Google to Grab: One Year Later

Fifteen-month follow-up to Why I Left Google to Join Grab, written on a plane home from a leadership offsite in Kuala Lumpur. Grab is every bit as amazing as it felt on the way in — the challenges harder than expected, ride-hailing more complicated than it looks. The emotional centre is Siti Fatimah, a wheelchair-using Malaysian woman who, with her wheelchair-using husband, gambled their savings on a car they retrofitted themselves so they could pass the driving test and become Grab drivers. Anthony Tan met her at random in an elevator and brought her to the offsite; she kept thanking him. Watching the room cry, Steve makes the central argument: at Amazon they were delighting customers who could have got the same products at Walmart; at Grab they are changing society itself — millions of jobs for people with no other option, in a region where taking a cab is dangerous if you are a woman, and where Grab is already five times safer than the alternative. The back half teases the never-ending fraud arms races and OneGrab (how a leadership team across Bangalore, Singapore, Seattle and Beijing still feels like twenty people in a room — mechanics deferred to the next post), and the Grab Super App growing faster than Amazon in 1998 partly because Grab, "unlike some other companies (ahem)," understands platforms.

Ends in Vietnam, on Backpacker Street in District 1, Ho Chi Minh City, with the green helmets of GrabBike everywhere and the line that captures the whole stretch of Steve's Grab years: "It's on us to make it happen."