Anthony Tan didn’t need to start a business to be rich.
He grew up as the youngest of three sons in one of Malaysia’s wealthiest families. His father, Tan Heng Chew, is the president of Tan Chong Motor, a multinational automobile distributor founded by Tan’s grandfather in the 1950s, that’s publicly listed on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange.
You might call me a “rebel without a cause,” Tan said. 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 U.S. in December 2021, it brought in over $2 billion in revenue in 2023, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
Grab
Today, along with offering ride hailing, the company offers food and groceries delivery, as well as financial services such as payments, lending and digital banking. As of 2023, Grab also serves over 35 million customers and provides 13 million gig jobs across eight countries in Southeast Asia.
“I remember when I was meeting with [former President Ferdinand] Marcos in the Philippines, and he reminded my board and I… [Grab] literally changed the unemployment numbers nationally,” he said. “That’s what I would say makes us all really happy.”
Business beginnings
In 2009, Tan began his studies at Harvard Business School, where he met his co-founder Hooi Ling Tan. Having both grown 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 having a chat about the Malaysian taxi system, which at the time was notorious for being unsafe, particularly for women. The two decided to take on the challenge.
“We want to make it just standard hygiene that women can get to wherever they need to get to [safely],” said Tan. “We both really believed we were very blessed [and] we wanted to serve Southeast Asia.”
They went on to draft up a business plan, which was submitted into a startup contest at the university. They won first runner up and took home a $25,000 prize, which was used as seed money for what would become Grab.
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 starting Grab was no easy feat.
It was very intense… I was probably doing 15, 18, sometimes 20 hours a day, and it was a Monday to Sunday thing.
Growing up working in the family business, Tan was expected to return from his studies and go back to working for the company. So, when he went to his father with his idea for Grab, the conversation was not taken lightly.
“[My father] said ‘Hey, I don’t think it’s going to work out, so please don’t disturb me about this anymore,'” said Tan. “It was tough. It was this idea of like, never being enough… but, I think those [moments] pushed me to say, ‘Look, I can create something that really solves real societal problems.'”
He took the same…
Read More: How I built a $2 billion a year super app called Grab: ’20 hour’ work days