Her passion convinced Gojek to hire her

It’s hard enough to secure a role in the upper management of a top-tier company. What’s even harder is getting hired for a position that doesn’t yet exist.

That’s what Tanah Sullivan, head of sustainability at Indonesia’s GoTo Group, managed to do. In 2020, her passion for advocating sustainability was so strong that it convinced Gojek’s founders to create a role for her at the company.

On this episode of How to Get a Job at a Unicorn, Sullivan discusses the pivotal moments in her career that led her to join the Indonesian tech giant and shares advice for anyone looking to join a billion-dollar company at the upper management level.

Timecodes:

00:00 – The definition of a dream job
01:24 – How to get a job made for you at a unicorn
02:05 – What it means to be the head of sustainability
03:54 – Tanah Sullivan didn’t come from the startup world
05:05 – How stressful it was to decide what to do for her career
06:09 – Setting out to become a diplomat
08:33 – Feeling jaded with the public policy sector
10:38 – Joining the World Economic Forum
12:37 – Meeting Gojek
16:54 – Showcasing her passion
17:58 – Tips for anyone hoping to join GoTo Group

Host:

• Peter Bithos, CEO of Seek Asia, the parent company of JobStreet and JobsDB in Southeast Asia

Featured Interviewee:

• Tanah Sullivan, head of sustainability, GoTo Group

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JobStreet by Seek Asia is Southeast Asia’s leading online jobs portal. Visit JobStreet now to find your dream job.

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Episode Transcript:

Peter Bithos (VO):
A dream job. Everyone talks about it. But what is it?

I like to think of a dream job as one in which you’re not only treated well, paid a lot, doing something you like, but one where you have the opportunity to work on something that really, really matters – something that could make a real difference in the world.

That’s why I think that Tanah Sullivan has what could very well be the coolest job in Asia – no, strike that – the coolest job in the world.

Tanah Sullivan:
You know, look, I’m not going to lie, it is probably the coolest gig haha.

Peter Bithos:
That’s right, it makes me jealous, that’s for sure.

Tanah Sullivan:
I’m going to own it. So in the beginning, I had joined Gojek as the first head of sustainability.

Peter Bithos (VO):
Yup, you heard right. Back in October 2020, Gojek hired Tanah as its head of sustainability. Then, after the Indonesia-headquartered super app merged with local ecommerce behemoth Tokopedia, Tanah became the head of sustainability for the new merged entity GoTo Group.

And the best part of it is that Tanah’s role didn’t exist before she joined the company – it was literally made for her.

From JobStreet and Tech in Asia, this is How to Get a Job at a Unicorn, a podcast where I talk to employees at Asia’s top tech companies to find out exactly how they landed their gigs.

I’m Peter Bithos, CEO of Seek Asia, parent company of JobStreet and jobsDB around the region, and in this episode, I’m going to tell you the story of how Tanah managed to get a job – and such a high-level one, at that – carved out for her at Indonesia’s top unicorn and Southeast Asia’s third most-valuable startup.

But first, I know what you’re thinking: What does a head of sustainability even do?

Peter Bithos:
What does head of sustainability entail? I’m assuming it’s not business sustainability, but what is it?

Tanah Sullivan:
Well, you could argue it is business sustainability, Peter haha.

Peter Bithos:
That’s true.

Tanah Sullivan:
Yeah, so it’s covering – for those who are familiar with it – it’s covering environmental, social, governance – ESG – performance for GoTo Group, and it ranges from everything from the kind of black and white environmental impact that our company has and our ecosystem to the social impact that we have. And I mean that in less so of a traditional CSR perspective and more of a millions of drivers, partners, merchants partners, sellers that we work with, do we have a systematic and strategic way of measuring and improving the income generating opportunities for them, their livelihoods for the long term, their economic resilience, in particular, especially, which was heightened during the pandemic. And so that’s kind of covering the social part, which also includes diversity inclusion internally, which is something very close, obviously, to my heart.

To, then, the governance aspects, which is, you know, the kind of infrastructure of the company itself and how we integrate ESG into the company’s DNA and governance mechanisms. So making sure, for example, the entire leadership are not just aware, but are co-owning these mandates with me because, ultimately, it’s the business units who are responsible for the implementation of a lot of the kind of roadmaps that we’ve built out for 2030.

Peter Bithos (VO):
Like I said: dream job. But Tanah didn’t come from the startup world. In fact, her background was in public policy.

Tanah’s Canadian, but she grew up in various places around Asia, spending most of that time in Indonesia – she’s half Indonesian on her mother’s side. In university, she studied political science, eventually working her way up to a master’s degree in international politics and political economy – try saying that 10 times fast.

But how exactly did she go from that to working for a US$30 billion tech company in Indonesia? I mean, her resume at this point looks more like that of a future policymaker or a diplomat than that of a startup executive. Well, the humble person that Tanah is, she says that sometimes life just happens.

Tanah Sullivan:
Peter, I think you’re making an assumption that I was particularly strategic about my career decisions haha.

Peter Bithos:
I think that’s the point. If you weren’t, that’s OK. Because I think a lot of people out there, they’re, like, “Oh my God, what do I want to do in five years?” And, “I don’t have a career plan,” and this and that – it’s OK, right?

Tanah Sullivan:
Exactly.

Peter Bithos:
How did you start out?

Tanah Sullivan:
I mean, look, it was so stressful for me in the beginning, you know? Because I knew what I was passionate about: I knew I wanted to help people, I wanted to work with people.

So my background’s in political, I wanted to actually go into the foreign service, which is what I did. And so I’m half, as I mentioned before, my mom’s Indonesian –

Peter Bithos:
But why did you want to go to the foreign service? What was it about –

Tanah Sullivan:
I wanted to be a diplomat. I’ve always been kind of a strong communicator and, as I mentioned, I love interacting with people. And on top of that, I saw kind of the impact of public policy. I saw how important it was in some of the challenges and the issues that, you know, I had grown up seeing, growing up in Singapore. So that’s the other thing: I grew up in quite a few different countries – Singapore, Oman, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia – and so seeing all these kind of unique contextual challenges that were in these countries and how different they were and how they impacted all the different… you know, all the people’s lives, I saw what I thought – what I believe – was the most powerful tool, which was public policy. And so that’s how you can make real change.

Peter Bithos (VO):
So Tanah set out on her road to becoming a diplomat, with the first step in that journey being a career in foreign services. Now the question was: Which country would she work for?

Tanah Sullivan:
That’s a good question. I applied… so I wanted to work for the foreign service in Australia because that’s where I was based at the time and I kind of had the most reference points, even though I didn’t grow up there, I did have the most reference points to.

But, you know, I thought what the heck, I’ll also try for the Canadian foreign service because I can. And sadly, very devastatingly, I didn’t get into the Australian one, but I did get into the Canadian one.

And it’s a funny story because when I had to do my security clearance for it, I actually met with the head of security at the time for what was known as DFAIT – the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade – in Ottawa. And he looked at me, he was, like, “You know, I’ve never… when my team brought me your file, we don’t even understand why you’re Canadian,” because I’m a Canadian who was not born in Canada and never lived in Canada, who was also born to a Canadian, my father, who was not born in Canada and has never lived in Canada. He’s, like, “We’re so confused, why do you want to work for the Canadian government?”

Peter Bithos (VO):
Despite how unusual it was, her security clearance checked out and Tanah spent the first couple of years of her career in the Canadian foreign services based in Japan, eventually finding herself being moved back to Canada in Ottawa to work as a policy analyst and, later, a policy officer for things like nuclear security.

And while Tanah enjoyed the challenges of working in public policy, an opportunity to move closer to home soon came knocking.

Tanah Sullivan:
At the time there was a lot of job openings coming up in Australia as they were preparing for the G20 Summit in 2014 and they were looking, funnily enough, for someone to work in trade and investment as the liaison officer in Indonesia, and I was, like, “That’s me.”

Peter Bithos (VO):
So Tanah moved back over to this side of the world, leading trade and investment facilitation for businesses in Queensland to and from Southeast Asia and China. But after three years in that gig, Tanah found she wasn’t making the impact that she’d yearned for when she started out.

Tanah Sullivan:
I got pretty jaded, right? I mean, you write policy brief after policy brief, you sit in your office and you do thousands of these things, you know, and you work with ministers, and some are great, some are not so great. But you’re completely beholden to the government that is elected into power, right? Every four years, your department or your ministry’s kind of direction would change depending on the individual that was there or the administration that was elected. I mean, everybody knows, government’s not perfect, but at the time, I thought, you know, it’s so bureaucratic, it’s really getting dry, it’s getting the same old, same old thing, and you just don’t see change. You see these policy briefs come through your desk and then disappear into the night.

Peter Bithos (VO):
You know, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard of that kind of sentiment across my career. So often, I’ve heard of people who were in the private sector go to work for an NGO or in the government, but when they get there, they realize that it’s really, really slow. In fact, it’s sometimes downright byzantine, beholden to agendas, and then it dawns on them that, actually, the private sector – pointed in the right direction by the right leadership – can make a difference in a compelling way much, much faster.

And that was something that Tanah was beginning to realize as well. But she couldn’t just jump into it. After all, she’d spent seven whole years working in the public sector. Luckily for her, through the G20 Summit in 2014, she’d gotten to work with the chairman of the B20 or Business 20 – one of the five streams that advise the G20 leaders on policies as they relate to, in the B20’s case, the private sector.

And that connection helped Tanah get her foot in the door at the World Economic Forum.

Tanah Sullivan:
So I got to know, quite well, the chairs and the working groups and so forth, and so he said, “Hey, I go to this little meeting called Davos every year, it’s hosted by an organization, it’s a non-profit called the World Economic Forum, and they bring together all these business leaders and government leaders around the world, and they’re looking for someone to basically join their Asia Pacific team.”

Unbeknownst to me, the Asia Pacific team was a few people at the time covering everything from Mongolia, down to Australia, New Zealand, excluding China and Japan, but still a pretty big scope.

Peter Bithos (VO):
So Tanah joined the World Economic Forum – or as some would say, the WEF – leading its Asia Pacific business engagement in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, on topics ranging from energy transition and combating deforestation to circular economy and supporting the growth of SMEs – just to name a few.

It was then that Tanah met her now employer.

Tanah Sullivan:
So while I was at the forum, I was responsible for Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and engaging companies and business leaders from those markets. And of course, you know, for me, Indonesia, very close to home, I was basically there once every two months or so and kind of building these relationships with people.

And you know, the Forum has quite strict criteria for joining. So you have to be kind of a Fortune 500-caliber company. And when I looked at the kind of business landscape in Indonesia, I saw that, you know, you have your state-owned enterprises, you have your family owned businesses, the big conglomerates, but you also had this burgeoning kind of growing group of tech companies, which was really exciting and not something the Forum had historically engaged with, right?

And so I came back from one of these trips and I kind of made the case, internally – thank God I had a lot of support – but to say that, you know, these are the future drivers of Indonesia’s economic growth and it would be silly of us to ignore… not ignore, but, you know, to not engage them now, and ensure that we bring them into… because if we’re talking about topics like energy transition in Indonesia, for example, I mean, some of these companies even have the solutions to help, or the scale to help, implement or respond to these challenges very credibly.

So that was the kind of the case I made and it started building out from there and, of course, that’s how Gojek came into play, right? So that’s how I was introduced and met with the leadership from Gojek and got to fall in love with them over the years, and likewise with a lot of the other tech companies in the region as well. And we build up kind of a regional tech community and I got to know them quite well and –

Peter Bithos:
So how did the conversation come up… like, at some point, somebody – either you went to them or they went to you – like, were they creating a role, head of sustainability, and then they came to you and a lot of others? Or did it happen organically through your conversation and it just ended up being you? What happened?

Tanah Sullivan:
I would say… you’re giving away all my secrets, Peter haha.

Peter Bithos:
Oh, that’s part of this podcast, you know, people want to know.

Tanah Sullivan:
I’m kidding, no, I just… yeah, I mean, look, it was an organic conversation with myself and, at the time, one of the co-CEOs of Gojek, Andre, and they already had this idea of building out –

Peter Bithos:
OK, so they already had a mission or a purpose of “We’re going to make a difference in sustainability, we’re going to make sure we’re a sustainable enterprise”?

Tanah Sullivan:
Actually, no, I would say that Gojek was born, was conceived, already with social impact kind of at its core. And I know a lot of companies say this and, you know, a mission, a purpose, and so forth, but if you actually look at it, like a lot of companies in this region, they were trying to solve a real problem. And that was the congestion in cities like Jakarta by giving people back time that they were losing through the horrendous traffic conditions, but also providing a more systematic way of income generation for now, I mean, millions of drivers that we have.

And lo and behold, over 10 years later, it’s an incredible model. It works very well in the Indonesian context and market. And so I think at that point in time, Gojek had been thinking of how do we more systematically and strategically approach this, right? We talked about social impact being kind of in our mission, but what does it look like to do this in a credible and according to global standards way?

So I was just trying to bring to Gojek kind of a brainstorm: What were some of the best practices that I had seen across the region, globally, across the industry? And it kind of happened organically from there.

Peter Bithos:
And did you ever interview formally? Or was it just an organic conversation that evolved?

Tanah Sullivan:
I mean, on the surface of organic conversation, looking at what best practice looks like and what it looks like, really, within a company’s context and the function and so forth. And I did all that thinking, “I would love to do this, I would so love to do this,” but I’m just trying to help them out.

And, you know, as I said, I fell in love with the team and the leadership at Gojek and, ultimately, you know, as I was going through this process, I thought, “You know, I just really want them to find the right person because whoever fills this role, there’s so much impact and there’s so much responsibility, and if it’s not me, that’s OK.”

Peter Bithos (VO):
Luckily for Tanah, the Gojek leadership saw – probably what you’ve heard – that not only did she have a good grasp of their business and what it’s all about, but she was also completely aligned with their purpose and their mission.

Now, you might be thinking out there, it doesn’t matter as much if you’re a full-stack developer, a digital marketeer, or a finance expert, but trust me when I say that companies – at least the more innovative ones, the ones you probably want to work for – look for people who, first, know and then, second, are aligned with and passionate about what they’re trying to do as companies.

And it was because Tanah’s care for Gojek’s mission shone through that they offered her a position as their very first head of sustainability.

Oh, hot tip for anyone out there thinking about pursuing a career like Tanah’s: she’s hiring.

Tanah Sullivan:
The two people I have on my team right now are internal transfers – amazing, amazing individuals – so now it’s time to kind of grow the team and start doing some external recruitment. So this is very exciting for us.

Peter Bithos:
You know, I’m sure a lot of people would love to get onto your team after listening to this podcast. Thinking about your interview and thinking about when you interview, what do you think are some of the things that got you over the line or things that you think about in your team that you’re putting together and put together got them over the line that you could share?

Tanah Sullivan:
Look, I mean, someone with a little bit of sustainability experience. I mean, it doesn’t mean that they have to have been, you know, GRI standards certified or, you know, have previous experience auditing ESG reports or things like that – it helps, definitely, but, ultimately, I’m looking for someone with some heart and some soul and some stomach for this because it’s very much, you know, rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty.

We’re really looking for someone who’s not afraid of… you know, who can work at all levels, right? You set the high-level strategy, we work with our board, with our leaders, senior leadership, on a regular basis, and that requires some high-level thinking. But then you also have to be willing to kind of get down in the weeds as well and make sure you really understand how this business, the different business lines, and how we operate so that we can be in the best position to support those business lines and implement our big sustainability goals.

Peter Bithos (VO):
It’s not often you meet someone whose job makes such a difference to not only the company they work for and the country they’re in but for the rest of the world, and that’s what makes Tanah’s job such a cool one in my book. So I hope you’ve had as good a time listening to her story as I did when I first heard it.

Anyway, that’s all the time we have for today. Thank you so much for listening. How to Get a Job at a Unicorn is a podcast by Tech in Asia, produced in partnership with us over here at JobStreet. If you’re looking for a job, find us at jobstreet.com or jobsdb.com, depending on your geography and, hopefully, we’ll get you started at your own dream job real soon.

Special thanks, of course, to Tanah Sullivan for sharing her unbelievably amazing career journey. If you wanna connect with her, we’ll include some links to her LinkedIn profile in the show notes down below. And special thanks to Nat Fetalvero, our trusted podcast producer with us today.

This is the last episode of How to Get a Job at a Unicorn. Thank you so much for listening. But if you like what you hear, give us a follow and rate us five stars on whatever app you’re listening on. If people love it enough, we might just make more of these – who knows? I hope we do. Make sure to check out our other episodes too – we’ve got people from Grab and Lalamove talking about how they landed their gigs and sharing some tips for anyone who wants to join a unicorn.

But that’s it for this episode. My name’s Peter Bithos. Thanks for joining, and I hope you join us again soon.