Taxi mafias, cash vaults & 100% MoM growth: The story of SEA’s biggest startup | Kevin Aluwi (Gojek)

In the early days of Go-Jek, 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, um, through violence by specific, you know, area mafias and when we started having drivers pick up orders and pick up passengers, these people, uh, would actually physically assault our drivers. Um, you know, we've had everything from, like, bricks thrown at, uh, uh, our drivers to, you know, knives, um, and machetes being brandished at them, and I think it would have been easy for us to say like, "Hey, you know, you know, they're, uh, they're all contractors, they're third parties, like, you know, let them, let them kind of just sort it out." But instead we, uh, we actually hired private security. So we actually work with private security companies to help our drivers in those situations, you know, to, to help, to help kind of, like, you know, extract them out of these, these sticky situations. And so we actually ran a fairly big private security operation, uh, for a fairly long time.

(instrumental music) 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 Go-Jek, which I've always been fascinated by. You may recall a former guest, Crystal Wajiha, who was Head of Growth at Go-Jek and I've always wanted to get more of the story. Go-Jek 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 start-up in Indonesia and all of Southeast Asia. Kevin and the story of Go-Jek 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 start-up, 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 firsthand, 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 their 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 road blocks 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 start-ups. Sign up today at coda.io/lenny and get $1,000 start-up credit on your first statement. That's coda.io/lenny to sign up and get a start-up credit of $1,000. Coda.io/lenny. This episode is brought to you by rows.com. The world runs on spreadsheets. You 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. Rows 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 Rows to do your analysis on data straight from BigQuery or Snowflake. If you're deep diving on marketing, you can import reports 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 Rows. 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 Rows. Go to rows.com/lenny to check them out. That's rows.com/lenny. Kevin, welcome to the podcast.