Gojek 的蛮干打法：超级应用、现金金库，以及把品牌当护城河

Lenny introduces Kevin Aluwi as co-founder and former CEO of Gojek, a company he says many US listeners may never have heard of despite its scale. Kevin explains that Gojek began as a motorcycle-taxi service, a uniquely Indonesian model supported by millions of drivers in urban centers. The first product was an on-demand app for rides, package delivery, and shopping errands.

Over time Gojek evolved into a broader on-demand consumer super app that added car rides, grocery delivery, payments, and financial services. Kevin says the company went public about a year and a half before the interview after merging with Indonesia's top e-commerce platform. By then it had about 2.7 million drivers across Southeast Asia and had completed roughly 3 billion orders in the prior year.

Gojek also worked with about 15 million merchants across e-commerce, restaurants, and food delivery. Kevin recalls that the IPO was Indonesia's largest ever, raising over $1 billion at a valuation of roughly $27–$28 billion. He argues the company's scale places it among the largest US platforms and larger than Lyft, with more drivers in its region than all of America.

When Lenny raises the renewed enthusiasm for super apps, Kevin responds bluntly that he is annoyed by how often the idea is cited in VC, consulting, and analyst circles. He says the strategy-deck benefits sound appealing: lower customer acquisition costs, higher attach rates, better retention, and easier cross-selling. In practice, he argues, many of those benefits fail to pan out.

Kevin uses Gojek's mobile top-up product as an illustration. More than 95% of Gojek's customers needed prepaid phone credit or data, yet UX research found that only about 30–40% knew the product existed on Gojek. That was especially shocking because the feature sat on one of six buttons on the home page.

The insight was that a super app needs a unifying concept customers can hold in their heads. Gojek's customers thought first about the driver, so cross-selling from rides to package delivery to food and grocery delivery made sense. When a new service did not fit that mental model, the logic broke down.

Kevin recalls that when Gojek launched on-demand massage, some customers asked whether the driver would come into their house to give the massage. He says super apps also create design constraints because unrelated services often collapse into a giant menu or grid. Customer education then raises acquisition costs, undermining the promised super-app economics.

Kevin says the two most important things in a consumer business are product and brand, in that order. He acknowledges that brand is often treated as the squishy afterthought, but he sees that as a major missed opportunity for consumer technology companies. For Gojek, brand was not decoration; it was part of how the company survived.

He reminds listeners that Gojek began as the underfunded player. For the first six months after launching its app, it had raised about $2 million while a regional competitor had raised $250 million, more than 100 times as much. Kevin credits a strong brand with helping Gojek reach escape velocity and maintain leadership in Indonesia; great brands create associations that transcend transactional utility and become part of identity, like Apple fans or Nike sneakerheads.

Kevin says brand shows up through consistency across every customer touchpoint, not just a logo or a clever ad. Gojek tried to make its copy, app design, and advertising feel culturally connected and willing to make fun of itself. It also leaned into cultural artifacts; in Asia people often send food as gifts to loved ones or romantic interests, so Gojek built features that let users set a delivery point far from their own location and leaned into the GoFood dating phenomenon.

The driver jackets and helmets were powerful because they were both ubiquitous brand imagery and a physical demonstration of the service. People stuck in traffic could see Gojek drivers carrying passengers, packages, or food zip past them, making the value proposition concrete. Kevin calls such opportunities rare and argues that the laziest branding is often the most popular: putting a name and copy on a billboard or performance campaign.

Kevin describes Gojek as an early technology pioneer in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, where many pieces of digital infrastructure did not yet exist. Digital payments were limited, so Gojek struggled to get earned money to drivers who needed cash. In the early days it ran physical cash booths with vaults and cash inside; drivers showed their driver ID and balance, and lines of drivers waited to withdraw earnings. The company later integrated with a bank and ATM network.

Another scrappy fix came from fake driver apps that connected to Gojek's platform, stole driver details and sometimes financial information, and offered features Gojek did not allow. One example was automatic order acceptance, while Gojek required drivers to press accept so they stayed aware of what was happening. Security and engineering talent was scarce, so Gojek copied the top two or three features from those third-party apps instead of building a full technical defense. Kevin says this was a decision made out of necessity, not a philosophical principle, and it significantly reduced usage of the fraudulent apps.

Kevin emphasizes that engineering and security talent in Southeast Asia was extremely scarce at the time and still is today. Because Gojek could not build every capability to combat the apps quickly, it prioritized the product features that mattered most to drivers. The broader lesson is that operational and product shortcuts can be rational when the alternative takes too long and leaves customers exposed.

Kevin is skeptical of the way strategy discussions chase moats, because he believes every moat can eventually be crossed. He argues that an under-discussed advantage is the ability to do hard things that demonstrably create customer value. If something is hard to do and customers care about it, competitors face a higher bar to win those customers away.

In Gojek's early days, motorcycle-taxi mafias controlled some areas through violence, and drivers faced bricks, knives, machetes, and mob brawls. Kevin says it would have been easy to call drivers contractors or third parties and let them sort it out. Instead Gojek hired private security and ran a sizable security operation for a long time to extract drivers from dangerous situations.

That commitment showed the driver community that Gojek cared about their safety, not just their output. Kevin says the goodwill helped keep driver loyalty even when competitors arrived with more money. The security operation included on-call support and patrols in hot spots, with responders often showing up within five to ten minutes to defuse brewing conflicts.

Kevin held many roles at Gojek, including co-CEO, de facto CPO, and at one point writing push-notification copy and working as a driver. He says founders need to understand the work required to see what excellence looks like, especially when experienced talent is scarce. Seeing how bad he was at a job helped him understand what good looked like and what to hire for. He frames this less as performative scrappiness and more as a way to build judgment.

His stint as a driver was different: it was about empathy. When Gojek launched car ride-hailing, Kevin says he was the first actual driver on the app. He recalls picking up a woman with a giant bag, helping her load it, taking a detour so she could do laundry, and earning very little. That experience informed driver-app features such as waiting fees and multiple stops.

Kevin describes himself as a failed finance professional who entered college around 2005, studied finance, and graduated in 2009 after the financial crash. He eventually got a job at a boutique investment bank, only to feel he was underperforming and leave the field he had built his identity around. In 2011 he moved back to Indonesia to bet on local technology when talent, funding, product-market fit, and internet transactions were all still very limited. He says being early to that development showed him what was possible in a short time.

For founders building outside Silicon Valley, Kevin recommends being operations-heavy and doing unscalable things when necessary. He also urges companies to get good at remote work early; Gojek built an engineering center in Bangalore in 2015 to access deep talent. Finally, he says not to copy: Gojek was not an Uber clone but a response to Indonesia's motorcycle-taxi reality, which led to an on-demand super app before the term was common and to branded drivers when car-centric competitors did not brand theirs.

Kevin notes that Indonesia is the fourth-largest country in the world and that Southeast Asia holds almost 10% of the world's population. Beyond macro scale, he says the region has seen an unusually fast pace of adoption for products with strong product-market fit. Gojek's app grew more than 100% month over month for its first 16–18 months after launching in 2015, and Sequoia told the company it was the craziest growth story it had heard of. Kevin attributes this to a mix of broken day-to-day problems and a young population eager to try better solutions.

He offers eFishery as an example of an off-the-wall but serious company being built in the region. eFishery creates a closed-loop ecosystem for fish farmers, using an IoT smart device to measure feed, helping farmers get financing, and helping them sell produce to local, regional, or global markets. Kevin says the company was doing about a quarter-billion dollars in revenue and was profitable. For him, that illustrates the region's hunger for better solutions and the scale that can follow.

Kevin has stepped down as CEO and from the board, and he says he is still on the journey of figuring out how it feels. He calls Gojek by far his most important professional experience and one of his most important life experiences, one that made him a better person. Contrary to what people might expect, he does not feel bored or aimless; he does some angel investing, works with founders, and is trying to discover what activities he finds rewarding. He says he has no plan and may start another company at some point, which he calls his default.

In the lightning round, Kevin recommends What You Do Is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz because he is obsessed with building engaging cultures. For marketing and brand, he recommends How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp as a primer, even though he does not agree with everything in it. His favorite recent movie is The Menu, and his favorite recent TV show is Cyberpunk: Edgerunners.

He also names two products he finds delightful: the Arc browser, which he praises for tab management and ambitious design, and the Steam Deck, which he sees as the best platform yet for truly portable mobile gaming. His favorite interview question asks candidates to describe a subject or activity they have been obsessed with for a long time. He looks for people who can pitch that obsession with passion and structured detail, and he likes the subject more when it is obscure.

The final question asks for a minor product-development change with outsized impact. Kevin says execution improved when Gojek made it very clear that whoever is accountable for a result should also be the decider. He agrees that ideas should come from everywhere and that product teams should be communal, but argues that unclear decision rights slow execution. Making the decider explicit was a small change with a significant effect.