Tan Hooi Ling

I use Grab almost every day.

Never once thought about the text message that started it.

Here's what I didn't know until recently.

In the early 2000s, a Malaysian woman named Tan Hooi Ling was working late nights at McKinsey in KL. Client engagements that ran past midnight. Solo taxi rides home.

Before getting into every cab, she'd text her mother two things: the taxi's license plate number, and her location.

"A manual GPS system," she called it.

Every woman who's taken a cab home alone at night in Southeast Asia knows exactly what she meant.

She wasn't documenting a business problem. She was just scared.

That fear became Grab.

Hooi Ling went to Harvard Business School on a McKinsey scholarship. Met Anthony Tan there. They entered the HBS New Venture Competition in 2011, won US$25,000, and used it to launch MyTeksi in Kuala Lumpur in June 2012.

Most people would have launched in Singapore. Clean, regulated, easy.

They launched where the fear was real.

Then Hooi Ling got to work.

She described her philosophy as "being the plumber." The unglamorous infrastructure. The back-end nobody sees.

The first thing she built was the driver vetting system. The mechanism that made it actually safe to get in a stranger's car. The thing she'd personally needed every time she texted her mom a license plate.

Then Grab went regional. Indonesia was next. But Indonesian drivers didn't have bank accounts. They didn't own smartphones. They couldn't accept digital payments or even receive earnings without them.

Most companies would've skipped to an easier market.

Hooi Ling helped the drivers open their first bank accounts. Helped finance their first smartphones. Built the onboarding process from scratch so the app could function in a country of 270 million people.

Then Thailand. Vietnam. Philippines. Cambodia. Myanmar.

Eight countries. Eight different regulatory environments. Eight different versions of the same problem.

Anthony Tan was on stage for most of it. The TEDx talks. The Forbes profiles. The CEO interviews.

Hooi Ling was in the engine room.

MyTeksi became Grab. The most used super app in Southeast Asia.

Here's the thing:

Most founders talk about product-market fit. About finding the right customer for the right solution.

Hooi Ling didn't find the market. She was the market. The scared woman in the cab, texting a license plate, hoping she'd get home safe.

And then she spent a decade making sure nobody else had to do the same.

What's a product you use every day where you've never thought about who actually built it?