Part IThe Story
The phone call was a performance. Late at night in Kuala Lumpur, after a day at a consulting firm that routinely kept her past the hour when anyone sensible was home, Tan Hooi Ling would climb into a taxi, lift her phone to her ear, and talk to her mother. Sometimes she was only pretending to. The words did not matter. What mattered was that the driver heard them and understood that somebody knew this car, this route, this woman, and that somebody was still awake.
Most nights her mother really was awake. The two of them had worked out what Ling later called a "manual GPS system." Before the car pulled away, she texted her mother the number plate. As the taxi passed each large landmark on the way home, she sent another message, so that someone in a house in the Klang Valley could follow a dot that existed only in text messages and imagination. Her mother stayed up every night until her daughter walked through the door. In those years, if you typed "World's Worst Taxi" into a search engine, the results for several pages pointed to Kuala Lumpur.
Anthony Tan tells this story often: to Bloomberg, to the Wall Street Journal, to TED audiences, to podcast hosts. He tells it well, in his loose Malaysian-inflected English, and he always names it correctly as the beginning. It is worth noticing that it is not his story. He is the man who never needed to pretend anyone was on the other line. He grew up with an Indian family driver, inside one of the wealthiest automotive dynasties in Malaysia. The founding wound of Grab belongs to a state-schooled engineer's daughter from Petaling Jaya, a woman who prefers, in her words, "to be behind the scenes." He supplied the voice.
Fourteen years later, the company built on that pretend phone call serves more than 50 million monthly users across more than 900 cities in eight countries. It reported $2.80 billion in revenue for 2024 and posted its first full-year profit after that. It owns a digital bank, a supermarket chain, a restaurant reservations platform, and a fleet of licensed taxis on the streets of Singapore. At one point in 2021 it was valued at $39.6 billion. On September 21, 2026, with the stock having fallen by more than half over the previous year to a three-year low of $2.74, its founder bought 10.4 million shares at $2.8866 apiece, about $29.9 million in all. It was the first time he had bought rather than sold since the listing. Asked why, he said it was a signal of where he stood.
The point of the purchase was the same as the point of the phone call: to make sure the people on the other end believed somebody was watching.
By the Numbers
The Grab Ledger
$25,000Harvard Business School New Venture Competition prize, runner-up, 2011
27.5%Stake in Grab that Uber received for exiting Southeast Asia, March 2018
$39.6BEquity value of the 2021 Altimeter SPAC merger, then the largest ever
3.3% / 60.4%Anthony Tan's share of Grab's stock vs. his share of its voting power at listing
237,000+Ride-hailing drivers moved into delivery during 2020
$2.80BRevenue, fiscal year 2024
8Countries served: Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia, Myanmar
Fourteen Hours in the Rain
Every dynasty keeps a founding scene, and the Tans of Tan Chong keep theirs wet. As Anthony heard it from his parents, again and again, his grandfather stood outside the Japanese Embassy for fourteen hours in the rain, waiting for the chairman of Datsun, in order to ask permission to sell two cars. But you don't have any experience, the chairman told him. The grandfather did not take the no. "These are humbling stories and they stuck in my head for a very long time," Tan has said. The lesson he drew sounds like a slogan and was probably meant as one: never say no; always say yes.
The documented facts are drier and do not diminish the legend. Tan Yuet Foh and his brother Tan Kim Hor co-founded Tan Chong & Sons Motor Company in 1957. The company secured the rights to import and sell Nissan vehicles in Malaysia. Datsun, as Nissan was then known, became one of the most popular car brands in the country, and the Tans became rich. Tan Yuet Foh died in 1985, three years after his grandson was born. Tan Kim Hor lived until 2016. Before the car money came the taxi. Family accounts disagree on who drove it. Most say Anthony's great-grandfather, a few say the grandfather himself. In every version a Tan was driving strangers around for money before the family was rich enough to employ a driver of its own. "Autos," Anthony told Fortune in 2016, "are in my blood."
He was born in Kuala Lumpur in 1982, the youngest of three sons of Tan Heng Chew, who would become president of the listed Tan Chong Motor. The family's roots trace back to Anxi, in Fujian, and the household language was layered like sediment: Mandarin, Hokkien, Malay, English, and the separate accent of the Indian family driver. The boy said nothing intelligible until he was five. Relatives assumed he was mute, or deaf. "No, I wasn't deaf or dumb," he said much later. "I understood the language, I just got confused. There were so many languages… being spoken around me. We had an Indian driver, who had a different accent altogether. So everything was just jumbled up."
This is worth holding onto. The future founder of a company that would operate across eight countries, a dozen languages, and an in-app chat function that auto-translates between driver and passenger, began life overwhelmed by translation. Southeast Asia's diversity, which every venture capitalist of the 2010s would cite as the reason the region could not scale, was for him first a private silence.
Once he started talking, he started selling. At eleven he sold X-Men comics his father had bought him at a comic convention in Singapore to friends who wanted them, in cash. At fourteen he raised money for the AIDS Foundation. As a teenager he worked on the assembly line at his father's company and sat in on meetings with union bosses, which teaches a particular lesson: the cars that made the family rich were built by people whose pay was negotiated across a table, sometimes angrily. His father liked to repeat a family line: Your grandfather beat this into our heads, and now it's our turn to beat it into yours. You can sleep all you want when you're dead.
An uncle put the inheritance more bluntly, and Tan has repeated it so often it is effectively scripture. "Your grandfather had no money, no education, no people. Nobody wanted to work for him. And yet he could build a great business. What's your excuse?"
He went to the University of Chicago and graduated with honors in economics and public policy. He came home to Tan Chong as head of supply chain and marketing for the group's automotive brands, the position from which a well-mannered heir rises. Harvard Business School's own profile of him notes, approvingly, that he "had a bright and well assured future." He hated the assurance.
— Anthony Tan, to the BBC, April 2018There's this sense of... there's a chip off my shoulder. Always being called somebody's grandson or somebody's son. [And thinking] if they can do it, why can't I?
He said chip off my shoulder, not on. The idiom slips. It is unclear whether he meant the chip he carried or the chip off the old block, and the ambiguity fits him. The grievance and the inheritance are the same object.
The Base of the Pyramid
He arrived at Harvard Business School in 2009, sent by a family that expected him to come back sharper and return to Tan Chong. The family's own idea of the MBA was as a finishing school for the heir.
In a course called "Business at the Base of the Pyramid," about building companies that serve the world's poorest customers, he sat next to another Malaysian. Tan Hooi Ling had been raised in a middle-class household in Petaling Jaya by a civil engineer father and a remisier mother, the local term for a commissioned stockbroker. She attended state schools. She went to the University of Bath in England for mechanical engineering, and during an industrial placement at Eli Lilly in Basingstoke she noticed that the decisions that mattered were made at the management level, above the engineers. She resolved to get upstairs. Back home she signed up for a McKinsey recruiting event without knowing what McKinsey did, got hired, performed well enough that the firm sponsored her MBA, and arrived at Harvard bonded to return. She played the piano to diploma level and the violin to Grade 8. They were both Tans and not related, a fact every subsequent profile would have to state.
The two became friends. Then, in 2011, an Indonesian classmate needled Anthony across a table.
— An HBS classmate to Anthony Tan, as Tan recalled to the Financial Times in 2014Your great grandfather was a taxi driver, your grandfather started the Japanese automotive industry in Malaysia, but your female friends suffer a lot of safety issues when taking a taxi. Why don't you do something about it?
It was a tease, and it worked because it was genealogically exact. It turned the dynasty's founding taxi into an accusation. If your family is going to claim the cab as its origin, you are responsible for what the cab has become.
Somewhere in that same class of 2011 sat Nadiem Makarim, who would go home to Jakarta and found Gojek, Grab's fiercest regional rival, and later serve as Indonesia's education minister. The base of the pyramid turned out to have two founders in one room. Who the Indonesian needler was, the sources do not say, and the coincidence is better left as a coincidence.
The business plan Anthony and Hooi Ling wrote, with a third classmate, Adeline Chan, described an app that would connect people who wanted taxis directly with the drivers closest to them. The drivers would be given smartphones. Riders would know who was coming. Unlike Uber, which was then setting itself against incumbent cab drivers in American cities, this plan proposed to work with the drivers: fewer empty kilometers, more fares, less time waiting at the stand. Tan has said the plan was submitted to the competition's social enterprise track, not the ordinary business one. It took runner-up at the 2011 HBS New Venture Competition and $25,000. Ling and Chan did the backstage work, Tan said, laughing at himself years later. He did the presentation.
Here the record turns up a detail too good to have been planted. In 2011 a man named YS Chan was invited to brief a multinational group of Harvard MBA students on the Malaysian taxi trade. Chan had driven premier and budget taxis for ten years, from 2000 to 2010. Unlike other cabbies, he recorded every trip: time, destination, number of passengers, fares, tips, fuel, the waiting time to refuel, maintenance and repair costs per kilometer. He had been a general manager before he was a driver, had set up five businesses, and ran a tourism school on the side. He knew the Tan family, too. He had worked in the Tan Chong workshop from 1969 to 1971 and at a wholly owned Tan Chong subsidiary, Mayflower Acme, from 1973 to 1992, and had met the founding brothers "innumerable times." The briefing took place at Tan Chong Motor's head office on Jalan Ipoh in Kuala Lumpur. He was called back afterward to clarify his figures.
The heir who refused the family business researched the business that would replace it inside his father's headquarters, interviewing a former employee of his grandfather who had kept the best data on taxis in Malaysia in his own notebooks. The idea was never as far from home as the legend needs it to be.
Your Head Is in the Clouds
Anthony went to his father for backing. Tan Heng Chew's answer has come down in two versions. In one, recounted to TIME, he said: "Your head is in the clouds." In the other: "Hey, I don't think it's going to work out. Don't disturb me about this anymore."
What followed, Anthony told TIME in 2023, was close to excommunication. "My dad basically disowned me. I thought, I'm not going to grovel. I'm going to fight and make sure we win. That was a pivotal moment." He gives the softer account to Harvard: "My family had a tough time understanding what I was trying to do and I don't blame them." Both are probably true, at different distances from the event. In a 2024 interview with CNBC he folded the wound into gratitude, as successful men do: "In a weird kind of way, I'm grateful because it helped me realize I had no other option but to make it work."
His mother, Khor Swee Wah, thought the idea was as doubtful as her husband did and wrote a check anyway. She became one of MyTeksi's first investors. "Moms are amazing, right?" Tan said, which is the most unguarded sentence in his entire published record.
Her money mattered less than her presence, and that is where the story turns strange. Kee Lock Chua was a managing partner at Vertex Ventures, the venture arm associated with Singapore's state investor, whose job was to price risk in a region most of the world's capital was still ignoring. In 2015, total tech investment across Southeast Asia came to $1.5 billion, against nearly $50 billion in China. Chua's firm put about $11 million into the company for a stake of roughly 22 percent, part of a Series A round Tan has described as "very painful." When Chua explained the bet afterward, he did not mention unit economics.
"We saw how he spent time with his mum, how he talked to her, and how much respect he gave her," Chua said. "That told us he had strong character and conviction. Besides the solid idea, that helped us make the decision to invest in the business." Vertex exited in 2019 with more than ten times its money.
So the company's capital structure has a mother at each end. One mother stayed up waiting for a daughter in a taxi. Another wrote a check against her husband's judgment. A venture capitalist watched a son with his mother and decided the son could be trusted with $11 million.
There is a third woman in this chain. Chloe Tong is the daughter of Tong Kooi Ong, chairman of The Edge Media Group, Malaysia's leading business press, a relationship The Edge dutifully discloses whenever it covers him. She wrote a children's booklet on basic nutrition and left her own career to support her husband's. They have five children. In 2017, asked by The Edge for the three most important lessons of his first five years, Tan listed his wife third and quoted her: "Happy wife, happy life!" Seven years later he gave CNBC a more sober accounting: "My sacrifice is nothing compared to the sacrifices my wife has made and many others have made to go through this journey with me." A former chief of staff to the co-founders, Ee Ling See, later described the life around them without decoration: "It's an always switched-on life for them and their immediate circle."
Knocking on Windows
MyTeksi launched in June 2012 out of a rented storeroom in Kuala Lumpur, a space later remembered as a garage. It had no air conditioning, no Wi-Fi, and no real ventilation, in a city where humidity is more or less permanent. The team tethered their phones to get online. On its first day the app was downloaded 11,000 times. Hooi Ling was not there full-time. Her McKinsey bond required her to go back, and she then went to Salesforce in San Francisco, where she worked on corporate strategy and pricing and took up swing dancing, which she counts among her life's accomplishments. She helped Grab on the side, from the other end of a long-distance line, and came back full-time only in 2015.
Anthony sold the app one driver at a time. "In fact, I personally signed up many of them," he has said. The method was literal. The team walked down rows of taxis queued under the afternoon sun and knocked on the windows. The drivers were, in Tan's unsentimental words, "clueless and jaded by the world. The government rolls out a new taxi programme, only to get them screwed… They didn't understand the technology." They were right to be skeptical. They had been promised things before.
Then the founders found the hole beneath the hole. The drivers had no smartphones. Many had never owned one. They had no bank accounts either, so a company that wanted to pay them for a day's fares had nowhere to send the money. "Drivers didn't even have bank accounts," Tan said. "So we couldn't send them money after their day's earnings. We had to first finance their smartphone, set up their first bank account, and get them going." He presents this as an operational problem. It was in fact a revelation that would take him the next decade to fully exploit. The taxi problem was a safety problem for the rider and a banking problem for the driver, and the second turned out to be much larger than the first.
Expansion was fast, improvised, and occasionally lethal. GrabTaxi reached the Philippines in August 2013, Singapore and Thailand in October, Ho Chi Minh City in February 2014, Jakarta in June 2014. In Vietnam, Tan stood at petrol stations at four in the morning handing out free coffee to drivers. In Manila he sat up late drinking cheap beer with taxi fleet owners, trying to learn where it hurt.
One of those Manila nights became the anecdote he tells at dinner parties. A fleet boss he had arranged to meet walked into a restaurant surrounded by large men. "I remember thinking, Manila is hot, why is everyone wearing a jacket and sunglasses at night? What is going on?" Partway through the negotiation there was a heavy thud. Tan looked under the table and saw what appeared to be a machine gun on the floor. "I was like, holy cow, I guess this negotiation is going in your favour!" Only later did he learn he had been negotiating with one of the area's biggest arms dealers. He tells it laughing.
Manila produced another story he tells without laughing. At some point in those years the company failed to pay its Philippine staff for a month, and nobody at headquarters noticed. "We were very lucky to have started out with compassionate staff. They didn't tell us they were not paid. We didn't even know until a month later." The directors covered payroll from their personal savings. Afterward Tan checked the cash balance every day, a habit that remains the cleanest operational lesson in his record.
The financing ran on the same thin margin of survival. Tan has spoken about collapsing in a Walmart between investor meetings during the Series A. A decade later he wrote on LinkedIn, in a tone that sounded like a man correcting the record about himself: "I'm not afraid of hard work, but I don't want to romanticise it either." He has estimated his hours in those years at "15, 18, sometimes 20 hours a day, and it was a Monday to Sunday thing." A customer once turned up at the office to shout at the team in person. A board debate on driver supply, he has said, passed by a single vote, and he believes that vote saved the company from collapse. He has never said who cast it.
Then the money arrived in a flood. Vertex's round in April 2014 was followed by others in quick succession, and in December 2014 Masayoshi Son's SoftBank put in $250 million. By year's end the company had raised $340 million and was live in 17 cities in five countries. Harvard, which had awarded it $25,000 three years earlier, published a profile. The Series E in 2015 raised $350 million at roughly $1.6 billion, making Grab the region's first unicorn. Downloads went from 4 million in 2015 to 17 million in 2016 to 45 million the following year. The fragment does the work: the curve bent.
In November 2014 the company tried something its American peers had not. In Ho Chi Minh City, where most traffic moves on two wheels and the xe ôm motorbike taxi is an institution, it launched GrabBike as a trial. By 2015 motorcycle rides had spread through Vietnam and Indonesia. Here the localism Tan would later preach as doctrine became visible as product: an American app built for American sedans had no answer to the motorbike, and a Malaysian one did.
It also brought blood. In 2016, Grab Vietnam counted around 65 assaults on GrabBike drivers by traditional motorbike taxi drivers in Ho Chi Minh City alone, with 47 more recorded in 2017. In March 2016 Jakarta police arrested 83 people as anti-Uber and anti-Grab rallies turned violent. Cabbies in Kuala Lumpur blocked traffic. On October 26, 2017, a Grab driver in Pasay, in Metro Manila, was killed by a man posing as a passenger. Passengers were assaulted too, in Singapore and in Chiang Mai. The company that began as a promise of safety found itself, for a period, a source of danger on the streets.
Its answers were mechanical, and that was their strength. An emergency button in the app, in 2018. A telematics program to monitor driver behavior and fatigue. In 2019, a rule that passengers in some markets take a selfie before riding, to verify their identity. Each was an elaboration of Ling's text messages to her mother.
They've Lost Once
On July 31, 2016, before the deal was even confirmed, Tan sent an email to every employee. Didi Chuxing, which had invested in Grab the year before and joined it, India's Ola, and America's Lyft in a loose global alliance against Uber, was about to buy Uber's China business. The subsidy war in China had reportedly cost Uber some $2 billion. Tan read it as prophecy.
"Didi's success reinforces what we have believed all along," he wrote. "That we live in a very diverse world and there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Localized solutions best solve local problems. Like Didi did in China, we make sure that the unique pain points of users in Singapore or Jakarta or Manila will get addressed because they are prioritised over the competing needs of users in New York or London or Istanbul." Then he dropped the strategist's voice. "With the deal in China, we expect Uber to turn more attention and divert resources to our region. But we have seen that when the local champion stays true to their beliefs and strengths, they can prevail. We see this happening in China, and it will be the same here. They've lost once, and we will make them lose again."
TechCrunch, publishing the memo, observed that it was not clear how much of Didi's win applied to Grab's fight. That was fair. At the time Uber's Southeast Asian operations were already profitable in Singapore and the Philippines. But a memo like that is not analysis. It is a declaration of the identity under which a company intends to fight: the local champion against the global one. It cost Tan nothing to write and paid off in recruiting, in government relations, and in the national pride of every Malaysian, Indonesian, and Filipino who downloaded the app.
The war was fought in regulators' offices as much as on the streets. The Philippines accredited GrabCar as a Transportation Network Company in 2015. Singapore passed laws in February 2017 recognizing private-hire services and then required drivers to hold vocational licenses. Malaysia tabled amendments in April 2017 classifying Grab and Uber vehicles as public service vehicles, and Parliament passed them on July 28, 2017. Vietnam legalized ride-hailing by decree in 2020. Thailand, which had suspended Grab's motorbike service in 2016, approved a ministerial regulation in 2021. As early as December 2012, six months after launch, Malaysia's land transport commission had publicly introduced MyTeksi to cabbies as a tool to make them more efficient. In 2014 MyTeksi was asking the same regulator for a "level playing field" against Uber. Grab came into existence partnered with the state, and Tan's later line, that governments "sensed our sincerity," is less a boast than a description of how the business was built.
The capital escalated alongside. In 2016 Grab was valued at more than $3 billion, had raised more than $1 billion in a year, and opened an engineering office in Seattle. In 2017 it raised another $2.5 billion led by Didi and SoftBank. By then it was in 65 cities in seven countries with more than a million drivers.
In March 2018, Uber gave up. Grab took over Uber's Southeast Asian operations, including Uber Eats in Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, and Uber received 27.5 percent of Grab. Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's chief executive, joined Grab's board. Uber's stake had been diluted to 13.71 percent by 2025, still the largest single holding.
A few weeks later the BBC's Asia business correspondent, Karishma Vaswani, sat with Tan in his Singapore office. Her first observations were that he wore a large silver cross around his neck and that he had very good skin. He used the word serve repeatedly. He called the deal "a win for South East Asia." He said startup friends had told him, "Dude, you showed so many South East Asians what is possible." When the subject of acquisitions came up, he offered a line that was half joke and half doctrine: "We're not sellers, we're buyers."
Read the transaction coldly and the drama has a twist. The local champion did not drive the global giant out of the region. It bought the giant's local business and paid with more than a quarter of itself. Uber did not lose so much as convert its Southeast Asian operations into a large passive stake in the winner and send its CEO to sit on the winner's board. The war ended as a merger, with the loser holding the biggest block of stock. Tan's memo had promised to make Uber lose again. What happened was more useful than a rout and a good deal less romantic.
One in Four
"Only one in four people have a bank account in South East Asia," Tan told the BBC in that same 2018 interview. "Something like one in 10 are using a credit card in the region… so it's clearly a real problem where the masses aren't being served." By then he was describing the ride-hailing business as a means to an end. "We have the two largest use cases which is transportation and food. We can leverage it for payments... for financial services." The payments market he was aiming at was estimated at $200 billion.
The logic went back to the drivers who could not be paid. If you have to open a man's first bank account to send him his wages, you are already his bank, informally. If you can see every fare he takes and every meal a hawker sells through your app, you know more about his creditworthiness than any lender in the country. Tan made the point to Bloomberg in 2021 almost as a confession of advantage: traditional banks could not offer microloans to food merchants because they could not see the merchants' revenue, "but we could."
The sequence followed: GrabPay credits in 2016; Kudo, an Indonesian payments startup, acquired in April 2017; GrabPay opened to third-party merchants in November 2017; Grab Financial in 2018; an investment in the Lippo Group's OVO in November 2018; a numberless Mastercard in December 2019, Asia's first, discontinued on June 1, 2024; more than $300 million into Grab Financial from Hanwha Asset Management in January 2021. In December 2020 the Monetary Authority of Singapore awarded a digital bank license to a Grab–Singtel consortium. GXS Bank opened in 2022. In February 2026, having reached its first full-year profit, Grab agreed to buy Stash, an American digital investment app, at a $425 million valuation. The taxi company now owned a broker.
Tan's moral account of all this comes, characteristically, from church. A fellow parishioner in Singapore told him he had once served time in Changi prison for working as a loan shark's enforcer, the man who splashed pig's blood on debtors' homes. "He said there were thousands of people like him in Singapore," Tan told TIME. "It's fundamentally wrong to charge somebody 20% a day interest because you're putting them in a real poverty trap." He then gave the sentence that is the company's thesis in nine words: "What's good for society is good for business."
That sentence deserves skepticism and gets some here. A lender that knows its borrowers' daily cash flow is a better lender than a loan shark, but it is still a lender, and the incentives of a listed fintech business do not stay aligned with its borrowers just because its founder tells a parable from a church pew. Tan's own formulation helps him. He describes Grab as a "double bottom line" company, profit plus social good, and says the original plan was entered in the social enterprise track. The double bottom line is a promise that both columns will be counted. It is not a promise that they will always point the same way.
What he did build, without ambiguity, was a habit of making the board look at the second column. Grab holds its board meetings in the cities where it operates. "We could conveniently do it all via Zoom," Tan has said, "but we do it [in-person] because we want our board to see the livelihoods we impact. They meet drivers, they talk to them, they understand their problems." At one meeting in Manila, directors watched Grab staff work until 1:30 or 2 a.m. signing up a long line of motorcycle taxi riders. "When the board saw that for themselves, you could see a different appreciation after that."
Much later, in a meeting with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Tan says the president "reminded my board and I… [Grab] literally changed the unemployment numbers nationally." Tan reports this with pride. The skeptic notes that a gig job is not the same as employment. The president, by Tan's account, did not dwell on the distinction.
Love as an OKR
When the pandemic arrived in early 2020, it hollowed out the core business almost overnight. People stopped taking rides. Asked by the Wall Street Journal whether it had been a frightening moment, Tan said no, and then gave a corporate answer stranger than any confession of fear. "We stopped thinking about business as usual. One main OKR was love — how to create user love, public love; how do you deliver services that help our community tide through this difficult time?"
An objective and key result called love. The reflex is to laugh, and the laugh is not wrong. Then you read the operating record and the laugh falters.
In February 2020, Grab launched GrabCare, a round-the-clock ride service for health workers in Singapore, starting with Tan Tock Seng Hospital and the National Centre for Infectious Diseases. Fortune reported it was built in under 72 hours. Over the year the company moved more than 237,000 ride-hailing drivers into delivery and took its grocery service, GrabMart, into all eight markets in three months. It designed a "Mix and Match" option for hawker centres, letting a customer order from several street stalls in the same food court in one basket. A single driver would batch the pickups, the stalls would pay lower commissions, and the order would still be large enough to be worth delivering. In Vietnam, when supply chains seized up, the platform sold tons of lychees for farmers. "We never thought we'd be selling lychees through our platform that would have otherwise gone to waste," Tan said. Adjusted net revenue for 2020 rose 60 percent.
That August, Tan wrote an essay for Fortune that opened not with numbers but with a soup. As a boy, he wrote, he went every weekend to Klang, the town his parents came from, to eat bak kut teh, pork rib soup, at a famous hole-in-the-wall run by a family that had cooked it for generations. He dunked fried dough fritters in the caramel-colored herbal broth and ate the soft-bone ribs with chili sauce. The queue formed before lunch, and inside people sat "cheek to chopstick." The shop had never done any marketing beyond word of mouth. When footfall fell to zero, he wrote, businesses like it "simply folded." Ninety percent of the region's economy, he noted, is small business.
The essay was an argument for digitizing the hawker stall, which happened to be Grab's next growth market. It was also, unmistakably, a man remembering being fed.
The cost side of 2020 was less tender. In April, senior management took pay cuts of up to 20 percent and employees were encouraged to take unpaid leave. In June, Grab laid off 360 people, just under 5 percent of its staff. Tan told the company in a town hall and, by his own account to the Anglican evangelist Nicky Gumbel, who had known him since his twenties, cried in front of employees for the first time. It was the kind of detail that circulates afterward as proof of character. It also cost 360 people their jobs.
Three years later the town hall had no tears in it. On June 20, 2023, Grab cut about 1,000 jobs, 11 percent of the workforce. Tan's letter to staff included this sentence: "With or without this exercise, we're on track to hit Group Adjusted EBITDA breakeven this year." A Singapore communications coach named Faridah Hameed dissected the letter on LinkedIn, and her post drew more than 2,500 reactions. "What the heck is Group Adjusted EBITDA," she asked, "and why would someone who is losing their job care if the company is 'on track to breakeven'?" She pointed out that the letter did set out ten forms of support for departing staff. Her complaint was about register, and the register was the problem: a man who once made love a key result had written a goodbye that read like an earnings release.
In May 2023, Tan Hooi Ling announced she would step down from her official roles at Grab by year's end. She had been, for most of the company's life, the one who stayed out of the news. In 2017 she met a Straits Times columnist for lunch at the Bukit Merah View Market and Food Centre, dressed in a black Uniqlo T-shirt, jeans, and white sneakers, and explained how she chooses a stall at a hawker centre: one with a queue, because a queue means the food is good, but a short queue, so she won't waste time. They ate Na Na Curry. "I'm introverted by nature," she said, "and also because I just enjoy getting work done and spending time out of the news." Tan, describing their partnership to Fortune in 2016, put it more simply: "We genuinely trust each other to the core."
Her shares were held in a trust that gave Anthony the voting rights.
Sixty Percent of the Votes
On April 13, 2021, Grab announced that it would go public on Nasdaq by merging with Altimeter Growth Corp., a blank-check company, at an equity value of $39.6 billion. It was the largest SPAC merger in history, and the $4 billion raised alongside it was the largest US equity offering ever by a Southeast Asian company. Grab said it chose Altimeter partly because the sponsor promised to donate 10 percent of the shares it would receive to an endowment for Grab's drivers and merchants. That is the double bottom line in its purest form: the dealmaker gets paid and gives a tithe to the people who knock on taxi windows.
Fourteen months earlier, Tan had told The Edge that Grab would go public when its whole business was profitable. It went public before then.
The listing day, December 2, 2021, compressed the decade into a single trading session. Grab opened at $13.06 and Tan was, briefly, a billionaire on paper: his stake was worth about $1.1 billion, Ling's about $333.7 million. The stock closed at $8.75, down 20.5 percent, wiping out about $17 billion in market value. By evening his stake was worth $725.4 million. He and Ling rang the opening bell from Singapore. Orchestrating a New York listing from the other side of the world became one of the stories he tells on his company's podcast.
The most important number from that day was not the price. Tan owned 3.3 percent of Grab's shares and held 60.4 percent of the voting power. The gap came from a high-vote share class and from the trusts holding Ling's shares and those of Grab president Ming Maa, which gave the voting rights to Anthony. The man who had left a family company where he would always be someone's son built a public company where he could not be outvoted.
It would be easy to read that as hypocrisy and not quite right. The control structure is the institutional form of the uncle's question: what's your excuse? No one can blame the board. In the same period Tan was developing a stewardship language that sat oddly beside his control. "Investor money is the public's money," he says. He says he uses the phrase to decide what to spend. "Ideas are a dime a dozen," he told his podcast audience in 2026. "Investors don't just look at the model; they look at whether the founding team has the tenacity to grind it out for the long run." A founder with 60 percent of the votes who treats investor money as the public's money is choosing to be bound by an obligation no shareholder can enforce. Whether that comforts you depends on how much you trust the founder, which is the same judgment Kee Lock Chua made at a family table in 2014.
The years after listing tested that trust. In November 2023, during the war in Gaza, an Instagram story Chloe Tong had posted in July, during what reports described as a religious heritage family trip to Israel, resurfaced. In it she said she was "completely in love" with the country. Consumers in Indonesia and Malaysia, Grab's two largest Muslim-majority markets, called for boycotts. That same month, Tan's English-language Wikipedia page acquired a notice warning that it "may have been created or edited in return for undisclosed payments." No one has said who did the editing, and the notice may say more about the page than the man. It is still a fitting artifact for a public figure whose company's fortunes can be moved by a family photograph.
In September 2026, with the stock near a three-year low despite a first full-year profit and the acquisitions of Stash, the Chinese robotics developer Infermove, and foodpanda's Taiwan business for $600 million in cash (Grab's first market outside Southeast Asia), Tan bought those 10.4 million shares. In the month before, he had sold 400,000 for $1.5 million, part of his usual pattern of selling down. Then he reversed. It is the oldest move a controlling founder has: when the market stops trusting you, put your own money where they can see it.
On His Knees
The silver cross is not decoration. Tan has named Jesus Christ as a business hero. He describes Grab as a calling and his job as service. He told CNBC in 2024 that the single most important advice he could give a founder was that "it has to be your life calling," and then went further than most public-company CEOs will: "For me, I believe it's literally God's calling to me to serve, and if I have to serve on my knees, I will." He reads the Bible through each year using Nicky Gumbel's Bible in One Year, and says "the Bible is the best leadership book." On the World Economic Forum's site his chosen motto reads: "Serving my leaders to drive Southeast Asia forward together." He organizes Grab's values as four H's: Honour, Hunger, Humility, Heart. In his personal capacity he supports Transform Cambodia, which rescues street children.
The ambition sits alongside the humility, unreconciled. Two years after founding, he said that "if we get this right, we can literally go into the history books." A lawyer at a firm that works for Grab told the Financial Times: "Anthony always wants to be number one." The FT called him "unabashedly ambitious." In January 2024, at a TED event in conversation with BCG's Amane Dannouni, after an introduction listing his titles, he said: "Well, first of all, I'm squirming. I grew up with Asian parents, so I'm not used to such kind words." The squirm was real and so was everything that preceded it.
He reconciles them through a theology of obligation, which is also an economics of guilt. "With great power comes great responsibilities," he told The Edge in 2017, quoting both Spider-Man and the Gospel of Luke without apparent irony. "I have been given a very blessed and comfortable life, but I have also learnt that it has given me a greater responsibility to do good. Not everyone can have the luxury and blessing to pursue their passion and mission. To whom much is given, much is expected." Ask him whether he would do it again and he gives the most honest answer in the record: "Honestly, maybe it was — ignorance is bliss, and if I knew it was gonna be so hard, I'm not sure if I would've done it." Then the pivot. "Look, I got the longer end of the stick."
That self-awareness invites the obvious objection, and the internet supplies it. Under a Grab LinkedIn post quoting Tan's advice to "burn the ships so there's no path turning back," a commenter wrote: "Its easy to Burn the ships and have no way to turn back when you have Generational Wealth and Infrastructure backing you up." This is true. It is also incomplete. A disowned heir's ships may be expensive, but he has still burned them. A father who says don't disturb me about this anymore has not handed over a safety net.
The heritage he invokes most now is neither Christian nor American but Hokkien. On the company's podcast, sitting with Cheryl Goh, who has worked with him for thirteen years and remembers the storeroom office, he explains jiak kor: eating bitter. It is the ability to absorb pain and grind through the hardest years. It is his grandfather's fourteen hours in the rain and his father's you can sleep when you're dead. He describes it as a mindset, but in Hokkien it is literally a meal.
Which may be why, for all the money, the detail that recurs in profiles of him is food. He can be seen eating cai fan, cheap economy rice, in Singapore shopping malls. His co-founder chose a hawker stall by the length of the queue. His essay on the future of business opened with soup in Klang. In 2024 at Davos he hosted Grab's annual dinner and gave guests two books: Ray Dalio's Principles and Adam Grant's Hidden Potential. Both authors signed copies at the table. The dinner was in Davos. The instinct to feed the people who matter is from Klang.
The Hand at the Curb
The current chapter is about machines. Grab says it has built more than a thousand AI models and that dispatch, matching, pricing, surge, and promotions all run without a human in the loop. At the Wall Street Journal's first CEO Council Summit in Singapore, Tan described stopping the company's normal work for nine weeks so that every team could build only with generative AI, aimed at customer, merchant, and driver problems. He said 93 percent of Grab's engineers were using Cursor. He named the ethos "AI first with heart" and explained it: "You can take AI first but you need to center it on humans." At GrabX in Jakarta on April 8, 2026, the company announced thirteen AI products, and Tan said AI "shouldn't be limited to only those who can afford it."
The autonomous future is arriving in the places Grab was once most cautious about. Tan's line on AVs in 2025 was conservative: "For AVs to take off in the region, it needs to be as safe as what you see in the US today and it needs to be much cheaper." Then came partnerships with Motional and WeRide, a deal with China's Momenta in December 2025, approval from Singapore's Land Transport Authority that November to test autonomous vehicles in Punggol, and on January 7, 2026, internal testing of a drone delivery pilot over Tanjong Rhu. Grab describes this as upskilling drivers for the AV era rather than replacing them. After Tan posted a Father's Day greeting to delivery partners, one commenter asked whether those partners knew they would be replaced by riderless vehicles. The question remains unanswered and will not go away.
In the same years the company did something that looks like a retreat and may be a return. In August 2025, in Hue, Vietnam, Grab launched Grab Cyclo, a bookable cycle rickshaw: the oldest human-powered vehicle on Asian streets, now on the same platform as the robotaxis. And in 2025 Singapore's Land Transport Authority granted Grab a ten-year street-hail taxi license. GrabCab began operating in July 2025, the sixth taxi company in the country, with Hyundai Konas painted in Grab colors, roof signs and all.
The heir who refused to join the family car business, who built an app to make taxis unnecessary as anonymous strangers' cars, now owns a taxi company. The family dynasty began with a man driving strangers for fares. A great-grandson spent fourteen years building a machine to make sure a woman in the back seat was never alone with a stranger and that someone on the other line always knew where she was.
The GrabCab license allows its Konas to do the one thing an app-booked car cannot: stop for anyone on the curb who raises a hand.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows are the operating principles that emerge from Anthony Tan's fourteen years at Grab. Some are explicit doctrine, things he says on stages and podcasts. Others are visible only in the pattern of his decisions, sometimes in tension with what he says. All are drawn from the record above. Read them as one founder's adaptations to one region, which is to say, read them as he would: localized solutions to local problems.
The principles
- 1.Inherit the problem, not the company.
- 2.Let someone else's fear write the spec.
- 3.Sign up supply by hand.
- 4.Follow the friction under the friction.
- 5.Make locality an identity, not just a strategy.
- 6.Win the war by buying the enemy's map.
- 7.Treat the regulator as a co-founder.
- 8.Take the board to the street.
- 9.Choose capital by character, in both directions.
- 10.In a crisis, redeploy before you retrench.
- 11.Pair the voice with the engine.
- 12.Make the calling non-optional, then refuse to romanticize it.
Principle 1
Inherit the problem, not the company
Tan's founding move is usually told as a rejection: the heir who walked away from Tan Chong. The record shows something subtler. He did not reject the family's domain. He rejected its position in the domain. He kept the cars, the drivers, the dealings with unions, the supply-chain knowledge from his years running logistics and marketing for the group's automotive brands, and the access that let a Harvard student team hold a briefing with a veteran cabbie at Tan Chong's headquarters on Jalan Ipoh. What he refused was the seat at the top of an existing hierarchy.
This is a more transferable lesson than "follow your passion." Inherited advantage is usually domain knowledge and network wearing a job title. Tan stripped off the title and kept the knowledge. The Indonesian classmate's taunt worked because it named the domain as his: your great-grandfather drove a taxi, your grandfather built the auto industry, so the broken taxi is your problem. He took on the family's unfinished business, not its finished one.
Tactic: List the domains where your background gives you unfair knowledge, then look for the problem that the institutions in those domains have tolerated longest — and build there, outside the institutions.
Principle 2
Let someone else's fear write the spec
The product requirements for MyTeksi were written, in effect, by Tan Hooi Ling's mother. Texting the plate number before departure, pinging at landmarks, someone awake on the other end: every element of that "manual GPS" became a feature. Driver identity shown before pickup, live tracking, and later the emergency button, telematics, and selfie verification all formalize a ritual two women invented because the market had failed them.
The lesson is about which pain to build for. Tan was never the frightened passenger. His partner was. The strongest product insight in the company's history came from the co-founder's lived experience rather than the CEO's, and Tan was disciplined enough to make it the founding story instead of substituting a more flattering one. "We want to make it just standard hygiene that women can get to wherever they need to get to [safely]" is a specification, not a mission statement.
Tactic: Find the workaround that users have invented for themselves — the fake phone call, the texted plate number — and productize the ritual exactly, step by step, before adding anything clever.
Principle 3
Sign up supply by hand
Two-sided marketplaces die on the supply side, and Grab's supply was hostile: drivers "clueless and jaded by the world," burned by every previous government taxi program. Tan's response was not a referral bonus. It was his own body. He knocked on the windows of queued taxis, handed out coffee at petrol stations at 4 a.m. in Vietnam, drank cheap beer with fleet owners in Manila, and sat across from an arms dealer to sign up a fleet. "I personally signed up many of them," he says.
Founder-led supply acquisition is not scalable, and that is not the point. The point is information. Signing drivers by hand is how Tan learned they had no smartphones and no bank accounts, which became the foundation of a financial services business worth more than the original one. Delegated acquisition would have recorded a conversion rate. Personal acquisition recorded a life.
G
From the Curb to the Bank
How hand-to-hand driver acquisition revealed the adjacencies that built the super-app.
2012
MyTeksi launches in Kuala Lumpur; founders knock on taxi windows and finance drivers' first smartphones.
2014
GrabBike trial in Ho Chi Minh City adapts the model to two-wheeled traffic; SoftBank invests $250M.
2017
Kudo acquisition and GrabPay rollout to third-party merchants turn driver payouts into a payments network.
2018
Uber's Southeast Asia business acquired; Grab Financial launched; GrabFood begins.
2020
Grab–Singtel consortium wins a Singapore digital bank license; 237,000+ drivers redeployed to delivery.
2022
GXS Bank launches; GrabMaps built for hyperlocal routes.
2025
GrabCab becomes Singapore's sixth taxi operator; AI tools launched with OpenAI and Anthropic.
2026
Stash and foodpanda Taiwan acquisitions; first full-year profit; Tan buys $29.9M of stock at a three-year low.
Tactic: Personally onboard the first few hundred units of your hardest-to-acquire supply, and keep a written log of every non-product obstacle they mention — that log is your roadmap.
Principle 4
Follow the friction under the friction
The visible problem was taxi safety. The problem underneath was that drivers could not be paid. Under that was the fact that one in four Southeast Asians had a bank account. Tan built each layer of Grab by digging through the one above it. A ride-hailing company needed driver payouts, so it became a payments company. Payments data showed which hawkers were creditworthy, so it became a lender. Lending under a license required a bank, so it got one.
Many founders talk about "adjacencies" as though they were plotted on a whiteboard. Tan's were encountered as obstacles. The difference matters: an adjacency found by stumbling over it has a built-in customer, the person whose problem stopped you. "This is a natural adjacency," he told Bloomberg in 2021, and natural is the right word. The bank grew out of the taxi the way roots grow toward water.
Tactic: For every operational workaround your team builds to make the core product function, ask whether a standalone customer would pay for that workaround — and price it before a competitor does.
Principle 5
Make locality an identity, not just a strategy
"Localized solutions best solve local problems" is a sound strategic claim. GrabBike, Mix and Match hawker ordering, Grab Cyclo in Hue, auto-translated in-app chat, and its own maps for streets commercial providers had not charted are all proof. Tan's real innovation was turning the claim into a tribe. The July 2016 memo did not just argue for localization. It cast Grab as "the local champion" in a morality play against a foreign giant, and promised: "They've lost once, and we will make them lose again."
Identity does what strategy cannot. It recruits engineers who would otherwise join a bank. It earns patience from regulators. It turns a download into an act of regional pride. Fortune traced a wider "Grab effect" in Singapore's startup ecosystem: in 2015 the region attracted $1.5 billion in tech investment, and in 2020, $8.2 billion. The risk is that identity is brittle. The local champion is judged by local standards, which is why a family Instagram post could set off a boycott in the company's two largest Muslim-majority markets.
Tactic: Write down the specific ways your users differ from the global default, build visibly for those differences, and tell the story in terms of who you serve rather than whom you beat.
Principle 6
Win the war by buying the enemy's map
The March 2018 Uber deal is remembered as a victory, and it was, but not the kind the memo promised. Grab acquired Uber's regional operations, including Uber Eats in three markets, which became the base for GrabFood two months later. Uber took 27.5 percent and a board seat for its CEO. The rivalry ended in co-ownership.
The lesson is about what victory is worth. A war of attrition with a better-funded global rival was winnable but ruinous. A merger traded equity for peace, absorbed the rival's local assets and data, and turned an enemy's CEO into a director with an interest in Grab's success. "We're not sellers, we're buyers," Tan said, and the line is truer than the bravado suggests: the best buy was the competitor's map of the region, paid for in stock.
Tactic: When a well-funded rival's regional business is subscale, propose an equity-for-assets exit before the subsidy war ends, so you inherit its operations instead of its scorched earth.
Principle 7
Treat the regulator as a co-founder
Grab came into being partnered with the state. Six months after launch, Malaysia's land transport commission was introducing MyTeksi to cabbies itself. Over the following eight years the company was legalized market by market: the Philippines in 2015, Singapore in 2017, Malaysia on July 28, 2017, Vietnam in 2020, Thailand in 2021. In Singapore and Cambodia it supplied traffic data to planners. Its banking business exists only under a license. Its taxi business exists under a ten-year street-hail permit.
Tan's explanation is that "governments were drawn to us because [they] felt our sincerity," and sincerity is part of it. The structural point is that the company's original design, working with taxi drivers rather than against them, created a political coalition instead of a political enemy. The table below sets out the contrast.
R
Two Theories of Regulation
How Grab's approach differed from the confrontational model of early ride-hailing.
| Conventional ride-hailing playbook | Grab's approach | Phase |
|---|---|---|
| Launch first, seek forgiveness later. | Onboard licensed taxi drivers first; state transport body endorses the app within six months. | Entry |
| Position drivers as disruptors of incumbent cabs. | Position the app as a tool that raises incumbent drivers' income. | Coalition |
| Fight licensing regimes as barriers. | Support vocational licensing and public-service-vehicle classification as routes to legality. | Legitimacy |
| Treat data as proprietary moat only. | Share traffic data with planners in Singapore and Cambodia. | Partnership |
| Avoid regulated industries. | Pursue bank and taxi licenses as core assets. | Exposure |
Tactic: Design your first product so that the group with the most political leverage in your market earns more because you exist — then bring their testimony to the regulator before your competitors arrive.
Principle 8
Take the board to the street
Most boards encounter the business as a deck. Grab's encounters it as a line of motorcycle taxi riders at 2 a.m. in Manila. Holding board meetings in operating cities, with directors talking to drivers, is the most distinctive governance practice in Tan's record, and he justifies it in the language of anchoring: "People think it's only for your employee base, but actually it's just as important, if not even more important… for the board to be anchored."
The tactic does two things. It gives directors firsthand information a dashboard cannot provide, and it changes what they are willing to approve. A board that has watched staff sign up drivers through the night is more likely to fund the unglamorous work of supply and less likely to cut it for a quarterly margin. Governance practices shape decisions long before any vote is taken. Recall that a decision on driver supply once passed by a single vote.
Tactic: Hold at least one board meeting a year where your customers or suppliers work, and schedule an unscripted hour for directors to talk to them without management in the room.
Principle 9
Choose capital by character, in both directions
Kee Lock Chua invested partly because of how Tan treated his mother. Tan chose Altimeter for his SPAC partly because the sponsor pledged 10 percent of its shares to a driver and merchant endowment. Both choices were made on evidence of character rather than on spreadsheets alone, and both turned out well: Vertex made more than ten times its money, and Grab got the largest SPAC of its time.
Tan's doctrine on capital, "Investor money is the public's money," is paired with a governance structure that gave him 60.4 percent of the votes on 3.3 percent of the shares. The pairing is the point. Concentrated control lets a founder pursue a double bottom line without being overruled by the single-bottom-line majority. It works only if the founder holds himself to the stewardship standard he preaches. His September 2026 purchase of $29.9 million in stock at a three-year low was the kind of costly signal that makes the claim believable.
Tactic: Before closing any round, ask what non-financial commitment the investor is willing to make in writing — and if you hold outsized voting control, make a costly, public personal bet whenever the market questions your stewardship.
Principle 10
In a crisis, redeploy before you retrench
When ride-hailing collapsed in 2020, Grab moved more than 237,000 drivers into delivery, rolled out grocery delivery across eight markets in three months, built a health worker transport service in under 72 hours, designed a batched hawker-ordering product to keep street-food merchants alive, and sold Vietnamese lychees. Senior pay was cut by up to 20 percent. Layoffs were held to about 5 percent. Adjusted net revenue rose 60 percent.
"Love as an OKR" sounds absurd until you see it as a forcing function. It made the team ask what the community needed before asking what to cut, and the answers turned out to be businesses. The contrast with June 2023, when 1,000 jobs went in a letter dominated by "Group Adjusted EBITDA," shows the cost when the order is reversed. The redeployment instinct produced goodwill. The retrenchment letter spent it.
Tactic: When demand for your core product collapses, map every idle asset — people, vehicles, relationships — to an urgent unmet need before drafting a single layoff list, and write any layoff letter for the people leaving, not the analysts watching.
Principle 11
Pair the voice with the engine
Tan did the presentation at the New Venture Competition. Ling and Adeline Chan did the backstage work. That division held for eleven years. Anthony was the face, the memo writer, the man in Davos, the one who told the story of the fake phone call. Ling ran product, people, technology, and customer experience, and chose hawker stalls by queue length. "We genuinely trust each other to the core," he said. Her votes sat in a trust under his control.
The lesson is not that every company needs an introverted COO. It is that a founder whose gift is persuasion needs a partner whose gift is execution and who has no interest in competing for the microphone. Ling's three-year absence at McKinsey and Salesforce, honoring her sponsorship bond, is a reminder that the best partner may arrive late. The company waited, and when she came back full-time in 2015, the operating discipline came with her.
Tactic: Identify the co-founder or executive whose strengths are the inverse of yours, give them unambiguous ownership of the functions you would neglect, and publicly credit the origin story to them when it belongs to them.
Principle 12
Make the calling non-optional, then refuse to romanticize it
"Burn the ships so there's no path turning back. Then you will stay very focused." Tan's advice to founders is maximalist: it must be a life calling, from "up above or whatever you may believe in," or "don't do it, because so many fail." His own version included disownment, 20-hour days, a collapse in a Walmart, and a partner who gave up her career. He names the discipline jiak kor, eating bitter, and traces it through his grandfather's fourteen hours in the rain.
What separates his later views from founder mythology is the correction. "I'm not afraid of hard work, but I don't want to romanticise it either," he wrote a decade on, distinguishing "brute force" from "high-velocity intensity" and crediting support structures, his wife, assistants, a sleep tracker, for making it sustainable. A founder who never questions whether the ships should have been burned cannot tell anyone else when to light the match. Tan's admission, "if I knew it was gonna be so hard, I'm not sure if I would've done it," is the most useful thing he has said to anyone deciding whether to start.
Tactic: Before committing irrevocably, name the three people whose sacrifice your venture will require and ask them directly — then build the support systems that let intensity last years rather than months.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Anthony Tan, company-wide email to Grab staff, July 31, 2016We live in a very diverse world and there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Localized solutions best solve local problems.
— Anthony Tan, to TIME, 2023My dad basically disowned me. I thought, I'm not going to grovel. I'm going to fight and make sure we win. That was a pivotal moment.
— Anthony Tan, to The Edge Malaysia, August 2017Call us stubborn, call us optimists or even crazy, but every time we heard the word "no", we believed it was one step closer to a "yes".
— Anthony Tan, on Grab's in-city board meetings, Inside Grab podcast, 2026We could conveniently do it all via Zoom, but we do it [in-person] because we want our board to see the livelihoods we impact.
— Tan Hooi Ling, to The Straits Times, July 2017In general, I prefer to be behind the scenes. You can think about it as going back to first principles. I'm introverted by nature, and also because I just enjoy getting work done and spending time out of the news.
Maxims
- Inherit the domain, refuse the seat. Family advantage is knowledge and access. Keep those and leave the title behind.
- Productize the workaround. The fake phone call and the texted plate number were the spec. Users' rituals are your feature list.
- Acquire supply with your own hands. The founder who knocks on taxi windows learns the drivers have no bank accounts, and finds the bigger business.
- Dig through the friction. Each operational obstacle sits on top of a market. Payouts led to payments, payments to lending, lending to a bank.
- Locality is a tribe. Build for local difference and tell the story as service to a place, not just defeat of a foreigner.
- Buy the map, not the fight. The best end to a subsidy war may be the rival's regional assets in exchange for equity and a board seat.
- Make the regulator's constituency your customer. A product that raises incumbent drivers' income turns a political enemy into a coalition.
- Show the board the street. Directors who have watched a 2 a.m. onboarding line fund different things.
- Judge capital by character. The investor who notices how you treat your mother is the one who stays through the hard years.
- Eat bitter, but count the cost. Burn the ships if the calling is real, then build the support that lets the fire last.
