Anthony Tan didn’t need to start a business to get rich.
He grew up as the youngest of three children in one of the richest families in Malaysia. His father, Tan Heng Chiu, is the chairman of Tan Chong Motor, a multinational automobile distribution company founded by Tan’s grandfather in the 1950s, which is publicly listed on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange.
“You can call me ‘Rebel Without a Cause,'” Tan said. But I was on a mission to create something that could be a “force for good.”
Now, Tan is the co-founder and CEO of a multinational ride-hailing and super app giant He catches. After the company went public in the US in December 2021, it generated more than $2 billion in revenue in 2023, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
He catches
Today, besides offering ride-hailing services, the company offers food and grocery delivery, as well as financial services such as payments, lending and digital banking. As of 2023, Grab also serves more than 35 million customers and creates 13 million jobs across eight countries in Southeast Asia.
“I remember when I used to meet with [former President Ferdinand] Marcos is in the Philippines, the board of directors and I mentioned… [Grab] “It literally changed the unemployment numbers nationally. That’s what I would say makes us all really happy,” he said.
Business beginnings
In 2009, Tan began his studies at Harvard Business School, where he met co-founder Hui Ling Tan. Having both grown up in Malaysia, they became good friends after sitting next to each other in a class called “Business at the Base of the Pyramid.”
One day in 2011, they were having a conversation about the Malaysian taxi system, which at the time was Notorious Because it is unsafe, especially for women. The two decided to accept the challenge.
“We want to make standard hygiene one that women can access wherever they need it [safely]“We really thought we were very lucky,” said Tan [and] “We wanted to serve Southeast Asia.”
They went on to formulate a business plan, which was submitted to a startup competition at the university. They won first place and received a $25,000 prize, which was used as seed money for what would become Grab.
Today, Grab is backed by the likes of SoftBank, and the company has a market capitalization of more than $14 billion.
However, Tan’s journey to start Grab was not an easy task.
It was very intense… I was probably practicing 15, 18, sometimes 20 hours a day, and that was Monday through Sunday.
Tan grew up working in the family business, and was expected to return from his studies and return to work for the company. So, when he went to his father with his idea for Grab, the conversation was not taken seriously.
“[My father] “Hey, I don’t think it’s going to work, so please don’t bother me about it anymore,” Tan said. “It was hard. It was this idea of like, never being enough…but, I guess.” [moments] “It pushed me to say, ‘Look, I can create something that solves real societal problems.'”
He took the same idea, refined it, and brought it to his mother, who eventually became Grab’s first individual investor. Using the money he got from the startup competition and from his mother, Tan also invested everything he had in his bank to start the company in June 2012. At that time, the company was known as “MyTeksi”.
“20 hour” working days
The first few years in business were by no means glamorous.
Tan and his co-founder had just tasked themselves with building a new infrastructure for Malaysia’s taxi system, but money was a big limiting factor.
The original office was in a small room in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, a region of the world known for its hot and humid weather all year round. The office lacked ventilation, air conditioning and even WiFi. “We had to connect our mobile phones,” Tan said.
It was also difficult for the team to bring drivers onto the podium without enough money, so they had to get creative.
Anthony Tan is running as a delivery driver for Grab.
Courtesy of Grab
To recruit drivers in the early days, Tan was on the ground traveling across Southeast Asia, trying to convince taxi operators to try Grab.
Tan observed that before starting their morning shift, drivers in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, would stop at a gas station to drink coffee. So he would come around 4am to offer free coffee to taxi drivers, which was also the time he would encourage them to join Grab. “It was the only way, and there was a lot of this,” he said.
“In Manila, I remember meeting taxi fleets, because they always changed their shifts at around 4 a.m….and then [I spent] Time with them [with some] cheap beer, [to try to] “They understand their pain and problems and why they need more income,” Tan said.
“It was very intense,” he said. “In between flying — I was doing two to three cities a week when we were growing and expanding — I was probably doing 15, 18, sometimes 20 hours a day, and that was Monday through Sunday.”
Driving Southeast Asia Forward
In 2018, after a long and exhausting battle, Uber agreed Selling its Southeast Asia business to Grab for a 27.5% stake in the company. As part of the deal, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has joined Grab’s board of directors. This deal established Grab’s dominance in the region.
What started as a dream to fix a safety problem in Malaysia’s taxi system has now become the dominant super app in Southeast Asia, but that dominance has been anything but controversial. The company has faced antitrust allegations from critics and regulators.
However, there is no dispute that Grab has shaped the infrastructure itself in Southeast Asia.
In December 2021, Grab went public and listed on the Nasdaq.
Courtesy of Grab
It has changed the way people in the area live their daily lives, empowering people “at the bottom of the pyramid” by giving them access to things like microfinance programmes, so they can buy a smartphone and start making money as drivers.
“That’s what sets us apart, right? Understanding what their problem is,” he said. “People might say, ‘Hey, Anthony, you’re just serving a niche.’ Well, it’s a big niche that has a very poor market and is underserved.”
“It’s all about really helping them, serving them as an ecosystem that no one else can do…that’s what sets us apart from any of our peers.”
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“Devoted student. Bacon advocate. Beer scholar. Troublemaker. Falls down a lot. Typical coffee enthusiast.”