Raditya Wibowo: Gojek Chief Transportation Officer, Founder MAKA Motors & How Hard Can It Be? - E468

Raditya (Dito) Wibowo, CEO & Founder of MAKA Motors, and Jeremy Au discussed:

1. Gojek Chief Transportation Officer: Raditya describes his seven-year tenure rise from managing a nascent on-demand transportation service from the modest two-story home HQ with only 2 toilets to becoming Chief Transport Officer. Developing Gojek's first dynamic pricing algorithm was key to beating competition from traditional and emerging tech players. His strategic thinking was pivotal in navigating these emerging problems, including how to navigate the demand vs. supply aspects of Ramadan.

2. Founder MAKA Motors: Dito shared how he founded an electric motorcycle startup nd the transition challenges from software to hardware. He detailed the design principles tailored to meet Indonesian market demands and consumer behaviors. Strategic decisions include customer personas, in-house R&D vs. outsourcing and managing component assembly logistics. His industrial engineering background has also influenced his approach to solving complex problems at the company.

3. How Hard Can It Be?: The phrase "How hard can it be?" encapsulates his entrepreneurial spirit, strategic planning and resilience. He shares how his early consulting experiences at McKinsey shaped his later thinking, as well as how he has had to think on his feet to overcome multiple startup challenges.

Jeremy and Dito also explored the importance of adapting business models to changing market conditions, continuous learning for consumer needs, and the personal commitment to become comfortable with uncertainty.

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(01:30) Jeremy Au:

Hey Dito.

(01:31) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

Hello, Jeremy.

(01:32) Jeremy Au:

Yeah, Excited to have you on the show. I think there's something that you're building that's really fun and exciting and can't wait to get into it. Could you share a little bit about yourself?

(01:40) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

Sure. My name is Dito. I'm the founder and CEO of MAKA Motors. We're an electric motorcycle company. We're launching our first product later this year. We've been spending the last three years almost doing R&D. So we chose the hard way to do it. We're very excited to bring our product to the market. We genuinely think it's very different from anything else out there. I've tested it myself. I've driven it like hundreds of kilometers. I've been driving a motorcycle as well since high school. So definitely super excited to see the product out there. But right now, it's the final leg. Like the kind of the final crunch time before we actually get it out, right?

(02:13) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

And I was in Gojek before. I used to run Gojek's transportation business. I was in Gojek for seven years, actually. So I joined in 2015. When the office was still in a house, basically. So it was a two storey house. Saw the company go to IPO and then left and started my own thing. Definitely very different vibes between software and hardware but just very grateful that I even have the opportunity to do this. Yeah, very excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

(02:36) Jeremy Au:

That's great. Why did you start out with studying industrial engineering?

(02:40) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

So, I was in, did high school in Bandung, actually, which is a different city from Jakarta, where I'm in right now.

Honestly, at the time, all I knew was that I wanted to go to the university in Bandung, ITB, which is the Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia's MIT, in a way, because most of the students from my high school, the aspiration was to go to that university. So I knew I wanted to do engineering. I didn't know, I wasn't sure what type of engineering. And then they actually had this counseling where they help you figure out what kind major would be best for you. I think I ended up going with industrial because it also had a people aspect or at least that's what I was told. But honestly, I think it was a really good choice because it's an interesting mix between engineering and a more management and business degree. So you get the best of both worlds in a way, of course, it also means your knowledge is a bit more shallow compared to the people who actually did hardcore engineering. But it's a nice, it was a nice prep for going into consulting and then actually going into the startup world cause when you learn a little bit of everything, it helps you connect all the dots. I was a product manager as well at Gojek for a few years. And I actually think my degree gave me a really good base.

(03:42) Jeremy Au:

First time I've heard that industrial engineering is less hardcore compared to other forms of engineering.

(03:47) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

That's my personal opinion. I think it was hardcore in other ways, like for example, one of our assignments was, there was a big laugh machine as big as like a desk, were 160 people in my batch And the assignment was simply, you guys take apart this machine and then recreate it in 3D. Like, basically make a 3D model of every single part, connect everything together, make sure it works but you guys figure out how you want to organize the work, which I thought was really cool. So like 160 students, we have to figure out how do we divide the different parts of the machine. How do we make sure everything fits together? Who looks at what and then obviously you'll have people who aren't really carrying their weight. You have people who have to compensate for others. So this was again, as I mentioned, really good prep going into the startup world.

(04:31) Jeremy Au:

That does sound like a little bit of a mess for sure. You chose to become a consultant at McKinsey. So what was your thinking about that job?

(04:37) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

So when I was about to graduate, I think, actually the hottest field was still oil and gas. A lot of people wanted to go to oil and gas. I also did an internship myself at an oil and gas company for like one or two months. I went to a remote area and stayed there as an engineer for one or two months. I learned that I didn't really enjoy it cause it was basically repeating the very similar things every day. So I ended up going to consulting, which is the other option, McKinsey. I think was a really great first job. Honestly, of course you never know how things would be otherwise, but in hindsight, I would say it was one of the best choices for a first job, right? Because I think it really forces you to grow very quickly. You are a junior person coming in, trying to advise much more senior people.

You have to learn how to think on your feet. You have to learn how you know, add value, right? Even though in terms of experience, you don't really have a lot of it. It was a really good experience. I spent three and a half years and, I think interestingly, a lot of the founders in Indonesia, a lot of us, a lot of people in that batch who ended up starting their own companies, including my wife, who I met at McKinsey, who also joined Gojek together with me, with another one of our friends, and then there were a few others from that batch, like, Ruanguru for example. We were all, kind of there Nadiem used to work at McKinsey, the CEO and founder of Gojek. So that's kind of how he found me.

(05:48) Jeremy Au:

Yeah. How was that? How did he find you? How did you find a job?

(05:51) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

This was my, I think this was in the middle of my fourth year at Mckinsey. I was actually on a project in the States. So I was in Washington, D. C. I wasn't really looking, but at the time, this was mid 2015, so Gojek was just starting to take off. They just launched an app. So Gojek itself, they were a call center from 2011. Actually, so they've been around for, they were already around for a while at that point but they only recently launched an app. The app was starting to get traction and they raised the new round, they wanted to hire more people from consulting to build new businesses. I think I was very lucky to be at that level of seniority in that year, right? Because Nadiem was very specific. He wanted to hire third year analyst. No one more junior, no one more senior. If you're too junior, then you're not experienced enough. But if you're too senior, then you're a bit more stuck in your ways, less, less moldable. I was at the right level of seniority at the time. He reached out. I initially turned him down, actually. I said I wasn't looking, but Nadiem is the best salesman I know. And he managed to convince three of us to jump ship from McKinsey, at the time, I'm a very risk averse person, so this was the first time I switched jobs. McKinsey has an industry leave program where you can work in company for I think a year and then come back. Initially I was only supposed to join Gojek for a year and it was supposed to be my MBA story. And I just ended up doing my MBA at Gojek.

(07:02) Jeremy Au:

So what was your first six months at Gojek like in those early days?

(07:06) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

Oh it was definitely a different experience. It was fun. My first day, I showed up at the office, there was, no one really knew we were coming. So these were very hectic days, right? So no one knew we were coming. They showed us our room. So I came into Gojek to start a new business for them, which was GoBox, the trucks on demand business, so I ended hiring some of my high school friends as well to do it with me. And they're the ones who I ended up hiring again into MAKA Motors. So we've been working on that first day, we all came in, we saw the room. The room was full So GOMAR team the day before had been doing a photo session of SKUs to put in the app.

So there was a lot of half eaten food from the grocery store inside the room. So we had to clean that up. The room was completely empty. No desks, no tables, no desks, no chairs. And then we asked where the tables are. They gave us a box, which we had to assemble ourselves, so that was our first day, putting together our own tables just cleaning up the room the whole office there were only like two working toilets, one of them was inside our room. And that's how we ended up meeting everyone else in the because would have to come inside our room to use the toilet.

(08:08) Jeremy Au:

So they run to the restroom and after that they're done, they're like, Hey, Dito.

(08:11) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

Exactly, exactly. Or like, because the other restroom upstairs was I think inside a meeting room. So whenever there was a meeting, people couldn't go there. Fun times. So that office, if you come to Jakarta, if you look at that office from outside, you can't tell it used to be the Gojek office. It's now it's a house again. The air conditioning was not great. The Wi Fi was very buggy but it was definitely, it was a different vibe. It was nice. . We had drivers hanging out in the yard. We got to talk to them every day. It was cool.

(08:37) Jeremy Au:

Yeah. And what's interesting is that, you spent and did kind of like those early days, you're competing with, from your perspective, many different players, right? So obviously there was the existing chessboard system, there was Grab, there's all these other things. So how did you think about competition in those early days?

(08:53) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

Right. So I think for Gojek itself, initially, the competition, the main competition was the traditional "ojek" drivers, because ojek drivers have always been a part of Indonesian society. Initially, there was definitely a bit of resistance, because it's a new thing, but then I think they realized, they can get more business from working with Gojek because basically, we help standardize the experience for the customer. We basically took a very hands on approach to actually try to get them to be Gojek drivers. The first few years was a lot of that. There were some intimidation cases as well, right? I think in some cities drivers were wearing jackets and then to enter certain areas or to do pickups at certain POIs. Right? They would have to kind of take off the jacket.

But I think ultimately, if you have a product where, like it's a marketplace, which has a lot of network effects. So as the network gets bigger and bigger, it just ends up making sense for them to join. That was the incumbent, right? We did end up expanding the market, we also had competition from Grab, obviously, initially. So that was fun. I think these were very different days in terms of where the tech market was at. Rates were, were a lot lower back then. The main priority was growth. Our KPI at the time, we weren't yet looking at profitability. We weren't yet even looking at net revenue. We were more looking at transactions initially, number of users. How do you keep making that go up like every week? And we were hitting new milestones every week, which was really cool to see.

And then, the whole, our backend started buckling under its own weight in 2016, 2017. So we were going down like every afternoon every rush hour we would go like between like 4 to 6pm because of the load on the system.And the fact t that at the time, we didn't have dynamic pricing and our competition did. So Grab did have dynamic pricing, so they would be more expensive. So everyone tried to book us first, but then the drivers don't take the order because the price is lower. And then people switch to Grab. And this is what would bring us down every afternoon especially during Ramadan. Because during Ramadan people order food at 4pm and they also go home at 4pm. So everything happens same time. That was pretty intense. I ended up basically running the team that rewrote the whole what we call the "allocation" I think now we call it marketplace. So this is basically the part of the Gojek system that matches drivers and customers. So we changed the algorithm to make it more scalable. We fixed the infrastructure to basically to make sure it didn't go down. And we had to build dynamic pricing from scratch which is also really interesting.

The, first version of dynamic pricing for Gojek was me typing in a multiplier and pressing enter. And then got to see the effect on the chart. And that's how we got there. So I think it, it was just a constant process of iteration. And I think, obviously the markets evolved. It's a lot more mature today. But, back in those days building a large scale back end for, for ride hailing on demand was not a trivial problem at all. And were kind of building the plane as we fly.

(11:25) Jeremy Au:

So you're saying that the first ever dynamic pricing algorithm was a human person called Dito.

(11:29) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

Well, kind of, Yeah. I mean, we had a whole team, actually I would say the, the, the MVP was a chart, just simply a chart that allowed us to look at in every single square of the grid in the city what are the demand and supply ratios. And then there was a, a portal that allowed me to type in a number and punch in a number and see what happens to the colors, right? Does it go from red to green? If not, make it higher. And then we would that like, every day. Eventually, we learned how to actually make it properly and it's continued to improve to now.

(11:56) Jeremy Au:

Oh, that's super fascinating. That's great to hear. And you mentioned that some peculiarities about Ramadan, for example, in terms of your ratios and in terms of your thing, any other quirks about Ramadan from a systems perspective?

(12:08) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

Oh yeah. Cause I think if you look at a Gojek drivers day, they're out all day, and they, they cover a lot of ground, more than a hundred kilometers a day. Even, I tried being a driver for for a day. A very tough job. You can end up in random parts of the city basically, but typically how it works is you start early, in the morning you take transport orders cause it's morning rush, people are trying to work and then you have package deliveries probably. After that until noon, noon is lunchtime. Lunchtime, you have food orders. And then after lunchtime, you'll do more package deliveries kind of a mix, maybe some transport as well. In the afternoon, you have afternoon rush transport. And then you have dinner, which is food. And then you have some drivers who continue overnight.

And during Ramadan this, this pattern kind of changes because people when people leave earlier to their offices, so the office hours change during Ramadan, right? You come in earlier and you leave earlier as well because you want to break fast at home. And there's no lunch GoFood, right? Yeah. So that changes the pattern a bit because the lunch GoFood will shift to afternoon. Afternoon is crazy. Like, traffic is always very bad because everyone's trying to go home and get food at the same time. And then nearing the end of Ramadan, there's a lot of package deliveries. People are sending parcels to each other.

And then on Eid al Fitr itself is also challenging because everyone is trying to get somewhere and send stuff, but the drivers are also celebrating Eidl Fitr, right? So you don't have enough supply, which is always a problem. So we would have to prepare the incentives for for over that week from far in advance.

(13:33) Jeremy Au:

Then it's some person manually keying in a ratio. So I think what's interesting is that you almost spent seven years as well as Gojek, right? So you're VP GoBox, VP Logistics, to SVP Marketplace, to Chief Transport Officer. Why did you stay so long? It's a long chunk of time.

(13:48) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

Right, yeah, no, that's an interesting question because out of my batch who joined Gojek in 2015, I actually probably am one of the last to leave to start my own company. At the time I started Maka, a lot of my batchmates had already started their own companies, right? And I think, for me I felt like there was still a lot to learn over those seven years, because I kept taking bigger and bigger roles, right? Because initially I was just Gobox, which is trucks on demand, and then Logistics, which was Gobox plus the package delivery side of the business. I actually worked on the, the first ever integration we did with Tokopedia. This was in, like, 2016. First instant delivery experience on e commerce in Indonesia. That was pretty cool. I remember ordering ice cream after we first finished it cause before that, you couldn't get ice cream delivered immediately, so that was pretty cool. This was way before any Gojek, Tokopedia, GoTo. Then 2017 I started looking at the backend systems, and then I think around 2019, I started looking at all of the transport PML. So I thought it was interesting the kind of experience that journey because you also see what happens to a company when it grows from very scrappy, smaller team based out of a house to a very large relatively large headcount much bigger scale obviously much more funding much more investors, about to IPO.

(14:58) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

So I think observing that journey, there were a lot of learnings there. And I think from day one though, since I joined, the idea was always for me to eventually start my own thing. And this is how Nadiem pitched it to me as well. Like, hey join Gojek, you'll get a budget, run a P&L, you get to start your own business basically, but you don't have to worry about funding, you can hire whatever you want. And for me at the time, I was like, yeah, sure, why not. And it took a while to find the right idea or what I wanted to work on, but I think I think once you find it, right? it feels a bit obvious when you connect the dots going backwards.

I think in my last year at Gojek, one of the things I started at was electric motorcycles. We did a lot of pilots with the drivers that we actually found that, most of the products that are already on the market, they don't really work for the driver. So that was the starting point. That's when we started thinking, you know what? Maybe we should just make a bike? How hard can it be? It's pretty hard. Ha, ha, ha. but, you know, I think another great part of the experience was actually seeing what success looks like, because I think seeing firsthand how a company can grow from being in a house to getting that big, and being able to scale and have so much impact in Indonesia, I think, was quite inspiring, right? It does make you feel like, it felt like something I wanted to have a crack at as well because everyone worked very closely. We were supporting each other. I think we all knew that we didn't always have all the answers. We were definitely far from perfect, but as long as you persevere and you have the courage to just push through it, try things out, then it can work, it can scale. And I think that was a big part of what gave me and maybe all the other people who ended up starting a company, the confidence to kind of take that risk.

(16:27) Jeremy Au:

So how hard can it be?

(16:29) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

Pretty hard, pretty hard, because I think because I was making software products before. I studied manufacturing and hardware. So I had an idea of how hard it would be from a theoretical standpoint but I think there are a few key differences between software and hardware. Number one is, with software, and this is something I always took for granted, but you are literally creating the product out of thin air. Someone thinks about it, and then they write code and they deploy, and that's it. That's your product.You have e distribution channels to everyone's pockets using the App Store and Play Store. If you want to add a new feature, you just deploy, upload to the store. Again, it goes to everyone's phones. You have a bug, you can fix it on the backend. If it's a backend bug, you don't even have to update the app. If it's on the frontend, you can release an app update, it's just a lot more faster and simpler when you're not dealing with physical stuff that actually needs to be transported, and processed, and it's kind of heavy. And, so that's one. I think, hardware, the tangible aspect of hardware just makes everything a bit more harder, right? It increases the difficulty mode.

And then second is dependencies. When you're building a software product, most of the inputs are kind of in your control. You might be hitting some APIs for some functions you don't want to build in house, but by and large, it's faster. You have multiple options. Again, if anything breaks, if you decide you want to do it in house, you just build it. With hardware, it's different. We have so many components in the product. For most of them, we need to work with suppliers, because, if we build everything in house, it's a lot of capex and it's a lot of expertise. Making a good battery pack and making a good suspension, brake system, making a good metal frame, these are all very different manufacturing processes that require different technical knowledge as well. So you have to work with a lot of external parties and you need to be able to orchestrate everything so that they're all ready at around the same time cause you have to, and that everything fits together once it arrives. That's, that's the that's the other hardest part. Cause sometimes when things don't fit together, it takes more time for them to redo it. It's hardware, right? You have to change the tooling.

(18:21) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

And then, I guess number three is the development process itself. It's very, it's very waterfall. And I think if you look at the history, the Agile processes in software, initially software development was based on, how you would run a big hardware product, automotive, and we were always taught to, you know, iterate quickly, just launch an MVP and then improve it later. But you can't really do that with automotive because if you launch an MVP and it's not safe, or if, if something breaks, can't do that basically, right? So you have to make sure that everything is perfect before you launch it to the market, which means you have to do a lot of testing, which takes more time. Every time some little thing changes, you have to do a lot of rigorous testing on every single thing. You update the firmware in the control unit, you have to run the tests all over again because the byte needs to be very robust and everything needs to be very hardened because you can't fix anything once it's out there. You cannot deploy an app. You can do a recall, but recalls are very bad, right? We definitely want to avoid that. So it's a bit of a different mindset as well, and it took a bit of getting used to because you have to pass through gates, once you pass, you cannot go back. So you really have to commit. And it's a very different vibe from, just launching, learning, and then changing it. I think those are probably the reasons I would say that, hardware is a different different kind of ballgame.

But, it's also a different kind of satisfaction. Actually seeing the bike, touching it, getting to ride it, it's hard to describe, but it feels very nice once you actually finish it.

(19:38) Jeremy Au:

And, when you're designing for nice to ride, nice to have, what are some of the design principles or trade offs that you're thinking about?

(19:45) Raditya Wibowo (Dito): So I think if you go jumping back a bit to why we started the company, so, the initial idea was that, the Gojek drivers, they all wanted to switch to electric actually, because they wanted to save money on petrol cause petrol is their number one expenditure. Number two is food, number three is data plan. Food and data plan, we we

re able to help with, fuel, there's not much you can do. And the savings are significant. If you are traveling more than a hundred kilometers a day, this is maybe twenty five to thirty thousand rupiah you're using but probably 6,000 rupiah on electricity. It's savings and it adds up every day. So again, the, the interest to switch to electric was always high even from before the pandemic when it was still very early. The problem was we tried a lot of different bikes and it didn't really it didn't really work.

The way we use bikes in Indonesia is quite different from elsewhere. Actually, different countries are quite different in how they use their two wheelers. More so than four wheelers. So to give an example by the way, Indonesia is the world's third largest two wheeler market. There are six million bikes sold every The only bigger markets are India and China. China and India are also quite different. In China, bikes travel a shorter distance. It's more of a first mile, last mile thing for you to connect to public transport. Most people are driving the bike without a license, which means that you have a limit on the top speed and you're not allowed to carry a passenger. So when you take a bike and also like the bikes have their own lane in China. So two wheelers and four wheelers are separated. You don't have to overtake cars. So if you take a bike designed for that environment and you bring it to Jakarta, it's very different because in Jakarta, you have to overtake cars. People are a bit more aggressive.You drive e a slow bike, you get honked at.m

(21:19) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

Also you're more than half of the time you have a passenger on board. You also need storage space for your items and the travel distance is a lot longer. So you need a bigger battery as well. So compared to China, the specs were different. And then if you look at India India, a bit more similar to Indonesia than China, which is true, but in India you have three wheelers. The three wheelers do the heavy lifting on people transport and logistics. The two wheelers are mostly a personal mobility thing. For example, I don't, there's not really an ojek culture in India. People don't really get on bikes with strangers. The way they use the bikes and what they need from the bikes is a bit different. You look at the, the top two wheeler EV products in India, they're also they're more optimized for solo riding, right? Because taking a passenger is not as prevalent of a use case. And then when you come to Indonesia, people use the bike for everything, personal use, commercial use. You see people carrying refrigerators, really heavy stuff on these bikes. I have a lot of fun photos of people just carrying the craziest things on their bikes. And in terms of the road quality China roads are very flat, very nice. Here in Jakarta, you have a lot of potholes. Even when it looks flat, it's also wavy, which puts more load on the mechanical structure of the bike, right? So you do have to make sure the bike is designed to be very robust, to be able to withstand abuse. And to also have long range because what people are most worried about is what happens if they run out of battery outside of my house, especially if you have a long commute.

Gojek drivers gave us the idea initially, but we didn't want to design a bike just for specifically for delivery drivers and this is one thing that's interesting about Indonesia. You would typically think that the delivery drivers, they would just always use the cheapest bike cause it helps keep more of the income. And this is typically what you see in other, in like China or India. But in Indonesia, it's different. The way the drivers see it is I want to make more money so I can buy a nicer bike. So the bike is something that for most households, their bike is the most expensive thing they own. It's something they are willing to splurge on. So the bar of quality is actually really high as well. To convince them to switch you need to deliver something that is as better or comparable in quality to the existing petrol options. And that's what we think wasn't really there when we started.

Of course there's a lot of competition right now. We're also trying to solve this problem. We ended up taking a bit of a different approach, which is do the R&D in house which is honestly scary because it's the hardest way to do it. It's the most capex intensive, but we do believe that deliver what the user wants. This is how we need to do it, and it does take a bit more time, but we believe that the long-term outcome is better. And we have a lot of proof but we're getting there. And again, I'm really excited about the bike. Really looking forward to people actually starting to use it on the road.

(23:43) Jeremy Au:

On that note, could you share about a time that you personally have been brave?

(23:45) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

Yeah, I think, honestly, one of the scariest things I've done has actually been starting MAKA Motors in basically late 2021, early 2022, the beginning of the current tech winter. Hardware companies were a new thing in Indonesia for sure. We were trying to do and we were, we were trying to do it in the hardest way by doing our own R&D investing our own CapEx for the production, tooling, and everything. So doing that was scary. Of course when we first started, we already had some funding but we knew that it would take a lot more funding to build the factory, cover the working capital. The market started progressively getting deeper and deeper into winter since we started, I think when we started, it was more like, autumn, maybe late autumn, early winter and then the environment kept changing. But I think we're very grateful that we ended up working with the right lead and the right investors who really believe in our approach, who also know that it's more expensive. It takes a bit longer. But at the end of the day, it's the product that matters because that's that's what the Indonesian consumers care about. But you know, they're taking a big risk on us. We're taking a big risk on ourselves as well again. It's our all it's our third year now, and we still don't have revenue which honestly is scary and the costs will go up as you get closer to launch because you need to build everything.

You need to build the manufacturing, you need to build the sales, you need to build the after sales. Of course, R& D has been the main activity as well over the last three years. I think simply continuing to have that conviction in yourself I think is really important, and one of our, one of our company values is actually courage. We have three values. Integrity courage, and intelligence, because without having the courage to do this we wouldn't be here, and we have a long way to go, but we made it this far. So many people said we were or like, how are you going to compete against the Chinese? How are you going to compete against the Japanese? Which are all valid questions. And the honest answer is we'll know when we launch how the market reacts, but what we can do is control our inputs. Focus on making the best product have the confidence in our understanding of the market and what the user needs, and just roll with it.

(25:38) Jeremy Au:

How do you keep conviction in yourself?

(25:40) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

Ooh, that's a good question. I think, I think at the end of the day, I think who you are is who you decide to be and I think ultimately it, it boils down to the question of when things get really hard, do you want to be the type of person who pushes through, or do you want to be the type of person who doesn't do that. And obviously, I choose to do the former. It's easier said than done. But I think it's about always consciously making that choice. I ran my first marathon in Singapore last December, and I think I definitely felt this as I was heading into beyond kilometer 30. It gets really painful. It's a different world, like, I had never run that far before. And your feet are, like, melting you have aches here and there, you see a lot of other people just walking. And you're tempted to do the same thing. And then you start asking yourself, why am I doing this anyway? Who told me to run 42 kilometers? Why did I sign up for this? But I think I'm glad, I'm proud of myself for taking the choice to keep going. And that was my first finish. And I think there's a lot of parallels between that experience and what it's like to run a company, especially a hardware company where your timelines are a bit longer.

Right now we're getting very close to the launch, but we don't know how the market will react. It's kind of like, we're in kilometer 30, 35 or so, and it gets really, really hard, but you just have to keep going because we got this far. We need to keep making that choice.

(26:54) Jeremy Au:

Thank you so much for sharing. On that note, I'd love to summarize the three big takeaways I got from this conversation. First of all, thank you so much for sharing about, Gojek and, the humans search pricing algorithm that you were part of. I think it was fascinating to hear about those early days where, you know you had to make a decision about whether to join the and also what you were working on, what your first days were like, and why you decided to stay so long.

Secondly, thanks so much for sharing about building MAKA motors in terms of the design principles about what kind of product you have, what a persona is, some of the intricacies around consumer behavior expectations how that translates more practically as well as a hardware startup. There's making the decision about whether in house or outsource R&D as well as the assembly of parts and the various trade offs associated. So, thank you for that.

Lastly, I love the phrase "how hard can it be?" I think it's a phrase that resonated with me because you brought it up at different points, right? In terms of the Gojek story, experience. really, like you said, in terms of making a decision to be a founder after having been part of a high growth startup and really putting it all together to build something, to continue maintaining conviction to yourself and the team. On that note, thank you so much for sharing your journey.

(27:57) Raditya Wibowo (Dito):

Thanks, Jeremy, for having me.