A closer look at the Lazada mafia

When Alibaba bought a US$1 billion controlling stake in Lazada five years ago, many anticipated the birth of an ecommerce juggernaut in Southeast Asia.

Between 2018 and 2020, Alibaba injected about US$4.4 billion into the ecommerce firm, pumping in more than US$2 billion in 2020 alone.

While Lazada’s journey hasn’t been smooth sailing, the company has churned out influential entrepreneurs. Ex-Lazada bosses and executives are now at the helm of notable tech companies like Branded Group, Vestiaire Collective, Pomelo, Ula, Aspire, and BukuKas, just to name a few.

Tech in Asia first chronicled the Lazada mafia network in 2019 and released an updated version in 2020. Our data was cited by a recent report published by Bain & Company and the Tech For Good Institute. A separate analysis by Asia Partners found 385 Lazada alumni members who are founders, co-founders, or CEOs in Southeast Asia.

As members of this network have grown in size and racked up hundreds of millions in funding, we want to present a new analysis to capture the growing influence of Lazadians.

The league of extraordinary Lazadians

This time, our analysis consists of 212 former full-time Lazada employees, who were picked randomly from LinkedIn. Most are co-founders or founders, with the exception of former Lazada co-founder Max Bittner (now CEO at Vestiaire Collective) and former Lazada board member Nicholas Cator (now managing partner at Venturi Partners).

Out of the 202 companies in our sample, 73% were founded after Alibaba’s acquisition of Lazada in 2016, with most of these startups operating in Southeast Asia.

We estimate that about 35% of the alumni founders in this sample don’t come from this region.

Most alumni startups are in the pre-series and series A stages, which hints at the nascency of the Lazada mafia.

Rise of the elites

Before 2016, the majority of Lazada alumni founders were non-managerial and middle-management staff. In 2018, however, the number of ex-upper management employees in the network jumped, measuring 3x higher than the annual average between 2012 to 2021.

Striking out

A mafia-powered super app?