Google to Grab: One Year Later

Written on a wifi-less flight home from a leadership offsite in Kuala Lumpur. Steve had promised a one-year check-in, missed the date by three months because he worked all the time, and finally had a few captive hours to pay up. It reads like the letter he owed: loose and cheerful, wandering from what drivers tell him about scams and fake apps, to the machine guns carried by Jakarta hotel guards, to his own wife getting charged for a ride by a "driver" who never came — a fraud permutation none of Grab's ML models happened to be watching for, though the Head of Trust and Safety was sitting on the same plane and would probably have it fixed by landing. The costs get their due too: a Seattle team sixteen time zones from Singapore, living on conference calls that run until midnight or two in the morning.

This is Steve at maximum conviction, and the one call that missed is instructive. Go-Jek gets written off as running out of steam, in its "last gasps," unlikely to matter in the end; that rival went on to merge with Tokopedia, list publicly as GoTo, and still fights Grab for Indonesia today. Forecasting aside, what the essay is good for is the interior view: a rocket-ship year in Southeast Asian tech, measured in real time against the Amazon and Google years by someone who lived those too, with genuine stakes — Steve, a big guy, says plainly he does not feel safe in a Jakarta cab — and an enthusiasm that never once sounds calculated.