In Part III of our "Hari-Hari Awal" or "Early Days" series, we interview Ajey Gore, Gojek's former Group CTO. Now an Operating Partner at Sequoia Capital, Ajey describes as "largely unplanned" his career progression from his early days in Bangalore to Indonesia's most important engineering leadership position. He instead followed this progression much like "water flows across a floor". Ajey is extremely pleased with how Indonesia's engineering community has evolved since his involvement in the region began many years ago. Not only does it more aggressively embrace new technologies, but the community is now much more "self-organising and self-governing."
In Part III of our "Hari-Hari Awal" or "Early Days" series, we interview Ajey Gore, Gojek's former Group CTO. Now an Operating Partner at Sequoia Capital, Ajey describes as "largely unplanned" his career progression from his early days in Bangalore to Indonesia's most important engineering leadership position. He instead followed this progression much like "water flows across a floor". Ajey is extremely pleased with how Indonesia's engineering community has evolved since his involvement in the region began many years ago. Not only does it more aggressively embrace new technologies, but the community is now much more "self-organising and self-governing."
ALAN 0:11
Welcome to the 32nd episode of Season Two of the Indo Tekno podcast. Selamat datang semuanya. I'm Alan Hellawell, Founder of tech consultancy Gizmo Advisors, and Venture Partner at Alpha JWC ventures. Our "Hari Hari Awal", or "Early Days" series has featured tech leadership such as Leon Alpha Edison of Tokopedia and Kevin Aluwi of Gojek, both of whom have played a seminal role in helping to build the thriving ecosystem that we see today. One individual whom we have sought to bring on to the Indo Tekno series for quite a while now spent more than five years as the group CTO of Gojek. Ajey Gore is now an operating partner with Sequoia Capital based in Singapore, Ajey a true privilege and pleasure to finally have you on the podcast.
AJEY GORE 0:58
Hey Alan. Thanks a lot for actually inviting me. This is one of those things, which I always feel pretty happy to share the learnings or share the mistakes which I have done. So thanks a lot for inviting me.
ALAN 1:09
You're very welcome. So Ajey, you're originally from India, but your career has led you pretty far afield to places such as the UK, the US and more recently, Southeast Asia. Was it always part of your game plan to work overseas?
AJEY GORE 1:23
No, not really, actually. I always that life flows as water on the floor. If you throw water on the floor, it finds it way. And you can't predict where it is going to go unless you know the slopes. So I did not know the slopes. And every time something very unusual came in, I ended up joining that. So starting with Bangalore, I went to UK, came back to Bangalore, then moved to Pune. Then I moved to Chicago, again moved back to Pune. So it has been a worldwide tour. I have spent a lot of time in India. And mostly now I can say I've spent almost the same amount of time outside India as well. But till five years back, I spent only like two or three years outside, but the rest of my time was spent in different cities in India.
Excellent. You're giving off a very strong "Bruce Lee vibe" in your reference to being like water.
(Laughs). No, no, because there is a saying that "man proposes and God disposes", or something like that. Going with the flow is the most appropriate or important thing you can do in life. Because for me, especially planning brings a lot of anxiety, because then you start worrying or the plan will go well or not go well. And if everything is planned, then you kind of lose the happiness or joy of spontaneous moments, which happen suddenly. And then when you look back, those small things actually shape your life in a very different way. So yeah, that's what my thought process has been.
ALAN 2:48
Fantastic. Well, following the flow of water, I noticed that early in your career, you were at NCST Mumbai, and that was between 1999 and 2001. You describe it as the "world's first multilingual virtual classroom project, with an aim to provide education to remote areas with low bandwidth at that time". We still seem to be trying to "crack that nut" 20 years onward. Can you share with us some of your experiences from that era?
AJEY GORE 3:17
So in 1999, the internet was just catching on. And we used to have 96 kbps dial-up to Mumbai from Bangalore, and maybe it became 256 kbps later on and then have 1 mbps. And so what we did; we kind of developed something on top of IRC protocol. If people don't know what IRC looks like today, it usually looks like Slack today. But IRC did exist at that point of time. And we kind of created a superset on top of IRC protocol, which would allow teachers to let students join in. And we had a virtual whiteboard where they could draw and type things and have answers to questions. But it was mostly a supplemental project to provide classroom access, while teachers can't go to those places and where they can teach. So that was the idea. And it pretty much ended up as a research project. We did work on it for maybe three, four years, even after I left; and we did deploy it to multiple places. But soon the internet boom caught on. And the idea which was very amazing at that point of time soon got replaced by voice conferences, voice calls and many more better things by 2003 or 2004. But back in 1999 or 2001, it was an amazing thing to do.
ALAN 4:33
So we can legitimately call that "Edutech 1.0". Now Ajey, you joined Gojek through the 2016 acquisition of CodeIgnition, which is a company that you founded in New Delhi, I think in April of 2013. What is the story behind that transaction?
AJEY GORE 4:50
It was not a transaction. It was more like a marriage; a kind of arranged marriage but we fell in love. Let me put it that way. That kind of romanticises a little bit. So back in 2013, I wanted to start my own stuff. And we started a cloud automation and scaling company. At that point of time, one of the things which I realised is that the last mile of software delivery was not yet developed. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which is like CI and CD tools, were still not that much popular. They are coming up, but they were like, just at a nascent stage. And I worked at ThoughtWorks for a while and ThoughtWorks was very big in CI, CD and last mile deployment, DevOps and whatnot. And I was pretty active. So that's where we started CodeIgnition to provide last mile delivery. On the other hand, we had a sister company called C42, which is run by my friend Sidhu, and they were doing the software development. So we kind of became very good complementary parties to holistic software delivery. And we started working with a bunch of companies. And at one point of time, we started working with a lot of Sequoia companies like Tokopedia. We worked with Byju's as well, in those days. And given that, we ended up working with Gojek as well. And after like three to six months, Nadiem (Makarim, Founder of Gojek) said: "Why don't you guys come and join us"? And having worked with them for three to six months, we knew the people, we knew what we were getting into. And one of the things which was good for us was that we would gain the amazing experience of building something from the start; very, very early stages. They were only six months into their app development and the app going online. They had already found a very crazy product-market-fit. And they were dealing with a lot of growth issues, and scaling issues. So we found our sweet spot over there, and it looked like an amazing opportunity. Looking back, it was one of the most fantastic opportunities for us, something that we built or we created. So that was the ambition, to go create something impactful, which would change the social fabric of the community, which Gojek did indeed, in a lot of sense, right? So we shut down CodeIgnition, and we joined Gojek. And after five years, the rest is history. But it has been a fantastic ride.
ALAN 6:57
Very good to hear. And clearly this was one of the first of what is now many examples of partnering between Indonesia's massive online opportunity on one hand, and India's decades-old global leadership and software and engineering. On the face of it and from what you just described, it would indeed seem to be a match made in heaven. But Ajey where does this India-Indonesia partnership work exceedingly well? And where do many of the biggest challenges lie?
AJEY GORE 7:26
Look, when we are dealing with humans, one of the most amazing challenges we have is weaving the human social fabric together. And that actually lies on top of communication. So I think one of the most important things was communication. The good thing for us was that since we always worked in distributed environments, because of our history working with a lot of remote clients, a lot of US clients, a lot of Australian and European clients; we always knew how to make it work. So we understood that there would be the same problems that we'd face over here as well. So we went around solving the communication gaps. That was the first one. Second one is that we solved for proximity. That means that every one of us would actually fly every week across India or across Indonesia. So we would have Indonesians coming to India, and our Indian family going to Indonesia. And they got treated as family. Since I was their group CTO, it was very much apparent and required of me to be in Indonesia as well. So I would spend 50% of my time in Indonesia, in the early days, to the extent where I was spending my weekends over there as well. And it was simply because if you look back and see, there are a lot of things which we find very normal in today's circumstances. We were creating those cadences and discipline at that point of time, in terms of meeting people virtually, making them comfortable, putting some ground rules around those. So what we focused on was mostly around communication, and making sure people understood each other. And that helped us in terms of making teams together move forward, and move forward as one team. We also knew that we can't create silos. So we never had a siloed team, either in Indonesia, or in India. We always had this working from the Day One. So people knew what is going on. And we try to provide enough face time with each counterpart so that they can actually accelerate that. So those are the things which I think are still relevant for anybody who is trying to do to distributed computing, or distributed development or distributed teams. But at the core of it lies the communication and the way you put the virtual experience to the in-person experience. That bridge is super important.
ALAN 9:43
Understood. And would you go so far as to say interpersonal trust was the "pot at the end of the rainbow", and if so, was that challenging to really build trust across borders and across cultures?
AJEY GORE 9:58
Actually, I think trust is given. A lot of time we say we earn trust. And with distributed teams, in the distributed way we work, even in startups, the trust is given from the Day One. So that's what we did. We did give trust from Day One for very simple things like, there is no leave approval required. You can take infinite medical leaves. Or you can take leave at any point of time. You don't need approvals. Kind of the simple examples. On the other hand, we did not demand who can deploy who cannot deploy (software). We created automation. So anybody can go and deploy software. We also made sure that we don't have to go and create different kinds of meetings for different things. We kept almost everything in the public domain, so that we actually would send out our business metrics to everybody in the product engineering department so that people understand whatever they working on, they can see the impact. So the trust is given. And it is given by transparency-by-virtue, and not transparency-by-requirement. So building on transparency, trust just comes by default. And once that happens, then the magic happens. Let me say that
ALAN 11:03
That's fantastic. I don't think that always is the case. So, it's very impressive that all of these things came into play. And I assume that transparency and trust from the top were elemental to making this all play out as well as it did. Now Ajey, you took your first title as Head of Engineering at Gojek in June of 2015. Can you share with us some more of your recollections of that period?
AJEY GORE 11:27
Oh, wow. Ah. We were kind of failing every day. Or w can say we were "passing" every day. We were successful every day. That's why we were failing every day. Because every day our traffic would increase. We were facing around five to 10% growth week-on-week. So whatever was 5,000 bookings a day, it would be 5500 the next day or next week; and the next week is going to be 6,000 then 7,000. It's just gonna increase. So that was our success. Gojek, found a crazy product-market fit. There was a real need for the product. So given that, we're trying to change the engine of a car, from like, say an 800cc car to like a 2500cc car; to trying to put together five cars to make it a rocket and then replacing that with a rocket. And then trying to do something else. Because we can't put 10 cars together to make a rocket. So we are constantly replacing, changing things, responding to demand. Yet, we were trying to balance the strategic vision every day. And the chaos was kind of the "cause of creation" as well. And that brought everybody so much together. Because if the product goes down, then everybody is all hands-on-deck. And if that's every day, people know what you're going through. So everybody's best intentions came out. First thing is that. The second thing was that everybody's camaraderie came it. The third thing was that we were trying to solve real problems faced by real people. And we didn't have to go and put a hypothesis; whether this is gonna work or not. We were like so lucky that we could put out experiment, and then could see if it works or not. If it doesn't work, then tomorrow, we are ready with another solution. The day after we are ready for another solution. And that constant creation and chaos. I just can't explain how beautiful it was. It was tiring. But the adrenaline rush was so much that we never felt that we were tired. We actually never that we were tired. It was a crazy ride. And given those days, you have to bring structure to the chaos. You have to leave some part as chaotic as it is. But you have to bring other parts as a structure. So you need to have this forward looking vision while you are trying to fix things which are already in bad shape. How do you do that? How do you balance that out? And that was the amazing learning, which I had personally in my view, and a lot of us had. None of us had done this in the past. But we could not fail our driver partners, and we could not fail our customers. That sheer responsibility was the main driving factor. So those days were just, what do you say, "mesmerising" in a lot of sense.
ALAN 14:01
Well Ajey, if you don't mind, share with us the most challenging period of your career at Gojek.
AJEY GORE 14:07
All of it. All of it, dude. There was not a single month where I did not face challenge. You know what happens. It's like when you're growing crazy. For example, in 2016, we launched around 14 products in nine months. That means we were launching one product every two-to-three weeks. Like in January, February; I remember we launched GoMart; then in March or April, we launched GoCar. And then we were launching our merchant application. Then we are launching our GoMart and GoMassage and all this stuff. It was just one-after-another. So first, we were going through this management of mismanagement, or management of chaos. 2016 was a year of challenge in terms of how do we put all these big pieces together. So I would say that it was like learning to manage things. Once you learn to manage things, then you have to scale those things up as well. And what works from 0-to-10, and from 10-to-100, and 100-to-1000 does not work in each of those stages. So you need to change your toolbox every time. We learned how important it was to actually set the objectives, how important actually it is to understand and start learning to say "no". Because what we were doing at that point of time, we were looking at an unstructured marketplace. We were making a structure and were making sense out of it. And we were iterating very fast, because we cannot wait to get to perfection first. So given all this stuff, first, we had the challenge of scaling. Second, we had the challenge of managing that at-scale and operating it out. And third, we had the challenge of working through a very large team, and making sure that the scope, making sure that the product strategy, that all the product pieces, dependent streams, and also the business vision, align together. So our meetings became quarterly. Our strategy or vision became like six monthly or yearly, instead of quarterly or monthly. So those changes brought in the maturity. But every year, we were faced with absolutely different challenges than earlier years.
ALAN 16:12
Wow. Sounds like you were "drinking from the proverbial fire hydrant", every day of your career there.
AJEY GORE 16:19
All the time!
ALAN 16:20
Now, can you tell us about the absolute pinnacle of your career, your highest achievement at Gojek. There must be one anecdote that you will share with your grandchildren. And what is that?
AJEY GORE 16:32
I had a "pinnacle of mistakes". I can tell you that. I had so many mistakes. So I always say I might be a package of one or two success stories, which is Gojek and it was not me. It was the team. But I am like a "cargo full of mistakes" of what we should not do. I think success is not mine. I wouldn't be anyone if the team were not there. I'm not trying to be humble or whatever. But I think success is always collective. The startup is a team sport. And I don't think that a single one person should be able to claim that "he did that". The only success for me in terms of making Gojek what it became, is to assemble the team. I was very lucky and very fortunate to have so many good friends and colleagues who came and joined me later on. For example, the early days of the Gojek team was all my friends, acquaintances and people I would meet on Twitter. I would talk to them. And they decided to come and join us. At that point of time, we were not such a big brand in 2015 2016. We were still not very big brand compared to other competitors in our marketplace. We had players from the US and other players coming and playing in the same level playing field. So given that, I think one of the most successful things I can tell people which I always say, is that in your life, if you "earn" people, the rest of everything will fall in place. Just keep "earning" good people in life. That's what I would say still. And I'm still striving and still learning to do that.
ALAN 17:57
Great, great. Let's change it up a bit. Now Ajey, we've heard multiple definitions of what a "super app" is on this Indo Tekno podcast. How would you describe it from the perspective of a CTO?
AJEY GORE 18:10
Hmm. I think a super app, by definition is basically a bunch of apps. But why would those bunch of apps live together? In my view, super app has two things. One, we found this unstructured marketplace. And we created structure out of it. The first thing is that. And that resulted in a very big ecosystem. So I think the super app is the culmination of a bunch of unstructured marketplaces, a bunch of daily chores, which you need to do, and creating ecosystem out of it. And if people can live in that ecosystem, if it can become the operating system of their day-to-day life, then it becomes much, much easier. I used to say earlier, we "help people buy time". We give their time back by standing in line for food on their behalf, by shopping on their behalf, by getting cleaning done on their behalf. So we give that time back to people. But later on, we kind of change our saying. "We are there to serve people for whatever they need". And it can be a different ecosystem for a different kind of scenario. But in a country like Indonesia, or India or even Singapore, the super app is an ecosystem which provides a convenience of outsourcing or giving away your daily chores to somebody else. And taking care of that. In this specific context. The what a super app is. But a gaming software app can be a one-stop venue for gaming. Our super app was one stop venue for your daily life.
ALAN 19:41
I like that phrase "we help people buy time". I've never heard that phraseology. Now Ajey, I also wanted to ask you a couple of qualitative or subjective questions. Now I used to cover some of the outsourcing greats from India such as Infosys, TCS and others many years ago. I then spent a substantial amount of my career looking at China. Now back then I used to share with investors that the average Indian engineer seemed to gravitate more toward mastery of multiple programming languages, while his or her Chinese counterpart would often go really deep and do only one or two languages. How can we compare and contrast the Indian engineer today with the Indonesian engineer in this regard?
AJEY GORE 20:25
Hmm, really interesting question actually. I think it all depends on exposure and the way industry has evolved. If you look at India in the early 80's when TCS and Infosys and the Wipro's were starting up, they were offshore development agencies for their offshore counterparts. What happens when you become an offshore development agency for an onshore counterpart is that your onshore counterpart kind of changes when the project is over. And for example, one client is doing a project in Java and a second client is doing project in dotnet. And a third client is doing project in something else. While they create a Centre of Excellence, a person gets exposed to different thought processes and different technologies and different methods of doing things across his career. And that's what happened in India. The majority of services were offshore centres for multiple organisations. In the case of China or even Indonesia, Indonesia was mostly the banking and petroleum industries. So people will use the standardised software and a standardised language, which happens to be in most cases Java. That's what they are exposure is. But if you look at Indonesian engineers today, all Indonesian engineers, at least in Gojek or even Tokopedia or even Bukalapak; they know 2, 3 or 4 languages because of their exposure. Also, in the startup world or a product business is such that you don't use only one language, because "when all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail". But what you do, if you think language is a tool to get something done, then you use a different kind of tool for performing different kinds of tasks. So that means you are forced, or you are naturally exposed to, different environments. And that's what has happened with India. And that is exactly what happened with Indonesia, five to 10 years back as well. In China, I met a bunch of people from different startups, and they actually dabble in multiple languages now. In the early days, it was not like that. And even still, if you go to companies or people who are still working on one thing for 10 years in let's say IBM Global Services or some part of Infosys or some part of TCS, they'll still be working on one language. So that is also true over there. So I think it's a function of exposure, and a function of tools and frameworks than a geography. And because India was an outsourcing centre, India had that opportunity much, much earlier than anybody else.
ALAN 22:51
Sure. And so I guess my follow on question is: how do development teams in Indonesia work differently than in India?
AJEY GORE 22:59
In my view, I don't think that they work very differently at all. My exposure is only limited to Gojek. And we built the Gojek engine both in India and Indonesia in equal parts. And actually, we have more engineers in Indonesia compared to India now. So the thought process is the same. The fabric is the same. So I don't think that they work very differently. But earlier, the people who we used to get were working in a bank or somewhere else. And you don't use the newest tools. You don't use Cloud. You don't use the new stuff. But once you are exposed to that, things just change. And the startups in Indonesia have done that fantastically well. While I was at Gojek, Gojek actually acquired four startups in Indonesia. And we did not find them very, very different. So yeah, it was like that.
ALAN 23:45
Fantastic. So let's bring the story up to modern day. Ajey, Can you describe your current work at Sequoia Capital?
AJEY GORE 23:53
So when I was thinking to leave Gojek, at some point of time, Sequoia came up as well. And it was fantastic in a lot of senses. I'm basically a community builder. While I was in India, I built a Ruby community or devopsdays community or a gophercon community. We tried to do the same thing in Indonesia as well. We ran RubyCon in Indonesia. We did DevOps days. We also contributed in other ways. So I'm basically a community builder. I am basically a team builder. I love to bring community and people together. Given that, one of the unique things about Sequoia which appealed to me was that I can actually contribute back to a startup ecosystem by working with so many different quality startups. There are so many amazing product ideas. So what I do at Sequoia is very, very simple. I go meet people and see what they're building and see if we can help them, if we can partner with them. That is one part. And the second part is, once we partner with them, how can I help them by telling them my mistakes. As I always say, I tell them what not to do. I tell them: "If you do this, you will certainly fail because I have failed in the past and I have seen this failing 15 different ways". I also help them shape up their product teams. I help them with their product strategy, their technology strategy. So basically I'm helping our companies which we partner with, and helping our ecosystem by looking at whether we can partner with them or not. So both things go hand-in-hand. And that's where I spend a lot of time meeting with future founders, and also spending a lot of time with current product teams and current companies in terms of shaping up whatever I can, in terms of technology, strategy, product, data science, engineering, or even as simple as org structures.
ALAN 25:32
Fantastic. Ajey what have been the most dramatic changes that you've seen transpire in Southeast Asia's development community since you arrived years ago?
AJEY GORE 25:40
There are two or three things which have changed the development community. It has become much more "buzzing" in terms of adoption. We see immediate adoption of new technologies, and people are on the bleeding edge. I can say that. The first thing is that. Second, the community itself is very much self-organising and self-governing. There is a lot of good stuff around like meet-ups. There is a lot of good stuff around hosting technical conferences, a lot of good stuff around giving or "paying it forward" and giving back to the community. That is the second thing which has happened. I have seen so many groups like this. I have seen that the product engineering fabric which is getting weaved over here is very different than like five years ago. It is more what you would say crowdsourcing, more "let's do it together", and more "let me see what can I do for you". That attitude has seeped in so much, which is just amazing, where earlier it was not like that. So that is one thing that has happened. Second thing that I have seen is that a lot of companies, whether they're cloud companies, or enterprises, or VCs; they are nurturing the ecosystem very well. These are phenomenal times for the startup community or development community to go and build their ideas. There are a lot of good ideas. I believe that a lot of dev and deeptech SaaS tools and DevOps tools which can be built out of Singapore or Southeast Asia or India, which wasn't possible earlier. We have seen giants coming out of Singapore and Southeast Asia now, which is really, really amazing. Like, for example, at Sequoia, we run the Surge programme. And with the last two cohorts, we have seen more than 60% to 70% have been SaaS companies. That tells you that the majority of the developer community is actually thinking in terms of what is "buildable", what is "buy". Where we should build something, where we should buy something. And that has created a huge marketplace for creating a very developer-focused rich and vibrant community over here. And that is just amazing in the last three or four years. That change has been one single phenomenal change for me.
ALAN 27:41
Fantastic, very encouraging to hear this ongoing evolution and rising maturity, as you say, in Indonesia in the region. Ajey, really a treat to listen to one of the true "OG's" (old guards) of the tech world out here. From your early days as an engineering lead in India, to your present day work with Sequoia as an operating partner. I have to say your humility is also one of a kind. It's also so cool for me just to be able to speak to someone who's played such an elemental or fundamental role in the rise of what is now Indonesia's largest tech company. Thanks so much for joining us today.
AJEY GORE 28:17
Thanks a lot Alan. Glad you invited me and I'm super happy to be here. Just wanted to say, if there is anything else you need, just reach out to me for anything they have. I'm mostly reachable on Twitter, and I'm easily searchable as well. So thanks a lot for inviting me dude.
ALAN 28:29
You're very welcome. We hope our listeners have enjoyed today's episode. As always, please consider sharing any feedback that you have about the Indo Tekno podcast with us. Terima kasih telah mendengarkan. Sampai jumpa lagi!