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

**Kevin Aluwi** (0:00)
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 like 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 like, hey, they're all contractors, they're third parties, let them kind of just sort it out. But instead, we actually hired private security.
So we actually work with private security companies to help 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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:15)
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 Wajia, 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.
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