We'd built up a framework for picking which clients to work with at Leftshift, and Gojek is the reason that framework mattered. It was an interesting first meeting with Gojek in early 2015, at their South Jakarta office, with Nadiem and their then CTO, talking about how they allocate orders to drivers. This was a few months before everyone in Jakarta would be using Gojek for pretty much everything, and certainly before they managed to color the whole town green with their jackets. Though, it still had the same energy that became the cornerstone of life at Gojek later on.
Over the next year, we built multiple new products together, including GoCar, which went from idea to production in just a little over three weeks. This was a team which knew exactly what a MVP meant, understood how to take decisions fast, and were the experts at building traction.
By mid-2016, keeping Leftshift independent and taking Gojek on as our biggest client would have meant staying a services company forever, scoping our own roadmap around whatever they asked for next. Joining meant giving that up entirely, no more picking and choosing clients, no more being our own company, in exchange for building one product at a scale none of our other clients could ever get us to. We'd already stopped taking most other client work by then anyway, so the honest version is that the decision had mostly made itself.
What we gained was speed and scale we couldn't have manufactured on our own; what we gave up was the company we'd spent years building a client-selection framework to protect.
In August 2016, Abhinit (Leftshift's co-founder alongside me) and I talked to Ajey (Gojek's CTO at the time), Nadiem, and Kevin (Gojek's co-founder) about working together, and a month or so later, the whole team had relocated and settled into Gojek's Bengaluru office.
All 42 of us were sitting in Gojek's Bengaluru office, dreaming of new products that would change the lives of people who would use them.
Moving the whole team from Leftshift's home in Pune to Bengaluru wasn't the clean cut it reads as now. Some of the team didn't want to relocate, and we lost a few good people over it, the kind of thing that doesn't make it into the press coverage below. Pune was where Leftshift had built everything up to that point, and asking 42 people to uproot for a company they'd have to prove themselves inside all over again wasn't a small ask, even with a good story to tell about why.
The acquisition was covered by a number of publications
Business Standard, LiveMint, YourStory, VCCircle
Inc42, E27 NextBigWhat, DailySocial
Reading the coverage back now, none of it mentions the part that actually stuck with me: the friends who chose not to make the move to Bengaluru. Ten years on, I still think about the version of Leftshift that would have existed if we hadn't gone.