech-heavy. And doing the things that don't scale through other means I think is definitely something that is absolutely necessary if you're building outside of these main technology hubs. Another thing I would say is you need to get good at remote work really early. And I think today that's kind of become a lot more prevalent as more and more people have experience with remote work. For us, we built an engineering center in Bangalore in 2015, and this allowed us to compete a lot better with the global giants because we had access to a really deep talent market in India at the time, but we were really early in this whole remote work thing because it wasn't common for people in our region, but also globally to have so much talent concentration outside of headquarters. And I do believe that companies who want to compete against world class competitors outside of these technology centers like Silicon Valley need to become good at remote work really fast because getting that talent probably means having offices or individuals who are outside of your home market or your headquarters. And probably the final I would say tip here is don't just copy, because Gojek was not an Uber clone, even though that was kind of how some investors or analysts talk about us, we were focused on a solution that was uniquely an Indonesian phenomenon, the motorcycle taxi driver. And this led to both product and branding innovation. On the product side, we were an on-demand super app because we saw that 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 even before super apps were really a thing. ecause we saw that 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 even before super apps were really a thing. And then that branding point that we talked about a little earlier about giving our drivers jackets and helmets so people could see them zip around town, which actually doesn't make sense if you're a car ride hailing service because it's not very easy to brand a car and the drivers are inside the car. But all of our competitors at the time when they first entered the motorcycle ride hailing space didn't brand their drivers because they came from a car-centric view. And so again, understanding your unique market dynamics is also really important if you're building outside of these technology centers.…

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