Before I joined Gojek and understood the math behind on-demand, I was skeptical about the sector.

How big is the TAM? What about delivery fees? Is the margin big enough to build a big business?

Then I met a friend who works in VC and he explained his thesis on Swiggy. This was years back before Swiggy became what it is today. I am obviously paraphrasing, he said something along these lines:

  1. Our generation will not eat food the same way as our parents did. We will all work late. Have private jobs. No energy to come back from office to cook food.
  2. Ordering food is equality. Instead of fighting over who makes dinner, like our parents, our generation will simply order food.
  3. We will explore far more when it comes to cuisines. It won’t be the same as our parents who were happy going out and eating Chinese once in 6 months.

This was even before I understood supply utilisation, how you can leverage your fleet to build more use cases once you have captured demand, get people to store money on their wallet and what not, that Gojek ended up doing.

Sometimes you have to think beyond the UE of today and identify generational shifts.