♪ haslinda: hello. i'm haslinda amin in singapore. it began looking to harness the earning power of indonesia's motorcycles. then came go-jek's business covering ridesharing, logistics, food, and financial technology. nadiem makarim is today's highflyer. ♪ haslinda: still in his early

30's and in control of a billion dollar business, it has been quite the ride for nadiem makarim. go-jek has grown to become indonesia's leading mobile on demand platform. the ridesharing app now controls 95% of the online food delivery market. go-jek employs 300,000 riders, dominates the same day logistics market, all achieved in just two short years. ♪ haslinda: nadiem makarim, welcome to "high flyers." good to have you with us today. nadiem: thank you for having me. haslinda: go-jek is a play on an

indonesian word which is a motorbike rider. how did it come about? it has to do with harvard? nadiem: yes, when i was in business school, we had an independent study project. i had this idea that i always wanted to do, and so i did it first as a school project. in between the summer, i decided whatever, let's just try building a call center because we did not have money to build a app. we built a call center, recruited a few drivers, and i think that's how it all begin.

i recruited the first 20 drivers of go-jek. those 20 recruited the next hundred, 200 and so on. haslinda: it was slow going in the initial years. for a long time it did not take off. nadiem: it was a call center. it took 30 minutes to get a go-jek because we had to call to order and then call the driver one by one to find the nearest driver, so it was a slow growth rate, but it survived those three years without any funding whatsoever. haslinda: is it true you started with six personal phones and basically you took calls from family and friends? nadiem: yeah, basically. we started marketing it on our personal facebook pages and to our friends and family. they started using it, and it spread organically from there. we did not have any money for online marketing, so it was all word-of-mouth. haslinda: you didn't have any money. it forced you to work at other startups to keep your startup

going. nadiem: yeah, because i had to make a living, so i can only do go-jek part time. i had a full team on it, but a small team, and i was working at other companies, so i was the first managing director of rocket internet in indonesia. i had to do other jobs where i learned how to build a tech startup, how to scale it up, so it was pivotal that i had those other experiences. i worked for a payments company and learned about innovation in the merchant payment space. so, i think it was critical for me to get that exposure so that when i did come back and turn go-jek into a full technology company that i was well prepared. haslinda: what changed that helped you scale? nadiem: what helped to spread the growth was having the right product at the right time. it was just that inflection point where mobile penetration and congestion was a serious problem. i think the product was just so convenient at the time that it struck a chord. it also helps that all the drivers were wearing green go-jek jackets, and so we did not have to spend that much on marketing. everybody could see, what are

these green jackets and green helmets running around? it was go-jek. haslinda: how did it start? how did you convince the early riders to come aboard? nadiem: it was a very simple proposition for them. here is how much you make. you work 14 hours a day, and you take three or four orders. ok, if we can double that amount of orders for you and take 6-7 orders, you would make 1.5 times because we will reduce the price and you will have a steady stream of revenue. do you want it? okay, sure. so the proposition is very simple. i am guaranteeing you a much more stable and frequent number of orders. haslinda: the company is valued at a few billion dollars, but it started small with $100,000 in savings and loans from family members. how did you convince them to part with their money?

what was your proposition to them? nadiem: i basically said i am doing this. i really need your help. i don't think anyone really thought it would actually be successful, but i basically said, look, this is something that's interesting. the market is very big, and to be honest, if i need it, i feel like a lot of people would need it as well. haslinda: what were some of the early challenges you had to face? it did not start in a garage like most startups. nadiem: a garage would have been nicer than a first office. -- our first office. it was a rundown house the size of most people's bedrooms. it was really, really decrepit, but it was super cheap, so i think the challenge when we first started was convincing the first 20 drivers was a little tough. convincing the next 200 drivers was easier because we had

drivers in the system making more money than they would have otherwise. that was the first challenge. the second challenge was building the system ground up, even the dispatch center using desktop computers and phone orders was actually super complicated when you don't have enough technology and resources and you don't have enough developers. so i thought that was really a challenge. the next challenge was getting people to change their behavior to actually calling a go-jek instead of hailing one on the side of the street. haslinda: in the end, it was

about technology because go-jek has only been used by indonesians, so it was the technology that changed everything to make it more efficient. nadiem: yes, that's what consumer technology does. it basically takes idle capacity and makes it productive, and therefore overall now not only have we transformed the go-jek industry in indonesia, we've reduced the price by one third to half of what it was before, but still earn drivers double of what they earned before, so that is a very fascinating dynamic. that's the typical positive effect of efficiency. drivers can earn more because you are utilizing more of their time, but at the same time, the price to the consumer drops which increases the market size again, which is a positive cycle increasing the market size. the market size for rides since go-jek, it has exponentially increased, and now the majority of our users are women, and that was not the case before. there is this added layer of safety and security in having a company behind the drivers. haslinda: what inspired the growth of the go brand, because is not just go-jek, and you can get food delivered and so on and so forth. what inspired that thinking? nadiem: i think we got very lucky with picking the name go-jek, because go works

perfectly with every other service, so that was almost like serendipitous thing that led us to hyper diversify to other segments. food is just doing incredibly well. i think we are one of the largest food delivery companies in the world now, and it's only in indonesia. i think what spurred that was the fact we have this asset called the driver and how to make this asset most efficient and most productive was our number one objective, so what we realized if this driver today, a go-jek driver in the morning takes you to work, during lunchtime delivering food to offices, during afternoon delivering e-commerce packages and documents. come rush hour evening, they are delivering you back to home.

and while they are around your home throughout the full evening, they are actually delivering food to your home for dinner time. and in the time in between, they are selling go pay, so they are also a financial agent. the diversification came first and foremost from how do we utilize this driver in the most efficient way possible, and that is actually what makes our competitive advantage so strong, because no matter what happens our efficiency is highest because we can provide the most revenue streams to the drivers, and so our efficiency is much higher. ♪ nadiem: i wouldn't call us a success yet. haslinda: you helped create a million jobs. that must be a success. nadiem: well, that part feels good, definitely. ♪

♪ haslinda: nadiem, when you look at go-jek, it is an adaptation of uber. yet, when you take a look at uber, it has adapted and it's now providing services that

go-jek is providing. how do you feel about that? nadiem: i feel like, first of all, it is interesting how things begin as an adaptation of something else, then what initially inspired you in turn actually you can inspire it is actually an interesting feeling for us as a management team. i think that what we are seeing is a convergence in the market itself towards multiple on-demand verticals that have synergy with each other. and i think that go-jek is a little bit ahead of everyone else in the world in terms of discovering that. that actually from transportation leads to food leads to logistics, and now leads to payments. and i think that kind of foresight is what puts go-jek at a bit of an advantage now having accelerated so quickly towards those verticals. haslinda: so many verticals. which one? payments? nadiem: well, i think we have four mega-verticals, human transportation, food, just fix, -- logistics, and payments, but we do believe in the future the

biggest one will be payments. just by the nature of the business itself and the potential in indonesia given how many, the vast majority, 70% of the population are un-banked, so we believe this path to ubiquitous payment wallet is the biggest opportunity to take go-jek to its next inflection of growth. haslinda: and given your success, do you envision competition from elsewhere, other startups? you have become an inspiration for indonesians. nadiem: i would not call us a success yet. we launched in january 2015. so i think we've -- haslinda: you helped create a million jobs. that must be a success. nadiem: well, that part feels good, definitely, and all the ecosystem we support in terms of employment and providing jobs in the informal and formal sectors.

part of what drives that growth is also the structure of indonesia and how we have leapfrogged towards mobile technology in such a powerful way, and i feel like indonesia is not alone in this in the sense that there are other large emerging markets making similar leaps towards mobile that is the wave that a lot of tech startups can ride towards creating every transaction going through your mobile phone. go-jek's master vision is to

eliminate the need for a wallet itself and eliminate the need to ever carry a wallet as you go around your daily life. that is the aspiration. haslinda: you said before that you need to out innovate everybody else. how do you do that? how do you stay ahead? nadiem: a lot of people assume that innovation happens in creative minds, out of individuals. that is not true. innovation is an output that comes out of a process of collaboration and debate between people who behave like scientists and are open-minded and curious and learning, and when you mix people up and they debate and they fight about ideas, concepts, etc., and have the courage to execute, the output of that is an

organization that creates innovative concepts and products. innovation is a group activity, an output of a way of group -- a group interacts. we have two very important core values at go-jek. the first one is it's not about you. our first core value is it's not about you. it's always either about your team members or the customer itself. you have to always think from the other perspective. the other one is be a scientist. this is where the act of experimentation and an almost playful sense is extremely important at go-jek and that is why we have been able to diversify so quickly. haslinda: you've been busy raising funds. the last fundraising came out to $550 million. you have also been acquiring indian tech startups. why india and why is india so important to your expansion? nadiem: i think now at the scale that we are right now, one of the largest companies in the world in terms of the number of users and the number and frequency of transactions. we have to ensure that our access to talent is the most optimal, so we actually have an r&d center in singapore, and we also have one in bangalore and in indonesia, and now we have to tap into a global pool of talent, so our acqui-hires in india were mission-critical in us being able to get talent that were exposed to doing things at a much bigger scale, right? because indian startups were doing things at a larger scale than other startups. but we are not just restricting ourselves to singapore and bangalore. we are now tapping into a global

pool of talent of engineering, product, and data scientist. haslinda: so it's safe to say we can expect more acquisitions then? nadiem: or hires. those acquisitions were basically more of a acquihire of a cultural fit with certain companies that had great engineers, and we acquired the company so they could come in as a family, right? haslinda: you've made clear that indonesia is the key market. 250 million, large enough for multiple players. that is not to say you are not interested in other markets. could india be the next market you target? nadiem: i think first of all, whether we will eventually expand regionally i think probably, probably. whether we go into india anytime soon or ever is still a question mark.

it's very interesting. if you just take our second largest vertical, go-food, and go-food alone does more transactions per day than the top four or five indian food delivery startups combined. so what we're noticing is we are discovering that indonesia as an internet consumer market is such an attractive market because people like to spend. their mobile engagement is very, very high, and so i think there is so much more to grow in indonesia alone, and there are other countries around the world that may have similar dynamics to indonesia that we are always looking to explore and consider

whether we should expand. so i think expansion is more of a question of when as opposed to if. ♪ nadiem: i was one of those kids that whenever it was asked what you want to be when you grow up, didn't have an answer. i just like to do things i like to do. haslinda: what did you like to do? nadiem: i liked to build stuff. ♪

♪ haslinda: nadiem, growing up, what was your ambition? i'm curious because dad is a lawyer and granddad was part of the independence movement in indonesia. was there any political ambitions? nadiem: no, definitely not, not any political ambition. i think i was one of those kids that when ever was asked what he -- what do you want to be when you grew up, i did not have an answer. i did not feel like it was relevant. i just liked to do things i liked to do. haslinda: what did you like to do? nadiem: i liked to build stuff. i was obsessed with lego and never wanted to follow the instructions.

i think that is what my mom always told me that i refused to follow instructions and built my own thing always. i was liked building stuff. having said that, i think my mom ever since a very young age, in my family you don't get brownie points for just going after money or doing well financially as a career. you always have to contribute, like the heroes she used to say are the people she respected of these people who give back to indonesia at some point in their lives, and so that was always in the back of my mind, to make my parents happy i had to do something that had some impact socially to the country, and so i'm extremely fortunate i am able to do well in business as well as have a very large amount of social impact. i'm very fortunate that way. nadiem: and you think education is important, and if you had a choice you would do the current -- undo the current education system. why, and what would you do? nadiem: i think "undoing" would be an extreme word to describe that. i think we need to reimagine the education system as it is now. being in the technology industry, the level of change

and disruption that will happen in the employment space is so, it is almost unpredictable what will happen, that the most important thing will be the agility and the ability of humans to relearn something again and again and again. and the current education system is not designed to do that. the current education system is fixated on standardized testing and memorization, i think, even in the top institutions. nadiem: you are a disruptor yourself. try to envision 10, 20 years down the road. what do you see as jobs and what do you see what the economy will be needing? nadiem: i think that automation of hardware and software, the dawn of artificial intelligence,

is going to fundamentally shift where human value is placed. so, where once safe-white-collar jobs that were highly analytical and highly quantitative will be among the most vulnerable to algorithms that will do a far more better job than a human in taking into account all these variables, so this is not just, everyone is already understanding blue-collar jobs, robotics, manufacturing automation is a huge risk. autonomous vehicles is a huge risk, i think, for drivers even who do it professionally. but i think it is white-collar jobs that people underestimate the amount of that can be replaced with technology, and so i'm optimistic that countries

will pick this up, but i don't think they're doing it fast enough to actually retrain their workforce and understanding that probably, within 10 to 15 years, that people will have to do something different every five years, so the concept of having a fixed education, 12 years of education, then 3 or 4 years of tertiary education, that format is no longer going to be optimal very soon. nadiem: coming back to go-jek. what is the vision for the company going forward? will you ipo? nadiem: it is definitely one of our aspirations, yes. as a company, it is kind of what we all dream about, doing that. we don't have a fixed timeframe yet in which to do so, but that is definitely one of the high probability scenarios that we have. haslinda: nadiem makarim, all the best and we thank you for your interview. nadiem: thank you for having me. ♪ ♪

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