Founder Mythos
The Operator Who Called Herself a Plumber
I call myself a plumber.
The co-founder of one of Southeast Asia's largest companies describes her own job as unclogging pipes: finding the bottleneck, unblocking it, reshaping the model so the next one does not form.
The fundraise gets the headline. The operations, the boring plumbing under the app, are what actually let a two-city ride service become a regional platform.
Technologists love sitting behind a computer, looking at code, looking at designs, but the best way to actually experience that is to actually go on the ground.
Tan visited Indonesian wet markets to talk to merchants and joined sales teams in the Philippines incognito to watch them pitch, so she could see the product through the seller's eyes, not the dashboard's.
In Southeast Asia's fragmented markets, the moat was proximity. The founder closest to the merchant's real problem built the better product.
Like everything in life, I think skills are very buildable. Practise, practise, practise.
Trained as a mechanical engineer, Tan left a pharma job when she saw decisions being made two levels above the work. She went to build the management judgement to sit where those calls were made.
She treated leadership the way she treated an engineering problem: a buildable skill, not an innate gift. Public speaking, operations, judgement, all iterated the same way.
Unlocking bottlenecks and reshaping the business model.
Tan seeded the original idea for the company and ran its operations for a decade without seeking the spotlight, shifting to an advisory role only at the end of 2023.
The visible founder tells the story. The operating founder decides whether there is a company left to tell it about.