E92 – The Impulso Podcast – Impact of Rocket Internet in fragmented markets: conversation with Blake Larson & Alex Le (2/3)

In the second part of our conversation with Blake Larson and Alexander Le, the three ex-Rocket Internet Alumni dive deeper into the fragmented Southeast Asian tech ecosystem, reflecting on how it has evolved since the days of Rocket Internet.

They share their firsthand insights on navigating the fragmented markets in the region and the lessons they’ve learned from their expansive global experiences.

The second part of this series highlights:

• Rocket Internet’s impact on tech development in Southeast Asia;
• Challenges Southeast Asia’s fragmented markets pose for scaling tech operations;
• How tech giants in the region, like Lazada and Grab, have tackled fragmentation issues;
• Importance of resource allocation when scaling globally;
• The future of tech scalability in the region.

Also available on Spotify and Apple Podcast.

Featured materials:
Seeing the Unseen, Jianggan Li, Guoli Chen
E91: Founders walk a lonely road: conversation with Blake Larson & Alex Le (1/3), The Impulso Podcast

[AI-generated transcript]

Jianggan: [00:00:00] The following is the second part of the discussion I had with Blake Larson and Alexander Le, both my close friends and comrades during the days of building Easy Taxi for Rocket Internet back in 2013 to 2015. So there were lots of stories and we have done lots of reflections. So this is the second part where we’ll talk about three things.

The first, the impact of rocket internet on a tech ecosystem in Southeast Asia. Second. Challenges of fragmented markets in this region where, I mean, of course, I mean, if you have any experience, you will know what we’re talking about. 3rd, the lessons from global expansion and resources allocation Blake, in particular, the late Lala moves global expansion after his rocket days and over, I think, 8 or 9 years.

He has seen a lot, he has done a lot, he has experienced a lot. So I hope you enjoyed this discussion. This is episode 92 of the Impossible Podcast by Momentum Works.

Blake: But this is like the crazy stuff, right? Like, and then like, maybe we can like talk about the good stuff about rocket.

Like it’s like an influence, right? Like the, the impact there. And like, I think the mindset, so like that mindset of just operational and execution, like overdrive, which you do need to be an entrepreneur. It should be focused, but like to survive. I think they bred a lot of that mindset in Southeast Asia.

Like I would say they like accelerated. Tech development, this region by some number of years, I don’t know by a lot. Right. Not just because those people also went on to start companies and run companies, but just like the mentality of like, how do you tackle such fragmented markets and like build something substantial and meaningful and get like a lot of youth and energy behind it.

I think they like, not the [00:23:00] only ones I’m sure, but like an impetus for the region in a very healthy way. 

Jianggan: Once in a while, some journalist from somewhere would come and ask me saying that, Hey there’s a bubble forming in the sector to which money is going into getting to lose the sector. That’d be too much subsidies, et cetera, et cetera.

Is that bad for the region? I would say that it’s good because a couple of things, I mean, any investment that gets into this sort of helps with the infrastructure. I mean, somebody else is going to do to create supporting infrastructure for this company to work. And it’s going to pop with talent because people are.

Getting a sense of, I mean, how accelerated, I mean, operations, et cetera, are light. Yeah. And you also create a bunch of people. I definitely like a lot, lots of our alumni that were not satisfied with the status quo. So many people left rocket. They created new companies and I think in general, it’s just positive.

And it also forces your competitors to be. More on their toes, right? I mean, many countries you look at the traditional industries, I mean, slow, but very profitable. So you have someone who comes in and [00:24:00] disrupt and it forces everybody else to say that, okay, I mean, look at a taxi company in Southeast Asia.

Everyone wants you to like, you know, improve the customer experience after all this right hand came in, they want to build their own tech. They make payment easier. It’s like, it was like a blooper today. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty good 

Blake: company now, right? I mean, I haven’t looked at like their stock or anything like that, but just by the tech and the experience is pretty good now, 

Jianggan: it’s still not as good as Grab, but it’s much better.

Blake: They don’t, they didn’t get 13 billion of investment to where they’re at. So what do you guys think of the 

Alex: quality, you know, various networks that follow Rocky would be like the OG first, because they spent a lot of money. The first to spend hundreds of millions of region before that could work, but then you have like the options of each venture to get like, then you get the crap.

Yeah. Even 

Blake: Uber. 

Alex: Yeah. Yeah, there’s a lot of town still because of Uber. I was recently invited to a, [00:25:00] an exclusive shop. Alumni one, I guess. Yeah. On my LinkedIn, I got the invite from Nick Nash has another group doing this, and, it’s very interesting though, ’cause like, I’m curious to think of what you think about the virus groups.

’cause when I, there was this one introduction phase, like, like I think 70% of the alumni in that group for Shopee, they were all doing agency work now, which means like, they weren’t like really building new ventures. So I kind of think you like in your circles, you see, 

Jianggan: but agency work is necessary, right?

Because it helps all, all these like ecosystem. I mean, 

Alex: yes, it’s a necessary because it’s very fragmented. It’s very fragmented and it’s very hard to execute good stuff. But also shows that there’s a lack of. What hard problems to solve or mindset around that, or, or like, cause I’m curious to see like for your, what you see in your online, is anyone building meaningful things?

Jianggan: mean, for me one part of the pain I had when I was at rocket is that I could see what’s going on in China. I think a few months into easy taxi, I went with Paul Malishki to Shanghai. To visit Kuwaiti and they [00:26:00] have visited Didi in Beijing. The two companies eventually merged.

Yeah, yeah. They have to go over to China. And I look at the scale of that. They are doing things. I look at, the tech that they were building and the things they were figuring out the talent they were acquiring. And I just always felt that why the hell am I in Southeast Asia? If you don’t see what’s going on there, it’s fine.

And especially now, looking back 2013, 2016, best years in tech in China. Why do you think it was able to go faster there? 

Blake: Yeah. Like, 

Jianggan: just 

Blake: like, just like, what is the cultural bits of that? That like, 

Jianggan: I think a couple of couple of factors. This couple of years, the loss of Chinese business to try to expand to the Southeast Asia, so I’m doing a lot of reflection comparing the two ecosystems.

One thing about China is obviously single market. And I would argue that China, US, two large single markets, and there’s nobody else in the world which will fit into this bill, like very, very large single market. And the same language good infrastructure, I mean, different kinds of infrastructure us had good infrastructure, which would be like, years ago, I had the new [00:27:00] infrastructure, high speed railway the logistic network, the.

Blake: And you had a few powerhouses where they hit alumni, right? Like the Alibabas have been around for 

Jianggan: a while, I think just having an alumni is not enough. Right. You have all this growth. I mean, back then it was also,

Blake: it’s the alumni, but I mean, like the belief that something can be built Southeast Asia, where does the belief come from?

Jianggan: The belief, something can be built, the belief for investors who are willing to, I mean, just look at how many rounds of money that before they went for IPO. Sure. I don’t have the numbers in my head of the whole ecosystem. Yeah. But, but I think the US investors probably spend much more money in China compared to what they have ever been doing in Southeast Asia.

Oh, for sure. 

Blake: Yeah, 

Jianggan: for sure. Sure. 

Blake: I 

Jianggan: mean, that SoftBank exists still. 

Blake: Today’s Alibaba, right. 

Jianggan: Yeah, 20, 20 14 was time when Alibaba went for IPO. Like I think that was the biggest I I I 

Blake: in the world. Biggest listening. Yeah.

Jianggan: Then that got more money to be reinvested. I think for Southeast Asia, there has not been a fantastic.[00:28:00] 

Exit. We’re still there today. Get rich. They were thinking about, okay, where should I deploy my money? And of course, a large portion of that gets into VCs and gets into founders. 

Alex: Yeah. So we’re still there. I think the early stage guys have made significant money, like later stage, probably not so much for something today.

Right. So I think still the amount compared to what appears, of course, well, because it’s a fragmented market. It’s not what it is. It is.

Blake: And I think like VCs finally like, well, they’re probably looking at grab. Yeah. Right. And they’re like, that’s, that’s the biggest success in Southeast Asia. Unless you guys can think of like a better one, like just a shoppy, maybe go check maybe nine more of that.

I thought at one time early stage. Yeah. But I mean, okay. Shopping maybe, but but look at the money that’s gone into grab versus their market cap. It’s about a dollar for a dollar. Right. Give or take, right. And so it’s like, it’s not that people didn’t make through that, but it’s not so outsized and it didn’t keep continuing to run.

And maybe it will, maybe it won’t, but like, it shows the challenge of the fragmentation here. [00:29:00] And like, I think I didn’t recognize that definitely easy taxi, but I saw it more and more with lalamove is that like the economies of scale for Southeast Asia for tech are just not there. I mean, there’s some. But particularly if you have any kind of an operational bit, like again, the simple languages, having to hire local teams, having different, like you can’t consolidate and like the efficiency and the margin that can come out of a business because 

Jianggan: for leaders point of view.

Right? I mean, the same thing. A lot of grab or whatever, the same thing you have to think about 6 times because you send a manager for Indonesia to work on the ground in Vietnam. So it’s very hard. You multiply that across all the operational aspects and then that gets translated into the mental space as a leader you have to figure out.

Well, 

Alex: I think the important insight is that you can build a category this way, but you have to be very realistic on the market size 

Blake: and the amount you’re willing to spend to write based on the market size, like, well, let me give you an example, like a lot of move. This is a perfect [00:30:00] example. It’s China.

We had 300 cities, roughly give or take represented 65 percent of our deliveries and almost 90 percent of our revenue for GMB, right? Like that shows you the level of effort for the business that I was running in Southeast Asia, like on a city for city basis, my cities were doing way more deliveries, but.

The significance on a revenue or top line. And then it just shows you the economy scale, right? Like I had the perfect juxtaposition of looking at the two businesses and being compared against China all the time and being like, I’m killing it as far as like driving volume, but the profit that you can get out of it.

Well, this and, and the cost structure that supports it is just completely different. 

Alex: It ties back to your question of like, why China was probably more productive, right? It’s just at the end of the day, I think in terms of the big and small, the biggest government macro, they can provide the infrastructure and drive incentives and policy.

And then it’s what you said about like the olive oil guys on the ground level. Right. But when there’s a big disconnect, you need both, you need [00:31:00] like, so you’re constrained by the macro and the macro is not going to be that big on the. Like a distributive wealth perspective, I still can’t capture that. 

Jianggan: So one discussion I think I told some of my friends about it.

So it’s between large Chinese tech platform and a large logistics player in Indonesia and over dinner table out there. And the guy from China was saying that I mean, because they have examined the logistic efficiency in Indonesia saying that, how can we double that? The Indonesian guy who studied in China, who speaks perfect Mandarin was saying that, well, just go to our air hostess, go to our trucks.

I mean, when do we see our trucks going? Above 30 kilometers an hour in Jakarta, go to our warehouses and most of our warehouses will get out of warehouse is immediately traffic jam. I mean, I’ve been to China and look at every logistic power you have. I mean, you connect the, I mean the government connects the expressway it, yeah.

Correct the language. I think if you listen to o I think David Fried the other day talked about the, the electricity. So, yes. So last week I was in the city of Yiwu where like 33 million e-commerce parcels are sent out each day. And I went off to factories [00:32:00] there, they said, I mean they examined setting up factories elsewhere, including Vietnam.

He said, no way they can get the rates of electricity as competitive as they can in China. And that’s a big factor. And 

Blake: you’re bringing a hundred nuclear plants online, right? 

Jianggan: Yeah. 

Blake: So they’re trying to drive that basically down to zero on a unit basis for these companies. 

Jianggan: And sometimes you get, you get into manufacturing, get an operations and look at cost structure.

 You get surprises of why things are structured in a certain way. 

Blake: And I think like the incentive for a place in like maybe Indonesia, Vietnam and correct me if I’m wrong on this is like the labor generally is still so cheap, the impetus to drive productivity and efficiency, it’s just like, oh, it’s just easier to get more people because it’s cheap, right?

But that doesn’t drive productivity or efficiency of an organization. It may solve the problem, and it may allow you to grow at the speed you’re growing, but it’s like a different way to think about things because it’s like, it’s just easier to get more people. 

Jianggan: And that actually goes back to the same issue that we’re figuring out as a, I mean, I was telling you earlier about being a founder, right?

Sometimes, I mean, you are [00:33:00] just so good at doing things yourself, but you need to empower the team to be better at what they are doing so that we become less reliant on you. And it’s the same thing here, right? You harm more people in short term, you put patches to the problem, you make it faster, but in the longterm, it’s not healthy because you have, you end up having like bloated organizations, but how to balance the short term and longterm is 

Blake: my point is also that each incremental worker, you don’t notice it.

Yeah. Right. Right. Right. So I think that’s part of it. It’s like, it’s like, Oh man, we all of a sudden have an extra 10, 000 workers, but like, I didn’t notice. Any change in my expenses, the first 5, 000, 

Alex: yeah, feature of where we are in something. Yeah. 

Blake: So like, and so some of this is just timing. Sometimes there’s like macro things like, and I think it’s something that not the founders should think about.

Actually, it’s probably more for like, investors to think about is like, Yeah. When there’s tipping points in these kind of dynamics that force a step change in the underlying cost structures, right out of necessity, a founder, you can’t wait for timing, but these are things you can’t [00:34:00] control. But from an investor, you probably pay attention to like, from a return standpoint and like where it’s going. 

Jianggan: One thing you can probably tell from first firsthand perspective, I think what Lalamove did well is that and you mentioned about 300 cities in China driving 90% on the gmv. So now we’re looking lots of China tech companies, China expand outside China. So a typical challenge they have is that.

Whatever you need to have outside China, it’s peanuts compared to, and if it’s evaluated by the same metric, by the same sort of resource allocation, they would not get, so you guys figured it out. I mean, even though the global business outside China is small, you still get resources, right?

You still get to do things. Yes. 

Blake: Yes. But like the input. Like we constrained our resources a lot compared to a lot of like very well funded companies because we saw that unit input was so much more needed in the global business than the Chinese business. So it’s like, it’s a simple R O I right? It’s like you put 5 in China to 1 and then the productivity that dollar goes so much further.

And so in a good way, it builds like the [00:35:00] frugality and efficiency from like day 1. Which allowed us to like, you know, go through some of the ups and downs that are just the macro cycles that weren’t in favor, right? Whether it was funding, whether it was economies, whether that and it built a resilience in the team.

But yes, like, it is, you’ll never see the return profile. It, I’d be interested to hear, like you work with a lot of Chinese companies and their perspective on like the necessity to expand particularly operationally heavy. Like maybe it’s, if it’s more tech or different, like, you know, if like, it’s all direct export stuff, like of a product, it’s a different game, like more from the space that we’re in.

Like, how did like, look, look at JD for an example, they went to Indonesia to millions of dollars. Cause I talked to them. Several years ago, providing delivery and they’re like, we’re no, we’re nowhere with this. And then they, I think they retreated, right? Like they retreated from both Indonesia and Thailand, right?

And so it’s like biggest market in Southeast Asia. But like, there’s no, like, I think they just sense it’s like, it doesn’t make sense to keep spending that money. It’s better to defend, it’s [00:36:00] actually more efficient to defend our own space. 

Alex: So what’s the lesson then? So like if you’re a Chinese trying to expand like what I wrote whole book about it, but , 

Blake: that’s, that’s why I’m it up, right?

Here’s the book now, and why don’t I see it flashing? Well, I think speaking of live commerce, 

Jianggan: YouTube should really, really close the loop of why it becomes a much easier platform for many people to access, but anyway, so. I look at that. I mean, I think the bigger challenge for many of these companies is that many of the founders that know China intricate well, they don’t know any of the outside markets.

 Because the market in China requires so much effort to defend there’s so much competition, it’s very difficult for them to spend their mental space. On different markets, especially when you have multiple markets, each market would give you feedback, which is different from what you see in China.

 You need to make decisions. And if you are not familiar with the market yourself, you grab it towards someone you trust in the market. [00:37:00] But if the someone you trust in the market keeps telling you things, which different from your own cognition, your own life experience, at some point in time, you you are either going to say that, Oh, this market is just different or you’re going to say that, okay, this guy’s incompetent.

And the latter seems to be the more common sort of way that things work. I thought that was at times for just, 

Blake: no, but it’s true. Yeah, it’s true. Right. Like, and of course the market’s different. Right. That’s the thing. Like I was telling my team, like, of course, every market is different. So let’s figure out what isn’t different.

Is there a business in what is different? 

Jianggan: But then you should, I mean, you think back to the rocket is like every month you kept a call, you decide, I mean, how much money I get to which market, how do you fucking do that? If, sorry, how do you do that? If you don’t know the market, I mean, everyone in each month would tell you that, okay, because of this peculiarity, we need more sourcing in this way.

 And somebody else in another market would tell you something different. And also another dimension is that, okay, a bigger market, We’ll tell you that, okay, because we’re big, we need this. And a smaller market would tell you that, okay, we, because we can’t potentially have more growth that [00:38:00] therefore we need this and all this, the things come in.

It’s 

Alex: it’s like the operating model of rocket makes sense on a monthly basis. Cause you can really tune every month. And then it’s like a very data driven German approach where they would look very heavily at this. It’s the KPI stack. 

Blake: Yeah. 

Alex: And so that’s why every month, it kind of makes sense on a frontier when you don’t know.

Blake: One of the things that I talk to most founders at this point, like it’s about expansion and like, what are the criteria? Why do you expect to expand what you do? And I think you will see less and less models. Go back to the rocket where you go to so many early and then be like, well, maybe.

Because like, it’s so risky to go that way that like, you’re interpreting data as being because we, we see, I’ve seen markets like go really slow and then be the best market for lalamove over time. Right. And like, you’re like, if you looked at the first 18 months, you’re like, this market’s terrible, but we had confidence in the product market fit from like your home market typically.

And we had a foundation there that we didn’t have to over resource things. But if you just go so wide so quickly, I think it’s. You’re really playing with fire as far as resources. Like you’re making a [00:39:00] big gamble that you’ll get some insight from some market that actually helps you with that capital allocation.

Jianggan: It’s quite hard. And it’s really hard. And notice, I mean, you look at this for delivery time, right? It tries to expand. I can know that a top player in Hong Kong and of course people, people sort of argue that Hong Kong is not really outside China And now they’re going to Saudi and they had opportunity to buy for time in Southeast Asia, which they didn’t, didn’t, which I think initially I was thinking that, okay, I mean, buying for the panel will force you to really like take over something, they run it and you have the capabilities, you have the resources to make it more efficient.

But then I thought about it again, they are, they’re probably doing the right thing by going to Saudi Arabia, because I look at Alibaba buying Lazada Like in 2016 we can’t say it’s the right or wrong decision, but they definitely had to spend much more resources trying to figure out the peculiarities of each market in Southeast Asia.

Well, as for Meituan what they do is operationally heavy, supply, demand, and I mean, two types of supply, right? The food as well as the riders. And they can [00:40:00] easily get stuck in the market. Yeah, they can easily get stuck. So, so from their point of view, they have to be very cautious. I mean, if they go into one market, they have to better have a, have a good chance to win in that market, have a chance to concentrate that they’re limited.

I mean, sort of overseas expansion resources, limited managers who can Function in overseas markets was to understand the core of the organization into that market, win that market before they move on to another market. 

Blake: I mean, I tend to agree the strategy makes it’s a long term strategy in a good way, because it’s like, look.

Our China business is enormous. We cannot jeopardize this. We see potential outside, but like we don’t need the outside to survive or to succeed. Right. And so with that, they can be a bit more patient in what learning looks like and definitely constrained. It’s way cheaper to like build your own market and in the way you want them to go buy, spend a lot of money, try to integrate a different culture, as you said, with like Lazada or whatever.

And I think they probably learned, like, for me, this is like actually a really good [00:41:00] move. And they’re like, Hey, we’re not trying to win global expansion in the next few years. Why do we need to, 

Alex: well, it ties to also the macro, the time that we’re doing this, there was a lot of easy money squeezed over from, you know, just.

Whatever it was rates to write it to DC. So that’s kind of like the forcing function, like, well, there’s so much money you might as well deploy it. And then it probably kind of managed the whole culture of big money expansion. Right. And like, so what do you tell founders these days that if they’re looking at expansion, like what’s the advice is because it’s slow kind of like, kind of like a Lalamove approach.

Yeah. 

Blake: Well, so like Lalamove is unique too, cause it started in Hong Kong. So like from, it’s like starting a company in Singapore, like you were by necessity. At some point, if you are going for a VC model of any kind. Right. So like that gives you a different framework than somebody who has like starts in Indonesia with big domestic markets, not just in Chicago, talking to all these founders and they asked, they founders always more and more.

And I was like, well, are you dominating your market? Do you feel that like, if you expand, it’s not going to either jeopardize your [00:42:00] cash or your talent because. At what expense, like wherever market you’re going to, it’s going to be smaller than Indonesia. So like the hurdle to expand, if you’re not, it’s just, it’s very, very high.

And I would actually, I would say that for most markets in Southeast Asia, the exception of like Singapore, like even if you’re in Malaysia, it’s like but like the GDP per capita is there. And it’s like, you could build a business that like, if you wanted to then go expand, like you should feel good that your domestic business isn’t going to go under.

And you’re from there, so it’s probably in the middle case, but 

Alex: it’s interesting because if you talk to just real businessmen, just tight on business, that’s like the default mentality, just like have a very strong business. Then think about whatever afterwards, but I guess the tech space, because of where we’ve been in the past decade, it seems like a lot of the young founders I meet these days, they’re always like.

Trying to jump ahead to the next market. Yes. But they have to solve very strong product market fit or even the technical 

Blake: issues. So, but in a good way, the dry up of all the funding is forced these companies to really [00:43:00] rationalize spend. And so they actually know if their business model is sustainable.

Like for example, you can look at all of like the bike sharing and stuff like this. Those were not great business models, but the capital forced them to go so, so fast that like when the funding dried up, there was no business left. Right. So anyway, that makes you really understand 

Jianggan: there’s a reflection about the business model of like shared power banks or power. 

It’s very interesting business model because initially people saying that, okay, we need to invest in this business model and lots of companies will save lots of money. And because people believe that it’s become a consumer entry point for a lot of other things, but you didn’t, but.

A few years later when the capital starts started to get squeezed on, they started forcing all these companies to, to make money. And this company realized they can actually make money because they build a consumer habit to always like always charge. And. And this time I was I was in China.

I was like comparing that. I mean, I got used to that as well. Right. And don’t bring a power back with you. You just go with someone to sit [00:44:00] down. It’s so convenient. And then you change. Yeah. You take it for default. There’s always the a stack of power banks there. I realized the price that I’m paying for this.

Has been rising from, in the past was nothing to 1 yuan per half an hour. And now it’s like, it’s only a place you pay for 5 yuan to half an hour. 

Alex: Well, it’s solving the convenience utility. It makes sense, right? So, 

Jianggan: yeah. And for me, for many people, it’s just yeah, sure. I will spend on it. But what I’ve been reflecting is that if it’s not for the early, like the crazy amount of burning.

Sure. You’d be waiting years to actually get that. How will the consumer get into this habit? 

Blake: No, no, no. Just dependency. For sure. In consumer businesses, money makes a big difference, right? That’s why VCs are willing to bet a lot, but you have to really believe in the change in the behavior is going to come.

Jianggan: And also yeah, also within the time spent that the money, the amount of money you do, you threw in a market that actually does change the consumer behavior. Before that, you don’t know. You’re right. It’s based on projections. 

Blake: Yeah, you’re right. But whatever, like, yeah, that’s a very good point, right?

The money accelerates. Change in behavior as [00:45:00] much as the product market, but actually there are certain ones like ride hailing that probably like, it’s so much better than the incumbent, like what you were doing, the behavior is going to change. But for most things, people are resistant to change, right?

Like in everything in their life, it’s just like a natural default, especially as we get older. So like the money. It really helps do that. But it also burns companies that might have been good companies out, right? Like there’s a lot of things that go off. Yeah, it’s a double edged sword. 

Alex: So, well, I think a good framework is that maybe if you’re a young founder starting up, there’s nothing wrong with focusing on fundamentals.

Like we said, focus on your core market, make sure you understand the product market and go through the cycles. But I mean, like, if you have a very clear vision or you have a very, very good clarity around like what that could be at scale. Right. So then maybe you could kind of play this big VC game. I tried to convince her.

Of course that depends on the macro. Is there enough money to go around? Are people distributing this kind of stuff? Right. I mean, it’s very interesting because Sam Albin recently tweeted, tell me what you guys think about this. If you strap a rocket to a dumpster, The dumpster [00:46:00] can still get to orbit and the trash fire will go out as soon as it leaves the atmosphere.

Many important insights contained in that observation, but it’s also better to launch my satellites instead. It’s very telling, right? Because we’ve built something like this in the region, like Grab was kind of pieced back together in reverse. Right. And as you were saying, even now to this day, it’s not even that great in your perspective.

Right. Right. Like, it’s, it’s good, 

Blake: but like, it’s ubiquitous. Right. Right. Utility is there and you need it no matter what. I don’t know. I think we all have perspectives on this type of stuff, but it’s like each situation to me is so nuanced that I try not to get caught up in like quotes like this because it’s like maybe for someone that is absolutely the reality.

Yeah. And for most people, maybe it’s not. Right. And so like, and when most people, it’s not right now for most people, it’s not, but when you haven’t like particularly first time founders and stuff, you know, you’re like, you don’t, you don’t have no context and filter. So it’s, it’s really hard. Yeah. And you have to be really thoughtful of like what you’re trying to emulate.

Alex: Yeah. 

Blake: And learn from versus like what your vision [00:47:00] and your reality of what you’re building is. Which is 

Alex: Yeah. Which is why the founders like Adam Neuman has reality and distortion abilities. Yes. People will see that and like, oh, that’s, that’s the model. Right. But yeah, it’s just trust, not necessarily.

Right. They go that they, 

Blake: they have the superpower. Yeah, they do. Yeah. Incredible. Yeah. Right. It’s 

Alex: a very different game than maybe your own context. Yes. You have to really, you 

Blake: really have to think about 

Alex: that.

Jianggan: I Hope you enjoyed this conversation I had with Blake Larson and Alexander Le, two close friends with whom we built some of the earliest rocket internet companies in Southeast Asia. This is part two of the whole conversation we had, and this is episode 92 of the Impossible Podcast by Momentum Works.

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