Aluwi: Founders must perform operational roles themselves to recognize excellence when hiring
Kevin Aluwi · Taxi mafias, cash vaults & 100% MoM growth: The story of SEA’s biggest startup | Kevin Aluwi (Gojek) · Mar 26, 2023 · at 40:32
Gojek co-founder Kevin Aluwi explains why he worked across multiple roles at Gojek, including performance marketing and driving.
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“I do think that as, and this is probably most relevant for founders, less, less for executives, but, you know, I think for, as a founder, I do think it's really important to understand the work that needs to be done in order to see what excellence looks like. And for us, you know, again, we came from an ecosystem where the availability of experienced talent was relatively low. And so for me, It was very hard to be able to say, like, oh, like, let's hire a person X from organization Y with, you know, job description Z, and we know that they probably can deliver. Because, you know, again, the talent availability was really low, and so a lot of times I needed to, I felt like I needed to understand, okay, what is this job? What exactly does it entail? What is, and seeing how bad I am at it allowed me to understand what good looked like. And so I held a lot of those roles just because, you know, I wanted to understand every part of the business as best as I could in order to then find somebody who could do it, you know, orders of magnitude better than myself.”
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