YouSaid · the spoken record

Anthony Tan

lines on the record: 25
first: 2025-09-02
most recent: 2025-09-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“What's at stake? Lots at stake. We have 13 million drivers and merchants registered on Grab. We are probably one of the largest enablers of jobs. We need to hold ourselves to such a high bar. We must And help them along this journey to really be embraced in an AI first, in an AV hybrid world. And the best way is to start early, invest in them now, even before AVs are here, and reflect those values in every decision we make. Every day”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, people would say very high intensity. They would say, but you know, I do believe in this concept. I come from a faith that believes that you can come out as a lion and be proud and be fierce and you're willing to chew anything in your path. But at the same time, also sort of had the humility of a lamb. And so I always talk about how do you be really bold but have tremendous empathy. A lot of times you are wrong and I'm wrong and that we are constant work in progress. So I think it's that it's like showing love all the time and caring for your people while at the same time being holding a really high bar because you love them, because you want them to do better, because you believe that customers expect much more from us and society want to see many companies that have triple bottom line fail. So you've got to prove to them.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But my hours haven't changed, you know, 13 and a half years later. You know, I still wake up for this interview at 6 a.m. I finished work at 11.30. Look, the reality is it doesn't change. And I don't want it to change in the sense of I still love every week my assistant, now I can afford to have assistant. My assistant really has been able to tell me in 26 weeks of the year you traveled for 25 weeks. So because I need to go to the ground. In the early days, I was by the large monsoon drains that were really smelly, you know, pounding the table, screaming louder than the competitors to make sure we were recruiting drivers. Having the local chocolate milk to incentivize them to sign up with us, that hasn't changed. Last week, I was still with drivers learning from them and getting scolded. Not much has changed.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of talk about American obsession, but I can say I think the culture is one part that has made a lot of our global peers sort of look at Asia and say, hey, these are things that we could learn as well.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By driver leader groups to say, hey, you're not doing a good enough job here. And I love getting that feedback right. Just tell it to me so I can learn and iterate. And then from there, I called my leaders and said, look, these are things we have to change. And the good news is that because of the culture so prevalent that they can take the feedback and iterate very quickly, then it's hard to serve. The culture, you asked me in those days, and this was pre-Dara with Uber, The cultured work of governments, not fight them head on, but work with them and say, look, we're in this together. They're hard to serve communities, the passion to serve, you know, whether it's the visual vision impaired community, whether it's the silver generation helping governments digitize their communities and just honor that whatever we say we're going to do. So I.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reality is the culture here is one that needs tremendous humility, but tremendous hunger all at the same time. Our leadership culture is based on 4H, right, of hunger, of humility, of honor and heart, right? Hunger, look, we know we just have to outwork everyone because it's a tougher market. It's much lower margins. Prices are much lower. And just have a much lower cost structure. Second, you just need to be extremely humble. Know that you're not the smartest guy in the room. In fact, most people are smarter than you. So you just got to take feedback all the time. I get scolded just recently, last week I got scolded by drivers.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's so many problems to solve in the region. And the region is 600 over a million people. It doesn't have the wealth of America for sure, but it does have lots of babies. It's double the size of American population size. But we literally help reduce unemployment by close to 1%. Regenerate 0.7% of the GDP of the ASEAN nations, of the big ASEAN nations, right? But the penetration is still low if you look at mobility. It's in a low double digits in some markets, in some single digits. So do we see huge upside tremendously our fintech is our fastest growing vertical. And we are looking at dispersing billions of dollars. We just raised $1.5 billion. It was eight and a half times oversubscribed. We are looking at M&A opportunities, not just locally, but also even globally.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the driver app, you will see how we've partnered MasterCard, how we've partnered Microsoft to have our curriculum and micro learning segments. We think about how to create new jobs as we think about the AV world.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It just needs me much cheaper, but we are already experimenting. We've deployed our autonomous shuttle. We're partnering many autonomous vehicle companies across the region globally for the region. And we are just going to just roll out experiments. Many AV companies might not care about drivers. For us, we have to care because drivers make up 99.99% of our business today. So we have to think about not just the displacement effects, but also the augmentation benefits. So we're really thinking about saying, hey, for every driver, how can he become a safety driver? How can they become remote pilots during edge cases? How can we think about them becoming data labelers? We've been upskilling our drivers for a long time, Bob.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is going to take a longer ramp up time in Southeast Asia. Why? Because the road infrastructure is very different. Outside of Singapore, it is much messier, to say the least. It's much less developed. If you've been to Jakarta or Bali or Bhuket, it is behind many of the road infrastructures that you're used to in the West. That's one. The second is that the labor cost, again, outside Singapore, very, very much lower labor cost. So for AVs, autonomous vehicles to take off in the region, it needs not only to be as safe as what you see in the US today, but it needs to be much cheaper. Those price points that you see in the US just can't work.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On our platform so that we can drive this agenda. Not all markets have EV infrastructure already. You want EVs everywhere, but the problem is a lot of the charging infrastructure just isn't ready. So we had to partner governments to make sure that EV infrastructure is strong. We had to work with many companies around to make sure financing is available, not just for the EV cars, but also for EV bikes, motorbikes, but also for PMDs, personal mobility devices. And then, of course, building, as I said, with grab maps, we've been able to cut travel time, which again reduces carbon because of our maps, because of our AI that is an auto adaptive across our entire system. So for us, honestly, Bob, it is mission critical, and we have very clear goals, very clear plans to get there.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For us is two parts. The first part, it is about sustainability, but it's not sustainability for the sake of sustainability. We have to be honest with ourselves about climate change does impact livelihoods. Our drivers, just recently in Philippines, when there was a massive flood, our drivers couldn't move. That impacts business. That impacts their lives. That impacts their livelihoods, our lives, and our business metrics dropped in Manila when that happened. So we have to care about the environment. When we think about EVs, we think of it in that light. We need to hit our goal of being carbon neutral by 2040. And EVs is just part of one of the solutions. We have invested several hundred millions of dollars in lower emission vehicles that are really primarily”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's why you build ground maps. And it's not only provided us a huge competitive advantage, a huge cost advantage, but it's become now a B2B enterprise service that now Amazon buys from Microsoft buys from us. So that's why we can really understand these local problems and solving them in a hyper local way that leads to a much better service that creates higher loyalty, higher retention.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. How do local, hyper-local players like us win? It's tough, but how do you get problems that no one else can solve? Uber is a huge company. There are many great global tech companies that have huge scale, but they won't invest in very unique problems. Like, for example, mapping in Southeast Asia. We built our own maps, our core services are all built on the most accurate maps. We found that third-party maps were just not accurate enough. They weren't updated. They didn't understand where most of our mobility fleet are two wheels, our motorbikes.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your problem. And I know you must be thinking, hey, look, it's not a big set of people who are visually impaired, but you know what, Bob? It helps these individuals in such a real large-scale impact way to them individually. But not just deploying it for as we think about just visually impaired. We're thinking about the elderly group, the silver generation, right? So again, we first started with large impact for small group of people now with specialized training. Now it's going to larger and larger groups, deploy them more and more geographical markets. So there are scenarios we build on our own. There are scenarios we partner the best, like OpenAI, like Anthropic. There are scenarios we partner with the best universities around the world. But what we do believe is Generally, partnerships make us stronger.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, you want to find the best solutions for these real world challenges. We want to partner the best and we want to find the best models for specific tasks. When we first started the early days, I remember we did a change, we did an update on the app. And then there was a bunch of really angry drivers and angry customers who came up to us and scolding us. And we were wondering why. It was a few of them were visually impaired. And because we did an update and they couldn't use the accessibility option. Today, we've been able to work with OpenAI to create using multimodal LLMs on voice specifically such that they can speak so easily into it, whether you're totally blind or not, and really solve your problem.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the merchant assistant talks in such an empathetic, such an encouraging way as their personal best friend. So that's the type of products that couldn't have come out without this generative AI sprint.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jobs, total mindset shift. And that's the beauty. And it wasn't just, hey, we just wanted to create a sprint for fun. We built real generative AI solutions. For example, we created AI merchant assistant now that's deployed across millions of long tail merchants. We worked with the top R&D labs across the world, like Anthropic. And yesterday I was just looking at, we use Claude 4 to think about how to make it so much more empathetic, so much more relevant for the merchant. So now it's helping them not just boost their sales, helping them with photo edits, helping them position how they look on grab food, cross-cut the customers, how to pack. They even ask questions, Bob like, oh, you know, business. Isn't good. Times are tough. Can you give me some encouragement, sis?”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think mindset change is tough, especially in August of over 9,000 people. First, we had to really upskill folks. But shock the system. So we did a generative AI sprint. I spoke to everyone, whether you're from engineering and data science, you're an AI specialist, or you're someone just signing up merchants in a tier three city in Vietnam. And we said for nine weeks, folks, we're going to focus on learning and experimenting where the goal outcome was every grabber has to be a technologist, regardless of what backgrounds you come from. Before we started the sprint, something like 80% of folks were worried that their jobs would be replaced. But interestingly, by the end of it, 80% was saying they understand generative AI so much better and they can see how it's helping their”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you ask me what's the biggest risk, I would say look, for us, it's really about being stagnant. And I think Talked about the geopolitical environment, we can weather uncertainty, we can really help communities become resilient. But we need to constantly change. So at Grab, we called it how do you think about Kaizen, which is just 1% better every day. For every service, we just need to be 1% better every trip, every delivery order, every payment. But that's not enough. That's just not enough, Bob. We need what we call Kaikaku, which is an A Japanese term besides Kaizen. It's sort of this step change. So we call that Gai Gaku, G-A-I, generative AI Kaku, using generative AI to become totally a different company. And that's what we introduced, this idea of AI first with heart.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the geopolitical environment hasn't been easy. The tariff wars hasn't been easy when factories have to close down because of the tariffs or whatever shocks that are happening. We are able to cushion all this additional employment. And governments really appreciate it because they are really concerned when unemployment shoots up. So they see that we've been able to drive not just more employment within 20 minutes, they can sign up to be a delivery partner, to be a driver. But as we got more supply, actually prices came down. So if you look at our financials, interestingly, we have more supply, which meant less surge sessions, which means lower prices, which means more affordability, which means more customers. Yet at the same time, our earnings per online hour keeps going up. So our drivers earn more per hour basis. So really...”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The key is two things. One, how do you create amazing data? And two, how do you create an amazing collection, right? It's easy to lend money out. The issue is collecting it, right? Bob. So as more and more services erupt, everyday services are rolled out. More and more data is gathered. As more and more data is gathered, that data has given us an advantage to lend because we basically create a credit score across 100 distinct data points. But it's that massive data advantage that allows us to price risk much better and to collect much better.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For them. So we said, you know what, let's just take out cash out of the system. The drivers have a grab pay wallet. The customer has a grab pay wallet. So all this just helped build more and more services on one app.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the super app just means an app that has multiple services. If you look at how it's evolved here in Southeast Asia, we started just to solve Southeast Asian problems, for example, safety. Safety was a major issue. We wanted to make sure rights were safe for women and children. That was a real problem and we solved that. And we're now at 99.9% safety. And then we said, okay, what's next? We realized, wait, but to get drivers, you needed to lend them a phone. How do you lend them a phone? Because many of them didn't even have a smartphone. So we said we'll start a financing business. So we have fintech built into the grab app. So it's just like one service after another. And then when we said payments, we said, hey, you know, the driver became an ATM mobile ATM and wasn't.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can come out as a lion and be proud and be fierce, you're willing to chew anything in your path, but at the same time also sort of have the humility of a lamb. Like showing love all the time and caring for your people, while at the same time holding a really high bar because you love them, because you want them to do better, because you believe that customers expect much more from us. And society wants to see many companies that have triple bottom line fail. So, you got to prove to them that a triple bottom line company can not only survive but thrive.”
2025-09-02 · Masters of Scale · Grab’s rise from rideshare to superapp in Asia, with Anthony Tan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT