Don’t underestimate Singapore: Gojek co-founder on missed chances

Southeast Asia is often seen as the next growth frontier for tech companies. Over the last two decades, it has been the third-fastest-growing region in terms of annual gross domestic product (GDP).

But billing the region as the next China or India is “misguided,” according to Lightspeed Venture Partners.

In a report titled “Resetting Expectations,” the global multistage VC firm challenges this portrayal of Southeast Asia and shares why the region hasn’t delivered on this expectation 10 years in.

Kevin Aluwi, venture partner at Lightspeed and co-founder of Gojek, co-authored the report. Speaking to Tech in Asia, he discusses how Gojek could have approached regional expansion differently, why many who invested in Southeast Asia got “burned,” and why projections from many tech companies in the region ultimately didn’t materialize.

Kevin Aluwi at Tech in Asia Conference 2022 / Photo credit: Tech in Asia

Now based in Singapore, Aluwi stepped down from GoTo’s board of commissioners in 2023. He joined Lightspeed in January of this year.

What Gojek got wrong

In its early years, Gojek made missteps in the way it navigated Southeast Asia.

As its co-founder, Aluwi has a few regrets about the strategies the company implemented in the past, particularly the timing of its regional expansion.

In its early years after launching the app in 2015, Gojek chose to focus on Indonesia first. Aluwi says it wasn’t realistic for the company to build regionally from the start because its fleet initially consisted only of motorcycles. Unfortunately, ride-hailing services using such vehicles are banned in Malaysia and Singapore.

Kevin Aluwi, co-founder of Gojek / Photo credit: GoTo

In 2016, Gojek launched its car-hailing services in Indonesia. Aluwi believes it should have expanded overseas after that to capture cities with high GDP earlier, but instead, it waited two more years before entering Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore.

Internally, the company believed that “as long as you win Indonesia, you win everything,” Aluwi recalls. But that was “a huge mistake,” and it was “way too premature to make that assumption.”

“It might be true in 10 years but very, very wrong back then and today,” he adds.

Singapore is the “most important” market

Why SEA isn’t the next China or India

Reality check