The Rise of Grab: How I built a $2 billion a year super app

My parents would have described me bull in a china shop type. So I would run around very high energy. I tried pushing the boundaries a lot. This is Anthony Tan, co-founder and CEO of Grab. If you've ever had to hail a ride in Southeast Asia, chances are it was through Grab. But this is more than the region's Uber. Grab has become a super app that's listed on the NASDAQ. The company has built itself into the very infrastructure of eight major Southeast Asian countries, providing day-to-day services to over 35 million users and a source of income to more than 13 million drivers and merchants as of 2023. If you ask me, providing 13 million gig jobs is probably the largest job impact and poverty alleviation on a grand scale in 750 cities. That's what I would say makes us all really happy. Our calling is one that continues to be very, very clear. How do we make sure nobody's left behind? Grab's latest push has been in artificial intelligence. So to learn more, I've come to the company's global headquarters to hear from Anthony Tan himself. Hello. Hi, Anthony. Welcome. Thank you very much. It's five-star treatment today. It better be, right? So how often do you drive for Grab? Not that often. I mean, I wish I could drive a lot more. And you know, the learnings in certain buildings, the security treats you like real second-grade citizens. It really feels awful. And that's when you really have a much better appreciation of the everyday pains they go through. Do I get five stars? Five stars. And a tip, yeah. Good, generous customer. Life advice from Anthony Tan. Exactly. There are three numbers to look out for in Grab's story. 25,000, the Grab seed money Anthony won from a startup contest at Harvard Business School. 2.15 million, Grab's first institutional investment in June 2013. And 2.36 billion, the amount Grab brought in in 2023. This is founder effect. Anthony grew up as the youngest son in one of Malaysia's wealthiest families. His grandfather founded Tan Chong Motor, one of the biggest automobile distributors in the Southeast Asian nation. But Anthony's claim to fame came decades later. I've seen how my parents worked really, really hard nonstop. My father used to remind me, your grandfather beat this into our heads and now it's our turn to beat it into yours, which is you can sleep all you want when you're dead. So it wasn't like they took things as if they're entitled. In fact, they saw it as we're given so much, more is expected from you than the average Joe out there. So make sure you push hard. Before creating Grab, Anthony worked at his family's business on and off for about five years. When I worked for my dad's factory, I went into the factory line. I was spot welding, doing the seats. I remember giving a speech to thank the folks that helped me through that entire period, tearing as I spoke to them, because many of them has been with us for 20, 30, 40 years. And I appreciated how tough that kind of work is. And I could never really appreciate it until I did the work myself. In 2009, Anthony began his studies at Harvard Business School, where he met his co-founder, Tan Hoi Le. And I'm very, very thankful for Harvard Business School. I did classes like business at the base of the pyramid, and that's where I really got close to my co-founder. She didn't do her homework as frequently as I did, so she strategically positioned herself beside me to peek at my work. We created a love for each other because we were united on values and we wanted to serve Southeast Asia. The idea for Grab stemmed from a conversation about the inefficiencies and dangers of the Malaysian taxi system. The original idea was to solve safety problem for women and children. And the whole idea was basically you can create societal benefit, environmental benefit, and you can create economic benefit at the same time. It's a win-win-win. During their second year at Harvard, the duo pitched their original business plan at a startup contest called the HBS New Venture Competition. They took home $25,000. We got first runner up. And the reason why we lost was because they said Malaysia's just too small, and hence, you should think about a Southeast Asian growth enterprise that is focused on the same problem. I spoke to my dad. I told him we're gonna create a cloud dispatch system, and he didn't understand it. He then said, hey, I don't think it's gonna work out, so please don't disturb me about this anymore. My mother also said she didn't understand, but she said, I love you, son, so here's a bit of money. With that seed capital from my mother and myself, I put in everything my bank had, and then we started the company. In June 2012, Anthony and his co-founder launched the first iteration of Grab. At the time, it was called MyTaxi. The OG office was literally in the driver's room, poor ventilation, and we didn't even have Wi-Fi. We had to tether from our mobile phones. When Ling and I first started, we didn't have that much money, and drivers all didn't have smartphones. I remember going to the early days of a very big Korean phone company that helped us, and it was part of the ESG team that said, you know, we will help you with a first set of phones. We could take these phones, and then we microfinanced it to our drivers. There were times when we nearly ran out of funding, so I am grateful that people took bets with me and on me, but it is a journey of suffering. Just one year after Grab's launch, the company received its first institutional investment of over $2 million from Vertex Ventures. So when you decided to leave the family business, how did that conversation go? Oh, it was tough. I'll never forget that. I mean, it was this idea of never being enough. My dad disowned me. It was hard, right? Being taught all your life that you're gonna go back to the family business and help the family. My dad used to tell me, you're useless. You know, you don't deserve to have a family name. I would say, in a weird kind of way, I'm grateful because it helped me realize I had no other option but to make it work. CNBC reached out to Anthony's father via his company for comment. We did not hear back before publication. In 2016, the company rebranded from MyTaxi to Grab and hit unicorn status, a startup valued at over a billion dollars. Today, we have 30 million registered drivers and merchants. It's not like anything happens. It was really tough. I mean, I remember in Ho Chi Minh, you know, we couldn't afford to get drivers. So at like three or four in the morning, we realized, hey, taxi drivers would go to outside gas stations to drink coffee. So we could afford with a very kind auntie. She let us sponsor the entire coffee canister and it would give free coffee to the taxi drivers. And that was when we pitched hard about our driver application. It was that constant pitch of why we're different than today. As I said, many still stay until now because they said, you don't only walk the talk, you run the talk. And that's been consistent. Grab's journey has been far from easy. The company has faced strong competition along the way, including from the likes of U.S.-based ride-hailing giant, Uber. If you looked at those odds, it looked like we would get crushed by them. And I told Dara when I first met him, I respect you and I respect the company, but iron chopping iron, you guys pushed us real hard and we pushed back real hard. In 2018, Uber agreed to sell its Southeast Asia business to Grab in exchange for a 27.5% stake in the company. As part of the deal, Uber's CEO joined Grab's board of directors. It was a keer-shed moment for all Grabbers. It was going to be announced at 10 a.m. We didn't even know the deal was going to happen at 6 a.m. We were still negotiating until like two hours before the press announcement. I remember when it signed and the deal got closed, many of us in the meeting room literally fell to our knees. We were just like, I can't believe this is happening moment. This deal established Grab's dominance in the region, a dominance it still holds today. It's been all about this ecosystem mindset. That's what differentiates us, right? Understanding what is their problem. If you look at when we first started, it was to solve the safety problem. Then there were many attempts to hurt our drivers and steal money from them. Then we said, no, let's digitize their money. And that's why we created GrabPay. We said, look, drivers during off-peak hours from work time or school time, they didn't have much to do. So we said, how do we give them more utilization, more jobs so that they can earn more money? And we realized GrabFood was perfect in between your coming to work and leaving work. During the times of quarantine, we said, wow, people really need their groceries, and we launched GrabMart. People may say, hey, Anthony, you're just serving a niche. Well, it's a big niche that has a very poorly underserved market. In December 2021, Grab made history after going public in the US in what was at the time the world's largest SPAC deal. Did you ever anticipate that Grab would become as big as it is today? I literally just had this conversation with my mom last night. We didn't. None of us did. We were happy to be a 100 million ringgit company. Currently, Grab is zeroed in on AI. The company is set to launch a new voice assistant feature in 2024 designed with visually impaired users in mind. It is a major shift from web to mobile. So one, it's really getting our own folks leveling up in this new way of working, this complete change in customer experiences. Second is then seeing how it's forming and recreating total new solutions that customers has never seen before. If you could go back and talk to a younger version of yourself, what advice would you give him? It's gonna be really hard. Honestly, maybe it was ignorance is bliss. And if I knew it was gonna be so hard, I'm not sure if I would have done it. But is it extremely rewarding? Look, I got the longer end of the stick. So yes, I would have done it again. But there are many who weren't as blessed. If you're ever to start again or you're starting for the first time, be very clear, it has to be your life calling. I really mean it. If you don't, don't do it. Because so many fail. It's that hard. And lastly, this is more of a personal question, but how does your dad feel now that Grab's become so massive? Well, the reality is he hasn't spoken much to me yet. I will continue to reach out with love. And I hope one day he will see that there's no other intent but love. And I'm always grateful that he shared all the teachings of Confucianism, the idea of working extremely hard, the idea of honor. He will say you're a zero to hero, but it's not me. It's all these sort of unnamed heroes and angels that literally helped prop me up. And I literally stood on the shoulders of giants to get to where we are today.