Speaker 1: Pushkin, what do you understand about maps and the world
Speaker 1: because you have been, you know, studying it and working
Speaker 1: on it for so long.
Speaker 2: I think the reason I personally love maps is just
Speaker 2: because there's a super super complex problem and very very
Speaker 2: hard thing to solve. That's why why I'm so passionate
Speaker 2: about it.
Speaker 1: This is Philip Kundall. He's the chief product officer at
Speaker 1: a company called Grab. Grab is huge in Southeast Asia
Speaker 1: and its main businesses are delivery and mobility, kind of
Speaker 1: like a combination between Instacart and Uber, and as a result,
Speaker 1: maps are at the core of its business.
Speaker 2: But the fascinating thing for me is like, once you
Speaker 2: get a digital representation of the real world, you can
Speaker 2: basically the vision that I always had for long, long years.
Speaker 2: If you haven't solved that yet is imagine when he
Speaker 2: went from Yahoo to Google. Right. Yahoo was like the
Speaker 2: static index of web that you could say, for something
Speaker 2: that just leads you to a website. Right if you
Speaker 2: would search for sports and it gets you to a
Speaker 2: sports side and then you need to navigate your way.
Speaker 2: And then Google you can say you search for a
Speaker 2: very specific thing and it brings you exactly to that page. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: and that's what we haven't solved with with maps yet.
Speaker 1: Right if you say, if we're still in the Yahoo
Speaker 1: era of maps, is what you're telling me.
Speaker 2: Maybe slightly beyond the Yahoo era. But let's say like
Speaker 2: when you say, where do I find the in Southeast Asia?
Speaker 2: Durian is like a super popular fruit? Right say where
Speaker 2: I said, where do I find the freshest Durian for
Speaker 2: this price? Right now, right now, the real world, right now,
Speaker 2: in the real world, right like, which store stocks a
Speaker 2: Durian right now? Show me where it is and then
Speaker 2: guide me to that store. There's nobody who has solved
Speaker 2: that problem. And and that's the fascinating part for me
Speaker 2: that I want what Google has done for the web.
Speaker 2: I want that for the real world.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's a wild problem. When you formulate it
Speaker 1: that way, you would have to know everything all the time.
Speaker 1: There's an information problem there that is quite hard.
Speaker 2: I mean, the hot problems are the fun ones and
Speaker 2: a yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is what's your problem? The
Speaker 1: show where I talk to people who are trying to
Speaker 1: make technological progress. Philip Bilton sold a mapping startup before
Speaker 1: he wound up at grab in twenty nineteen. Today, he's
Speaker 1: based in Singapore, which is one of several countries where
Speaker 1: Grab operates. Others include Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Speaker 1: And in addition to doing delivery and mobility, they also
Speaker 1: do payments. It's what they call a super app. And
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk to Philip about maps in particular
Speaker 1: because I mean, I guess I just kind of thought
Speaker 1: maps were solved or assumed that without really thinking about it,
Speaker 1: and then when I started learning about GRAB, I realized
Speaker 1: I was very wrong. So there's that dream of real
Speaker 1: time mapp apps that Philip mentioned a minute ago. But
Speaker 1: there's also something that's really interesting and kind of more
Speaker 1: immediately relevant, and that is this The online maps we
Speaker 1: use in the US and other developed countries just don't work.
Speaker 3: Very well in a lot of other parts.
Speaker 1: Of the world. And when Grab launched several years ago
Speaker 1: in Malaysia, that turned out to be a big problem.
Speaker 2: I mean, from day one, you needed maps, so you
Speaker 2: can't run the company without maps, and grabs started using
Speaker 2: a third party service. But then what we've realized a
Speaker 2: lot of these services are built for like a developed
Speaker 2: market like the US, and very built around the mental
Speaker 2: model of like cars, and Southeast Asia is really different.
Speaker 2: We're operating primarily on motorbikes, even two thirds of our
Speaker 2: transport trips on the back of a motorbike. And then
Speaker 2: if you know Southeast Asian cities, then you have these
Speaker 2: narrow alleys and sideways and so on, and traditional maps
Speaker 2: just don't cover them because interesting, basically how maps are
Speaker 2: made traditionally is with these big mapping vans that I'm
Speaker 2: sure you've seen driving through cities. One hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: two hundred thousand dollars basically look like a way more right,
Speaker 2: That's kind of like how they look like, and they
Speaker 2: don't cover the roads that we need to deliver our
Speaker 2: services and really reach our customer because they expect to
Speaker 2: be picked up in their home. They expect that the
Speaker 2: food get delivered to their front door, and not just
Speaker 2: to the nearest street that might be two hundred meters
Speaker 2: away in terms of like a big car drivable street.
Speaker 1: So lots of life, lots of people live, lots of businesses,
Speaker 1: earned streets that a van couldn't even drive down if
Speaker 1: it wanted to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no chance. I mean, when I do the immersions
Speaker 2: like on the back of a motorbike. There's absolutely no
Speaker 2: chance that with a man you can get there. It
Speaker 2: was a scooter centric world, and Southeast Asia updated so quickly,
Speaker 2: like I mean, there's like entire new neighborhoods springing up,
Speaker 2: and it was traditional maps are built in a way
Speaker 2: that these big vans collect once every one or two years,
Speaker 2: and we need to refresh the maps in like days.
Speaker 1: So you have this problem, like what's the first step?
Speaker 1: So you realize the maps aren't working. You're a mobility company,
Speaker 1: that's that's not gonna work. How do you It seems
Speaker 1: impossible to think, oh, well just map everything.
Speaker 2: How do you go?
Speaker 1: How do you start doing that?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Exactly right. It's a crazy problem, right yeah. I
Speaker 2: mean the numbers that were out there when Google started
Speaker 2: mapping the US, they apparently spent like anywhere between half
Speaker 2: a billion to one billion dollars and it clearly didn't
Speaker 2: have that amount of money to map it. And it
Speaker 2: seemed crazy, right like people when we started doing this,
Speaker 2: I mean, I got like so much feedback that people
Speaker 2: thought we were completely insane because God cost us and
Speaker 2: Southeast Age are right, I mean, we are home to
Speaker 2: like close to seven hundred million people, which is like
Speaker 2: a lot larger than the US. So you can imagine
Speaker 2: like how much it would normally.
Speaker 1: Cost, yes, two x exactly and crazy dense cities, traffic,
Speaker 1: tiny alleys. So how do you even start to undertake
Speaker 1: this project? What do you do?
Speaker 2: Yeah? No, so this was this was really the fun part.
Speaker 2: That's such a fun challenge yourself. But basically what we
Speaker 2: started is we started taking it from first principles like
Speaker 2: why was it so expensive to map? And then we
Speaker 2: tried to solve those problems and the problems why it's
Speaker 2: so expensive normally to produce a map are a few things,
Speaker 2: the ones that I just said. The mapping vehicles are
Speaker 2: extremely expensive. Then the people sitting in the mapping vehicle
Speaker 2: are extremely expensive because you sent them around driving in
Speaker 2: the country, sleeping in hotels. So the cost like to
Speaker 2: send these vans with people around cost a fortune, and
Speaker 2: like operating that is just super super costly. And that's
Speaker 2: what we had a unique advantage because obviously we had
Speaker 2: our drivers already crisscrossing the city in like insane amounts.
Speaker 2: I mean our drivers. Any city is like crossed by
Speaker 2: our drivers like one hundred times or more in a day,
Speaker 2: so there's like no roads that our drivers don't see.
Speaker 2: So we thought about two things that we needed to
Speaker 2: drive the radically down. One is we build our own
Speaker 2: collection hardware. So instead of building these like massive rigs,
Speaker 2: we build small GoPro like cameras with an echip in
Speaker 2: there that we can give to our drivers. And instead
Speaker 2: of costing one hundred two hundred thousand dollars for full
Speaker 2: mapping van, these cameras are under order of like a
Speaker 2: bunch of one hundred dollars, so orders of magnitudes cheaper.
Speaker 2: And then the second thing is we said, the driver's
Speaker 2: drive around the city anyway, can they just have the camera?
Speaker 2: And then we just need to pay them a little
Speaker 2: for them. It's a great extra income. But they get
Speaker 2: their main income from doing food deliveries or doing mobility trips,
Speaker 2: and they get an extra income from that. And that's
Speaker 2: because we could deploy like we have in Southeast Asia
Speaker 2: probably one hundred times at least more cameras than anybody
Speaker 2: else deployed because they're so cheap. And then we don't
Speaker 2: need to send drivers traveling everywhere.
Speaker 1: So let's break it down a little bit like building
Speaker 1: your own hardware, like the driver part is kind of obvious, right, like, oh,
Speaker 1: we've got these guys already out there, could we get
Speaker 1: them to do the mapping. It's not at all obvious
Speaker 1: to me that you would need to build your own hardware.
Speaker 1: So tell me about that, Like, first of all, why
Speaker 1: do you need to build your own hardware? Why not
Speaker 1: just dumb question, buy a camera?
Speaker 2: No, great, great question. Actually, I mean that's what we tried. Okay,
Speaker 2: So I think when we went and looked into this,
Speaker 2: because we didn't want to build hardware, and so basically
Speaker 2: we tried two things. So they were these go pros
Speaker 2: a few hundred bucks cameras, and then they were the
Speaker 2: more professional mapping Greade cameras twenty thousand bucks. So the
Speaker 2: problem with go Pro was a bunch of things they made,
Speaker 2: usually as action cameras, right, like you can go skiing
Speaker 2: and so on with them, but they don't have great
Speaker 2: GPS in them, and basically because you don't need it,
Speaker 2: right Like, if you go like somewhere mountain biking, it's
Speaker 2: typically open sky. It's not like a dense urban environment
Speaker 2: with big skyscrapers that reflect GPS. So they're decent for
Speaker 2: what people usually use. Goal pros, but they're not the
Speaker 2: media level precision we need for high density urban center mapping.
Speaker 2: So that was one problem. And the second problem with
Speaker 2: Goal pros was they just have no tooling that they
Speaker 2: kept operate twenty four to seven drivers upload automatically data,
Speaker 2: so they're not made They usually made for like a
Speaker 2: one two hour recording and not this heavy duty recording
Speaker 2: for the back of our motorbikes for twelve hours in
Speaker 2: blistering heat in Southeast Asia, tough rail and so on.
Speaker 2: So that's basically why both of these cameras that existed
Speaker 2: didn't fit the needs that are very harsh environment.
Speaker 1: So would the mapping camera have worked, but you didn't
Speaker 1: want to spend twenty grand per camera. That was presumably
Speaker 1: the simple problem with the mapping camera.
Speaker 2: Yeah, twenty grand was the problem. And the other problems
Speaker 2: are they're also quite heavy and bulky, So those cameras
Speaker 2: are close to ten kilograms, which is not super easy
Speaker 2: to operate. So they were too bulky and too costly.
Speaker 1: So what do you just get on a plane dest
Speaker 1: engine and tell them what you need, Like, how do
Speaker 1: you build your own camera?
Speaker 2: So this was really certing that we actually had a
Speaker 2: small team and Scenzan already building building off our battery
Speaker 2: swap blockers for scooters. And back then I talked to
Speaker 2: our Cito at that time and he is like kind
Speaker 2: enough to say, like I feel it, like we really
Speaker 2: need to find something next for this team to do.
Speaker 2: So you can have them all. They can build your cameras,
Speaker 2: so amazing, We're very lucky.
Speaker 1: So tell me about the camera they came up with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the first camera that we built, we called
Speaker 2: it a Karda cam, so like after like carda in
Speaker 2: like some language, was like map. So basically those cameras
Speaker 2: where the first version was mounted on the helmet of drivers,
Speaker 2: predominantly it was two hundred and fifty grams mounted on
Speaker 2: the helmet of drivers, and it would basically be a
Speaker 2: camera with an AI chip and really highly accurate GPS,
Speaker 2: like that's all we needed. And so they would just
Speaker 2: mount them on their on their helmets and go about
Speaker 2: their day and just at the end of the day,
Speaker 2: take it home, take it on their Wi Fi, upload
Speaker 2: the data and yeah, we would get data from tons
Speaker 2: of cameras.
Speaker 1: And then you made a cardacam too, right, tell me
Speaker 1: about Carteracam too.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we made a bunch of iterations of our hardware.
Speaker 2: So Karda CAN two is our latest generation, which is
Speaker 2: basically a three sixty camera, so it has basically four
Speaker 2: camera lenses and all directions. Has also like more advanced centers,
Speaker 2: like allied our sensors in there, so we basically made
Speaker 2: the setup a lot more professional that we can capture
Speaker 2: maps an even higher level of accuracy to get things
Speaker 2: like lane level navigation for our drivers or advanced safety features.
Speaker 2: So the latest camera is basically a great iteration that
Speaker 2: has taken just a step further to capture more details
Speaker 2: in the map.
Speaker 1: And where does it go? Where does the camera go
Speaker 1: if somebody's driving a scooter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so now we've built a mount on the back
Speaker 2: of a motorbike. So we've built actually the cameras that
Speaker 2: you can either mount them at the back of your
Speaker 2: motorbike that it doesn't disturb you and in a pole
Speaker 2: so that's high so that you can see because the
Speaker 2: camera obviously needs to have a good view even if
Speaker 2: there's cars around, so we've built a special mount on
Speaker 2: the back of a motorbike. We have mounts also for cars,
Speaker 2: so some drivers also mount them on cars. And then
Speaker 2: we have a backpack that you can carry if we
Speaker 2: want a map indoor. The other thing that's really important
Speaker 2: in Southeast Asia is malls are gigantic. Do you have
Speaker 2: like these malls which it takes you fifteen minutes to walk.
Speaker 1: Around, and so people will get a delivery to whatever
Speaker 1: the noodle shop in the middle of the mall, and
Speaker 1: you've got to put that on the map.
Speaker 2: Well, the other way around, people get a delivery from
Speaker 2: the noodle shop of course, of course, and our driver
Speaker 2: needs to find their way there, and if they get
Speaker 2: into the wrong entrance of the mall, it might cost
Speaker 2: them ten to fifteen minutes extra to walk back and forth.
Speaker 2: So we need to precisely not only tell them go
Speaker 2: into the mall, but we also precisely need to tell
Speaker 2: them where to park their motorbike. So what we emphasize
Speaker 2: when we build our maps that we build them like
Speaker 2: and to end, and we say, here's where you park
Speaker 2: your motorbike, here's where you walk, here's where you pick
Speaker 2: up the noodles, and then you can do the same
Speaker 2: in reverse.
Speaker 1: How many of these cameras do you have out there
Speaker 1: like today? How many people are driving around mapping with
Speaker 1: these cameras today ish by end of this year.
Speaker 2: We have about twenty thousand cameras in the field. And
Speaker 2: to give you a sense, like professional mapping companies in
Speaker 2: Southeast Asia, to my best of my knowledge, have about
Speaker 2: tens of cars, but not tens of thousand tens of cars.
Speaker 1: So does that mean they have basically seeded it to
Speaker 1: you like that you have won the mapping Southeast Asia fight.
Speaker 2: I think it's still so so early. Fair. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's so many things we want to do.
Speaker 1: Interesting. I love that. So let's talk a little more
Speaker 1: about what you're doing now and then let's talk about
Speaker 1: what you want to do. So you have an incredible
Speaker 1: amount of data coming in now, right, I mean, if
Speaker 1: you have twenty thousand cameras driving around every day like
Speaker 1: that is a wild amount of input. What are you
Speaker 1: doing with all that data? I mean there's basic mapping,
Speaker 1: and I'm sure you've got that, but what's the next level?
Speaker 1: Presumably have AI? You said you have light? Are like,
Speaker 1: tell me all the things you know because you have
Speaker 1: all this data.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're right. I think the basic vision that you
Speaker 2: have is get an accurate representation of the real world
Speaker 2: in real time. That's that's the that's the goal of
Speaker 2: mapping in real time?
Speaker 1: Is crazy? In real time? It's crazy? Yeah, that's wild.
Speaker 1: But fine, that's just like right now, what do you know?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so a bunch of things is I mean, first
Speaker 2: of all, everything that you need for navigation roads, how
Speaker 2: our road's drivable? Is the road safe to drive? Does
Speaker 2: it have a lot of potholes and things like that,
Speaker 2: and that signage obviously is it a one way road?
Speaker 2: Is it not a one way road?
Speaker 1: Can you worry me about a particular pothole? Could you
Speaker 1: be like, be careful, there's a pothole on the left
Speaker 1: coming up, try that right lane.
Speaker 2: And we're doing actually very cool things we're doing right now.
Speaker 2: We've already launched a safety navigation that tells you, hey,
Speaker 2: is the road safe to drive? Based on potholes? And
Speaker 2: does it have street lighting? Is it safe? Because if
Speaker 2: the road at night is well lit, it's a lot
Speaker 2: safer to drive, but it's not. So that's kind of
Speaker 2: like a practical use case that we that we already
Speaker 2: can do with that.
Speaker 1: Interesting as I'm sure you know, like ways in this
Speaker 1: country tells you where there's like a speed camera or
Speaker 1: like a speed trap. Do you do that?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely. So we have an AI voice reporting that
Speaker 2: drivers can share anything they're like, oh, the right lane
Speaker 2: of this road is closed, and then it gets processed
Speaker 2: and basically used for all the other other drivers. So
Speaker 2: we've launched that and it's been really successful as well.
Speaker 1: So when you say it's AI, does that mean the
Speaker 1: driver just says it and it gets integrated into the
Speaker 1: maps or what does that mean?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that's exactly right. There's the future. We actually
Speaker 2: work closely together with our friends at open Eye. So
Speaker 2: the driver natural language reports an issue and then it
Speaker 2: gets processed and if you're not clear, we ask your
Speaker 2: follow up question. If you say, hey, the right lane
Speaker 2: is closed and he said like, oh, do you mean
Speaker 2: this road? And then he says drive but yeah, that's
Speaker 2: exactly the road I'm talking about, and then we process
Speaker 2: it and basically one all the other drivers accordingly.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned your friends at open ai. It seems
Speaker 1: like good friends to have a good place to have friends.
Speaker 1: I know you have a deal with them, Like what
Speaker 1: is the nature of your deal with open ai and
Speaker 1: more generally, what's the work you're doing with them?
Speaker 2: So MAP I think is one of the key things
Speaker 2: we do together with them and use their models to
Speaker 2: improve our maps. The voice stuff that I shared earlier
Speaker 2: is like one of our one of our highlight features.
Speaker 2: And in general, we're just embedding like AI and everything
Speaker 2: we're doing. We're having we're having like over a thousand
Speaker 2: different AI models that we're that we're working on, so
Speaker 2: it's basically deeply, deeply embedded in many many of the
Speaker 2: things that that we're doing.
Speaker 1: Tell me more, like, what are some more examples of
Speaker 1: how you're using AI.
Speaker 2: So one of the latest things that that I really
Speaker 2: like that's really cool is the other thing that has
Speaker 2: really huge impact on our marketplace is weather. In Southeast Asia,
Speaker 2: the rain is insane. It is like pouring down, the
Speaker 2: roads are flooding, so and for our services for mobility
Speaker 2: for deliveries, that has a tremendous impact on that. So
Speaker 2: knowing when it rains early is super super critical so
Speaker 2: we can adjust the marketplace. We've launched AI based rate
Speaker 2: detection that a bunch of things, So we deploy sensors,
Speaker 2: other sensors in cars. So we have basically a device
Speaker 2: that's called a card to dongle that we deploy and
Speaker 2: the cars that we own and it plugs into a
Speaker 2: port in the car. That's called OBEDI two port, and
Speaker 2: that reads when the windshield viper's going.
Speaker 1: Oh genius, such a simple way, such a simple way
Speaker 1: to know if it's rating. Does the car have the
Speaker 1: windshield wipers on? It's so second order. I love it though.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and how fast it is?
Speaker 1: Oh? How fast? It's how fast the car is going,
Speaker 1: because the slower it's going, the heavier the rain. Is
Speaker 1: that the inference how fast.
Speaker 2: The windshield wiper is going. Because you kind of like this,
Speaker 2: are this right?
Speaker 1: So okay? So so and what do you do? What
Speaker 1: do you do with that data? That's the input, what's
Speaker 1: the output?
Speaker 2: The output is basically we know the moment it rains,
Speaker 2: we know demand will go up and supply of drivers
Speaker 2: will go down. So what we do We try to
Speaker 2: activate more drivers, so we would send out to all
Speaker 2: the drivers, Hey, it's starting to rain. There's a fantastic
Speaker 2: earning opportunity. If you're not worth now's a great chance
Speaker 2: to get on the road and make extra money. And
Speaker 2: then we try to actively get the supply of drivers
Speaker 2: up so that we can keep our reliability at the
Speaker 2: levels we need.
Speaker 1: We know people get all worked up about sarge pricing.
Speaker 1: Do you use searge pricing in that setting? It sounds
Speaker 1: like a classic use of search pricing. Everybody wants a driver,
Speaker 1: nobody wants to drive. What you need is a higher price.
Speaker 1: Do you do that?
Speaker 2: That's exactly right? Or like you need to motivate the
Speaker 2: drivers to come on the road.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, there is a market. I'm pro searge pricing.
Speaker 1: That's a great example. What's another example of the way
Speaker 1: you're using AI?
Speaker 2: So we used AI to translate in many scenarios. For example,
Speaker 2: when I go like to Jakarta, I obviously don't speak
Speaker 2: any Bahasa, but I can message our drivers in the
Speaker 2: real time, translate any messages, send them a chat to
Speaker 2: the driver and he can reply back to me in basade.
Speaker 2: I see it in English on my side, he sees
Speaker 2: it in basade my site. But the more important one
Speaker 2: for me was like food menu translations. So we invested
Speaker 2: quite a bit because whenever I go to Thailand and
Speaker 2: then like I mean, I can't read any tie script obviously,
Speaker 2: and I in the past I look at like some
Speaker 2: things on the menu and I have no ideas that
Speaker 2: like for me, always are worries that ultra spicy can
Speaker 2: I eat it or not, and I didn't even know
Speaker 2: what the item is, Like can look at the picture
Speaker 2: and kind of guess, but sometimes merchants don't have pictures.
Speaker 2: So we used AI to to translate all these menus
Speaker 2: in all kinds of languages, so that that has been
Speaker 2: a super impactful one as well. We'll be back in
Speaker 2: just a minute.
Speaker 1: So I'm curious about grab maps enterprise, right Like, you're
Speaker 1: selling something related to your maps to big companies right
Speaker 1: to to Microsoft, to Amazon and to government. It's like,
Speaker 1: what tell me about that business?
Speaker 2: That was quite an interesting one, right Like, we would
Speaker 2: have never imagined early on when we built our maps
Speaker 2: that this business will be created. But we've got people
Speaker 2: like once we publicized our maps and people have seen
Speaker 2: that they work generally quite well, we've got people approaching
Speaker 2: us say hey, can we use them as well? And
Speaker 2: that was like the genesis of the enterprise business. And
Speaker 2: then we started working very closely with AWS where any
Speaker 2: developer on their platform can use our maps now, so
Speaker 2: we have over one hundred different developers already using it.
Speaker 2: We partner with Microsoft, as he said, a bunch of
Speaker 2: other large tech companies that in Southeast Asia started using
Speaker 2: our maps because they've seen i mean, all these things
Speaker 2: that I shared earlier that just really serves their needs
Speaker 2: in Southeast Asia a lot better than anything else out there.
Speaker 1: What's an example if something someone has built, you know,
Speaker 1: on top of it.
Speaker 2: A really cool startup that I've seen that used our maps.
Speaker 2: What they do They go from merchant to merchant and
Speaker 2: collect like the old oil that they use for cooking
Speaker 2: and that basically recycle it. So they send somebody around
Speaker 2: going to all these merchants collecting that. And in the past,
Speaker 2: and a lot of these merchants are like small neighborhood
Speaker 2: mom and pop shops in all these like little side
Speaker 2: rolls and alleys, and that had a hard time for
Speaker 2: the for the person going around collecting all of this
Speaker 2: stuff finding that. And that's one of these examples where
Speaker 2: they use grab maps to make the navigation of the
Speaker 2: person going around and collecting all of that a lot
Speaker 2: a lot easier. And there's many of these kind of
Speaker 2: stories where people use it for things that that are
Speaker 2: very similar in those kind of finding the last mile
Speaker 2: has been really really hard before. So I'm curious.
Speaker 1: What you're working on now, Like, Yeah, what what are
Speaker 1: some of the things you're trying to figure out that
Speaker 1: you haven't figured out yet.
Speaker 2: I think the one thing that we're really passionate about
Speaker 2: is solving more of the indoor problem. So that's one
Speaker 2: thing that we're really mapping more so. We have a
Speaker 2: decent amount of malls already map, but there's still so
Speaker 2: much more to do. So hopefully we can find that.
Speaker 2: Butever you go into these malls, we can exactly help
Speaker 2: you to find whatever you're looking for, specific store or
Speaker 2: general a general kind of like shop or so. So
Speaker 2: that's that's one thing that I really want us to crack.
Speaker 1: So it's the general shop idea that like, if I'm
Speaker 1: just not working for grab, I'm just in the general
Speaker 1: public and I'm like, I want to buy a pair
Speaker 1: of shorts, I just type that into grab maps, and
Speaker 1: grab maps tells me where to go.
Speaker 2: Is that what you're thinking of there, Yes, but we
Speaker 2: always think about it with a hyperlocal twist.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, and what that means. As an example, let's say
Speaker 2: in Indonesia, a large part of the population is Muslim,
Speaker 2: which means they generally eat halal, and this is like
Speaker 2: all the mapping platforms they don't support that. You can,
Speaker 2: of course for every search for you can say restaurant halal,
Speaker 2: this halal, this halal, but you cannot make it part
Speaker 2: of your user profile. But it's it's like, it's not
Speaker 2: it's not something that you switch every day. Well, like
Speaker 2: either your preference is halal or is not. And and
Speaker 2: a lot of the mapping platforms support putting in your profile.
Speaker 2: I only want halal restaurants because I don't eat anything else.
Speaker 2: And those are the kind of things that we see
Speaker 2: in Southeast Asia that we need to really solve because again,
Speaker 2: nobody else would solve those kind of problems. So capturing
Speaker 2: this data accurately and knowing all these details, those are
Speaker 2: the kind of things that we really put a lot
Speaker 2: of emphasis on.
Speaker 1: Are there technical problems you're working on, Like are there
Speaker 1: things where you haven't figured out the right tech or
Speaker 1: where you need to build something, or where AI models
Speaker 1: aren't quite where they need to be, but you're trying
Speaker 1: to push them.
Speaker 2: I think what we are trying to do is what
Speaker 2: I said earlier, like you want to have a real
Speaker 2: time accurate model of the world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so let's talk about that. Like real time is
Speaker 1: a crazy phrase in that context, right, Like when you
Speaker 1: say real time a model of the world. What are
Speaker 1: you thinking of?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean a simple use case would be nowhere
Speaker 2: there's parking right now? Yeah, not like where there's parking
Speaker 2: in general, but I'd say a roadside parking. If you
Speaker 2: had another crap card driving past and say, hey, fifteen
Speaker 2: seconds ago there was a freak parking spot on the right,
Speaker 2: that's that's extremely useful.
Speaker 1: That is extremely as well that I know people in
Speaker 1: Brooklyn and San Francisco who would love to have that functionality.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think for us, really the goal is always
Speaker 2: what we know is like shaving off seconds of every delivery, right, Like,
Speaker 2: that's what really really makes a delta. I think that
Speaker 2: I really loved Steve Job's old mental model. But he
Speaker 2: convinced people to make the macboot like ten seconds faster,
Speaker 2: and he said like, well, if you take this, I
Speaker 2: don't remember the exactly now mark for him, but he said, like,
Speaker 2: if you make the macboot ten seconds fast and there's
Speaker 2: fifty million people using it every year, you save like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, it's like ten lifetimes of people's time
Speaker 2: waiting for the Magic Boot something like that, and fast
Speaker 2: right Like across I mean across I calculated to share
Speaker 2: this always with a team. Across a billion deliveries, two
Speaker 2: point five seconds saved across every delivery is roughly one
Speaker 2: lifetime that you can save. So any second we can
Speaker 2: shave off by getting cash to park faster, by getting
Speaker 2: motorbikes to park faster, park at the right space, at
Speaker 2: the right time. That's kind of the problems that we're
Speaker 2: really passionate on solving.
Speaker 1: How long does it take you to do a billion deliveries?
Speaker 1: How is it a billion per per way?
Speaker 2: We don't publish exact data, but it's the auder of
Speaker 2: magnitude of it, like a year or less.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, okay, that's a big number. So how do
Speaker 1: you get real time parking data? I mean, so, is
Speaker 1: the constraint now just getting more cameras to more drivers,
Speaker 1: like the what's the rate limiting step?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Great, great question. I think more cameras is one constraint.
Speaker 2: The other constraint is doing all the smart processing on
Speaker 2: the act because obviously you cannot upload all these data
Speaker 2: because that would be extremely costly, and mobile networks in
Speaker 2: Southeast Asia aren't quite that powerful that you could upload
Speaker 2: millions of video streams to the cloud. So we're working
Speaker 2: a lot on what is called like ATGYI that we
Speaker 2: can run all these models that are powerful but not
Speaker 2: in the cloud but on the app or at least
Speaker 2: on a mix of boths.
Speaker 1: So in this case, is the edge the actual camera?
Speaker 1: I mean, what what is like is the dream the
Speaker 1: camera itself is doing the work and just uploading something
Speaker 1: very simple to the network.
Speaker 2: That's in many places already happening. We already have quite
Speaker 2: powerful AI chips in the cameras. But I mean, of course,
Speaker 2: like no mobile phone, no edge camera right now is
Speaker 2: as powerful as let's say CHET GPT with GBT four O,
Speaker 2: that's sure.
Speaker 1: I mean, you have this sort of spectrum where you
Speaker 1: have a whatever one hundred million dollar data center on
Speaker 1: one end and one hundred dollars camera on the other
Speaker 1: and some things in between. Right, So what can you
Speaker 1: do on the camera now?
Speaker 2: We do things like privacy, so we blur people's faces,
Speaker 2: we blow license plates because we never want to upload
Speaker 2: this information. We do weather detection what I said earlier,
Speaker 2: with rain, so we detect on the cameras if it's raining,
Speaker 2: things like that. We detect traffic signs and see if
Speaker 2: they've changed. So we actually already run large part of
Speaker 2: processing on the edge and then only if something has changed,
Speaker 2: then we upload some data into a validation on the server.
Speaker 2: But that already allows us to reduce what we upload
Speaker 2: by more than ninety percent to.
Speaker 1: Just tell the server if something is different.
Speaker 2: Basically, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So I know, you know, we've talked mostly about maps,
Speaker 1: but obviously GREB is doing a lot of different things.
Speaker 1: Are there other parts of the business that we should
Speaker 1: talk about?
Speaker 2: The business is so fascinating, so if I have time,
Speaker 2: we should talk about all of our business.
Speaker 1: Yes, just tell me what's one other sort of frontier,
Speaker 1: one other thing you're working on.
Speaker 2: I think the other thing which we've really invested deeply,
Speaker 2: which is also quite closely connected to our maps, is
Speaker 2: when we look at across the delivery journey. The other
Speaker 2: part where a lot of time is spent is in
Speaker 2: the merchant cooking and preparing the food. And that's an
Speaker 2: area where you spend a lot of time optimizing together
Speaker 2: with the merchants to make sure that the food is
Speaker 2: prepared in the right time, that the driver arrives in
Speaker 2: the right time. So you've done lots of lots of
Speaker 2: cool things. So, for example, we've built a data science
Speaker 2: model that accurately predicts at every time of the day
Speaker 2: how long the merchant needs to prepare an order. So
Speaker 2: we can detect the busyness of the merchant and say,
Speaker 2: if we know all the merchant has gotten a lot
Speaker 2: of orders, normally they take to prepare, They prepare to
Speaker 2: bud me in like three minutes, but when they're very busy,
Speaker 2: they take seven minutes. And the merchants don't want that
Speaker 2: our drivers crowd their store and weigh in troves, So
Speaker 2: we typically allocate the driver only when we know, okay,
Speaker 2: the food is ready in seven minutes, and we don't
Speaker 2: allocate the driver immediately, but we know all there's a
Speaker 2: driver two minutes away, we just allocate them like five
Speaker 2: minutes later so that he's in the shop just in time.
Speaker 2: And that also cuts the delivery journey, makes a lot
Speaker 2: more pleasant for the merchant not having like a lot
Speaker 2: of people crowd their store, and allows us to offer
Speaker 2: more affordable price to the consumer because they don't need
Speaker 2: to pay for all these minutes of the driver waiting.
Speaker 1: So just all these optimizations, all these different margins where
Speaker 1: you can optimize. So if we think about whatever five years,
Speaker 1: ten years out, when you think about this sort of
Speaker 1: medium to long term like what's your dream, Like, how's
Speaker 1: it work? What's going on?
Speaker 2: I think like for me, the world is changing so fast.
Speaker 2: Five to ten years prediction is really really hard with
Speaker 2: all the AI advancements.
Speaker 1: How far you want to go?
Speaker 2: Two years? Four years?
Speaker 1: You tell me, like what you just give me a
Speaker 1: dream for the future.
Speaker 2: I mean the obvious one that I'm very passionate about
Speaker 2: is robotics that make so much sense in our marketplace.
Speaker 2: So if you can add robotics to our marketplace, that
Speaker 2: will be a huge, huge change and something we're actively
Speaker 2: working on to make happen. So that's I think probably
Speaker 2: the thing I'm most passionate about to change.
Speaker 1: Tell me what you're actively working on with robotics.
Speaker 2: We haven't shared much which we do on the delivery side,
Speaker 2: but for example, I mean things like autonomous cars. We've
Speaker 2: signed an agreement with a bunch of like autonomous car
Speaker 2: providers to come with us to Singapore and so on,
Speaker 2: so we'll do a bunch of things in that space.
Speaker 2: But basically you can imagine that it will be in many,
Speaker 2: many parts of our delivery chain.
Speaker 1: You need to build an autonomous scooter based on what
Speaker 1: you've told me, right, I feel like the analogy to
Speaker 1: the map story is the autonomous scooter that can go
Speaker 1: down all the alleyways.
Speaker 2: Great, if you ever want to have a job in
Speaker 2: our product team, to join us, build autonomous schooters with us,
Speaker 2: because you're exactly right, but you need to build products
Speaker 2: that work in our region. So that's exactly the right
Speaker 2: mindset that we're trying, like what we say always and
Speaker 2: we want to build hyper local products that work in
Speaker 2: Southeast Asia.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a minute with the lighting round. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's finish with the lightning round. So I read on
Speaker 1: your bio you write that you mostly travel between Singapore,
Speaker 1: San Francisco, Berlin and Cluge. Tell me about Clue the
Speaker 1: other three I'm familiar with Clues. I don't know anything
Speaker 1: about How does that wind up on that list?
Speaker 2: As a city in Romania, in the heart of Transylvania actually,
Speaker 2: and we have a we have a small engineering center
Speaker 2: there in our maps team, So I've spent a lot
Speaker 2: of time there because for my own startup, that's that's
Speaker 2: how I wound up Inclusure. Originally for my startup, Scobbler,
Speaker 2: which was a maps and navigation startup. I built a
Speaker 2: engineering team and cluge, so I've been going to Clusion
Speaker 2: working with engineers there for the last fifteen years or so.
Speaker 2: What's clue Like, it's fun. It's a student town, so high,
Speaker 2: high energy, young population, very smart, the computer science department
Speaker 2: very good. They used to clone the IBM mainframes for
Speaker 2: the Soviet Union, so a bunch of hardcore engineers.
Speaker 1: You also write in that bio you wrote in Berlin,
Speaker 1: I experienced some of the best parties ever. Tell me
Speaker 1: about a Berlin party.
Speaker 2: That was prior line, That was before I moved to
Speaker 2: before I moved to Southeast Asia. But Berlin was a fun, fun,
Speaker 2: fun journey for I lived there for five six years.
Speaker 1: Maybe he didn't tell me anything about any party. So
Speaker 1: and then you also say you lived and worked in
Speaker 1: Singapore and Berlin and San Francisco, and I'm curious, like,
Speaker 1: how is sort of whatever professional culture, work life different
Speaker 1: in those places. What are the sort of striking differences?
Speaker 2: I mean, Germany is extremely direct, but like that's where
Speaker 2: I'm originally from. I'm originally German, and Germans are known
Speaker 2: to be super super direct, which in Southeast Asia doesn't
Speaker 2: work super well. If they're not accustomed to it. So
Speaker 2: I think for me, the thing that I needed to
Speaker 2: adjust most is to become a lot more indirect, to
Speaker 2: become a lot more like have those conversations and like
Speaker 2: smaller groups, not in front of everybody. So I definitely
Speaker 2: had to just my style quite a lot when moving around.
Speaker 2: But I found that always incredibly fun. I always loved
Speaker 2: learning about new cultures, So after some adjustments, I really
Speaker 2: really like it here.
Speaker 1: That is super interesting. Was there, as you were saying
Speaker 1: that I was wondering, like, was there a particular moment
Speaker 1: when you realized, Oh, I'm not behaving correctly in this
Speaker 1: cultural context?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean this predate grap So this was when
Speaker 2: I was first doing business in China. So I sold
Speaker 2: my startup to a Silicon Valley company, but I also
Speaker 2: got a two hundred people team in China report to me,
Speaker 2: which was the first time that I ever managed a
Speaker 2: team in China, and I was extremely surprised why they
Speaker 2: wouldn't tell me about all the mistakes, all the things
Speaker 2: that I did wrong. And I said, like, that's very unusual.
Speaker 2: Normally I get a lot of like pushback from engineers.
Speaker 2: And then I started like asking people is why don't
Speaker 2: they do this? And then people said like, well, it's
Speaker 2: kind of root in a public forum to say the
Speaker 2: boss's wrong. And then I realized, like, oh, that's that's
Speaker 2: why I just need to like change how I'm asking questions,
Speaker 2: how I'm managing teams. And that's when I first managed
Speaker 2: teams in China. Took me quite a while to figure out, honestly.
Speaker 1: And how does San Francisco fit in relation to both
Speaker 1: working in Berlin and working in you know, China and Singapore.
Speaker 1: Where's the US on that continuum?
Speaker 2: Do you ask for me? I think the thing that
Speaker 2: I really loved in San Francisco was just the craziness
Speaker 2: of ambition. When I spent like April back in in
Speaker 2: SF four month to like vibe code and hack on
Speaker 2: a bunch of hobby projects, and like you go in
Speaker 2: every random coffee shop and there's somebody who said they
Speaker 2: work on a billion dollar idea and they they're just starting,
Speaker 2: they have nothing yet they're just like, Okay, I'm going
Speaker 2: to make it big. So I think that that ambition
Speaker 2: and that willingness to openly declare it even if people
Speaker 2: know it's super unlikely. There's not thousands of people who
Speaker 2: start billion dollar company, but in the Bay Area that's
Speaker 2: thousands of people who say they will and this conviction
Speaker 2: and this like optimism. I think that was for me
Speaker 2: one of the most striking things in the US, and
Speaker 2: that I still love the energy whenever I go there.
Speaker 3: Basically, Philip Condall is the chief product officer at GRAB.
Speaker 2: Please email us.
Speaker 1: At problem at Pushkin dot fm. We are always looking
Speaker 1: for new guests for the show. Today's show was produced
Speaker 1: by Trinamanino and Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited by
Speaker 1: Alexander Garreton and engineered by Sarah Bruguer. I'm Jacob Goldstein
Speaker 1: and we'll be back next week with another episode of
Speaker 1: What's Your Problem.