Kopi Time E076 - Gojek's CL Lien on Running an e-Services Platform

deal with Ebola. Prior to that, leon was a commando officer in the Singapore Armed forces where he led a battalion and was in East timor as a U. N. Peacekeeper. An avid adventure. And this is where the differentiating part comes in leon is the first guest in Covid time to have climbed the tallest peaks in the world including Mount Everest and K. Two. He has done things like run 250 kilometers ultramarathon through amazon jungles and the Gobi desert and he's done all sorts of expeditions in North

Pole and South Pole. Now that's a renaissance man for you. Cl ean, Welcome to Kobe time.

What is the experience? Somebody asked you and you go on a trip and I've got a good story about that. But the first, the first, the first trip, uh, which kind of had some good learning lessons when it became a second trip and a third trip. And after a while you want to become a little bit better. You want to have a little bit more mastery.

You want to challenge yourself a little bit more. You want to see a little bit more of the uh, the bigger names that people have been talking about the story, uh, peaks and mountains and trips and places that have been written about and that probably is the second arc. And then as you sort of get into the later stages, you do it because you really enjoy doing it. Uh, I'm, you know, probably still somewhere between the second and the third stage, I try to do a trip,

you know, every year. So that's on the, on the personal side in terms of adventure, I'll tell a very short story though, which is this foolhardy uh you don't know what, you don't know and that's why there's a survivor sort of statistic that if you make it past the first few months of any product or company, then you're probably okay. The first time I went to climb a mountain I had with me on my climb towards the summit, I was wondering why everyone was moving much faster than

I was. It was in California is a one thing called Shasta and I realized that, you know, they all have very light packs and I noted to myself that in my pack I had this really heavy book called the Freedom of the Hills and anyone who's familiar with it knows that it is the bible of climbing, which also means that it is a good, you know, several kilo tomes and I had, you know, things like my, my my heavy torchlight talking about men like they're just huge metal contraption.

So anyway, long story short is I ditched all my stuff and managed to make it into the peak at the cut off time, the very last person to be allowed on that day. So from those rather inauspicious beginnings became this pretty much a lifelong love affair with climbing and the outdoors. So uh if you survive the first few times and you kind of enjoy it, then hopefully you'll carry on doing it whatever endeavor it is

And then you can actually see for each each dune and in between each sand dune, these are parallel sand dunes are so big, they can actually see it on a satellite map. We're talking about a kilometer or two. So you can kind of see one kilometer away if you're in the sand dunes in the Gobi, you're literally seeing one hump away and then you're just doing that for hours and hours on end and you really can't tell what's beyond. Except that, you know, uh 50 m from from now, I've got another sand

dune to deal with. So even sand dunes are different. Even deserts are different. If you're in the Atacama desert, it is just a flat expense. And then you can kind of see people from really far away. So the first point is sand is different. Sand dunes are different. The geography is different if you're in the amazon jungle, 40 plus degrees Celsius, 90 over percent humidity. Kind of sounds like Singapore, but even even warmer.

It's a it's a different type of heat, a different type of discomfort, but a different type of beauty as well.

southeast asia along that vector. So, uh you know, go Jack spoke to me, I really, really, really liked what what we were doing. And I said, you know, it really makes sense. So that's how I joined. Go jek

If you're a young platoon commander in the special forces, it's about direct leadership.

It is about looking your men and men and for me it's just men by looking at men in the eyes, being the first to jump out of the plane, leading the run from the front as you move up the ranks, then you start being a leader of leaders and even though you you can have direct line of sight of the people that you lied but you primarily interact with managing your commanders and making sure that you provide very good intent, very good direction and then when you move even up further then you

don't even have line of sight with the with the people that you lied and it's very much around organizational change and that I think transitions or segments very well into my time as a consultant, I would say a large part of my projects involved a significant proportion of organizational change and you know that but you know that the speed of ground execution is actually much slower. I can draw a power point and move an Akhtar around in, you know, in in an hour.

But for that to actually flow through the system and for the ramifications of the skills capabilities, raising the teams. I mean those time cycles and the time cycles of years, months, months, if not years. So let's say skills things I learned right, what does leadership mean at the personal level, what does leadership mean at organizational level or leading through leaders? So that's really from both military and Mckinsey.

Uh as a management consultant, I think the second one is learning or just being very, very clear what your objective is asking the right questions and creating an environment where the people, the team and yourself can come up with the right answers. So probably just leave with these these two things or maybe a third one is and always being being very calm.

Um frequently I'm asked you know your greater strength and when I was younger be or how smart I am, how strong I am, how fit I am, how aggressive I am, how much I get things done now. I just say that column is contagious when you come, you deescalate the emotions when you're calm, you de escalate the anxiety and then everyone can come to a better solution. So right now com is probably something that I take from the different things that I've done in my life.

whatever particular alphabet that you have in mind. But it is true there are people who have your frontline staff is still staying on the front line and there are people, so there are people where you could do your work virtually, but it's still an hour of work more or less. So the teachers, teachers during the period spent an hour on a zoom classroom rather than an hour in the classroom.

And I know there's a lot more back end in front of work but roughly work is still in our except you're delivering it virtually there were some people where the work evaporated these were you're in early periods whether it's F and B. Whether anything frontline where the demand disappeared such as marketing events. And unfortunately many of these roles have to Reroll I'd say for people in a manageable capacity or managerial roles, the work is not proportional to volume. The work is

proportional to change. So every 20% down In terms of volume of traffic volumes meant a significant business decision had to make and every 20% recovery was again a significant business decision that I had to make. And so it's not as if, I mean obviously more more traffic better than less but it has changed. That actually

causes a lot of the work. So um, I'd say not so much for go jek, but for myself personally, I felt the rapidly changing conditions just meant that we collectively had to just cheap on top of it, what does it mean for go jek as a business as, you know what I mean, if you look at my background, this is a driver partner and we are ultimately here to were ultimately here to serve the customers to consumers through the on demand services and within the broader group as e commerce and finance

as well. But bingo jacket is about delivering food, delivering people, moving the parcels around um, and that is done by the driver partners, it is fulfilled by the driver partners and the driver partners are the ones who found it very difficult to uh, make,

make an earnings during that period. So whether it is supplementary supplementary, um, you know, money that we offered to them, whether it was taking away the commission's that go check, charged or even more recently we added on a fuel surcharge so that they could help defray the cost of rising fuel, which is uh,

one of the largest operating expenses. We've done everything that we could to support the driver partners so that they could say sustainable because ultimately they are the bedrock on which our business is operates on.

Uh, there are many stories of the merchants that have been enabled on go check uh, even through the pandemic to be able to provide a livelihood for their families. Similar similarly for the driver partners who have, I think, I think the statistic is that accounts for 12% of Indonesia's GDP now transacted through the on demand services that go check offers. I may be wrong the number, but I think it's roughly in that ballpark. So it is a massive,

it is important. It's massively important to the broader economy to the consumers that is unlocked, but even more so for the merchants and the driver partners that are on the platform and whether it's in Vietnam or even in Singapore, the social costs, the social impact uh, and the social impact because of the commercial impact. If you don't scale and you don't have a big commercial impact, then you know, the social impact also may not be quite

as large. So I think because of the commercial impact, we never forget the social aspect to it as well.

But that was all it took that one incident. Um, so do you find situations like this often that this is a very sensitive volatile group of driver partners and you have to be extremely careful in dealing with them?

For instance, you have a monopoly and I'm not, I'm not talking about any specific company, but in all examples, you see when you have a monopoly, then you just become less sensitive to market signals. You become less sensitive to competition signals. You try a little bit less hard if

you will. And that's true of any monopoly. So, uh, we, and, and you know, we operate in the open and contestant marketplace and that is one of the values of just having competitors keep you on your toes as a general principle. And then more specifically, we always try our best to um, take care of forever partners. We can't manage all tail and risk. Uh, I mean you're an economist. So, uh, there's a, on the other hand, on the other hand, there may

be real intentions. Uh, we try to support as best as we can and we definitely do listen to the concerns of every single driver partner. The answer may not be yes, but at least I guarantee that you'll, you'll have a, you have a year that does listen to you and does its best to manage your specific situation and if the specific situation keeps popping up categorically then it's something that we'll try to address as a system.

What's your sense of the economic recovery and ridership coming back?

there is still, there is still friction. So it was, it was, it was actually, I'm not sure whether it was one of, I'll look at it today as well whether, so anyway, it might be just as spurious anecdote, but that was, that was kind of interesting. Obviously ridership is growing up, you know, people are circulating, we can all see with our eyes and our own experiences and, and, and going out there domestically at least within Singapore things are looking very positive.

Uh, but there's obviously still a strong need for point to point whether it's for convenience, whether it's for rain, whether you have some mobility issues you're going to somewhere a little bit less accessible. I mean there are many reasons why you still want to do point to point uh but it is also true that costs have risen

fuel prices. We've talked about with what's happening in europe at the moment and so we launched a uh temporary surcharge uh which we passed through to the drivers primarily to defray the cost of fuel and this isn't something new it's been done in the industry before. Um Hopefully it is something that will be corrective. The point is will inflation be permanently high. Will prices be permanently high if they won't then you just take temporary measures to

address them. If they're gonna be structurally high then you need steady more permanent solutions to address them. So temporary cells for temporary pains, study more permanent solutions for more permanent pains and I think what we're seeing in terms of a rising CPI I hopefully is um is temporary

things about housing now that's that's outside my remit. So you might have to speak to other people who have a little bit more of real estate meant about what the price of a G. C. B. Is in Singapore but at least when it comes to transport uh we think that this will this will pass.

Not a good backdrop in the sense that it is in the context of slowing growth, but at least that specific pain fuel seems to be one of those very sensitive things, You know, anybody who is exposed to the transportation world, which is most of

of economy. And so, I mean understandably, these are the two things which people like yourself who look over it every single day.

I mean that's that's that's why we I mean, I was actually just reading the biography of uh Jeremy Heywood and he spent a lot of time in the british Ministry of Finance and it was all about interest rates and interest rate mechanisms and the, you know, european monetary union, fascinating history, which can be a little bit dry, but these are the things that move our economy and shape where the, it's a single number is one of the single numbers that matters the most. Yeah,

Simple thinking behind it. Every driver partner is an owner in Georgia.

people to be reckless with it. So there is a lot of education around the nature of equity, the nature of stocks, I mean, overall is very, very well received, but there's also a lot of education in terms of how to monetize this, how to open a brokerage accountants and so on so forth. But I think we've done that outreach, you know very well.

And with that with the advent of go pay for the first time, they actually have a digital store of money that that the drivers produce. And they could obviously use that subsequently to pay for the different transactions without All the old friction of money. Again, a well known story by the by the 2020s. But if you think of this 57 years ago really transformational and this is just maybe another another leg or another step in that journey of digital finance.

listed equity space? Is that how is that affecting the local startup scene

And in the long run it's a weighing machine. And we are looking at the long run game. Um, somebody, another friend said if you started the law, actually it's a great it's a great place. If you if you list at a high, uh this is not something that we're doing for a day, two days. This is not a fundraising round. I. P. O. Is not a fundraising round. It is something that you do in perpetuity. Ah and so you will need to have good performance and good growth in perpetually.

From their perspective, the specific timing at which you I. P. O. Is not maybe not so relevant. and if you had to pick one may be coming in at at the height of of the cycle may not be quite as beneficial in the long run as coming in at a different part of the cycle. So that's maybe from a timing perspective. But the point is You can't necessarily time time these things, you don't know what six months from now or 12 months from now will happen. You know, our company was ready. So that's why we

chose to do. So that's from a listing perspective for really early stage startups. Um, maybe it would be different from a sort of fundraising perspective, but if you have good ideas, I'll switch method first a little bit. Think of, think of running Singapore is actually a really bad place to, to, to do certain events because it's kind of warm. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's humid, but

it is the same for every single competitor. Everyone out on the lanes, everyone out on the tracks is experiencing the same heat, same temperature, same rain, same humidity that you are doing.

And if you're not trying to compare yourself with companies that came 10, 15 years before in a different environment, but you're comparing yourself to the market as it is now and the market is Fedex, internal prevailing conditions are fair, this is this, your all all out on the running tracks on the, on the lanes at the same time. So from that perspective, I'd say you can compare, you can wish or you can wish, but unless you're gonna tell us entrepreneur

Wait three years. I mean, if the entrepreneur really believes in his company, he's not going to wait three years, he will do it now because his idea is ready now. Could you tell him to do it three years ago? Of course? Sure. But unless it's a time machine that's

also not a readily available or a realistic option. And so what matters much more than the external timing is the power of conviction, the internal belief, the internal direction and uh, yeah, I don't think anyone is going to shape broad strategy around. I mean, you've got some flax, three months, six months, but you're not going to say, wait a year, wait two years, wait three years to have more certainty. No one's going to do that.

they are the same questions. I won't say there are any more difficult, you know, nobody's nobody's giving us a free pass in in any way, but it is, it has always been, do you believe the story and you believe the, the well not believe the reality. Do you value the reality the numbers now and you value the story for the future?

And that's a question for investors to ask. But I would say that if you look at the photo, if you look at the, how tightly integrated it is in Indonesia, the value that we bring in Singapore, the, the and the similar to Indonesia model that we are executing in Vietnam. I think there is at least the markets, the public markets are saying we do value the current and the future potential of this company and what it stands for. Mhm

Uh there's obviously a strong G angle. So I said, GSG really has uh become front and center across the consciousness of Corporates of people everywhere. Um PMS, you know, at the at the budget, we talked to, you know, the government basically gave a price to carbon and said that they will be raising the price of uh per ton of carbon emissions gradually over the next several years. Um So there is a market price to it already and the companies are responding.

Um the biggest emitters would be things like construction, concrete transport. Um so we're all taking steps to green. Go check in particular has a We have a 000 policy. Um you know, and when we think think uh so whether it is something around ah the amount of plastic waste that we generate through food delivery, whether it is having a fully Evie fleet, uh you know, by 2030 whether it's any of these um measures, I think we are definitely with the times

okay. Actually it's it's it's actually a really long line long long list but let's just say that um Under underpinning the 000 by 2030 there's a long list of practices that we have pledged to publicly and that we will be committed to?

Um we still have the spoke uh sort of artisan craftsmen, you've got mass produced shoes, but you also have people who like really nice shoes and other made shoes. And uh those craftsmen are still around, you have Casio watches, but you also have handmade, expensive swiss watches. So it really depends on the industry and there will always be a space for

some of these skills. I think the thing I always ask people is maybe you might not want to be a driver, but would you still want to get a driving license? Um there might be a day in the far future where driving licenses or there are no humans allowed. Right, But I don't think that that's coming yet. So maybe it's also around the question of how far or how, how near is that future?

Um more broad. So the first point I want to make is that the industry that you're in really matters, will there always be a space for some human element to it or some human craftsmanship? I think the answer is yes, driving maybe a little bit less of a uh sort of craftsman type of skill. But then the second question there is, what is the time horizon in which it will come 3rd and more broadly I think is, um, I really like how Ntuc pictures it

in other jurisdictions, in other countries. You have very strong unions who are trying to preserve the jobs and here and you see the mantra, I really like it is, it's about taking care of the workers, not taking care

of the work. So they don't, they don't, they don't know whether to a particular type of activity, but whether to the people that do things and that really comes to the point of re rolling and really supporting the re rolling in even in right hailing, we not just myself, but our competitors, we have re skilling and re rolling abilities for, um, for the driver partners, whether, and some of some people, our driver partners because it gives them the flexibility to amend one guy, He

was actually studying his part time degree and so driving gave him an income to help support him, support his, his education while he wanted to move into something else. And super happy for him.

So, to your point about striking the balance, I'd say, uh, the speed at which the innovation comes, uh, mm hmm, let's use a v specifically, the speed at which the innovation comes hopefully is in time for social acceptance ability for, uh, for large groups to, um, to reroll recently, we had a tripartite meeting where the conversation was about autonomous vehicles and uh, and, and sign posting that they will come and this is in a sign of how for looking

the whole industry is whether the regulators, whether the unions, whether the platforms, we're talking about these things early so that workers can be prepared. So the responsibility is to make sure that it's not too denied change, it is to manage the speed of change. And I think we're doing pretty well. Um, babies in particular looks like they still are a while away. But if it suddenly turns overnight that let's say you

had a magic wand tomorrow, babies could be here. Um, I think then it would be a case of really man managing through that transition, but without any magic ones already doing the best we can to signpost, doing the best we can to reroll and doing the best we can to ensure that people stay sort of culturally educationally fluid and are willing to reroll and willing to take on new things.

So if we talk about ports, porter, Porter quite well defined environments in places like that, in places where you're running a standard loop, I think he's already pretty well known and you know, I mean, these are um, it is these operating environments where you already have, if these uh, commercially operating, um, I think when you're exposing them to the full challenge of, of, of city traffic, then that's where you get so many unpredictable things happening and it is that till the end, ah,

and there's just so many cases, eight cases are much more the, the, the norm than the exception. I think that's where it gets pretty tricky, right? And we're not even talking about different climate conditions and we just get rained here, but imagine you're in a place that has rain sleet, snow, hail, maybe some all in the same day. Uh that that makes it much more tricky.

Have a great day