Ep12. Ditesh Gathani - Head of Engineering, Grab

This week, we have an end of year bumper special with Ditesh Gathani, Head of Engineering from Grab. Ditesh joined Grab as one of the first few engineers back when it was called MyTeksi. He has grown with the business into a member of the senior leadership team and has run hundreds of technical staff across the core business lines of Grab, more recently heading up the Grab Financials engineering business. Ditesh generously shares a wealth of learnings, insights and some brilliant anecdotes in how they solved market first scale problems whilst growing one of Asia’s most successful technology companies. He also gives his views on the exciting future that technology will help bring about during a fun and very informative quick fire question round.

Please find below the episode summary:

01:41 - Welcome - year in review & coping with COVID

09:51 - The early days & getting into computer science

11.16 - Applying data management principles to organisation management

19:21 - AirAsia

25:07 - Ditesh’s journey with Grab

31.56 - Grabs amazing growth

38:17 - How to maintain the vision & mission through growth

44:20 - Advice on growing and scaling a large organisation

48:51 - Building a great team and hiring team players

53:57 - Technical challenges of growth at Grab

1.04:52 - Best Practice vs Best Fit - Opinion vs Data

1.11:16 - Future of Grab & the Digibank

1.17:06 - Quick Fire Question Round