Lessons and impact: the Rocket Internet empire in Asia

A toast to Rocket Internet on its second anniversary in Asia.

Rocket Internet is an incubator that hatches online businesses across the world. In Asia, Stefan Jung co-founded and spearheaded its operations for over two years, seeing the growth of Zalora, Lazada, FoodPanda, and PricePanda, while witnessing the death of OfficeFab at the same time.

To mark Rocket Internet’s second anniversary of opening its first office in Southeast Asia this week, we reached out to Stefan to learn of his experience of building up the empire and also his take on the growing startup ecosystem in Southeast Asia. On a related note, Stefan is also one of our speakers at our upcoming Startup Asia Jakarta conference next month.

Tech in Asia: How has Rocket Internet in Southeast Asia changed over the last two years?

Stefan: Rocket is a startup story in itself. We went from a company that had a great track-record of building successful companies in Germany to becoming the world’s largest company builder with a presence in over 40 countries with over 25,000 employees in our ventures around the globe. When we started in Southeast Asia there were very few processes in place at the time and building up the operations was an amazing entrepreneurial experience. Looking at how professionally we support ventures today compared to only two years ago, we have made great improvements with the hard work we put in around the world.

Tech in Asia: What are some of these improvements you mentioned?

Stefan: We provide a much better infrastructure to our ventures now. We built our own systems to improve operations in all parts of the ventures from online marketing to warehouse systems, from buyer replenishment tools to supplier management. We’re constantly thinking about how we can make our ventures more successful. When we learn a new lesson in one venture in Brazil, Nigeria or India, we will share this with ventures around the world. Therefore we only need one person with a smart idea and then this idea will be implemented around the world. This gives each founder access to a global network, which we encourage to leverage more every day.

Tech in Asia: What have been some of the major difficulties you had to overcome in Asia?

Stefan Jung, Co-founder at Rocket Internet Asia

Stefan: There were two major challenges at the beginning. The first one was to convince people to join a startup. When we started to recruit our very first employees and talked about our plan to launch Zalora and the vision we had for the company, there was a common reluctance to leave a stable career path in a multinational company to join a startup.

The second challenge was to convince brands to come on board. The majority of the leading global fashion brands did not sell their products online yet in most of the Asian countries. They also didn’t even have any terms and conditions in place for online. So we had to educate many suppliers on the potential of commerce in the region and together set up frame agreements on what, for many of the brands, were their first e-commerce activities. Looking back, how fast both the startup scene and the brands engaging in e-commerce have grown, these challenges fortunately do not exist as much any more as the momentum is growing.

Tech in Asia: In the press, Rocket is often described with the term “clone factory” and “copycat.” How do you view this?

Stefan: There are two challenges to building a successful business: the idea generation and the execution. As the world gets flatter and more transparent, great execution will become even more important. And within execution, there are many examples of how we innovated. For our mobile payment business in Europe, we were the first ones to launch the technology to accept credit card transactions with the ‘chip and PIN’ solution.