Go-Jek, an Indonesian app-based motorcycle taxi service, is planning to hire about 200 people in India to help innovate new products, according to its founder.
They include developers, data scientists, designers and product managers who would work in areas such as mining data, building mobile applications and internal portals.
Best talent“We want the best Indian engineering talent. We are now 40 here,” said Nadiem Makarim, Founder, Go-Jek. He said Go-Jek’s India team is providing immense value in terms of bringing in the latest technology and sharing knowledge with its local team in Indonesia.
Mobile-focused“Here, we have the next generation of engineers who are very mobile focused,” said Mr.Makarim who started Go-Jek as a call centre and a side project while studying for an MBA at Harvard Business School in 2011. He unveiled the Go-Jek app last January in Jakarta and since then, it has been downloaded over 14 million times.
Backed by investors like Sequoia Capital and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner’s DST Global, it has partnered over 2 lakh motorcycle drivers and 5,000 trucks nationwide in Indonesia.
This February, Go-Jek bought Bengaluru-based C42 Engineering and Delhi-based CodeIgnition Software Solutions mainly to hire talent.
Mr.Makarim said that he had no plans to tap the India market even though it was very similar to Indonesia. However, this was not because of the regulations that recently halted the motorcycle taxi services of Uber and Ola in Bengaluru following a ban and seizure of vehicles by transport authorities.
“Regulations will forever lag behind innovation,” said Mr.Makarim who believes Indonesia is a big enough market for the firm. “Also, there is a lot of competition in India, we rather become a good colleague than a competitor, everybody is competing with Uber.”He said he was aware of the shake-up in the Indian tech industry.
