In 2013, I started working with Blake Larson and Alex Le in building Easy Taxi, a Rocket Internet company, in Southeast Asia.

It was a sugar rush, building product, operations, marketing, data/business intelligence, and financial control/compliance, with little experience and little guidance. That was also the reason that many of us became close friends, as we were in the trenches figuring out things together.

After that experience, we went on our separate paths. Blake led the international expansion of Lalamove, grinding across the world for almost 8 years; Alex had multiple entrepreneurial journeys across Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore; I built Momentum Works and associated ventures.

We gathered in Singapore a few days ago to reflect on entrepreneurship, leadership, business culture, navigating Southeast Asia’s fragmented markets, and how to reconcile with ourselves in this lonely journey.

We recorded part of the discussion for the community, and published it through 3 episodes of the Impulso Podcast. Here you go:


E91: Founders walk a lonely road,
E92: Impact of Rocket Internet in fragmented markets
E93: Life after Rocket Internet.

We hope you enjoy these discussions, and welcome any comments/thoughts/reflections.

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Thanks for reading The Low Down (TLD), the blog by the team at Momentum Works. Got a different perspective or have a burning opinion to share? Let us know at [email protected].

 

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Jianggan Li
Jianggan Li is the Founder & CEO of Momentum Works. Prior to founding Momentum Works, he co-founded Easy Taxi in Asia, and served as Managing Director of Foodpanda. The two years running Rocket Internet companies has given him a lifetime experience on supersonic implementation, and good camaraderie with entrepreneurs across the developing world. He holds a MBA from INSEAD (GMAT 770) and a degree in Computer Engineering from Nanyang Technological University. Unfortunately he never wrote a single line of code professionally - but in his first job he was in media, travelling extensively across Asia & Europe, speaking with Ministers & (occasionally) Prime Ministers. Apart from English and his native Mandarin, he is also fluent in French and conversational in Cantonese & Spanish. He tried to learn Latin (for three years) and Sanskrit (for six months) as well. In his (scarce) free time, he reads, travels, hikes and dives. Pyongyang, Tehran & Chisinau are among the interesting cities he has been to.