How Indonesia’s unicorns achieved hyperscale

Photo credit: Go-Jek

Indonesia’s “everyday” app and unicorn Go-Jek processes more than 100 million transactions a month across its wide array of services – from ride-hailing and payments to food and medicine delivery to massage and laundry.

Go-Jek’s user and partner network is just as impressive: up to 25 million monthly users, 900,000 drivers, and 125,000 merchants.

That kind of reach is massive for a company that has only 200 engineers making software decisions every day.

John Fitzpatrick, head of Google Cloud’s Startup Program in Asia, calls it “hyperscale.”

“I’ve had lots of experience working with startups and I’ve witnessed the growth that we’ve seen from Indonesian unicorns in the past years,” he says onstage at Tech in Asia Jakarta 2018, referring to Go-Jek, e-tailers Tokopedia and Bukalapak, and booking platform Traveloka. “Around Asia, it’s a special and unique story.”

While it would be tough to replicate what these companies have achieved, he says startups can learn tangible lessons from them. He details four of the elements that make up the “secret sauce” to hyperscale.

1. Speed

You need to be fast to market. You have to be the first to bring your product to the customers and leave no time for your rivals to catch up.

In tech, there’s a concept called “migration mindset” – you map out a plan and do a cost-benefit analysis of what it takes to get from point A to B. But that’s not the mindset that hyperscale unicorns have, Fitzpatrick points out. For them, there’s no point B.

“What they have is a ‘transformational mindset.’ You’re constantly innovating, accelerating development… you’re constantly pushing out your code, iterating, and improving your tech,” he explains.

John Fitzpatrick talks about unicorns’ mindset at Tech in Asia Jakarta 2018. Photo credit: Tech in Asia

If you want to scale quickly, you’d have to use platforms, he adds. Go-Jek is a platform in itself, but internally, it also taps platforms to power its operations. For example, it’s using serverless architecture like cloud computing to store big data.

2. Insight

“Data is everything when you’re a unicorn,” Fitzpatrick suggests. You crunch that data with tech like artificial intelligence and machine learning to derive actionable insight that can improve your product as well as customer acquisition rate and retention.

3. Work culture

4. Market opportunity