The Outside-Silicon-Valley Playbook
Compete with global giants from a talent-poor market: go ops-heavy, go remote early, and refuse to clone
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Aluwi's three-part answer for founders building in valuable markets that global players want but local ecosystems can't yet supply: be more ops-heavy than tech-heavy early, get good at remote work far before it's comfortable, and design the product around a local phenomenon rather than cloning a US model. Gojek executed all three and stayed ahead of far better-funded regional and global rivals.
Origin
Distilled by Kevin Aluwi from Gojek's 2011-2021 run in Indonesia — a market big enough to attract global competitors while its talent and funding ecosystems were still underdeveloped. The remote leg came from Gojek opening an engineering centre in Bangalore in 2015, years before remote work was normal.
Core principles
- 01The defining bind outside tech hubs: you compete with the best in the world for customers, without the resources in-market to build against them.
- 02Ops innovation is not a compromise — it is how you kickstart things until the elegant, scalable technical solution exists.
- 03Talent won't come to you, so build the ability to work where it already is.
- 04Cloning a foreign model wastes your only real edge: knowing your market's unique dynamics.
- 05Products with true product-market fit in developing markets grow at rates that don't exist in mature ones — a young population hungry for better solutions.
- 06The best local insight generates both product and brand innovation, not one or the other.
How to run it
- 1
Start ops-heavy, not tech-heavy
Do the things that don't scale by operational means. Accept manual, headcount-intensive solutions as the bridge to the eventual technical one, because building elegantly first will take time your market won't wait for.
Watch out Name the migration trigger. Ops bridges that never get replaced become permanent margin drags.
- 2
Get good at remote work before you need to
Build talent concentration outside headquarters early. Stand up a real engineering centre in a deep talent market and learn the operating muscle for distributed teams while the stakes are low.
Pro tip Gojek opened its Bangalore engineering centre in 2015, giving it access to a deep Indian talent pool and letting it compete far better with the global giants.
- 3
Anchor the product on a local phenomenon, not a foreign template
Identify the thing that is specifically true about your market and build the product around it. Gojek anchored on the Indonesian motorcycle taxi — a human on a motorbike who can do many things — which is why it became an on-demand super app before super apps existed.
Pro tip Investors and analysts will label you a clone of a US company anyway. Don't let their framing become your roadmap.
Watch out Cloning also imports the original's blind spots — Gojek's car-centric rivals never branded their motorbike drivers because branding a car is pointless.
- 4
Let the local insight drive brand as well as product
The same market truth that shapes the product should shape the brand. The motorbike gave Gojek both the super-app product architecture and the branded jackets-and-helmets distribution that a car company could never replicate.
In the wild
After launching the app in 2015, Gojek more than doubled month over month for the first 16 of 18 months. Aluwi credits not brilliance but the combination of an obviously broken status quo that better technology could fix and a young population eager to try new things — Sequoia, an investor, called it the craziest growth story they had ever heard of.
→ Sustained >100% MoM growth for more than a year, which Aluwi treats as evidence of how fast true product-market fit compounds in developing markets.
Facing an underdeveloped local talent pool while competing with global and regional players for Indonesian customers, Gojek built an engineering centre in Bangalore in 2015 — long before remote and distributed work was common in the region or globally.
→ Access to a deep Indian talent market, which Aluwi says let Gojek compete far better against the global giants.
Aluwi cites e-Fishery as the archetype of the off-the-wall local company: an IoT smart feeder that measures how much feed goes into a fish pond, plus financing for the farmer and a route to sell their produce into local, regional and global markets — a fully closed-loop ecosystem for Indonesian fish farmers.
→ Roughly a quarter of a billion dollars in revenue, and profitable — a business with no Silicon Valley template at all.
Common mistakes
Copying a foreign model
Aluwi: don't just copy. Gojek was not an Uber clone even though investors and analysts described it that way — it was built around the motorcycle taxi, which is why it produced both product and branding innovation Uber-shaped competitors could not.
Waiting for elegant technical solutions in an immature market
Solving things technically and elegantly takes a lot of time. Over-focusing on those solutions does customers a disservice when operational innovation could deliver the improvement now.
Assuming local talent will be enough
You compete with the best in the world for a valuable market while the local talent and funding ecosystem is underdeveloped. Companies that don't build remote capability early lose that arms race.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders building consumer technology in emerging markets that are large enough to attract global competitors but too immature to supply local talent and capital
Not ideal for
Founders in mature tech hubs with deep local hiring pools and abundant capital, where ops-heavy solutions destroy margin unnecessarily
From the transcript
“we were a lot more Ops heavy than Tech heavy and and doing the things that don't scale uh uh through other means I think…”
“you need to get good at remote work really early”
“don't just copy um because gojek was not like an Uber clone”
“we grew more than a hundred percent month on month for the first 16 in 18 months”
From the episode
Taxi mafias, cash vaults, and 100% MoM growth: The story behind Southeast Asia’s biggest startup
Kevin Aluwi (Gojek)