Exit from Rocket Internet: Reflecting on the Human Aspect

It has been nearly one and a half years since the author first took up those mysterious Skype calls (and then a dubious-looking employment offer) from Malaysia, and flew on a three-day notice from London to Kuala Lumpur.  And it has been nearly one year since taking up the post of Vice President of Operations at the Lazada Philippines office after another one-week notice to fly to Manila.  And as the employment contract finally draws to a close, perhaps it is a time to evaluate the whole journey before the last goodbyes.

As can be read from the last paragraph, Rocket Internet and all of its incubated ventures goes by a clear principle of speed over everything else.  Projects, from the smallest of hiring another guy (from another continent) to the largest of venturing into a new business/sub-business, involves quick decision-making and executions, sometimes with extremely murky details and little forethought on the impacts of those decisions made.  “To get things done” is why many people are hired, including the author.

To go into intricate details on how the speed factor affects the performance and general directions of the ventures would be a time-consuming task requiring pages and pages of examples, so the author would hesitate to proceed.  Yet, from a personnel standpoint, the effect is a bit more clear-cut and perhaps the author can offer some thoughts for so many people out there that pay attention to or involved in the global phenomenon that is the Rocket Internet universe. 

To any outsider or insider, it is certainly impressive that Rocket has been able to set up new businesses, often using a small team of three to four initial members, in far-flung places where the starting members (and Rocket executives) often have little on-the-ground knowledge.  And the businesses are set up in span of a few months, expanding from those few core members to sometimes hundreds of employees.  All this can be attributed to massive hiring of local talent in the short time period.

To get the local connections (often for supplier relations in many of its ecommerce ventures) and knowledge (for instance, on legal or HR practices), the best and the brightest of local specialists are first poached from competitors, using high salaries and promises of quick advancements as a draw.  Given wages sometimes double the current job, and nice management titles, Rocket has been highly successful in leveraging deep pockets to acquire strong local middle management in short periods of time.

The method start to not work as well when applied to latter management candidate or people occupying lower levels of the corporate hierarchy.  Due to increasing structural and procedural setup, each new candidate that joins latter on is faced with much more specific tasks and specific positions from Day 1.  Under such restrictions, the standard method of promising grandiose benefits in career advancement often does not align with the reality on the ground, and higher levels of disillusionment becomes more inevitable.

The result, of course, is a higher turn-over of personnel as the company becomes more established and mature, as those whose expectations are not met (or at least so they believe) seek out greener pastures.  Yet, because the venture in question, amidst all this, is busy setting up and moving forward on new projects, he tasks done by any person leaving the company is not properly handed over to anyone else (usually due to time constraints, or more often, lack of anyone to really take over the tasks).

The frequent disconnect, then, starts to affect the consistency of daily operations, at least in the eyes of employees who have been in the venture for relatively longer period of time.  New people come in with new ideas, disregard the old ones (often not intentionally, but jut because they don’t know much about them) and disrupt existing procedures and cultures in the most subtle yet frustrating ways.  When the replacement is good, people are happy and all is well, but if not, it is difficult to point out exactly what went wrong.

As the author go through the last weeks of his tenure at Rocket Internet, he is starting to blindly accept this phenomenon as fact of life in a fast-moving start-up venture that, for better or worse, moves the whole business ahead in some direction.  For those involved, it ought to be considered much more exciting than any corporate bureaucracy.  For those that are sidelined, it may be a more dismaying situation where they feel the need to extricate themselves faster to rid association with things that are no longer theirs.