A day in the life of Go-Jek’s VP of fraud

Photo credit: Go-Jek.

Day in the Life is a series where personalities in the Asian tech community recount what they do on a typical day. Read more from the series here.

I’m Nicole Zhu, the vice president of fraud at Go-Jek, and I run product, engineering, and operations teams out of Jakarta and Singapore. We ensure our tens of millions of customers and drivers can interact on a safe and stable platform.

In 2016, I moved to Southeast Asia from Silicon Valley to be a part of Go-Jek’s incredible growth story. Prior to that, I was the first PM at an AI software startup in the Valley, which was recently acquired by Cisco. A long time ago, I did my undergraduate and master’s degrees in engineering at Stanford University.

Here’s a day in my life now.

7 am: Wake up, run

At Go-Jek, we experiment and ship projects fast. My day can easily disappear, if I don’t carve out time for health. So in the mornings, I go for a run with my husband, write, or catch up with friends in a different timezone.

8/9 am: Take an ojek to work

Every morning, I use the Go-Jek app to call an ojek (motorcycle taxi) to go to work. When the driver arrives, I strap on a green helmet and hop on as a pillion rider. My journey to the office takes five minutes on an ojek, compared to 25 minutes in a car, as my ojek driver weaves through traffic and side roads.

My first time on an ojek was exhilarating. You get to interact with your surroundings and truly see the city, which you don’t feel behind a pane of glass in a car.

Morning rush hours: Emergency response with analysts

We take fraud seriously at Go-Jek. With millions of bookings on our platform, we fight issues such as when troublemakers make nuisance bookings, or when organized crime syndicates try to abuse our subsidies.