Why I Left Google to Join Grab

Steve's first Medium post — written on a plane back from Jakarta — went viral in a way that surprised him. The front half is an autopsy: after nearly thirteen years he leaves Google not because it's a bad place to work but because it can no longer innovate. Four causes: conservative and risk-averse; mired in politics; arrogant in a particular way ("the arrogance of the 'we', not the 'I'", a company of humble people that is collectively sure of itself); worst, competitor-focused rather than customer-focused — nearly every launch of the past decade traceable to a copy of someone else's product (Google+/Facebook, Cloud/AWS, Home/Echo, Allo/WhatsApp, Assistant/Siri, Instant Apps/WeChat). The back half is Grab — locked in a winner-take-all land war with Go-Jek and Uber across 620M people in Southeast Asia — and the durable claim he builds on it: you can predict how innovative a company will be by watching how close it sits to its customers. Amazon does it once a year; Google, never; Grab's mantra is "go to the ground," and they aim for daily.

It's a prediction essay wearing the costume of a resignation letter. Steve bets, hedged but plainly, that Uber will lose Southeast Asia; two months later Grab acquired Uber's Southeast Asia operations. He calls food delivery a "cat-5 hurricane" before ghost kitchens were household, and reads mobile payments leapfrogging the credit card in a cash economy where only 2% of adults carry one. Read alongside the Platforms Rant and Dear Google Cloud, it's the middle panel of Steve's long argument about Google's blind spot — and the first plain statement of the cultural thesis, proximity over ivory tower, that the rest of the archive runs on.