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

The episode opens with Kevin Aluwi describing an early obstacle for Gojek: organised resistance from motorcycle taxi mafias. He says certain areas were effectively controlled through violence by local groups, and that when Gojek drivers began taking orders and passengers there, those groups physically assaulted them. He lists bricks being thrown and knives and machetes being brandished at drivers. This is Aluwi's own account, given without independent corroboration in the conversation.

But instead, we actually hired private security.

Aluwi frames the decision as a choice against the easy option. Drivers were contractors and third parties, so the company could have told them to sort it out themselves. Instead, Gojek worked with private security companies to extract drivers from dangerous situations, and he says it ran a fairly big private security operation for a fairly long time.

Host Lenny then introduces the episode. He presents Aluwi as co-founder and former CEO of Gojek, mentions that former guest Crystal Widjaja (described as Gojek's former head of growth) had pushed for this interview, and calls Gojek infamous for its scrappiness and its unusual approach to operations and growth, as well as one of the first and most successful super apps. His preview of the conversation covers the private security team, company-built cash distribution centres for paying drivers, an early investment in brand, the value of doing hard things, and the claim that super apps are surprisingly overrated.

This segment also contains two sponsor reads, which are advertising rather than interview content. One is for Coda, a document and workflow tool, which includes a startup credit offer; the other is for rows.com, a spreadsheet product. The transcript renders the second name once as "Rose" in the host's closing sentence, which looks like a transcription slip for Rows. The segment ends with Lenny welcoming Kevin to the show.

Aluwi says the conversation took a few weeks or months of back and forth to arrange. Lenny says he rarely hosts founders, especially founders of companies not based in the US, and that Crystal Widjaja, whom he calls one of his favourite guests, urged him to invite Kevin. Aluwi responds that he is glad to be among that small group and says he is a fan of the show.

Asked to explain Gojek to listeners who may never have heard of it, Aluwi says it began as a motorcycle-taxi-based service, a distinctively Indonesian phenomenon given the millions of motorcycle taxi drivers in the country's urban centres. The first product was an on-demand super app in which someone on a motorcycle could carry a passenger, deliver a package, or buy something and bring it to you. Over the years it grew into a more general on-demand consumer app that added car drivers, grocery delivery, payments and financial services.

Figures stated by Aluwi in the transcript: about 2.7 million drivers across Southeast Asia; about 3 billion orders completed last year; about 15 million merchants, covering general e-commerce and restaurants on the food delivery service; a public listing roughly a year and a half earlier, following a merger with Indonesia's top e-commerce platform; and an IPO he calls Indonesia's largest ever, raising over a billion dollars at a valuation of something like 27 to 28 billion dollars.

There is a small transcript wrinkle: Lenny repeats the order figure as "30 billion" and Aluwi corrects him to 3 billion, so 3 billion is the number he stands behind.

On comparisons with US ride-hailing, Aluwi is explicit about the limits of his knowledge. He does not know the latest Uber or Lyft numbers and bases his answer on people and activity counts.

I would place our scale among the largest US companies.

He adds that by volume Gojek is up there with Uber globally and definitely larger than Lyft, and that it has more drivers in its region than all of America, while saying he does not remember how many drivers are in the US. These are his estimates and are not backed by figures in the conversation. Lenny's reaction is that it is striking such a large company is little known in the US.

Asked to list what Gojek does, Aluwi names ride hailing, package, food and grocery delivery, moving services by truck and van, on-demand massage and cleaning, hair services, movie tickets, loans and payments.

I think at our peak we had something like near 30 different services all in one app.