Backed by Sequoia Capital and Yuri Milner’s DST Global, Go-Jek is the first unicorn in Indonesia. The Indonesian startup, which was founded in 2010, has acquired 3 start-ups in India since the beginning of 2015.Go-Jek has plans to acquire more startups in the devOps and mobile engineering space.

Nadiem Makarim , Founder of Go-Jek shared the company’s founding and why India is critical for the company.

Q: How did the idea of Go-Jek come into being?

A: While I was working in McKinsey & Company, I started Young Leaders for Indonesia, which gave me loads of learning in entrepreneurship. While in Indonesia, I navigated a lot on O Jeks (Indonesian for motorcycle Taxi) and became friends with lots of them. I trusted them in taking me around everywhere in Jakarta to buy food and stuffs like that.The service had a lot of irregularities as they had other passengers to cater to.

The critical thing that I realised was if we build trust with them, they were ready to work beyond the normal working hours.That’s when the idea of a call centre came into being. I sat down with 7 to 10 drivers and briefed them about the concept. Their willingness to work more number of hours at better remunerations gave birth to the idea of Go-Jek.

Q: Transformation from a call centre to one of the Indonesia’s hottest start-ups

A: During the initial years, I worked for various companies as I required more cash to run the business. We had a small office with six staff and had ten phones in the office with 4 call centre agents taking calls from friends and family. That was how the first six months went and then I put my savings into it.Gradually, corporates started calling us for courier services -so we became sort of a B2B courier service. But working with corporates did not last long as there were a lot of payment delays and customisations for each vendor did not prove profitable. So we decided to go straight to the consumer with our services.

Source: Times of India

Image Courtesy: Business Insider