Evidence receipt / prediction
Published · transcript-backedKevin Aluwi: prediction
26 Mar 2023 Lenny's Podcast Taxi mafias, cash vaults, and 100% MoM growth: The story behind Southeast Asia’s biggest startup | Kevin Aluwi (Gojek)
“Eventually with enough time all moats can be crossed. And I think one so-called moat that doesn't get talked about enough is the fact that you're able to do hard things because hard things are hard and just simply doing things that are hard, as long as they create value to your customers, actually is a position that makes it harder for your competitors to be able to win over your customers because it's hard to do those things.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Kevin Aluwi
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- prediction
- Recorded
- 26 Mar 2023
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…Are you hiring or on the flip side, are you looking for a new opportunity? Well, either way, check out lennysjobs.com/talent. If you're a hiring manager, you can sign up and get access to hundreds of hand curated people who are open to new opportunities. Thousands of people apply to join this collective. And I personally review and accept just about 10% of them. You won't find a better place to hire product managers and growth leaders, join almost a hundred other companies who are actively hiring through this collective. And if you're looking around for a new opportunity actively or passively join the collective, it's free. You can be anonymous and you can even hide yourself from specific companies. You can also leave any time and you'll only hear from companies that you want to hear from. Check out lennysjobs.com/talent. These are hilarious stories that you had to compete with these ripoff jail broken apps, fraudulent apps, and then you had to build a cash box network all over the country. That's amazing. I knew there would be good stories in this question and I'm glad you delivered. There's also this feeling of within Gojek of just doing the hard thing and you just shared a couple stories of this versus the simple... 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 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? I really don't like the idea of moats. Again, one of the concepts that gets thrown out a lot by strategy type folks of what's the moat of your business or your product? And usually people are looking for an answer like, oh, look at this capability or look at this feature or look at this distribution partner or all of those kind of things. And I don't believe that any moats are durable over time. Eventually with enough time all moats can be crossed. And I think one so-called moat that doesn't get talked about enough is the fact that you're able to do hard things because hard things are hard and just simply doing things that are hard, as long as they create value to your customers, actually is a position that makes it harder for your competitors to be able to win over your customers because it's hard to do those things. And probably another example of doing something that sounds very difficult was that in the early days of Gojek, there was a lot of resistance to our services and one of the forms of that resistance, one of the more most common form of that resistance in the early days was actually by motorcycle taxi mafia. So you would have these areas that are essentially controlled through violence by specific area mafia. And when we start having drivers pick up orders and pick up passengers, these people would actually physically assault our drivers. We've had everything from bricks thrown at our drivers to knives and machetes being brandished at them to just physical altercations, literally mobs of people getting into these brawls. And there was a lot of these kind of things that actually happened in the streets of Jakarta at the time. And I think it would've been easy for us to say, "Hey, they're all contractors, they're third parties, let them kind of just sort it out." But instead we actually hired private security. So we actually work with private security companies to help these situations, to help our drivers in those situations, to help extract them out of these sticky situations. And so we actually ran a fairly big private security operation for a fairly long time until it became common to have Gojek drivers do all of these things across cities. We actually ran this very operation intensive thing just to make sure that our drivers could be as safe as possible and it showed our commitment to the driver community, it showed our commitment that we cared. And again, going back to that earlier point around having that branding association, drivers knew that, hey, we weren't just a platform that didn't care. We actually cared about their safety and that helped build that goodwill even as competitors started coming in and paying more money, we still had a lot of loyalty within the driver community because of things like that. How did you actually have a security person on a motorcycle? Were they pretending to be the rider and then just get out and punch them in the face?…
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