How I built a $2 billion-a-year super app called Grab: The '20 Hour' Workday

Anthony Tan didn't need to start a business to get rich.

He grew up as the youngest of three sons in one of the richest families in Malaysia. His father, Tan Heng Chew, is the president of Tan Chong Motors, a multinational automobile distributor founded by Tan's grandfather in the 1950s, which is publicly listed on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange.

You can call me a “rebel without a cause,” said Tan. 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 multinational ride-hailing giant and super app Grab. After the business went public in the US in December 2021, it brought in more than $2 billion in revenue in 2023, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

Today, in addition to offering ride hailing, the company offers food and grocery delivery as well as financial services such as payments, lending and digital banking. As of 2023, Grab serves more than 35 million customers and provides 13 million gig jobs across eight countries in Southeast Asia.

“I remember when I was dating [former President Ferdinand] Marcos in the Philippines, and he is my board and I… [Grab] Literally changed the unemployment numbers nationally,” he said.

In 2009, Tan began his studies at Harvard Business School, where he met his co-founder Hui Ling Tan. After both growing 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 chatting about Malaysia's taxi system, which at the time was notoriously unsafe, especially for women. The two decided to take up the challenge.

“We just want to make it standard hygiene so women can go wherever they want [safely]”Tan said.” We both truly believed that we were very blessed [and] We wanted to serve Southeast Asia.”

They went on to draft a business plan, which was submitted to a startup competition at the university. They won first runner-up and took home a $25,000 prize, which was used as seed money up for grabs.

Today, Grab is backed by the likes of SoftBank, and the company has a market cap of over $14 billion.

However, Tan's journey to start Grab was no easy feat.

Growing up working in the family business, Tan was expected to return from his studies to work for the company. So, when he approached his father with his idea for Grab, the conversation wasn't taken lightly.

“[My father] 'Hey, I don't think it's going to work, so please don't bother me about this anymore,'” Tan said. “It was hard. It was like this idea, that wouldn't be enough… But, I think they are [moments] Saying to me, 'Look, I can create something that solves a real social problem.'

He took the same pitch, refined it and brought it to his mother, who eventually became Grab's first private investor. With startup competitions and money from his mother, Tan invested everything he had in the bank to start the company in June 2012. At that time, the company was known as “Myteksi”.

The first few years of the business were by no means glamorous.

Tan and his co-founders were originally tasked with building new infrastructure for Malaysia's taxi system, but money was a major limiting factor.

The main office was in a small room in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – a part of the world notorious for hot and humid weather all year round. The office lacked ventilation, air conditioning and even WiFi. “We had to tether from our mobile phones,” Tan said.

It was also difficult for the team to get drivers on the platform without adequate funding, so they had to get creative.

In the early days to get drivers on board, Tan was on the ground traveling across Southeast Asia, trying to convince taxi workers to try Grab.

Tan noticed that before starting their shift in the morning, drivers in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam would stop at a gas station to drink coffee. So he would show up around 4 a.m. to hand out free coffee to taxi drivers, which is also when he prepared them to join Grab. “It was the only way, and it was a lot,” he said.

“In Manila, I was going to meet the taxi fleet, because they always change shifts around four o'clock in the morning… and then [I spent] time with them [with some] cheap beer, [to try to] Understand their pain, their problems, why they need more income,” said Tan.

“It was very intense,” he said. “Between the flights — I was doing two to three cities a week when we were going through the growth and scaling phase — I was probably doing 15, 18, sometimes 20 hours a day, and it was a Monday through Sunday thing.”

In 2018, after a long and taxing battle, Uber agreed to sell its Southeast Asian business to Grab in exchange for a 27.5% stake in the company. As part of the deal, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi joined Grab's board of directors. The deal established Grab's dominance in the region.

What began as a dream to solve security problems in Malaysia's taxi system has now become Southeast Asia's dominant super app, but this dominance is anything but contested. The company has faced antitrust charges from critics and regulators.

But there's no arguing that Grab has shaped Southeast Asia's infrastructure.

It has transformed the way people in the region live their daily lives and empowered people at the “bottom of the pyramid” by giving them access to things like micro-financing programs, so they can afford to buy. Start earning money as a smartphone and driver.

“That's what separates us, 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 with a very poor, underserved market.”

“It's really about helping them, serving them as an ecosystem that no one else can… and that's what separates us from any of our peers.”

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