07-Smu-Grab - Leading O2o in Asia

SMU517
GRAB: BUILDING A LEADING O2O TECHNOLOGY COMPANY IN

SOUTHEAST ASIA
We do know that in a hypergrowth company, things change all the time. Our CEO says he feels
like he has to reapply for his role every six months, and that applies to all of us.
- Chin Yin Ong, Head of People, Grab
Anthony Tan, co-founder and CEO of Grab, the largest ride-hailing technology company in
Southeast Asia, was talking to his senior management team in the conference room of the Grab
headquarters in Singapore’s Marina One building. Beside Anthony was Tan Hooi Ling, his COO and
co-founder. It was 27 March 2018, the day after Grab had announced its acquisition of its largest
rival, Uber. The deal terms stated that Grab would acquire Uber in Southeast Asia, and Uber would
take a 27.5% stake in Grab, and exit Southeast Asia entirely. 1
Anthony and Hooi Ling had started their taxi-hailing app, MyTeksi, in their hometown of Kuala
Lumpur, Malaysia in 2012. Within five years, it had grown beyond its domestic borders to cover
eight countries and over 190 cities in Southeast Asia. It had not been easy to achieve these results.
The company had gone through numerous challenges and pivots in strategic direction in the face of
competition from other start-ups and established venture capital firms wanting to tap into the
potential of the online-to-offline (O2O) platform business. Uber, a US-based behemoth which
entered the Asia market in 2013, had been Grab’s biggest rival. When Grab celebrated its fifth year
of operations in 2017, Hooi Ling remarked, "We're five years old but I feel as if we've evolved and
changed as a company at least five times, if not 10 times." 2
The company made its first foray outside Malaysia in 2013, under the name of GrabTaxi, extending
its reach to the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. In 2015, the exponential rate of growth and
scaling eventually resulted in it relocating its headquarters from Malaysia to Singapore. As the
engineering and product team grew manifold, and the employees became more geographically
dispersed, GrabTaxi had to consciously ensure that the culture of innovation and agility that had
enabled it to outperform its competitors remained strong. This was done through its leveraging its
organisational structure and also its people. To keep the culture strong as it expanded, the company
1
Yoolim Lee and Eric Newcomer, “Uber Pulls Out of Southeast Asia, Selling Operation to Rival Grab”, March 26, 2018, Bloomberg,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-cedes-southeast-asia-to-chief-rival-grab-in-latest-pullout, accessed March
2018.
2
Sumiko Tan, “Lunch With Sumiko: Grab Whiz Tan Hooi Ling Happy to Stay Low-Key”, The Straits Times, July 16, 2017,
http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/grab-whiz-happy-to-stay-low-key, accessed March 2018.
This case was written by Professor Rick Smith and Adina Wong at the Singapore Management University. The case was
prepared solely to provide material for class discussion. The authors do not intend to illustrate either effective or ineffective
handling of a managerial situation. The authors may have disguised certain names and other identifying information to protect
confidentiality.
Copyright © 2019, Singapore Management University Version: 2018-05-10
This document is authorized for use only in Prof. Marcus Pitt's EMBA GL B04/Innovation and Entrepreneurship at S P Jain School of Global Management - Dubai from Aug 2021 to Feb 2022.
SMU-19-0017 Grab: Building a Leading O2O Technology Company in Southeast Asia
hired and promoted for performance and culture.
By January 2016, the company had diversified from a pure ride-hailing company into an eco-system
play and it rebranded itself from GrabTaxi to just Grab. Although the word Grab had become
ubiquitous amongst its users and synonymous with the action of ride-hailing, to Anthony and Hooi
Ling, it was not enough to stop there. They were already planning their next step forward.
Grab
Hooi Ling met Anthony at Harvard Business School (HBS), where they were two of five Malaysians
in their cohort. Hooi Ling, who was sponsored by McKinsey & Company for her Masters programme
(and could play both the piano and violin), did not expect to hit it off with Anthony, who was the
grandson of the founder of Tan Chong Motors, a large Malaysian car conglomerate. 3 However, they
were united by a wish to see taxi rides safer for passengers in Kuala Lumpur (KL). Hooi Ling recalled
her late nights working at the McKinsey Malaysia office, where for a period of three years she had
to reluctantly take a taxi home,
I used to call myself a reluctant user of taxis. I was actually scared taking a taxi at like 1 to 3 AM.
You get into these dingy little cars, and these drivers are not the most well-mannered ones, driving
extremely unsafely. And, as a female, with news consistently saying that people are robbed, raped,
kidnapped and stuff like that, it wasn’t fun. 4
Anthony and Hooi Ling put together a plan for a ride-hailing business, which resulted in being
awarded the runners-up position in a HBS business plan competition. Anthony himself had been
inspired by the first case study he read on Lapdesk. Lapdesk was a company that made portable desks
for children living in the rural areas of Africa, where schools were often underfunded. 5 Lapdesk’s
CEO, Shane Immelman, believed that a business doing social good did not necessarily need to be a
non-profit. Earning some profit allowed the company to attract the resources necessary to do good in
a sustainable manner—a philosophy which Anthony shared.
In 2011, the two co-founders incorporated GrabTaxi in KL, and launched the consumer app a year
later, in June 2012. In April 2015 Hooi Ling too had served out her bond with McKinsey and returned
from the US, to concentrate full-time on developing the taxi-hailing app.
Launch
Besides safety for its passengers, Grab’s initial key aim was to shorten the existing taxi booking
process, which was extremely arduous for passengers who wanted to get a ride fast.
3
Forbes 40 Under 40, 2016, http://fortune.com/40-under-40/2016/anthony-tan-hooi-ling-tan-17/, accessed March 2018.
4
Colin Tung, “Call Me a Plumber, Not COO: GrabTaxi Co-founder Hooi Ling Tan”, e27, December 7, 2015, https://e27.co/call-plumber-
not-coo-grabtaxi-co-founder-hooi-ling-tan-20151207/, accessed April 2018.
5
Juliet Pitman, “The Lapdesk Company: Shane Immelman”, Entrepreneur Magazine, November 11, 2009,
https://www.entrepreneurmag.co.za/advice/success-stories/case-studies/the-lapdesk-company-shane-immelman/, accessed April 2018.
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The old taxi booking process
To book a taxi, customers would have to place a call to the call centre of a taxi company. The operator
at the call centre would answer the call, write the caller’s destination on a piece of paper, and slip it
under a glass separator to the dispatcher, who would radio out the destination to the drivers in the
city to see who wanted the job. Thereafter, the dispatcher would write on the piece of paper the call
number of the driver who accepted the job—but they would not know how far the driver was from
the passenger—and then pass the slip of paper back to the operator, who was supposed to call the
passenger back to inform her that they had found a driver. But this usually did not happen, especially
during peak hours when the operator was busy picking up other calls. So the passenger would have
to call back to check with the operator, who would sift through many slips of paper to see if a driver
had been found. The passenger was lucky if she could get through the line because in those days
there was no call waiting. This whole process would take at least half an hour.
Aaron Gill, Head of Business Solutions, and one of the earliest hires at Grab, said,
We looked at the process and we thought that we could improve this by 10x; we can bring this
down from 30 minutes to 3 minutes. That was the goal we set for ourselves.
From the outset, Anthony and Hooi Ling recognised that they were operating in a two-sided
marketplace that required a supply of taxis as well as passenger demand for taxis. And most two-
sided marketplaces were hard to build, because a startup would have to decide whether to ramp up
the supply or demand side first, or try to do both at the same time and risk spreading itself too thin.
So the initial strategy was to find a partner who had both sides already—the taxi radio companies. It
was believed that these companies would represent the best partner to learn about the industry and to
kick off the product; and at the same time Grab could help the taxi companies become more efficient
by becoming their tech solution provider for a monthly subscription fee.
They approached a few taxi companies but none were interested except one.
Assembling the tech team
The first system Grab built in 2011 resulted in high manpower savings at the call centre. When the
passenger called the taxi operator, the operator punched the request directly into a computer, which
did the dispatching automatically based on the location of drivers (which was determined from the
driver’s mobile phone). The driver would request for the job via the phone, and the moment the
dispatch system confirmed a driver, an SMS would be sent to the customer with the driver details, so
the customer was always informed of a confirmed booking. With the new system, the customer would
be happier, and the throughput of the call centre would be higher. At least, that was the intention.
The reality was that drivers were not adopting the product.
The first prototype had been built by outsourcing the job to a tech team in India. The system did not
always work properly; for instance, sometimes the driver’s location was not accurate. That was when
Anthony and Hooi Ling decided that, to run a tech startup, they needed to hire a tech person. Gill
was hired to fix the prototype and make it work. The new tech team comprising Gill, two engineers,
and a designer spent time with the taxi drivers to understand their pain points, and finally came up
with a decent working product which they continued to iterate and improve.
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By February 2012, the Grab team had a basic viable product for their pilot taxi company customer.
They had also succeeded in bringing the booking time down from 30 to three minutes, and had signed
up close to 100 drivers.
Grab started showing its working prototype to other taxi companies, but was still unable to convince
them to sign up. Many drivers found that the mobile phone, which was a crucial piece of the puzzle
for Grab’s system to work, was too expensive to own, compared to their monthly takings. 6
Responding to competitive threats
In March 2012, another ride-hailing startup, Taximonger, was featured in the local KL newspaper,
The Star, stating that they were going to build a taxi-booking app. Gill recalled,
The fact that they announced it to the world got them so much mindshare that it just annoyed me
to no end. Everyone we spoke to after that was like, “Oh, are you those guys?” And we were like,
no, no, we are MyTeksi (Grab’s initial name in KL). This news spooked the taxi companies, who
thought that Grab was going to come up with a consumer taxi booking app, thus bypassing the
taxi companies. Eventually, Grab could no longer pursue the avenue of working with them.
The Grab team faced a choice—they could continue to try to get taxi companies to join their B2B
system, or they could face head-on the potential threat of a startup that was building a consumer side
first, not even bothering to work on the driver side. If their rival launched the proposed product
successfully and Grab lost the mindshare of customers, then all of Grab’s hard work thus far would
amount to nothing.
The decision to pivot
The Grab team decided to abruptly change their strategy to build a consumer app. With the help of
friends, they built a working prototype for both iOS and Android mobile operating systems in just 2-
3 weeks, launching the beta version at the end of March 2012 for the tech start-up community to test
out. Summing up the rationale to pivot from a B2B to a B2C offering, Gill explained the shift was
imperative,
We were getting nowhere with the taxi companies; we had another start-up that was up and
coming... we had to launch regardless of whether we were ready or not.
On 5 June 2012, Grab’s consumer app was officially launched. Gill said,
The first day we had about 7,000 downloads, and the second day we had about 4,000 downloads.
But we still had only 150 drivers. So the bookings were coming in and nobody could get a ride…
This whole pivot was a big shift from Anthony’s conservative ‘under-promise but over-deliver’
6
Victoria Ho, “Malaysian Taxi App TaxiMonger Expands Coverage Outside Kuala Lumpur To Deal With Ongoing Rivalry”, July 5,
2013, Techcrunch, https://techcrunch.com/2013/07/04/malaysian-taxi-app-taximonger-expands-coverage-outside-kuala-lumpur-to-deal-
with-ongoing-rivalry/, accessed March 2018.
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style – but he bought into the whole lean start-up methodology and the idea of testing your product
with actual users and iterating quickly from there, instead of trying to wait for a perfect product.
Developing the ride-hailing app
The first iteration of the consumer app was designed very simply with just three screens. On the first
screen there would be a map for the customer to drop a ‘pin’ to indicate the pick-up location. On the
second screen another map was for indicating the drop-off location. And on the third screen would
be the driver’s name and the estimated price range (because fares were metered), how far the driver
was from the pick-up point, and his phone number.
In October 2012, in order to definitively pull ahead of the competition, the Grab team launched
version 2 of the consumer app with an improved version of the product based on customer feedback.
For example, the passenger would be able to search for locations instead of just moving the pin on
the map and the app also allowed real-time tracking of the location of the driver to gauge when he
would arrive. For Malaysia, these were groundbreaking features. Importantly, passengers could share
the details of their ride with someone else (‘share your ride’ feature) so that they could be assured of
the safety of their ride. This was also something that Grab pioneered. Gill shared the reaction of the
consumer to the new features,
It’s okay to launch with an unpolished product if you are not a big company. Consumers will
forgive you if you show that you are constantly improving on the product to win them back. For
all the people who were initially disappointed with us—and you only have a small window to win
back the customer—by October these few things had made the people go ‘wow’ in KL, and we
started getting more bookings.
Since the business model had changed and Grab now courted the drivers directly instead of going
through the taxi companies, Grab had to find a new way to collect payment from the drivers who had
used the app to get jobs. Previously, Grab would invoice the taxi company. While the taxi company
would collect RM120 (US$29.54) 7 /month from each driver, Grab would be paid RM20
(US$4.92)/month per driver. Grab could no longer do the same, as invoicing single drivers every
month with postpaid billing would be costly and an administrative nightmare.
That was when Grab introduced a prepaid service, a wallet for the drivers. Another one-of-a kind
service for the fledgling ride-hailing industry where drivers would top up a virtual wallet with Grab,
and when they were successfully assigned a job, Grab would deduct a commission fee from the wallet
immediately. So Grab was monetising the service from day one, and this wallet would pave the way
for other services that Grab would later offer, such as merchant payments.
Once the number of drivers hit critical mass, Grab also started signing on more and more drivers
through word-of-mouth and the network effect, without any significant marketing efforts.
7
US$1=4.0619 Malaysian Ringgits on 1/1/2018.
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A giant enters the arena
In early 2013, Grab stood to be outmuscled by the entrance of Rocket Internet, an established German
venture capital firm. It was rumoured that Rocket Internet would be launching a taxi booking app
worldwide, including in Southeast Asia. Gill described the reputation of Rocket Internet,
They are a big group, including Lazada, Zalora… and they pretty much decimate most of the
local start-ups in most of the countries that they operate in. Their strength was that they had the
ability to raise a lot of capital, and they could out-execute any local start-up in most places,
because they could bring in a lot of experienced people. They were very aggressive.
In the months leading up to the news about Rocket Internet, Grab was growing its business steadily
but fairly slowly. In January 2013, the company had a team of about 15 people. Having outpaced the
earlier competition, Grab was just waiting for drivers to come to them and for organic downloads of
the consumer app. With Rocket Internet coming in, Grab decided that they needed to out-execute and
out-race the newcomer before they caught up and overtook the start-up.
Anthony decided to quit the family business to focus on Grab full-time, in particular, raising capital
and bringing in talent. At that time, Grab was still bootstrapping, although it had raised some funds
from Cradle, a Malaysian government grant programme, for pre-seed and seed money (1st
RM150,000 (US$36,929) for prototyping, and the 2nd RM500,000 (US$123,095) for marketing). Gill
would lead the product development and execution.
Marketing to passengers
Grab started to actively market to passengers beyond the initial press event or word-of-mouth. The
first ads were decals plastered on the sides of taxis, with messages that tied back to Grab’s value
proposition of speed, safety and certainty, such as ‘I like it fast, I like it safe, I like it now’. Drunk
drivers were also another target market for Grab. Additionally, the company started to launch mobile
ads when digital marketing platforms such as Facebook became available around 2013.
Hiring a sales (acquisition) team
While the marketing side worked on attracting consumers to use the app, the acquisition team was in
charge of signing on more drivers. To out-execute, Grab wanted to acquire more drivers at a faster
rate. The team it had at that time wasn’t ready to do so; they were more customer experience people
who could manage relations with the drivers, but not sales.
By April 2013, Easy Taxi, funded by Rocket Internet, started operating in Malaysia. Easy Taxi
salespeople were already going to the petrol stations to recruit drivers, targeting specifically drivers
that had the MyTeksi sticker on their taxis. They knew how to use the MyTeksi app and were an easy
sell to convert to another app.
In May 2013, Grab officially hired its first driver acquisition team. The team effectively ramped up
Grab’s driver supply, recruiting about 1,000 drivers per month, which was 10x more than what it was
previously able to achieve. At that time Grab was still only operating in KL.
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Expanding outside Malaysia
In July 2013, MyTeksi expanded into the Philippines with the brand name GrabTaxi. This was
followed by Thailand and Singapore soon after (refer to Exhibit 1 for major Grab milestones). Gill
described his initial attempts in the Philippines,
I tried to speak to the top three or four taxi companies and I couldn’t even get past the armed
guards at the door.
It was only through the commitment of a local partner that Grab managed to sign up a number of taxi
fleets in the Philippines.
In October 2013, Grab launched in Singapore. Gill said,
We were resistant in the beginning because our service thrives in a fragmented, unsafe, maybe
even unscrupulous market. But in Singapore, what is our value proposition? People already pay
the metered price, it’s safe for passengers and drivers – what’s the point? Our investors were
saying– no, no, for us the problem is availability. Can you help us solve this? That turned out to
be a great move—Singapore turned out to be the fastest growing market for us at that point.
Having learnt from their earlier experiences of entering new countries, the Grab team figured out
their expansion strategy—especially whether to do it themselves or with local partners. When Grab
wanted to expand into a new country, a launcher would be sent to set up the new office. If possible,
the company would find a local partner. If not, they would launch and start looking for a local person
to lead the business. Gill explained,
We always prefer local country heads but sometimes it’s hard to find. We’ll hire somebody and
they’ll find out that it is really intense and they might realise it’s not for them. We then have to
keep looking till we find the right person.
While the new office was being set up, the local team would typically be supported by people who
had previously set up new Grab offices overseas. As the company grew and Grab launched in new
countries and cities, there was a larger pool of people who were willing to make this move.
Uber
In February 2013, the biggest threat to Grab to date arrived. Uber came into Singapore, the first step
in its purported Asian entry. 8 Uber, a US-founded global e-hailing app, was valued at US$3.8 billion
by August 2013. 9 Its entrance and eventual launch of the UberX private car-hailing product made
the Grab team question their existing business model of only working with taxis. Gill described the
ambivalence with which the Grab team responded to the threat of Uber,
8
“Uber Sets Asia in Motion with Singapore Launch”, February 22, 2013, https://newsroom.uber.com/singapore/uber-sets-asia-in-
motion-with-singapore-launch/, accessed March 2018.
9
Nathan McAlone, “Here’s How Uber Got Its Start and Grew to Become the Most Valuable Startup in the World”, Business Insider,
September 13, 2015, http://www.businessinsider.sg/history-of-uber-and-its-rise-to-become-the-most-valuable-startup-in-the-world-2015-
9/, accessed March 2018.
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For a long time, we were struggling with whether to launch private cars, which was a difficult
decision for us because we were built on the backs of taxis. We had just started coming out of the
war with Easy Taxi, but Uber was already gaining ground. And if we launched private cars, taxi
drivers would be furious because they would feel betrayed.
GrabCar
GrabCar had been launched in July 2014 but had not gained any traction. The Grab team was also
hesitant to market it much as they were concerned about the potential ire of the taxi drivers. The
internal debates carried on—and by the time Grab decided to commit to developing GrabCar (what
the business would call its second ‘vertical’ or business line after taxis), it had lost about a year to
Uber growing its presence in the region. Gill evaluated, “Can you imagine, if we had gone all-in
early on, we probably wouldn’t have to fight this war with Uber.”
A year later in 2015, Grab set up a separate team to manage GrabCar, a new dedicated team whose
sole mission was to grow the vertical. The product and engineering team, which was centralised,
started prioritising features in the app that would be beneficial for GrabCar users.
One of the key new features of GrabCar was job assignment for drivers. Taxis followed a bidding
system that mirrored that of the radio call centres. The jobs were broadcast to a group of drivers
nearest to the passenger, and each of the drivers could register/bid their interest for the job within a
bidding window. Then out of these, the closest driver would be assigned the job. Job assignment was
different. For private cars, the closest car would automatically be assigned the job—and if the driver
rejected the job, it went to the next closest driver. The difference here was in terms of the incentives
offered to the drivers. A private car driver who wanted to earn incentives, such as fee rebates, from
Grab had to maintain around an 80% acceptance rate.
After GrabCar, the company subsequently rolled out new verticals such as GrabBike for motorbike
hire in Vietnam (Nov 2014), GrabExpress for parcel delivery (July 2015), and GrabPay for mobile
wallet payments (January 2016).
Staying innovative, nimble, and ‘Grab’ while growing and scaling
Staying innovative through hiring talent globally
In April 2015, Grab announced that it would be investing US$100 million in setting up a new 4,500
square feet R&D centre in Singapore. 10 This would also mark the move of Grab’s headquarters from
KL to Singapore. The centre, which would specialise in data analytics, would house most of the
company’s product and engineering talent. Part of the investment would also go towards hiring talent
globally. Anthony commented,
10
Grab, “GrabTaxi Invests US$100m in Its First R&D Centre in Singapore”, April 8, 2015,
https://www.grab.com/sg/press/business/grabtaxi-invests-us100m-in-its-first-rd-centre-in-singapore/, accessed March 2018.
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Though we remain focused on Southeast Asia, we know that talent is global. In fact, we’ve
recently hired great senior talent from companies like Facebook, Amazon and Palantir
Technologies, as their experience and expertise with these global powerhouses will help
GrabTaxi reach our true potential. 11
By May 2017, this pursuit of global talent had led to Grab opening a total of six R&D centres around
the globe, including in Seattle, USA and Beijing, China.
Hiring the Head of People

One of the key hires that resulted from the new drive to invest in talent took place in November 2015,
when Chin Yin Ong joined as Head of People. She had been impressed with Grab from the time a
letter from a global headhunter arrived on her work desk, inviting her to interview for the position,
and said, “I could see the company was really serious about getting the right people on board.”
From a company size of about 1000 when she first joined, by early-2018, Ong had hired more talent
to grow the company by more than four times. The rapid expansion also meant that she had to roll
up her sleeves to put the house in order for exponential growth in the company’s number of
employees. Ong said,
In my first six months, I focused on three things. One was hiring my own team. Second was getting
the hiring system to be more efficient and transparent, standardising things like job levelling and
compensation structures. Third, we looked at the executive core and the top talent to make sure
we were retaining these people.
Staying ‘Grab’ – maintaining company culture through internal and external branding
When Ong joined, Grab’s founders were in the midst of discussing the mission, branding and next
phase of the company. Ong explained,
With all the services that we were offering, the GrabTaxi branding did not make sense internally
and in the market anymore. So we had to rethink – what kind of company did we want to become?
What are the values and the culture that will bring us there?
Grab’s pioneers and senior management identified behaviours that were evident in Grab that would
be extremely helpful to growing the company in its next phase, as well as new behaviour that was
required. In order for Grab to remain relevant in the market, one of these principles was ‘disrupt or
be disrupted’ (refer to Exhibit 2 for Grab’s 7 principles).
Rebranding
On 28 January 2016, GrabTaxi rebranded itself to, simply, Grab, to reflect the wide range of services
it offered across Southeast Asia. 12 Anthony said,
11
Ibid.
12
Grab, “GrabTaxi Rebrands To Grab To Reflect Market Dominance in Southeast Asia”, January 28, 2016,
https://www.grab.com/sg/press/business/grabtaxi-rebrands-to-grab-to-reflect-market-dominance-in-southeast-asia/, accessed March
2018.
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Grab aims to make transportation accessible to everyone in Southeast Asia. We have set the
benchmark in the industry, with the highest number of transport services that cater to all price
points, all available in one app. 13
Elaborating on the reason behind the diversity of services, Hooi Ling explained,
We take a hyperlocal approach to understand what users in each Southeast Asian city prefer,
from language preferences to payment options. 14
Rebranding and culture rejuvenation within Grab happened at the same time. While the seven Grab
principles were introduced internally, they were linked to the rebranding efforts so that the internal
and external perception of Grab by customers, partners, and employees alike were coherent.
Commemorating Grab’s 5th anniversary on 5 June 2017, Anthony reminded the Grab family why it
was important to stay customer-focused in the markets that Grab operated in,
[R]emember, money and talent don’t guarantee success… [I]f we fail to understand our
customers, if we produce amazing products that don’t solve local problems, if the user experience
isn’t right, and if we forget about our Why and care less about our customers than someone else
- then what IS guaranteed is someone else eating our lunch.
So get on the ground, regularly invest time into understanding our customers, be clear what
problem you’re solving, then build locally relevant, kick-ass products together. 15
With the rapid growth of Grab in terms of new lines of business and a burgeoning number of
employees, Ong also needed to ensure that the Grab culture remained strong no matter which role or
location Grab employees worked in. It was decided that instead of leaving it to chance, the culture
should be built into the systems.
Quarterly awards were held to recognise employees who demonstrated the seven principles. During
performance reviews, formal reviews and feedback were done purely on culture dimensions.
Performance ratings were calibrated according to a standard, instead of a curve. The results depended
both on what a person achieved (performance), and how he did it (culture). Ong elaborated,
Each person was literally given two scores, and their overall score would be the combination of
the two scores. A high performer would not get a good rating if he/she reflected a bad culture.
So we avoided, hopefully, the ‘brilliant jerk’ kind of situation.
As people got more used to these types of conversations, they understood what the standard was,
and therefore it was easier to have conversations on whom to promote or hire. When we hire, we
have a set of culture questions and it’s part of every interview. The hiring manager interviews
for culture fit. Also, we share the principles when we are onboarding new employees.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
Anthony Tan, “Grab is Five and What a Ride It's Been!”, LinkedIn, June 7, 2017, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/grab-five-what-ride-
its-been-anthony-tan/, accessed April 2018.
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Staying nimble through reorganising the company structure
2016 was a year of explosive growth for Grab. In order to stay nimble and execute quickly, teams
were regrouped to reflect the nature of their business. Verticals such as GrabTaxi and GrabCar were
collapsed into ‘four wheels’, GrabBike ‘2 wheels’, and GrabExpress and GrabFood became
‘logistics’.
The R&D teams moved towards a tech family concept, where self-sufficient teams of product people,
designers, testers, business folks worked separately on discrete business objectives. Effectively, there
were many mini start-ups within Grab.
The acquisition of Uber
On 26 March 2018, Uber announced that it would be exiting Southeast Asia, and would take a 27.5
percent stake in Grab. 16 Southeast Asia was still to become a profitable region for the longstanding
rivals, but the exit of Uber would potentially leave the playing field open for Grab to capitalise on
the ride-hailing opportunity that was slated to be worth US$20 billion by 2025 (from US$5 billion
in 2017). 17
Investor confidence in Grab being able to succeed had been demonstrated by the company being able
to raise US$4 billion in the preceding two years. 18 Grab had received a massive amount of its funding
from Japanese venture capital company Softbank, which also had stakes in ride-sharing companies
Ola in India and China’s Didi Chuxing (who made Uber beat a retreat from China). 19
Despite the fresh victory over Uber, Anthony and Hooi Ling never rested on their laurels. They
continued to work on the right next steps for Grab.
16
Yoolim Lee and Eric Newcomer, “Uber Pulls Out of Southeast Asia, Selling Operation to Rival Grab”, Bloomberg, March 26, 2018,
2018.
17
Benjamin Cher, “SEA Internet Economy Set to Boom: Google-Temasek Report”, Digital News Asia, May 25, 2016,
https://www.digitalnewsasia.com/digital-economy/sea-internet-economy-set-boom-google-temasek-report/, accessed March 2018.
18
Yoolim Lee, “Grab Vanquishes Uber With Local Strategy, Billions From SoftBank”, Bloomberg, March 27, 2018,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/grab-vanquishes-uber-with-local-strategy-billions-from-softbank/, accessed
March 2018.
19
Yoolim Lee and Eric Newcomer, “Uber Pulls Out of Southeast Asia, Selling Operation to Rival Grab”, Bloomberg, March 26, 2018,
2018.
11/12
EXHIBIT 1: MAJOR GRAB MILESTONES
Source: Grab
EXHIBIT 2: GRAB’S SEVEN PRINCIPLES
Source: Grab
12/12

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SMU517

GRAB: BUILDING A LEADING O2O TECHNOLOGY COMPANY IN

- Chin Yin Ong, Head of People, Grab

Copyright © 2019, Singapore Management University Version: 2018-05-10

hired and promoted for performance and culture.

The old taxi booking process

Assembling the tech team

Responding to competitive threats

The decision to pivot

Developing the ride-hailing app

A giant enters the arena

Hiring a sales (acquisition) team

Expanding outside Malaysia

In October 2013, Grab launched in Singapore. Gill said,

Staying innovative, nimble, and ‘Grab’ while growing and scaling

Staying innovative through hiring talent globally

Hiring the Head of People

Staying nimble through reorganising the company structure

The acquisition of Uber

EXHIBIT 1: MAJOR GRAB MILESTONES

EXHIBIT 2: GRAB’S SEVEN PRINCIPLES

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