Taxi mafias, cash vaults, and 100% MoM growth: The story behind Southeast Asia’s biggest startup | Kevin Aluwi (Gojek)

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 controlled through violence by specific area mafias. 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. And I think it would have been easy for us to say, hey, they're all contractors, they're third parties, let them just sort it out. But instead, 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, extract them out of these sticky situations. And so we actually ran a fairly big private security operation for a fairly long time.

Welcome to Lenny's podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Kevin Aluwi. Kevin is the co-founder and former CEO of a company called Gojek, which I've always been fascinated by. You may recall a former guest, Crystal Wijaya, 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 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 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. Enjoy this episode with Kevin Aluwi 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 it can help your team run smoother and be more efficient. I know this first hand, because Coda does that for me. I use Coda every day to wrangle my newsletter content calendar, my interview notes for podcasts, and to coordinate my sponsors. More recently, I actually wrote a whole post on how Coda's product team operates, and within that post they shared a dozen templates that they use internally to run their product team, including managing the roadmap, their OKR process, getting internal feedback, and essentially their whole product development process is done within Coda. If your team's work is spread out across different documents and spreadsheets, and a stack of workflow tools, that's why you need Coda. Coda puts data in one centralized location, regardless of format, eliminating roadblocks that can slow your team down. Coda allows your team to operate on the same information and collaborate in one place. Take advantage of this special limited time offer just for startups. Sign up today at coda.io/lenny and get a $1,000 startup credit on your first statement. That's coda.io/lenny, lenny to sign up and get a startup credit of $1,000. Coda.io/lenny this episode is brought to you by rose.com the world runs on spreadsheets. We probably have a tab open with a spreadsheet right now. But the spreadsheet product you're using today was designed decades ago and it shows. They live in silos away from your business data. They weren't made to be used on a phone. And if you want to do even the simplest automation, you have to figure out complex scripts that are a nightmare to maintain. Rose is different. It combines a modern spreadsheet editor, data integrations with APIs and your business tools, and a slick sharing experience that turns any spreadsheet into a beautiful interactive website that you'll be proud to share. If you're writing a report on a growth experiment, you can use Rose to do your analysis on data straight from BigQuery or Snowflake. If you're deep diving on marketing, you can import reports straight straight from Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, or Twitter, or if you're working with sales, you can natively plug Stripe, Salesforce, or HubSpot directly into Rose. And when you're done, you can share your work as a beautiful spreadsheet that's easy to read and embed charts, tables, and calculators into Notion, Confluence, or anywhere on the web. I've already moved some of my favorite spreadsheet templates to Rose. Go to rose.comlenny to check them out. That's rose.comlenny. slash Lenny. Kevin, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Thanks for having me, Lenny. We finally made it happen after a few weeks 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 companies that are not based in the US. in this case, Indonesia, Crystal Wijaya, who was 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 small group of category of people that you invite. Thank you.

I'm a huge fan of what you do. Thanks, man. I really appreciate that. And to redirect to you, you are the co-founder of a company called GoJack. Many people listening have never heard of GoJack. especially people in the US. So just to start, can you just describe what is Gojek? What do you all do? And then also I think more interestingly is just like the scale. I think people in the US, their mind will blow once they hear the scale you've reached with this company. They probably hadn't heard of it.

So Gojek started as a motorcycle taxi based service. So it's a kind of a uniquely Indonesian thing where we have millions of motorcycle taxi drivers in all the urban centers in Indonesia. And so we started 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 package for you, or buy something and deliver it to you. This then evolved over the years into a more general on-demand consumer super app that also included car drivers, and other services ranging from the ones mentioned 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 Indonesia's top e-commerce platform. And we've managed to also expand outside of just Indonesia, where today we have about 2.7 million drivers across Southeast Asia. We've completed about 3 billion orders last year, so that's 3 billion orders. So that the scale of our region is often underappreciated, where we also have about 15 million merchants doing general e-commerce, but also restaurants and our food delivery service. And on that IPO, we were pretty proud to say that it was Indonesia's largest IPO of all time, where we raised over a billion dollars at something like 27, $28 billion in terms of valuation.

And these numbers you shared, 2.7 million drivers, 30 billion orders. Or 3 billion? How would that compare to like an Uber or Lyft?

I don't know what their latest numbers are, but just in terms of the numbers of people and the number of activity, I would place our scale among the largest US 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 and Lyft.

In terms of volume, I would say that we're up there with Uber globally and definitely larger than Lyft. I don't remember how many drivers are in the US, but we definitely have more drivers in the region than all of America.

Just to kind of like check this checkbox. You said it was a super app. What are all the things that Gojek does? Just whatever you want to share, all the things that you can do.

From the point where we had the most services, we had everything from, you know, ride hailing to package delivery to food delivery to grocery deliveries. We had moving services on, you know, trucks and vans. We had on-demand massages, cleaning services. You could get your hair done on Gojek. You could order movie tickets. You could get a loan. You could pay for things. I think at our peak, we had something like near 30 different services all in one app.

I think it's like you're officially a super app if your founder can't even remember all the things that you do right now.

Yeah, definitely. I would challenge anyone 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. I'd love to talk a little bit about my thoughts on Super Apps at some point during this session because I definitely have some mixed views over it as a product strategy. as we've 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 you open up Uber these days, it's like 40 things that they're offering now. Elon, Twitter is talking about turning Twitter into a super app with payments, communication, messaging, all these things. So I think it's a really interesting trend that continues to pop up here in the US. And I would absolutely love to hear your perspective on on Super Apps.

Okay, I'm going to come off a little strong on this, but I am kind of annoyed at how much it's being mentioned these days. It's really popular in VC consultant analyst circles because it sounds really great on a strategy deck, because all of the things that are really, really appealing, we'll talk about lower customer acquisition costs, higher attach rates to different products, Talk about higher retention across different services, the ease of cross-selling and upselling. All of these things sound great, but in reality, a lot of those benefits don't pan out. And one probably really good example that I like to reference is that I remember one of our products was mobile phone top-up and recharge. in Southeast Asia, a majority of people are on prepaid plans instead of postpaid plans. So everyone basically buys their minutes and their data plans upfront in the beginning of the week or the beginning of the month. So we had a product which was a mobile top-up product. And so the reason I mentioned this specific product 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 it's a very, very relevant product. And we had our UX research team actually look into why the engagement on the product wasn't as high as we thought it should be. So one of the questions that our UXR team asked our customers was like, Hey, do you know that you could top up your mobile minutes and buy data on the Gojek app. And only about 40% of our customers, like 30 or 40% of our customers knew that this product existed. And that completely blew our minds because one, it's a product that is relevant for all of our customers. Two, it was literally there on one of the six buttons on the homepage. And I think the insight that we got here was 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 way. And for us, the way that our customers thought about us was that they thought about the driver. And so when we launched, when we went from ride hailing to package delivery to food delivery to grocery delivery. You know, customers really understood that. And 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 Gojek driver. That made sense. You can easily cross-sell somebody from a ride hailing customer to a 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 the concept that a customer has when they think about your service, it starts breaking down. So one other fun UXR insight here was when we launched massage services. So we had at one point, though we've already shut it down a few years after, we had massage services where you can order a masseuse to come to your place. And a question that many of our customers asked was that, oh, is the driver going to come into my house and give me a massage? And for us, that was insane. Of course not. Our drivers are not trained masseuses, but that was the question that people asked because they felt like, oh, this app is an app for these driver-related services. So if there was a massage service, I'm assuming it's that same man who's gonna give me a massage. And so, you know, I think this kind of illustrates the importance of having these unifying concepts that are easy for customers to think about the multiple different services. It's not as simple as just saying, oh, we have a lot of engagement, we have a lot of eyeballs, add a service, and then you have a super app that makes sense for customers. And so that whole nirvana of lower CAC, higher retention, 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 that you can use. And that's another 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 ways you can display a whole bunch of different services. that actually have little to do with each other, which is why when you see super apps today, it's kind of like this giant menu or this giant grid, which does limit the design decisions that you can make, which is unfortunate because if you kind of actually, I think it's an unsolved problem at this point.

It's a hilarious story about the massage product. Sounds like a lot of startups are going to 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 Marshall graduation speech and a few other interviews you 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 importance of brand. And to me and to most people, brand is this 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, 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 know, why do you think it's so important?

I do agree with you that it is kind of the squishy thing that most people see as an afterthought, may because it is kind of this squishy thing that it's hard to define. But I'm 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, especially to your audience, that product is absolutely critical and probably the most important. But yeah, the brand as an afterthought is definitely one of the areas where I think there's a giant missed opportunity for consumer tech businesses. And I almost, you know, I get why we kind of opened the session by talking about the size of the business to give an appreciation of the scale for audience members who might be unfamiliar with us or with the region. But I wish I didn't have to start there because we actually started as a very scrappy company where we were by far the underfunded player and without brand that we probably would have never gone to escape velocity beyond that scrappy stage. We've maintained our leadership in Indonesia and through a lot of the things that we actually did on the brand side to give you a sense of how scrappy we had to be in competition for the first six months after launching our app. We had only raised about $2 million and our regional competitor had already raised 250. So they had literally more than 100 times more capital than we have. So it's easy to talk about what we built as this kind of giant business, but we came from a place where we were seriously underfunded. And I think a big reason why we survived was that we built a great brand for our consumers and for our drivers and for our merchants. And I think that great brands create associations in their customers' minds that transcend the typically transactional or utilitarian one that most people have with businesses. They become part of one's identity. I think some of the best in class examples of these are probably, you know, all the Apple fanboys and fangirls, Nike sneakerheads, you know, for these individuals, you know, the brand becomes really part of their, a big part of their identity and their loyalty towards the products of the company, you know, go beyond just like, hey, you know, go beyond a relationship that can easily be swayed just through discounts or more features that other competitors might have. And so I'm a really, really firm believer of how important this is because you can see it. If you step out of the tech bubble for a second, you can see that there are so many great companies out there that really rely on the strength of their brand to build these fantastic businesses and to create great experiences for for their customers. And you ask, what are the things that one can do? I think for us, we invested a lot in our brand across multiple areas. And I think one specific area that I think is really, really important is that you create consistency across all customer touch points. And so branding is not just a cool logo, cool advertising, fun imagery. But it's really about the impression that a customer or a user has with your product and with your business. So having that consistency across all customer touch points is really important. So how you write copy and advertising and in the app, how you even design the app. But we were the first company of scale to kind of have ads that don't take ourselves too seriously. We make fun of ourselves. We make fun of our cultural observations of Indonesia. And again, to kind of just build this overall feel that like, hey, we get you. We are part of the overall culture of Indonesia. And even going beyond the more aesthetic or communication-oriented investments, we also leaned into cultural artifacts in our product features to kind of really build this brand that is part of day-to-day culture. One of my favorite cultural artifacts is that in Asia, it's fairly common to send food as gifts to your loved ones or maybe people you're interested in dating. So people would send over food as gifts to their their romantic interests. And so when we launched our food delivery service, a lot of people were actually using it for this. Like, you know, I'm going to send it to my boyfriend or my girlfriend or the person that I'm interested in dating. And so it became this whole cultural phenomenon of like sending GoFood for these people. And we kind of lean into it in our product feature where all of our, all the other players in the market at the time basically only allowed you to deliver food to your home or your office. But we actually created a feature that allowed you to choose a delivery point that was far away from where you were. There was a lot of reasons why other companies didn't allow it at the time because it's like, oh, it might be used for fraud and stuff like that. But we leaned into it. We leaned into it 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 had fun with this whole idea of gfu dating. And so, yes, it's kind of part of branding, but thinking about branding beyond just like marketing communication, but actually being relatable and being part of the culture and being sensitive of what that culture is, I think was something that 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 discounts. they could offer more incentives to drivers. But 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 the nature of our business to some level of accuracy.

So just to get even more concrete, 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 the personality of your product for you? You said it was like, we're just like of the people, we're like you, we're here to help you make your life easier. And then that informs the copy, the messaging, be a little, I forget how you describe it, but just like almost like bad grammar and stuff just 'cause it like relates more to people. And then some of these product launches that connect to that. So maybe if there's anything else you want to add there, that'd be 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 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 because they were just all over the streets of many cities in Indonesia, 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 if we were like, I don't know, an airline and we branded a bunch of people on the streets with our brand, yeah, sure, that might help with brand recall and people might know about the name. But what was really, really powerful was that when people would be seeing these drivers with their jackets and helmets, they would be seeing passengers on the backseat as they were stuck in traffic. So I'm stuck in traffic and I'm seeing these people whiz past me with this imagery on them. And immediately 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 carrying packages or delivering food, and you immediately get like, oh, these are guys who can deliver food or deliver packages for me. And so it was this beautiful combination of one, just having that imagery and having that visual everywhere as a reminder of the brand, but more importantly, it was also a physical kind of, it was a physical reminder of the service, of what we do and of how we can help you. And so looking for these opportunities where, again, customers can kind of make that connection between the logo and the colors and the name with actually what the service is, I think are the opportunities that I would say people should look out for. They're rare. They're admittedly, they're quite rare, which is why, in my opinion, the laziest kind of branding tends to be the most popular. Just put your name and your copy on a billboard or on a CPM or CPC campaign. But there are these opportunities, I think, on being able to reinforce the value proposition of your business in a way that is beyond just kind of visual recall. And I think that I think was why that specific anecdote is something I like to talk about because it was really, really one of those special things that reminded people on why we're here.

Yeah, I think you 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. It reminds me of Lyft's pink mustache, which went away, but I 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 US startup scrappy and then there's like Gojek scrappy. And 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 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 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 stored balance. And then we'd have a challenge in 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 like a vault and a cash sitting in the vault where drivers can show up, show 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 lines 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 being basically building essentially a mini ATM network, which is a, I think even that sounds too fancy of what it was. It was literally like a booth with a vault with cash in it. And we had at the time already tens of thousands of drivers all across 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 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, getting 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. 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 kind of came in. And so they actually, it was kind of this interesting situation where they were doing things that were fraudulent and 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, you know, at the time we had to make a decision of like, okay, 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 security aspects of it. But, you know, we didn't have the bandwidth to be able to do that. You know, engineering and security talent is actually super, super scarce in Southeast Asia at the time. Still is today, but at that time, extremely, extremely scarce. And so we ended up making the decision of actually copying those features. So we actually saw all these third-party fraudulent apps, and instead of building a whole system to prevent them from being built or preventing them from being worked, 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 kind of, you know, having this mentality of like, you know, if you can't beat them, then join them. And so that, I would say, you know, that wasn't a philosophical decision or a principal decision. It's actually a decision made out of necessity because we simply couldn't build all the 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/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 100 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 anytime, and you'll only hear from companies that you want to hear from. Check out lennysjobs.com/join talent. These are hilarious stories. Like you had to compete with these like ripoff jailbroken 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 like feeling of within Gojic 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?

I really don't like the idea of moats. Again, one of the concepts that gets thrown out a lot by, by strategy type folks of having, what's the moat of your business or your product? And usually people are looking for an answer of 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 modes 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 most common form of that resistance in the early days, was actually by motorcycle taxi mafias. So you would have these areas that are essentially controlled through violence by specific area mafias. 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 have been easy for us to say, hey, they're all, contractors, their 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 kind of like 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, you know, going again, going back to that earlier point around, you know, having that branding association, you know, drivers 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 actually cared about their safety and that helped build that goodwill. Even as competitors started coming in and paying more money, you know, 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 him in the face?

A minority of situations were like that, but a lot of that was just like, hey, having an on-call service where they could just dial a number and somebody within a five, 10 minute distance would actually show up. And so we would have these patrols effectively in specific hotspots where if there was a situation brewing that they would instantly or almost instantly show up to the site and help defuse it.

I love that you have this super app that's doing all these things for people, plus within the company you've built all these mini businesses like a whole bank. to pay people private security company. There's 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. Yeah. 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.

You.

Know, I have no doubt that. what we were building and what we are today as a technology company. But I do think that in the early days, you do have to be a lot more operations heavy. And then I think that lends to that scrappiness because there are a lot of things that to solve elegantly and technically will take a lot of time. And it just kind of over-focusing on those type of solutions, I think would be doing your customers a disservice because there are opportunities to make things a lot better just through probably more innovation in operations to kind of kickstart things until you have the more elegant, scalable technical or product solution.

That reminds me that @gojek, you held tons of different roles throughout the time you were there. You were obviously co-founder, your co-CEO on point, de facto 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 in the operational component.

I mean, yeah, so actually, you know, I did have a stint as an amateur performance marketer in the early days of Kojic. I would write copy, I would upload ads onto Facebook and Google and try and do my best in kind of 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? 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 looked like. Obviously, the drivers do a really challenging job. And I think I just wanted to understand what that role was like to kind of 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 every now and then would 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 like hump 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 was an instant, but this is kind of 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 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.

It feels like having to do that ends up being a feature, as you 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, that's interesting how that often turns into a good thing. I know you also have a pretty interesting journey into tech. What can you share around that?

So I am basically a failed finance professional. You know, I wanted to, I didn't really know what I wanted to do in my life and in 2005, which is when I entered college, the hot sexy thing to do was finance. And I guess that was what I wanted to do. And I went, studied finance, and then the crash of 2008 happened and I graduated 2009. So it's probably the worst time to be a, 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 was set for life. You know, I got the job that I wanted. I'm working in finance. But I then, long story short, I was not very good. I was not very good. My bosses thought I was underperforming. I didn't feel like I was performing. And I kind of left that that field, that field that I thought I built my entire, I guess, future dreams and identity around. And after I did that, I decided to take a bet in Indonesian technology because this was like when all this was happening was around 2010, 2011, and it was starting to see the development of the current technology giants in the US. at the time. And I thought that it would be pretty cool if Indonesia ever had a technology industry to be part of it at the ground floor. So I moved back in 2011 and it was super early. It was really, really early at the time where the level of talent, the level of funding, the level of product market fit, the number of people who transacted on the internet was also still super low. People still saw the internet as a place for chat apps and social media. And so the level of belief that people had in this space at that time was pretty low. People didn't think that real businesses and real valuable products could be built, especially be built locally. And so taking that bet was something that I think it really panned out for us to kind of be really, really early in this space, which, you know, today has become very, very vibrant. The scene in Southeast Asia has become, you know, I think one of the most exciting spaces in, in technology in the world to date. But at the time, it wasn't obvious. And, and being able to see that development, I think, was something that was really, really important to me because it really shows you what's possible in a very, 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 this space 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 was an experience that I, you know, definitely, definitely cherished.

It's really hard to just build a company outside of Silicon Valley and it was even harder back then. Like COVID 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 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 the US in general based on your experience.

Yeah, look, it was super hard back then because 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, it's 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 kind of technology centers in in the world, like China and India. So some of my learnings probably there on, you know, that I would, you know, take going forward is, I think we talked a lot about being scrappy. In the beginning, you know, 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 that are 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 like 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 on-demand super app 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. And before super apps were really a thing. And then that branding point that we talked about earlier about giving our drivers, you know, jackets and helmets so people could see them zip around town, which actually doesn't make sense if 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, really important if you're building outside of 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? We've chatted about what you guys have built and a few other companies here and there. But like, what companies should people be aware of? What's happening? What's the latest? What's exciting?

Yeah, I think on specifically Indonesia, Indonesia's most people don't know that India is the fourth largest country in the world and that Southeast Asia holds almost 10% of the world's population. But beyond the macro picture, I think it's also, we've experienced a pretty unique level of pace of adoption for products with great product market fit. So, Products with great product market fit grow tremendously fast in this part of the world. In 2015, for example, when we launched our app, we grew more than 100% month on month for the first 16-18 months. So we more than doubled every month for more than a year.

That is insane. I've never heard of that.

No, and our investors at the time, Sequoia is one of our investors at the time told us that, this was the craziest growth story that they've ever heard of in the world. And it's, I wouldn't say necessarily because of our brilliance, it was a combination of how in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, there are a lot of these things that are obviously broken and could be improved with better technology and better products. But also, you know, we also have in this region a very young population who are excited to try new things. And so if you find a solution that really resonates with a lot of these common day-to-day problems, the adoption curve is just absolutely insane. And I think it's one of the things that are definitely unique to developing regions like this one. One company that's really, really interesting, for example, just to give a flavor of the type of off the wall, seemingly off the wall product or company being built in this part of the world. There's a company called e-Fishery and what they do is they basically create a closed loop ecosystem for fish farmers in currently, I think they're only operational in Indonesia or they're recently expanding beyond Indonesia. They help farmers feed their fish through this IoT smart device that helps measure the amount of fish feed that needs to go into the ponds, but they also then help farmers do things like get financing and also sell their produce out to local or even regional or global markets. It's a company doing something like a quarter billion dollars in revenue and it's profitable and it's basically a fish farmer, a closed loop ecosystem. And it's pretty wild that something like this exists, but it does speak to, I think, again, what I said earlier about the hunger that the population have for better solutions. And if you can find these better solutions, you can really build companies of very meaningful scale very, very quickly.

So at this point, you've stepped down as CEO, you've stepped down from the board. What's next? And how does it feel?

Yeah, I'm still kind of on this journey, honestly, of like, how does it feel? I think that, you know, it is, you know, building Gojek is by far the most important professional experience and frankly one of the most important life experiences I've had. It's made me a way, way better person actually. And now that 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 be part of my life experience.

What's next?

Honestly, Lenny, I don't know. I don't know. I don't have a plan at this stage. I do some angel investing on the side. I work with other founders to be able to maybe just share some of these experiences that I've that I shared today and just kind of figuring out, you know, what are the, I guess, figuring out what makes me happy and what kind of, you know, what are the activities that I find rewarding. I don't know, you know, maybe I'll start another company at some point. I think that's my default. But I think right now I'm just kind of taking things easy and trying to figure out, you know, what my another problem, I guess, that I could kind of be obsessed about.

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 our very exciting lightning round?

No, Lenny, I think we've covered a lot today and yeah, I just wanted to thank you for the time.

Amazing, it's absolutely my pleasure. 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 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 obsessed with building interesting and engaging cultures. So I think that's one. Another is a classic marketing book. Again, we talked a lot about branding today. So there's this book called How Brands Grow. by Byron Sharp. I think it's a, I don't agree necessarily with everything in it, but I do think that it's a great primer on how to think about branding and marketing.

Favorite recent movie or TV show?

Favorite recent movie, the Menu, and favorite recent TV show, Netflix show, is Cyberpunk 2077, Edgerunners.

Oh, wow. I haven't heard of that one.

Always check it out. It's super cool.

So go 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 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 interested in knowing more into that subject. And the more obscure, the better and the more passionate they are about an obscure thing, even better. And I think it shows people's capability to be really passionate about something and sell something and think about something in a very structured and detailed way.

What are some products that you love and recently discovered?

Two products I think right now that I found absolutely delightful. One is the Art Browser. I know that it's gaining a lot of traction out there, but I'm a very chronic tab hoarder. My Chrome tabs are just all over the place. And I love that they've figured out, I would say the best approach to kind of tab management. And there's just a ton of little delightful, like awesome design details in the app that I think is just really, really cool. And it's a browser. When's the last time there was a really, really cool browser that came out? So I also love the ambition that the company has. Second product, Steam Deck. I'm a huge gamer and I think it is probably, I would say, the best game platform to actually build on the vision of truly portable mobile gaming.

I love your point with Arc for tab hoarders. I also, You used to have a lot of tabs, and I love it just auto deletes them. It just disappears. And it forces you to lose your tabs, and it works out surprisingly. 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 at Codecademy recently changed in their product development process that was maybe minor that had a tremendous impact on the 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 decider. 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 having it be super clear who is accountable and who is deciding often slows down execution a lot. and I think when we switch to making it really clear that who was the decider for any kind of product development 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 really excited to bring you on and to hear a lot of these wild stories that you shared. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out, learn more, and how can listeners be useful to you?

I am at KalouieKAlouie on Twitter. That's also my email, kalouie@gmail.com. I will always be happy to chat about Gojek or just generally anything technology related. Again, I'm not I have nothing I'm working on at the moment, so I just would love to jam 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 Podcasts, 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.