Fireside Chat with Gojek Founder Nadiem Makarim (Exclusive Full Recording)

we would like to invite mr mccarthy onto the stage and that we want to moderate the [Applause] is the founder and ceo of gojek in indonesian based multi-service platform i feel like most people here have heard of gojek or or used it i use it every day and uh his company's on a mission to empower the informal sectors in indonesia so please nadine thank you so much for making it um thank you for having me thank you uh just just to be sure there's no media here so you're you're at liberty to say whatever you feel like i'm gonna completely democratize the conversation but you could say whatever you want within limits that you you deem adequate let me start off with two basic questions right and then i'll i'll follow on with uh two questions uh with respect to artificial intelligence and sustainability and then i'll open it up thereafter i've i've known you and your family for a long time right and you were the first guy to basically put indonesia on a map on the tech space you became the first unicorn you became the first decacorn but you were just as humble and as simple as i would have known you long time ago and and i even feel like i'm overdressed now uh sorry about the sandals i mean it's bali what do you want me to do at least i put on jeans yeah so you know you're a lot richer than i am and you're still as as as as simple as frugal as humble as you would have been a long time ago what what's the secret sauce you know after all this time if if there's any wisdom in what you've done that maybe some of us could pick up on uh tell us first of all thank you for the compliment uh i don't i don't fully agree with you that i'm that humble as you think of i can be i can be overconfident at times as well uh but i think the short answer to that is i've just been through so much bad stuff and when you go through and what what everyone sees out there is all the good stuff right oh next deck of corn funding rounds etc but the type of business that i lead you know you name it we've been shut down by the government as you remember back in 2000 uh was it 17 we were shut down by the government i probably had more demonstrations than most government officials had to deal with one of which had to be mediated by balde i've gone you name it every single type of human and fatal injury because just the numbers are so big and so you know you go through these swings of crises and after a while you start to build a pattern recognition that you know when things are on the up there will always be a down and when things are the down it won't always give you down it'll come back up again and so a certain level of zen-ness develops over time when you're used to crisis and achievement like that and you start seeing it from a long term so i think that is what has led me to feel this immense sense of gratitude and i don't think a lot of founders you know sit back and just like enjoy and and be grateful for how this is because you know a lot of it's luck a lot of it's just like timing and luck and that's what a lot of these founders a lot of founders in in the us that are in india when they talk about their success they talk about as if it's due to them but there is definitely a timing and market fit issue like all businesses do you sense that you've learned more from your failures or from your earlier successes i don't learn anything from my successes at all it makes me feel good uh it makes other people feel good and makes people respect you and get the headlines and get you deals but um there's no comparison to the learnings of failure it's basically like at this stage like whenever i hit a failure i secretly relish it because like oh man i'm about to learn something i'm about to grow again um and so now i just i take the hit and enjoy it because okay this is just the world trying to teach me a new lesson right and then you you go on yeah when when did you decide to conceive the idea of a go-jek and and and what experiences that you think in hindsight would have brought about that that moment of reckoning so sometime around 2008 2009 right before business school at the time i was working in mckinsey uh i took objects i've been taking objects since i was like you know 14 and so because i i hate waiting in traffic so i just hail an object and i found this massive discrepancy with what society valued these guys to how i valued them because people kept saying that these were untrustworthy you know before gojek objects were essentially criminals right there i mean that's how people viewed them they were unhygienic they were not intelligent they were unruly criminals non-trustworthy you name it every bad thing because they're always on the side of the road you know blocking pedestrian walkways etc and they just seemed like not useful members of society but to me when i built trust with them and i had their phone numbers and i could send stuff with uh with them and and it's safe and i try it again and i try to give them money to go buy me something and it's the reliability is so high that i discovered wow this is my little secret here i know how valuable these guys are if you just give them a platform and you solve the trust issue and so it got born out of frustration of that perception and also frustration at how i can't have this quality of service constantly right because my langan and objects would be somewhere else or unavailable so only tech could scale that forward yeah but you have to be close to the problem you got to be writing in jakarta's streets and living life as close as possible to where they were and if you don't have conversations with them if you don't build that ability to to understand their world then the mechanisms of this business would never come out so that proximity was very important now i i you i mean i know that you you you had to go through some trials and tribulations and early stage but when did you first realize that that you could make it and you could actually become you know so big or a unicorn or even beyond how long did it take for that process you know from the get go to that point of realizing that you could actually make it as a unicorn or even a deck of corn it's very hard to pick a specific moment uh because when you're in it you don't really think that way right i think a lot of people they ask me and whenever i do like student sessions and they ask me like how tell teach me how to build a unicorn and i'm like i can't because if your goal is to create a unicorn you're very highly unlikely to achieve it right but if your goal is to solve a massive problem then becoming a unicorn the probability increases significantly so we were just chasing the problem and we we attacked it from many different angles and it was simply the problem of mobility right how do you get a human an object like food or money or value to move in the fastest possible cheapest most convenient way using one tool and therefore creating a human cyborg with the app gojek is nothing more than it's like the operating system of the real world right you're creating a cyborg in our consumers that are able to not have to do the things that they don't want to do and therefore more time to get stuff done in life right so i think for me one of the i do remember one moment though at that moment where i'm like okay this is going to be big i'm looking for something dramatic there's there's no media here nadine so you can be open when we launched go food when we launched go food so there was a competitor then it was called a food panda and they were around for like two and a half years they were doing pretty good um so we launched our app in january 2015 and we launched gofu six months later we launched go food none of the restaurants knew about it suddenly gojek drivers were coming in we overtook the incumbent food panda in six hours in six hours we overtook their orders for that day because we knew what their average numbers were and everything and that was the moment that i realized i think whoa okay we have a real advantage in the supply base like our guys are literally next to every restaurant you can think of this is going to be huge i mean when food picked up and then now gofu is you know one of the largest in the world i think that was the aha moment for all of us i think we we stood around the room and just kind of in silence looked at okay we got something big here like um we better buck up yeah uh i'm going to try to stay away from mentioning the other competitor yeah you could say now to to what extent do you think that would have served as an impetus as as for you to be a lot more creative than before or than ever huge okay just illustrate a little bit about that i mean as much as i try to hate them for all of their ridiculous behavior and overspending we'd be nothing without them we'd be nothing we would never be this big without having the craziest competitor i think in the world so based on a net revenue to burn ratio there is no company like our competitor that burns more irrationally as in indonesia southeast asia or world oh my god okay in global no chinese company no american company spends as much as them per dollar of let's say net you can use net revenue you can use total revenue it doesn't matter it's insane so we've never seen and our investors same they've never seen anything like that so to have you know competitors first we had to fight the number one technology platform in ride hailing which is uber then we both kicked them out thank god they swallowed them right so we didn't have to take the dilution so that so you're fighting against the best tech then you're fighting against the most irrational spender um that we've ever seen um and that you know in that crisis in that shadow of softbank and everything that's where you build you know your trench lines that's where the strongest uh human relationships get formed and hardened because of war and so the team that we have now in gojek was built out of war and war is a funny thing war uh is painful in so many ways but it solidifies bonds that will transcend even gojek you know when you've been in the trenches together you i mean you know this like it's it's it's this weird feeling of unity against uh an enemy um it's not that intense but you know you know what i mean um but i felt that without them and that's why over time you learn to build gratitude towards your enemy you learn to kind of love them because you wouldn't be there without them would you have dinner with them now maybe a whatsapp message to each other no not really all right all right okay i'll stop right now okay tell me tell me this so do you envision a future where okay i i you know i'm puzzled you know i went to an academic or went through an academic system where i was taught that the coolest thing would have been perfect competition right as for everybody to participate in the economic or financial or entrepreneur entrepreneurial narrative but increasingly as i i go to silicon valley and meet up with entrepreneurs they seem to belong to a completely different planet where the way to be is is is to be a monopolist they don't seem to be sensitive in embracing of the notion of perfect competition now in in in view of that just simply thinking there can only be one monopolist right uh you know i don't recall the second best search engine right i don't recall the second best social networking platform uh do you envision a future where perhaps you want to be the only dude in town or do you envision a future where maybe a duopolistic scenario is the prevailing factor or scenario i i think very i think a duopolistic is much more likely scenario um you know as much as tech companies seem to behave like natural monopolies the ones that do become monopolies i think are ones that are not charging the consumer for the use of their service so this is this is a looks like you you don't google doesn't charge you to be on it uh facebook doesn't charge you to be on it so the propensity to become a monopoly is is directly correlated to the network effect coefficient of the business right you can kind of say gojek's a network effect but it's not really it's not like you being on the platform is going to increase my utility of being on the platform it's not as much as facebook or whatsapp etc um and they're basically their whole revenue stream is coming from the advertising and the eyeballs i do believe that for the rest of tech which is going to be transactional in nature where you're paying for something there will always be second and third players but it's not like the thing with tech is that it is a game of scale so unfortunately it's there very few verticals have room for the seventh eighth ninth player unlike a restaurant right or smbs um it is and remains to be one of my biggest fears actually for gojek is how powerful it has become and you know it's so weird like even even we were in the leadership in gojek were discussing about how do we build systematic ethical boundaries given the amount of power and given the amount of jobs and of the economy that we we support right now so if gojek if gojek shut down tomorrow you would experience a calamitous like 1998 or worse um issue and that's something that stresses me out right like we are literally too big to fail and also to make sure that we always do everything for the social good instead of just for the good of our shareholders this is a very tricky balance when you're at that size when you've got such demanding investors but you also need to maintain your moral compass because ultimately that's what's going to carry you 10 20 years forward wow okay that that sounds more powerful than a political party uh i uh we're not going to get there but i just let me let me pick up on you you mentioned the word cyber uh threats uh let's let's talk a little bit about that you know artificial intelligence is something that you've been very passionate about and and there's two schools of thought right one is the elon mosque school of thought which is painting and portraying the doomsday scenario and the other is one where they think it's gonna be cool humanity uh how how do you envision the role of artificial intelligence in the context of our participation in the cyberspace uh more and more today and more and more going forward and how do you think that will affect humanity in general or the population of indonesia or southeast asia that's that's that's a big ass but you know just just at all you got you know oh it is a big question um i think i'm trying to get my money's worth i think overall first i have to put a caveat a disclaimer on this is that i am by no means the expert in artificial intelligence however i have the privilege of talking with some of the best experts of artificial intelligence so i just steal from them right and i just believe because i have no other cross-reference point so i just trust people smarter than me there are going to be massive benefits of ai and massive risks i would say that the massive risks in my opinion are three and in this order of priority i think the biggest risk out of all and none of this is is skynet i don't know skynet as in the terminator right yeah no yeah that's not in my list i could be wrong but that's not in my list the first one that i think stresses me out the most is cyber terrorism so it's not going to come from some like sentient being it's going to come from groups uh with their own interests um whether it's money ideology uh or politics or you know uh nation to nation warfare this is one of the most asymmetrical types of weapons because you cannot when someone if you detonate a nuke you will know who detonated it you will know who gets hit and you will know that someone did it so it's transparent to the world when you detonate a ai worm to disable a nuclear plant or disable a electrical grid system um you it's untraceable it's untraceable um and so this is i think the thing that it's already probably happening either governments are really good at hiding it right now uh or it's do it happening in a low scale level uh but it's definitely happening already so cyber terrorism the second is crispr and all the genetic ai engineering uh of humanity i mean all it takes is one country to move ahead first and then all the other countries will be forced to do it if they don't want their children to be the most stupid versus other countries that use it this is just going to be like a chain effect of genetic engineering for babies um which freaks me out that's i don't have a solution for that i don't know but they're going ahead i'm pretty sure they're already humans out there that are somewhat genetically edited like young kids or babies third biggest risk is automation on certain sectors i think the loss of jobs in i'm pretty scared about drivers in general like huge amounts of truck drivers in the u.s or ride-hailing drivers i mean that's one thing uh good thing gojek's done mostly on motorcycles so they haven't made automated motorcycles yet and i don't think they will for a long time uh i think automation uh but these two above it are i think a little bit scarier but the good news is that there are some things that will be fundamentally transformed for the good with ai for example the mechanics of climate change are simply it is your perfect machine learning problem there are too many variables for a human to compute what's happening to our planet and so a.i will will take leaps and bounds in terms of identifying the root cause problem the predictive capability of what's going to happen which is now we're in the dark we really don't know how fast this is going to happen and but we do know it's going to happen so i think in in in understanding climate change i think ai will play a huge part second thing is medicine um i think this will enable medicine to be delivered at a high quality level diagnostic diagnosis to be delivered high quality without having doctors at all so you can reach remote areas you can you know just having people that can read the instruction of the ai and take certain photos and tests and i think that will transform health uh in in very very powerful ways um i don't an education uh and i don't i think it'll be like it'll support some elements of education but until you can re-engineer the physics of a human child when they are faced with a human in front of them which is incomparable to a screen still and this is scientifically proven again and again um you know you can watch as many youtube videos about something and not learn as much as when someone is mentoring you side by side and it's just i can't explain why but that's it so i think ai and education will support but it will be a hybrid model health it can literally take over it can literally take over and yeah look all this is is as much as you try to portray optimism it it sounds a little scary because it it requires a proper regulatory framework right to the extent that it gets unregulated and i know you're a proponent of unregulation or less regulation but with with certain things like climate certain things like cyber certain things like genetic coding or recoding if if they do not get adequately or properly or correctly regulated how do you actually mitigate the risk of our basically falling into a cliff in the next day year decade or century i think i'm not against regulation okay um i think a lot of deregulation is needed in indonesia but for different purposes no disagreement yeah uh but i don't mean that i'm not pro-regulation i think i think you know companies of a certain size need to have boundaries and parameters in what they can do i think new technologies need to have some boundaries and size but you also need a flexible regulatory environment that will be able to penalize the dark side of it instead of just say no yes no yes because that's not how technology works and what's really ironic about this whole thing of like regulating uh technology companies is that the ones the companies that are able to get around the regulation are always the big companies they're the ones with the teams of lawyers and and so all these things that are trying to attack the big guys and actually bring the little guys are actually hurting little guys so much more and i've been trying to say this to a lot of people but it's it's it's just there's this now natural fear of big tech but i don't think that fear is unwarranted i think there are some really really scary things that is happening to society with social media and and i think talk a little bit about social media after you complete your analysis yeah well i'll tell you a story about okay i got off social media about one and a half years ago okay completely well i guess you could call whatsapp social media so not completely but i i went off uh facebook and instagram uh completely and one of the things that i noticed happening to me is um i used to smoke cigarettes and i still do i i vape you wake that's smoking yes but but i could is that good for the climate so uh it's i think it's neutral oh yeah all right i'll take it um that feeling of when i quit cigarettes is the same feeling that i had when i quit social media and my finger was constantly every time i opened my phone my finger was looking for that button and i felt all of these little mannerisms physiological mannerisms of addiction you only know you're addicted something once you quit right you don't know uh you're addicted to something and i could feel not only the the physiological addiction to social media i could also feel the emotional baggage that it it built in in me and the amount of effort and time and mind share that it was absorbing from me like a like a like a black hole of panchitra and jealousy or aspiration it's bad it's and you only realize that when you're out that's the thing you have to be out of the matrix to see the matrix um and that's the moment that i realized after that suddenly i found myself reading again suddenly i found myself contacting friends much more and actually meeting them more often and having authentic relationships i began to be able to make decisions in my company that were better decisions even though they may be unpopular publicly because i just stopped caring what people were saying about me or about my decisions because it was the right thing to do it was transformational um so that's me personally i'm looking at the effect of this on children right now and how suicide rates and teen girls are like three 4 x after instagram became big and everyone knows why um it's not like there's any other thing that could be attributed to it and so i think this is something that people need to be aware of and look really deeply about how it's affecting psychology how it's affecting mental illness how it's affecting our sense of community and identity and tribalism tribalism that's happening so yeah that is the scariest part i think out of all of these technologies uh for me you know i i made the point this morning about you know the new findings from the surgeon general in the u.s no longer our cancer diabetes and heart are the most concerning diseases in the u.s and the world over it's actually isolation and isolation as a result of people spending more than 50 of their time on their smartphones and most of that is basically social media related i i i do embrace the idea that somebody like you who is in a position of influence to a lot of the youngsters uh the millennials to to actually voice stuff like this for the purpose of you know positivities in in in the future uh so that we could all you know live uh more healthily and happily uh i wanna i wanna go back a little bit to your earlier academic life you know you went to brown and then you went to harvard do you think you would have been able to create gojack without having to go uh through brown and harvard i wouldn't know the answer to that question it's very hard for me to be able to tell did it was it the required skill that i gained there to start gojek no did those brands make people trust me more and gave me credibility and having the ability to have polish and poise when presenting to investors and absolutely brands matter but i feel it that you know for example in hbs it wasn't really the case method etc that was the biggest learning it was being exposed to other students that were doing stuff on their own that triggered a bit of fomo in me right and and that things like how they're doing it i can do it too you know i feel like i'm just as good right like i can i can start a business too and that was the i think the big takeaway of that exposure uh from an academic perspective i'm not sure i think most of that gets done by like 16 17. you know i think there's very little you build after that it's more like exposure and insight knowledge inspiration and and abstract thinking after that but your basics and mechanics are pretty much cracked by like 15 16 17. so that's that's the special part i think that's the zone yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna allow the audience to to ask some questions but before that i'm going to ask one tiny question for you know some of us here are slightly older than you are right uh please don't call me uncle uh what what tip would you give us uh in order to better adjust to the new way of thinking you know coming from your perspective your angle because the world seems to be changing at a very fast pace or rate right are we at risk if we don't learn how to code are we at risk if we don't read as many books as you do are we at risk is there a tip that you could perhaps give to some of the elder or older ones here to to make the adjustment again i'm trying to get my money's worth that's a really good question um it will it hurt you to not know how to code i mean i don't know how to code okay for the life that's good i can't code um i'm okay no you don't need to code it would be good if your kids can code they'll definitely have some form of is that a must for the younger generation no it's not a must okay but you know it's learning how to code is important not necessarily to code learning how to code is important to understand the computational logic of systems of all systems we're going to be building right in the future and so it's just great training it's like philosophy or mathematics right they're just good foundations um so coding is just a funner way of applied logic it's just applied logic it's like a coupon with words right it's it's like yes it's more complex than that obviously but you get the point uh the so to prepare for all these changes no i i don't think you have to be anxious or worried about all these changes i think you need to be anxious and worried about making sure that the next generation have the right critical thinking ethical compass and confidence to not be hijacked by the changes and and to build a certain level of stoicism of which adults have more older people have more um to the next generation so they shouldn't be worried about all the changes in being left behind they should be hyper worried about making sure that they're equipping the next generation with those tools to whatever the change may come you're you you decide don't be hijacked because the opportunities for hijacking are so big now in this new world it's crazy let me push it a little bit more because i i do think that it has some repercussions on the ability of parents to connect with their kids if they do not make the adjustment at the rate that the kids are actually embracing the new paradigm so quickly so fast but it's a it's a it's a battle you'll never win okay it's i even i already realized now that my two-year-old will you know have concepts and systems and how she thinks that i will never be able to catch up to so if you if you play catch-up you'll just feel like crap all the time because you'll feel like you're oh i'm catching up and then no i'm not so i think it's best not to try to catch up i think it's best to try to reinforce values and core and just don't worry about being caught up because they're being out chased by the next generation by their little sister etc so it's a race you all win all right makes sense let me open it up to the audience uh wow there's lots of hens lots of hints okay uh we got jeffrey in the back please jeff who's a venture capitalist yes uh thanks fine and nadeem congrats on all the great things that you have built big fan of gojack um so um we at alpha gwc we are indonesian focus fund and our wish and also hope is that we could support the next generation of nadim's fairies leon right and at alpha gwc when we invest in early stage fundamental becomes very important for us we believe that we are doing a great job at that meaning that okay you know really coaching the early stage entrepreneurs about fun problems obsessed with the problem so that there's a real value that can be created but i believe that now we are at the very very crucial point if we look into some of the news that has happened recently we were uber ipo like a few months back we know how that happens it's not that successful we work try to go ipo at 47 billion now maybe 20 below 20 billion right and recently the indonesia we also heard some you know not so good news about some of the unicorns right about you know downsizing and all that from your perspective we believe that you carry indonesian you know digital ecosystem and also startup can you share a bit on your confidence what you think about the fundamentals in the sense that now you know some of the valuation of these unicorns are you comfortable with that because for a lot of people are not comfortable with wework 47 billion valuation um if you ask me i'm comfortable with what i'm seeing in the early stage but how about unicorns because that actually have a lot of correlation a big correction in your stage will affect a lot in indonesia can you share a bit more about that uh i'm actually a lot more confident at the valuations of the unicorns in indonesia objectively speaking and the reason is because if you look at the penetration rates of all our businesses ferry's business my business william zaki it there yes they're they're tiny like our penetration rates are like one-tenth of the penetration rates of like say china right and so especially when you've got irreversible uh uh behaviors once you go travel locally you don't go back you don't go back once you go go food you don't call the restaurant and ask them to deliver the food anymore you know it's these are irreversible changes once you do ride healing you're generally going to do right healing so for for these kind of behaviors the penetration rates is really what matters and so are they overvalued for their today gmv yes they are not overvalued for five ten years and how big southeast asia is as a region no so southeast asia just indonesia even just indonesia the the potential for growth is massive and our verticals are not um they're not recession sensitive verticals they're all net savers generally it's always cheaper and there's the stuff you need to do anyway right you need to buy stuff you need to eat stuff you need to travel you know travel's a little bit more sensitive but hell millennials will spend every last dollar they have just to go travel nowadays so these are traveling is now a necessity it's become a necessity because of instagram right so um if you don't travel then you don't get to post and then you're the one guy if your friend that didn't post in bali so yes i think the valuations are okay but they will grow into their evaluations i guess that's my but the subsidy war thing will end it that that's a limited time period that will go in like i my guess would be two three years it'll run out of steam and then you'll price will rationalize and then the market will drop about 30 percent all of us will drop 30 in size and that will be market clearing price just one quick follow-up question on that actually along those lines um one good thing that i i believe what we're seeing in indonesia is that we do not have too crazy irrational competition like what china what we see in china i wouldn't say that man oh yeah i would say i would say indonesia is right now per gmv is the craziest okay in the world i don't think it's india anymore i mean i'm doing the math right i'm calculating gmb ratio our e-commerce uh markets are bigger than than the biggest india player right now if you look at it from gmb gojek does more uh food delivery than any india food player by both transactions and size so yes india will catch up india will catch up but right now if you're looking at all these cashbacks that are happening right sorry just to be clear is that on a per capita basis no not per capita per revenue right so per total gmv um indonesia is it right now i mean it's crazy i mean you've got all the soft it's mainly because of softbank and whoever's countering them so jeffrey uh it looks like you're not gonna be able to get a discount all right uh quincorn please a microphone please for good corn thank you very much i'm very intrigued uh by your statement about gojek being too big to fail could you expand on that a little bit because i must admit it worries me a little bit kojec is now entering my country thailand nadine he's the former minister of finance so thailand okay whatever you say will be recorded and we're doing kind of fine right now and soon you'll be big in thailand and we'll be in trouble if you fail so can you explain a little bit more um why you say that what do you mean by it we just became number one in food delivery in bangkok by the way so very happy about that and i i heard you're using get food oh yes so happy to hear that um i'll you know too big to fail is for me it's the sheer amount of because we designed a platform for the little guy right what we did was we took an informal sector and we turned them into cyborgs that were able to do 310 x productivity of what they otherwise would not have had with technology and it's not just the driver it's also the mom and pop store selling you know bubble tea or fried rice on the side of the street that is now at the same level as a mcdonald's in terms of revenue per square meter that's the leveling field that's what our platform does so for me it's just the fear of failing the fear of what happens if it gets shut down somehow or what happens if there's a cyber threat or what happens if the government comes in and and and uh makes a an erroneous regulation or something that really hurts these merchants and we are powerless to do everything so it's just that's what worries me from from one aspect the other part that worries me is you know at one point you know a company needs to decide what their mission is and there are some companies whose missions and they should just be explicit about it whose mission is to make the highest return of shareholder value and that's fine but own it then there are other companies like gojek that have to make an explicit mission that our mission is about social good and profitability is simply the way to earn the right keep earning the right to continue that mission so that's the company's need to and founders need to i think decide that point and if you are on this side of the social good then your entire decision-making process you will need to sacrifice some business concerns like for example plastic and go food right that's a huge issue now that we need to tackle what about air pollution in jakarta it's not our it's not our responsibility right or is it right so these are i think so when you ask that question i stress about whether not everyone in my organization believes this and thinks this so this is what keeps me up at night do we have the moral and ethical fiber to continue to do good does that make sense [Music] thank you i have a question regarding the this maybe you've heard of the star market yeah the recently the chinese government is just uh set up a kind of uh the star market is like a nasdaq as capital market but specific for the tech startup so i would like to have your opinion on that whether is it beneficial for us in indonesia or maybe in other countries in asia as well and secondly i would like to have your opinion or or your views on how do you make your business sustainable in the long run because i know that the test startup is burning money and i'm not making a profit yeah for the time being maybe thank you um i'm not equipped to answer the first question because i'm not a finance guy so i don't really know i like i like how that protects himself from having to answer i wish i was that sophisticated no i really just don't know um i'm guessing we need all the my guess is jakarta stock exchange needs all the liquidity it can get right now so hopefully these tech companies go ipo there but they need to do a lot of this um uh control issues they just need to fix that stuff i think they're already going to be doing that stuff to make sure that the company maintains and control instead of just majority of shareholders which is ridiculous you can't run a company like that right so um so i think with that fix i think we should be a much stronger stock market but i can't answer from a regional perspective on how to make sustainable sustainability is very simple uh the answer is very simple you just raise price that's it that's how you achieve profitability you just raise price market drops by 30 so this is the thing everyone says like oh uber hasn't reached profitability and stuff like they could they could they just have to kill volume right all they have to do is just uh uh decrease their demand generation and they're already in a positive structural unit positive so that's the thing yeah so actually ride hailing and apalagi food delivery food delivery is even higher margin because you take a take from the restaurant as well right ride hailing is out of tech is one of the largest net revenue generators out of any tech vertical we take 20 cut of every transaction right ecommerce at best you're getting like what one percent 1.5 right maybe more for certain high value items but um you know uh so the uber can be profitable tomorrow if they want so can go jack but then just how much market share you want to give up so it's really just about like raising price cutting burn it's simple because don't forget our businesses are already it's purely people paying for it we're not kind of just investing now to get some kind of a future revenue our revenue is already there we just have to capture it yeah so it's really about what you're willing to sacrifice all right we had a hand up from olivier yeah please okay two quick questions in the beginning you spoke about luck so i guess most that like probably came in the beginning maybe uh give an example of what you mean because i'm i think probably perseverance the theme of this probably increases your chance of luck more time more exposure the second thing is there's been a lot of mention about social impact the plastic would you be willing to um because that's what what we do we're garbage guys would you be willing to make um a time to meet with us to talk about specifically that because of course all right olivia just got funded by google by the way he's one of the more preeminent waste management players the answer is yes okay perfect so yeah tell me just i'm very lucky now you cut me some fees okay all right we'll pick up your garbage for free it's it's not an easy problem to crack we've we've looked at it from multiple angles but you know we have to do something about it we can start with go food okay and somehow figure it out we have different we have several ways to solve that we'd love to yeah i think you'd know better how to do this but we're just wrapping our heads around and this is like it's really hard but um what was your first question again about about luck as in was it early what about the luck well you said that luck played a big part in your success and you wanted examples of that yeah because i think um was it really luck i mean you you there are certain i mean when you were using the service problem that's not luck but were there certain key things that just seemed to happen no there's there's definitely some stuff that's just pure luck i mean yeah we have one of the best teams uh in in in the world let alone southeast asia so we're kind of lucky to have that but outside of that okay i'll give you some some indicators that are just like we started this battle the moment that we began the war we had two million dollars in the bank our competition had an app ready for two years and 250 million dollars in the bank that's when our app launched did they know that you only had two million dollars yes of course they knew wow that's why they offered to acquire and we said no and then i realized oh my god that's such a stupid decision we shouldn't we should have just accepted it but my team just out of ego or pride or something said no nadeem you made the right first instinct to say no that's that's luck man i mean that there was no rational way you could justify no app two million dollars against 250 and we're about to crush you when you had a when you had a majority uh offer on the table then we would have just been one company just just so you know nadim if it would have gone the other way i would still have invited you here [Laughter] that's that's luck uh what else uh deciding to pick motorcycles first instead of doing cars i mean that's were you guys one of the first in the world we're the first in the world to do that and that turned out to be the key enabler that was able to launch food and then logistics and et cetera because of motorcycles unit economics far better than a car in every sense you got to have so much breadth and network effect from from from supply base that's luck it's just decision why because i took objects right so uh maybe semi luck but like we didn't we weren't here trying to create like the alipay of indonesia or like the we weren't people complained that drivers didn't have enough change so we created a digital wallet just so that people stopped complaining and it became the largest wallet just because of that it wasn't like some rocket science we were trying to do that's all we did and that's luck you know so you you it was the right time you hit it uber was just uh fundraising and sf at the time so there was still investor interest and so we continued to raise money and just we didn't die the amount of times we almost died i can't even tell tell you because i cannot share that publicly but those are all like man like redefine what close calls are i think every every entrepreneur goes through it it's just that at our scale just you know the pressure of it's a little bit higher yeah because of all the jobs yeah no that's it i i i'm gonna end this with a question for me uh you know i like what you you were saying earlier earlier about doing good to do well right you got to do good to do well that's that's a great message for for the planet but but the fact is that you know you've got quite a number of shareholders and their interest or thinking may not be aligned how do you actually convince them that in order to do well you got to do good do you do you do do you find it difficult or not so difficult to convince him not so difficult not so difficult for two reasons well we're privileged in the way that we're one of the few companies that consistently exceeds what we promise so maintaining that trust of saying we're going to do this we're going to achieve this and hitting it every time is the reason why we can still continue to fundraise so effectively when you earn that trust then you get the right to also tell investors look this is the mission of the company you need to be aware of this and for them you know strangely enough they're all at the end of the day those institutions consist of people of humans humans that share the same fundamental altruism right two differing levels um about making the world a better place and their investment in gojek for those individuals that decided it's not just about oh yeah i you know for me and my pe team or my strategic team was like oh that's a great deal and we made a return on it it's also that they're part of this mission and it's so transformational and that feeling of of having impact is part of what makes their investment in gojek so much more fun so there's a distinctly human nature to investing that i think a lot of people overlook yeah and and so they because of that then during the tough times they're not as harsh on you right because they realize that there's a bigger mission there um so i think it's about your conviction and how well you can make them believe that you believe deeply about the mission and the rest is infectious i mean that just just spreads right so yeah fascinating a big hand for nadine thank you so much thank you thank you you

Channel: Gita Wirjawan

Views: 242,329

Keywords: nadiem, nadiem makarim, pendidikan, daring, gojek, menteri, mentri, mas mentri, mas menteri, gita nadiem, nadiem english, nadiem gojek, kevin aluwi, ceo gojek, startup indonesia, pendiri gojek, coding, education, future education, driver gojek, mendikbud, komisi x, jokowi, ancora, the maj nusa dua

Id: xhxOgCe9fhE

Length: 57min 18sec (3438 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020