CEO of Hong Kong’s hottest startup: ‘I’m the bottleneck of the company’

Steven Lam, co-founder of GoGoVan (second from left)

When Steven Lam speaks, people listen. The co-founder and CEO of GoGoVan is a soundbite assassin who seizes you with surprising quips.

Like this one: “I always tell my team: I’m the bottleneck of the company, because the company is growing much faster than I am.” He was talking to a packed hall at the Forbes Under 30 Summit in Singapore.

What a strange thing for a CEO to say. His employees were surprised, thinking that everyone in the team – not just him – was struggling to keep up with the company’s growth.

But Steven’s larger point was this: CEOs must acknowledge their own weaknesses and convince more talented people to share their vision.

Royston Tay, a fellow CEO who sat on stage with Steven, said it best: “I think the challenge as a CEO or founder of a company is knowing: ‘hey, I think I’ve done this to the best that I can, and I need to step away from this.’”

Royston co-founded Zopim, which was acquired by Zendesk in 2014. He shared: “My co-founders like to always remind me – because I started off as an engineer working on the product – that they promoted me out of harm’s way, so that I wouldn’t do harm to the code. And that’s why the company’s successful.”

Pride of Hong Kong

Steven is a lifetime entrepreneur. As a student, he sold DIY computers, hotdogs, refurbished bicycles, and more.

GoGoVan is his most successful rodeo yet, and it’s no ordinary company. The “Uber for logistics” is one of the hottest startups from Hong Kong, having expanded to 13 cities in Asia. Its network of 150,000 drivers have processed over 20 million orders since it was started in 2013.

These are small numbers in the larger scheme of things. But it shows promise. Promising enough that GoGoVan raised a series C round from heavyweight investors, including Alibaba’s US$130 million Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund.

The startup has put Hong Kong on the world map. In an Ask Me Anything session on Tech in Asia, Steven talked about how people used to tell him there were no examples of great startups coming from Hong Kong.

Our company almost went bankrupt three times.

“So no one believed in a local startup. But after two years of running GoGoVan, we made a brand that was well-known by the locals, who keep referencing it as a new generation of local business,” he said.

Yet despite raising millions in funding, Steven remained thrifty. He told us last December: “I worked in the office every Saturday and Sunday, and we don’t have people cleaning the office. So I would do it myself, like emptying the trash can, washing mugs, stuff like that.”

What being CEO means