Why I Left Google to Join Grab

Steve's first Medium post, written on a plane home from Jakarta during his first week on the new job, and the one whose virality caught him off guard. It gives four reasons Google can no longer innovate, among them the observation that a company full of humble individuals can still have "the arrogance of the 'we', not the 'I'" — but the real energy goes into where he landed: a winner-take-all ride-hailing war across a region of 620 million people, reported with a convert's zeal from the back of a motorbike heading into oncoming Jakarta traffic. Along the way he calls food delivery a "cat-5 hurricane," two years before the pandemic made ghost kitchens ordinary, and, right after warning that anyone quoting his predictions is "an idiot quoting a bigger idiot," bets against Uber in Southeast Asia. Uber sold Grab its regional operations two months later.

Read now, it doubles as a scorecard on what first-week infatuation sees clearly and what it misses. The Uber bet paid off almost immediately. The fight-to-the-death certainty fared worse: Go-Jek was never driven off the map, and the "war" settled into the long, expensive duopoly Southeast Asia still has. Readers allergic to evangelism should brace: Steve declares flatly that Grab will win, twice, in the same piece where he admits he's "pretty new to this space." And the resignation-letter framing hides a small sleight: what the essay is actually for doesn't come clear until the last line.