Hooi Tan0:00
I'm Hoi Tan and I co-founded Grab with Anthony. We had no idea honestly when we first started the company. We were trying to solve a problem that already seemed insurmountable back then, which is safety for taxi rides throughout the region. At that point in time, it was a problem that generations had gotten used to, so just by solving that, we thought it was mission impossible. But like many things in Grab, we were very lucky. We actually solved that problem in probably about 18 to 24 months and very soon realized that we had then built a platform and a set of capabilities to go solve even bigger, broader problems for the region.
There's no hardest thing. There are many, many hard things. The thing that I would love to remind everybody about is more often than not, the majority of startups actually fail. We are one of the lucky few: one in seven global average of startups and entrepreneurs that actually make it and continue to survive. Survival literally is the biggest challenge and was front and center for us for at least the first eight, nine, ten years.
It sounds cool and interesting to be an entrepreneur. I highly recommend reconsidering that life decision you're about to make. Startup life is far from fancy and glitzy. The majority of day-to-day interactions are more down time, difficult moments than it is the up moments. So unless you truly care about the problem you're trying to solve and you truly enjoy and trust and respect the people that you're working with, you're not going to survive those down moments.
For us, it worked well because Anthony is probably an extreme extrovert and I'm an extreme introvert. So he was really, really good at what I call his superpowers, and still is amazing at it today: everything external facing, partnerships, sales, business development, government affairs, always being on the ground with our consumers and partners. He derives energy from those activities. Me, I derive energy from less people, but probably more analytical, smaller group discussions, problem-solving discussions. So we just naturally ended up dividing and conquering that way. My yin-yang co-founder Anthony thankfully deals with way more of these than I do, and also if it's not co-founders, team members. Many public speaking clearly wasn't a natural thing for me, and like everything that I share in life, I think skills are very buildable. So practice, practice, practice. I practice in front of a screen, I practice in front of a mirror, and then I still made mistakes and I learned from it and I tried to get better at it over time. So what you see right now is hopefully much better than the version that was 10 or 11 years ago.
Initially, when we were on this one-T-a-month super app strategy, we realized we had to pivot away. It's very okay to have experiments and it's very okay to fail, but what is something that we need to ingrain into our day-to-day behavior is making sure that before we launch every or any experiment, be very clear on what hypothesis we're trying to prove or disprove and what's the definition of success beforehand. Why? One, experimentation for the sake of experimentation is not value-creating. You need to be clear on whether you even needed the experiment to start with, of what or why and what you're trying to prove in this process. Two, we all are emotionally attached to all of our ideas and all of our products. And if you don't try to logically predefine what would define success or failure beforehand, we often find ourselves in this gray zone of, 'Oh, but we just tweak it a bit more, it could get better,' and therefore we delay decisions, make tough decisions to potentially close things down.
A habit that I kickstarted with Anthony a few years ago starts with Anthony as our CEO: what are the things that only you can do and are the most important things for you to do? And then from that, what are things I could potentially pick up from you? And then cascading that across the company. I think constantly asking those questions and thinking about the dimensions of urgency and importance, and not getting stuck in only doing urgent but not important things, are just skills and habits to build.
