Respecting culture and integrating culture are different things

Absrtact: This time, we sit down with GrabTaxi CEO Anthony Tan, who can eat this huge market in Southeast Asia. A few days ago, soft Bangang to 250 million U.S. dollars to invest in Southeast Asia taxi software GrabTaxi. The team from Malaysia may be valued at more than 10

This time, we sat down with GrabTaxi CEO Anthony Tan to talk about who could eat the huge market in Southeast Asia.

A few days ago, soft Bangang to 250 million U.S. dollars to invest in Southeast Asia taxi software GrabTaxi. The team from Malaysia may have valued more than $10 billion trillion, and Uber, Goldman Sachs, has just completed $1.2 billion trillion in financing, valued as much as $40 billion trillion, publicly declaring that the Asia-Pacific market is a key development target.

In addition to Uber, GrabTaxi and the easy Taxi of the Hailo,rocket Internet in Singapore, the south-East Asian market has a taxi application. The 2015 competition, from the audience point of view, should be very good-looking. But the tide of the Southeast Asian market is raging, but only these teams can understand.

Respecting culture and integrating culture are different things

South-East Asia boasts 600 million taxi crowds, huge market potential, but the market itself is highly decentralized because of infrastructure, geography and urban development.

GrabTaxi first landed in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, when they want to expand to other cities, found that smartphone penetration rate is not high, and 2G, 3G, 4G network popularity is also uneven.

Bangkok, Thailand, is another scene. As the capital, Bangkok's public transport is very developed, subway, urban rapid transit and so on to meet the needs of the people's travel, taxi application where should highlight the value?

If the infrastructure can be used to make up for the hardware, such as dripping fast once gave the smart phone to the driver friend. Public transport can respond to location layouts. How can more deep-rooted geographical and cultural problems be solved?

Geographically, Southeast Asia is mostly island countries, and most of the region, inland and island environment is very different, the company is not the same way, echoing the language, alone in Thailand, there are Chaozhou dialect, Burmese, Lao, and Thai itself is not a tonal dialect of the language.

We can not use a city to locate a country, a language to locate the real language of this place. For example, when many Americans first came to China, they thought that Beijing was China and that other places must be the same. Or Chinese is a language, the whole country is universal. If you think about it, you are very ignorant. You must understand that in a country, some cities will be very developed, others, such as Bangkok is even more prosperous than Beijing, but nowhere else.

So every place, I will find very local people as our employees, they must live here for a long time, but also love the culture here, even to every street by heart. And I, try to eat and live with them, you have to learn not only to respect the culture of others, but also to integrate into.

Yes, talking to Muslims about pork and vegetarian hunxing always going out. In addition, do not need to worship bully when the start-up company landed? It's a local culture.

For Anthony, dealing with the local government is also a matter of caution. "The government can crush you in minutes," he said, quite open. The secret of GrabTaxi is to understand the needs of different governments and to understand what they are doing.

In Malaysia, for example, women's safety is a very important issue, and Anthony's own sister has had unpleasant experiences. In this way, they specifically add the app to the tracking and distance sharing function, and provide users with detailed driver information. Each driver in the registration, in addition to the driver's license, also need to obtain a special "license", is highly recognized by the government.

When it comes to the government's liking to install cameras in taxis, he does not think that this is wrong, "China and south-East Asian countries are not the same, we have a taxi license worth 8000 dollars, not to mention how expensive a car, so, in dealing with car disputes, the need for a camera as a voucher, I do not think it is spy Camera. ”

Understanding Government decisions, cooperating actively, and avoiding being dominated by grey areas, Anthony also shares an interesting underworld adventure:

One time I was talking to the boss of a taxi company, and the table was covered with a long tablecloth. Suddenly heard the sound of a bang, what fell under the table, I lifted a look at, incredibly is a machine gun! It turned out that the man was not only running a taxi, but a gun smuggler, and then I knew I had no chance to dour.

Whether it is the surface of the difference or behind the swamp belt, start-up companies to do localization operations, bully or to bye-bye, online products we can operate, but offline culture, not every team know how to integrate ...

We're going to do social Enterprise.

What is the taxi software? Tools？ At least in my case, it is. But Anthony gave me the feeling that, compared to a tool, GrabTaxi shoulders also have a social mission.

Anthony is very agreeable to the subsidy incentive, and he feels that the biggest demand for drivers ' friends is to earn enough money and live well with their families. But "do you think about their families while you care about their income?" ”

This is similar to the Easytaxi that I interviewed earlier, who are equipped with sound commercial insurance for their children's education or resources, which also grabtaxi the old Hong Kong drivers with special customer service. These are purely financial subsidies do not have the humanistic concern.

Returning to the issue of women's safety in Malaysia, GrabTaxi also believes that she is duty-bound to ensure security, but also through their own platform for everyone to pass: Most of the drivers are good, their value needs to be explored.

He told me very confidently: we do not take the taxi software, is the ecosystem.

In my values, there are two different startups. The first is to earn a lot of money in the young, do a great deal, to accumulate after the donation to the building, charity, but there is a growing, but also to the society to convey ideas. For example, respect for drivers and the concept of culture, this universal values than the simple charity, come to more meaningful.

So, he stressed, GrabTaxi tend to accept people with the same values, or people who say "genetically".

Some of my doubts

During the interview, Anthony asked two times, "How do Chinese drivers look at the car and feel betrayed by the drip and courier?" ”。 My first reaction is, GrabTaxi also want to do the car? Taxis in south-East Asia are much higher than at home, so there may be no difference between car and taxi prices, and taxi drivers are more hostile to the limousine.

So here I have a few questions not figured out:

1. In the country, car and taxi because of different consumption, facing the crowd is different, the taxi driver will not worry about being robbed of business?

2. Taxi software Finally, will use their own car to completely subvert the taxi?

3.Anthony said that Southeast Asian taxi companies have not responded to the situation at home, do not know the end of the taxi company, what is the outcome? Does a taxi become an individual that breaks up operations?