Grab’s CTO on hiring decisions, the future, and the failure that embarrassed him

Grab CTO Theo Vassilakis / Photo credit: Grab

Theo Vassilakis was a math researcher at university, and he was on course to become a professor. Hopefully, he’d get tenure someday, and with job security pretty much guaranteed and six of the seven Millennium Prize math problems still to be solved, that would be that.

But there was something missing.

“I woke up one day and said, I should do something that impacts peoples’ lives, makes their lives better,” he recalled, speaking onstage at Tech in Asia Jakarta 2018.

Tech for tech’s sake can be fun, but changing people lives… is fulfilling.

Vassilakis swapped chalkboard, textbooks, and tweed with elbow patches for the fast-paced environment of tech product development. It was a decision that eventually took him to Google and Microsoft via his own startup, before landing him in the chief technology officer’s chair at Grab late last year.

At the Singapore-based company, he feels he’s getting closer to fulfilling that waking realization he had many moons ago.

“Grab’s mission is to move Southeast Asia forward,” he said. “In building our businesses, we try to help others to build their businesses.”

The new guy

Getting this mission into gear has required Vassilakis to make some major strategic moves since he became Grab’s CTO in October 2017.

He estimates that the company’s tech headcount will reach 2,000 by the end of this year – double what it was at the close of 2017. That’s a testament to the hard work he and his team have been doing in terms of hiring, to grow Grab’s tech capabilities as it continues to diversify beyond ride-hailing.

He has also restructured the team to account for these strategic changes.

“Today, we’re the largest transportation platform in Southeast Asia, as well as the largest fintech platform,” he told Tech in Asia after the Jakarta event. “It made sense therefore for these two business lines to [each] be led by a dedicated CTO who is focused on the specific technology needs of each business.”

One of Vassilakis’s first moves was to appoint Bangalore-based Vikas Agrawal, who previously headed engineering at Indian payments portal Paytm, as CTO for the company’s mobile wallet GrabPay. Agarwal later became Grab Financial CTO when GrabPay was reorganized to include additional financial services offerings.

Earlier this month, Amazon, Oracle, and NASA veteran Mark Porter was brought on board as Grab’s dedicated CTO for transport.

Data-driven

Embarrassment