A big thank you!

Before joining Gojek, We were running a small startup called CodeIgnition. It specialized in Devops consulting, helping other tech companies to navigate through their scaling challenges. At the time I was only 3 years in my professional career, and super hungry to build products that customers would love. When Nadiem asked us to come aboard to help build Gojek. We had no idea of what we were getting into.

If anyone would have said to me then that we will be seeing a journey of growth from “10 million to 10+ billion”, I would not have believed them. Working here for nearly 5 years over several teams and offices has been a source of inspiration.

Gojek was an extremely demanding place from me. It kept pushing me to do my best work. I always felt that this place just transformed into a new company every few months. This place has given me so many stories, enough for a lifetime.

It has been an emotional rollercoaster. With so many moments, it is impossible to list them all.

• Feeling vanity as an Engineer, when we had “Integer overflow” problems.
• Feeling like a hero, when I patched a bug with Niranjan after a field trip from CBD which was flooding our driver’s phone in rush hour.
• Feeling the rush of “Blue line” hoping that it will be ahead of Yellow one, when looking at the “[New] Allocation Dashboard”
• Feeling ambitious pressure of timelines, when the CEO set up the Allocation team on “The perfect allocation problem” with 2 weeks as a goal!
• Feeling the frustration of realising that getting smart people into a room is not enough to get results going. A lot of us felt the same with acquisition of CodeIgnition, Leftshift and C42, it took us years of working together to iron out our work styles.
• Feeling rebellious by pushing Singapore launch against the existing Trifecta wave.
• Feeling the rush of release, when we pressured Kevin and Dito on releasing Surge pricing as a part of a “prod-support” problem
• Feeling miraculously calm, at the accidental release of GoCar a couple of days before when it was actually meant to be
• Feeling like a friend, with hosting countless after office parties at my place.
• Feeling like a firefighter, after peeling layer by layer of “infinite onion” each evening at House 630 in Indiranager, and then discussing the storm at coffeshop next door.
• Feeling stumped, when your replacement leaves before you. Understanding management as a first class problem. Which is a big deal, as I belong to set of people who wrote on a hoarding “Hire Engineers, not managers”

Keeping up with this place has not been easy. This place kept on demanding a better version of myself, every few months. It will be sad to not see this journey further, but I am glad to see this ship in the hands of such a capable team to steer it forward. I will be the biggest cheerleader but this time from the sidelines.

Gojek reinforced in me how much I love solving problems for people, building products they love. I feel inspired to continue picking up hard problems. I hope to continue doing the same after recharging.

This is not a goodbye, life is too long as well. I am sure our paths will cross again.

Signing out. Shobhit