Article source: Medium, author: Steve Yegge, compiled by the heart of the machine
stayed in Google for almost 13 years, and finally, I decided to leave. Before
, I never imagined that this moment would happen. I always thought I would die at Google—either by choking on a free brownie or having a heart attack by YouTube’s increasingly bizarre policies.
It is not easy for people to leave Google. Even at 20 years old, Google remains one of the most desirable companies on the planet, no matter what your metric.
I have many experiences that I would like to share. The company probably won’t mind me writing these things on my blog because the company has never explicitly prohibited them. But despite this, I still received indirect pressure from various VPs.
Eventually, I stopped. decline.
However, these are not what I want to talk about today. I will write a book about these unspeakable stories. Today, I want to talk about something new that I think you will be interested in. In fact, I can guarantee that no matter who you are, there will always be something in this text that appeals to you.
First of all, I would like to briefly talk about my observations about Google. In this context, let’s talk about leaving the greatest company to join Grab.
Why did I leave Google?
The main reason is that Google no longer innovates. The ability to innovate has been largely lost. There are several reasons for
, which are discussed one by one below.
First of all, conservative. Google is very concerned with protecting what already exists and is afraid of risk-taking and true innovation. When it comes to goalkeeping, risk aversion is the norm, not the exception.
Second, it is in deep political trouble. As the company grows, this is inevitable. When faced with political problems, the only effective choice is dictatorship, and dictatorship naturally has problems.
As former Google SVP Bill Coughran once said, politics is the best solution invented by mankind in the long history to solve the problem of resource competition, so politics is not the same as evil.
But politics is red tape. If you pay too much attention to politics, you will slowly fall behind and your execution will suffer.
Third, arrogance. It took me years to understand that a company full of humble people can still be an arrogant company.
This is the arrogance of "we" rather than "I". When a company is as successful as Google, the organization suffers from a sense of "invincibility" and "chosenness."
The consequences of this are tragic: arrogance, loss of creativity, loss of connection with customers, and poor strategic decisions.
I love Google people. They are super smart, world-class smart, and remain humble no matter how awesome they are in their field.
However, the company's strategy was a mess.
Anyone who has paid attention to Google’s press conferences in the past five to ten years should have felt this.
Nowadays, companies do all kinds of things that confuse viewers. Entering into unwinnable battles and forcing products on everyone, like Google+; launching products that are widely panned, like Allo; shutting down services that everyone loves, like Reader, Hangouts; launching official apps with competing and incompatible frameworks APIs, such as gRPC vs. REST; launching stacks that clearly compete and do not communicate with each other, such as Android native vs. Dart/Flutter, etc.
Google's efforts to innovate are hard to understand, and the final results over the past decade seem to indicate that its strategy has not been successful. Google sees this happening and shares your frustration.
The problem is with the leadership of the company.
Fourth, and probably worst, Google is 100% focused on its competitors, not its customers.
Google has no intention of changing things up, even though the company's new internal slogan is "Focus on the user and all else will follow."
Unfortunately, it's all just words and the company doesn't care. The crux is that the company's incentives serve other than customers.
Really set aside a fixed time for employees to communicate with customers.But now, Google is playing a simpler but dangerous game, in which competition with rivals replaces a focus on the true needs of its customers.
Google wanted to inspire successful products and features, but they took what they thought was the simplest and safest approach: plagiarizing their opponents.
You can look at all the products released in the past ten years, and they are basically copied from their competitors: Google+ (Facebook), Google Cloud (AWS), Google Home (Amazon Echo), Allo (WhatsApp), Android Instant Apps (Facebook, WeChat), Google Assistant (Apple/Siri), etc.
Google has been stuck in the "follow and innovate" model for several years. Innovation is no longer in the company's DNA because Google is focused on its competitors, not its users.
To be fair, there are not exceptions.
It will take some time for the industry to catch up with Google in terms of products such as Cloud Spanner, BigQuery, TensorFlow, and Waymo.
However, this does not excuse those who copy other people's failed consumer products.
All in all, Google is no longer an exciting place to be. I enjoyed being ignited by my work, but Google ultimately extinguished that flame.
So, like many people at Google, I have been thinking about where to go from to in the past few years. But where to go? Google is still a great place to work, especially for engineers.
Well-known large companies in the Seattle area all suffer from large company disease. Facebook’s “innovation” comes from shopping (Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus). I also don't like the culture of this company, I have friends who work there and they tell me that.
Amazon is continuing to innovate, although it is nothing more than plagiarizing its competitors and bullying its younger brothers. Basically, becoming a big company means becoming a bully.
I originally wanted to make fun of Bezos here, but I heard that no one can make fun of Bezos three times in a row and still live to tell the story, okay, I'll stop there.
However, I've been at Amazon for seven years and now want to try something different. Where to go? Oracle, Twitter , Apple, eBay and Microsoft , Adobe, etc. These big-name companies all look similar.
Nowadays, the only things that can inspire people seem to be startups. I almost joined a few of them, but in the end I didn’t feel like they were ideal.
At this time, I received an email from a brother who had previously worked at Google. His name is Theo Vassilakis. He studied tea leaves a few years ago, then resigned and founded a big data startup Metanautix, which was successfully sold to Microsoft.
Theo wrote to tell me that he went to Grab as CTO. This startup company located in Singapore has an office in Seattle.
Dear readers, this is where our journey begins.
Why did you join Grab?
Caught off guard, I was involved in a war.
I feel as if I have joined the Revolutionary War, which is a perfect description. Surrounded by guerrillas, we fight together, and the outcome is either victory or death.
I have never been so excited, it is an experience that can only be understood. The last time I felt this way was in the early days of Grok, a small startup incubated within Google, where I worked 12+ hours a day to change the way developers interacted with hundreds of millions of lines of code. But at that time, all I could change was the world of developers. Compared to that, the world of travel was too vast.
If you look at the technology heat map of the greater Seattle area, from the temperate zone represented by Niantic and OfferUp, to the tropical zone led by Facebook and Amazon, to the hot zone represented by SpaceX and startups, compared with these companies, The Grab is definitely a big ball of fire that can blow up your face.
Grab is the largest startup in Southeast Asia’s history. Grab is also fighting one of the most important battles in the world today, and is at a critical stage right now. I am currently typing this paragraph on the plane returning from Jakarta , where I witnessed this history.
I haven't seen such a large piece of fertile soil since the early days of the Internet, and it may have greater potential than I imagined.
So, what does Grab do?
A simple and crude answer is: Grab is the Uber of Southeast Asia.
But saying that is actually a bad marketing point because Uber is trying its hardest to be the most hated company in America. Just like they tout that they are the Comcast of Southeast Asia (Editor's note: an American telecom company, here is intended to show the ridiculousness of Uber's rhetoric), this is inaccurate. At their core, Grab and Uber’s corporate philosophies are so different.
Instead of comparing Grab and Uber, let me sit back and tell you a story.
It all started when my sister-in-law, Cathy, and her husband, Romano, started a food truck business. Before that, Cathy was an optometrist and Romano worked in a library. They had been saving for years to start their own business and doing a lot of research to be as successful as possible.
In 2012, they opened the Xplosive food truck project, with a menu that combines Philippine and Vietnamese specialties. This project was a success. They also won various awards from major Seattle magazines and were personally presented by the mayor of Seattle. They also participated in large-scale catering performances and even appeared in a photo shoot by Jeff Bezos for investors. film about the Amazon in South Lake Union, and became one of the best scenes. Xplosive customers, most of whom are Amazon employees, start lining up an hour before the truck arrives every day, and hours later, when the truck is sold out, diners are begging for more.
sounds like a success, right? They jumped on the food truck bandwagon at the right time. A few years later, there were food trucks everywhere.
But early last year, Cathy and Romano suddenly sold their car, along with their previously coveted city parking spot next to Amazon, and quietly ran a dedicated kitchen serving takeout through Peach.
The reason why they were able to achieve this dramatic decision was that they listened to the voices on the front line, so they became the first people to realize that the catering industry would undergo earth-shaking changes.
Restaurants and food trucks will be eaten by Uber and Grab. This is the root of the shock to the entire catering industry. This is why you see some big restaurants starting food truck businesses. But that won’t save them, and the entire food truck industry will be wiped out by the takeout business. Trucks will never disappear completely because they can make money wherever the local weather is good. But this is not where the real money comes from. The biggest revenue part of small businesses still lies in the takeaway business.
takeout has swept the world like a hurricane, and even a takeout advertisement is inserted between football matches. This emerging industry, which started with the construction of online ride-hailing infrastructure, is growing exponentially. Delivery workers can go anywhere to pick up food and deliver it anywhere in the city within a certain radius. The idea of
has far-reaching consequences. In fact, takeout is also a manifestation of the democratization process: democratized catering companies provide ordinary people with entrepreneurial opportunities that they have never had before. Opening a restaurant is a complex and expensive affair. The emergence of food trucks has greatly lowered the threshold for entry into this field, and takeout has reduced the transportation part to close to zero. Cathy and Romano were at the forefront of a new era of food vending that could come from their own kitchens. When that time inevitably comes, people will be able to get food from their neighbors, or from anyone in town who wants to cook. This will change the food industry forever.
What is very shocking is that from online ride-hailing to food delivery business, to dedicated kitchens, to small businesses, this series of progress is very fast. From a technology perspective, it unfolded almost overnight.In my opinion, in the past few years, when the Google team was wondering what new business to launch, emerging industries have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain, and have continued to evolve under the test of the outside world, thus entering the public eye with a more determined attitude.
At the beginning of this story, I complained that Google couldn't innovate anymore. Now let's face it, with Uber, Amazon and Facebook (including Facebook Eats) I don't see the potential in the food business either, they are all just copying.
With this background, let’s take a look at why I want to switch jobs to Grab. When I heard about the opportunity and finally understood its potential, I didn't hesitate to say yes.
Southeast Asia: The World’s Battlefield
I painted the ride-hailing industry as a huge disruptor, but hey, it’s nothing new. Ride-hailing has angered taxi companies around the world to the point of resorting to physical violence in protests. Online ride-hailing is a revolutionary change and has become a platform on which other industries have developed, such as the incredibly disruptive food delivery industry.
But in the United States, everyone likes to say that they hate Uber because "Uber drivers live like slaves." Drivers have to pay for the car, maintain it, insure it, pay for fuel, wash it, etc. So Uber as a whole is seen as an exploitative business. I don’t know whether this perception is the truth or the imagination of these people. But given that millions of drivers voted with their feet, and given that people generally aren’t fools when it comes to optimizing their income, this can only be considered a gray area no matter how bad the U.S. and European economies are. , so driving for Uber is probably more likely to be a good deal for most drivers.
However, in the United States and Europe, online ride-hailing has not really changed society. It just makes transportation cheaper and more convenient for everyone. Food delivery is certainly a huge social change, but it’s not that important in and of itself.
However, in Southeast Asia (SEA), online ride-hailing is an absolute cross-generational and society-wide change. It's the kind of transformation that a country like ours, which can propel a reality TV star into the Oval Office, is completely incapable of experiencing. Transportation in Southeast Asia is terrible. With the exception of Singapore, Southeast Asia's transportation infrastructure basically only has three conditions: "bad", "very bad" and "almost non-existent". (Come on, there are 17,000 islands in Indonesia alone, okay?) The credit card industry is almost non-existent. Therefore, realizing online car-hailing is a much more difficult problem than in the United States. But Southeast Asia, home to 500 million people, desperately needs cheap transportation and jobs. And online ride-hailing can provide both!
I don’t even need to read the Gartner report to see people in Southeast Asia making 3 to 5 times their original salary after switching to driver jobs. Just ask my family. My wife, Linh, is of Vietnamese descent and has many relatives and friends living in Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore. We've had six relatives and very close friends become Grab drivers in these countries and they love it. Because it changed their lives.
Therefore, unlike the United States, online ride-hailing is a complete social and economic game-changer for Southeast Asia. From Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, to Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines, that's 620 million people (2 times the population of the United States) and 12 cities with more than 2 million people (the United States has only 4 ). As for Southeast Asia’s middle class, it is estimated that it will double to over 400 million within two years.
So, I said, this is a huge opportunity.
After transportation is changed, there will be a takeout boom, which is exactly the same as the United States. In Southeast Asia, this trend will only grow faster - because friends in Southeast Asia will tell you - they are much more enthusiastic about eating this thing than you Americans.Food is an important part of Southeast Asian culture that is unimaginable to Westerners, especially those who don’t live in big cities.
But, let me say this: transportation and food are just scratching the surface. Same-day delivery of takeout can expand into same-day delivery of anything. We will see that in the next few years, we will see an endless stream of rule breakers emerging every year (or even sooner). Payment and financial services will be the first to explode, and these two alone are already huge opportunities.
If you want to hail a ride or order food, you have to download the Grab app. In Southeast Asia, everyone has a smartphone, so everyone can download Grab. This means we can move straight to the next problem: mobile payments. Grab is signing up millions of local merchants to allow people to use Grab to pay for the things they buy in stores, for a ridiculously low fee.
Why is this important? Ultimately, mobile payments have not been successful in the United States. Visa has been promoted for several years, and no one buys it; it failed miserably, like a disaster. Southeast Asia is different, because Southeast Asia is still a cash society. Less than 2% of adults in Southeast Asia have a credit card, while more than 60% don’t even have a bank account. People still have a deep distrust of banks, and countless credit card frauds have turned the entire credit system into an extremely dangerous area, so people still choose to use cash.
But they believe in smartphones! Thanks Steve Jobs! People in Southeast Asia are estimated to use more mobile phones than anywhere else in the world. Westerners have unwritten "traditions" that say you shouldn't look at your phone when eating with your family, not looking at your phone when hanging out with friends, or not while riding (or, ahem, driving) a motorcycle. Look at your phone. But Southeast Asians don’t think so. Every Southeast Asian is happily staring at their mobile phone screens all the time.
Southeast Asia is a cash-dependent economy. But cash has a bunch of problems. Yes, ubiquitous thieves are a problem, but the bigger problem is that cash is the basis of old world bribery, corruption, fraud and malpractice. For example, when taking a taxi, if you are not careful, you will be tricked by the driver. He does not have a meter, and then he will charge you an exorbitant price. And because he will give half of the money to the police, so the police are on the same side with them. You If you don't pay, the police will arrest you. Oh, by the way, today we saw a staff member at the Jakarta Airport wearing a company shirt with "No Tipping" written on the back, because in Southeast Asia, the dividing line between tipping and mandatory bribery is sometimes very special. The ground is not obvious.
If all purchases are made through the Grab app, all prices are pre-determined and there is no need to bring any cash. So, no matter how “always” cash-focused Southeast Asia’s economies were, today people are embracing this new model at an astonishing rate. But they can use cash to top up their Grab accounts, so the distrust of banks is perfectly avoided.
Moreover, payments will undoubtedly open up more vertical industries and services - things that can be done with money in the West may not be feasible in Southeast Asia (even if they are feasible, they will charge fees when you have no money) What’s worse is adding insult to injury). Payments will open up industry verticals for everyone, including those living in remote villages.
is so crazy.
The world is changing rapidly before our eyes.
Why do you say I want to fight?
There is a service called Uber.
Of course, Uber is everywhere, well...except China. Due to multiple factors that Didi had the right time, place and people, Uber exited the Chinese market in embarrassment. This "Great Retreat" reflects several key points: First, this is a winner-takes-all world, where network effects are created by unifying all vertical industries and making competition increasingly difficult. This is what Didi does in China. Therefore, competitors will continue to fight until only one winner remains.
Guys, this is a fight to the death.
Another point is that Uber can be beaten, even though they seemed invincible a few years ago. But frankly, I think Uber is bound to lose Southeast Asia as well. They are planning an IPO and need to balance their books as much as possible; because as we know now, Uber is losing money at a faster rate than other companies. As a well-known investor said, the ride-hailing space is like piling money on a table, pouring gasoline on it and setting it on fire. Uber has spent billions of dollars as rewards for drivers and passengers, and has also held many incentives and promotions in order to get that reward called "loyalty", and it hopes that this reward will be long enough to outlast local competitors (global). There should be 8) out of the market. Of course, these competitors are forced to fight back in kind.
Bah.
I really don't know what is going to happen, and I'm a newbie, so if you quote even a single punctuation mark from this article, you are an even bigger fool who takes what the big fool says as a guideline. But if I were an investor, I would not invest in Uber in Southeast Asia for a long time. Uber has to cut their losses quickly and they are already being eliminated from the Southeast Asian market.
However...
has another player in Southeast Asia, very similar to Grab, and very competitive. This opponent is called Go-Jek, and right now my iPhone is happily auto-correcting the spelling to Go-Jerk. They probably want to change this feature.
Go-Jek and Grab are destined enemies, locked in a life-or-death battle that will bring about the greatest social and economic changes in modern history. So, despite Vizzini's warnings against it, I'm taking it upon myself to jump into this Asian turf war.
I've never been so excited. It didn't really hit me until my first day at work last week. I attended a leadership meeting held by Grab in Jakarta, and part of the meeting was actually a competition - we had to book 2- and 4-wheel "mounts" to compete with other teams and go around the city. When I jumped on the back of that bike, looked up at the rainforest, and rode straight into oncoming traffic, I really meant it when I blurted out, "I'm going to die." When I realized that my field of vision was filled with green Grab and Go-Jek helmets, I fully understood that this was war. They are making history.
This war is fought on two fronts: online and offline. With
online, we must integrate world-class technology in the shortest possible time. It may have already been completed, and business requirements and business logic will become more and more complex in weeks. But Grab made smart technology choices like AWS, Go language, and Kotlin for Android. They don't have invention syndrome, so they don't waste time reinventing the wheel. I'm confident we will win.
has countless offline agents (real people) involved in expanding the activities of drivers, merchants, passengers and other participants. The agents we are talking about here are in the order of thousands, tens of thousands or even millions. I can't say how this is done, but the numbers are real.
Well, we have successfully built a platform (smile), and you know how much I love doing this.
The world's attention is focused on Southeast Asia.
Banks, investment firms, major corporations, government regulators, even the mafia, everyone has a hand, in the shadows, with guns blazing. I'm not exaggerating. This morning I saw a spy photo released by the Indonesian mafia: a group of guys holding a lot of mobile phones and pretending to be passengers to book online rides were crowded in a large but dirty room; Amazon has just launched in Singapore Same-day Prime delivery service; Didi, SoftBank and countless other investors are "burning money" on key players.
The world is focused on Grab’s territory – the territory of the green motorcycle helmet, and that’s no exaggeration. Dozens of major industries, including oil companies, power companies, automobile companies, battery companies, credit card companies, banks, international restaurateurs, travel companies, taxi companies, airlines, retailers, etc., will be affected by this land war. They are all fighting for a "better self".
Jeff Bezos has been trying to solve the "last mile" problem for two decades. It was 1999, and he called all of us into a room and told our 300-plus employees that Amazon was slowly losing steam. It was an amazing turn of events on Amazon's hockey stick curve, and we all stared blankly at him, wondering what the hell he was thinking. He calmly told us that what we sell are books, music and videos, which will gradually become digital, and soon these physical things will disappear. It was then and there that he predicted the Kindle, iTunes and Amazon Instant Video, all of which would appear a few years later. He said if we hadn't dug in and looked for other commodities, we would have been obsolete in a few years. He told us we had to be able to sell and ship anything, even a live elephant. So we solved the problem.
But at the same time, he also told us that if people do not purchase a large quantity at one time, then we will lose money. So he set out to solve the "last mile" problem: completing order delivery in about an hour. Twenty years later, the problem remains unresolved. Of course, Amazon is able to deliver same-day delivery on certain SKUs in some cities, and it has also made AmazonFresh and other bold attempts. But globally, the "last mile" problem can only be solved after the emergence of online ride-hailing networks.
Nowhere is the "last mile" problem more difficult to solve than in Southeast Asia. It has the highest population density, poor transportation and infrastructure, and people with smartphones want to get their stuff immediately.
Grab will win this war.
I didn’t know until now, after meeting Grab, their allies, and their customers. Grab’s team is different. Unlike Google, which doesn’t step out of its ivory tower to understand its real customers. Grab’s slogan is: “Go to users”. They constantly encourage every employee to communicate with Grab users. Only in this way can the company understand customer needs and market trends in real time, and respond and transform quickly.
I can't express how powerful this slogan is.
Amazon's motto is "Earth's most customer-centric company" and they have built a brand that everyone in the world trusts. However, they only interact with customers once a year - Bezos forces every leader in the company to spend one day in the customer service center every year, because the information fed back by the customer center does not appear on the management's desk in its entirety and must be in person. You can feel it by going to the customer service center.
In contrast, employees at Google ("Focus on users, and users will follow") basically do not interact with customers. Amazon only occasionally gets close to customers; Google never does.
If you want to hear the latest buzz and what customers really want, all leaders need to talk to customers.
By looking at how close a company is to its customers, it is possible to predict how innovative a company will be and how responsive they will be to market shifts.
's corporate culture of "going towards users" is a sign of successful innovation.
For Amazon, they do it once a year, while Grab does it every day. Their employees all use Grab to commute to and from get off work, putting them in direct contact with drivers and other passengers. (Of course, at Grab’s Seattle office, we needed to find other solutions.)
With a culture of “going to the user,” Xplosive saw a year earlier than its peers that they needed to sell the truck and open a kitchen. That's why Peach grew food delivery before Amazon, Uber, and Facebook. Amazon, Uber, and Facebook are all targeting competitors, and they will act when their competitors act. Innovating through "going to users" is Grab's motto, which is an issue that Grab attaches great importance to.
Grab will win because they care enough about their users.
