I'm not a big fan of Rocket, but I think that's an unfair way to put it. I'd say they're similar to what Bezos would be like if he had to start from Europe lol.
They take an existing model with a lot of potential and focus on implementation. They had a golden period with e-commerce because e-commerce is heavily logistics. And they do it in the hardest places, because the harder it is, the more they can sell the company for.
Back when Lazada started, Indonesia had terrible credit card penetration. Roads were not suited to delivery; heck they built their own logistics because the local logistics were not suited for e-commerce. There's a lot of complex laws on hiring, or incorporating companies there (which are nicer now).
China won't do it. They don't want to build companies in 6 different low income country with a total of 500m population or so. Normal people would just target the US or EU, which has more people and more money.
But Rocket goes into these countries. They have a lot of emphasis on leadership. They drop a scalable playbook for the locals. They grow it fast until it hits a cap before they sell it off to something like Alibaba. They do have some dark patterns as well. Whatever caricatures people have of China, Rocket does it better - they work longer hours, work people harder, build things for extreme scale, do what the Chinese won't.
It is not the funding model that GP speaks of. But it is a fairly successful model of creating and exiting startups. It's quite autocratic to my understanding. I don't have that kind of work ethic and I feel like there's a hint of envy when people call them copycats. They don't have a good presence on the English Wikipedia though.
They take an existing model with a lot of potential and focus on implementation. They had a golden period with e-commerce because e-commerce is heavily logistics. And they do it in the hardest places, because the harder it is, the more they can sell the company for.
Back when Lazada started, Indonesia had terrible credit card penetration. Roads were not suited to delivery; heck they built their own logistics because the local logistics were not suited for e-commerce. There's a lot of complex laws on hiring, or incorporating companies there (which are nicer now).
China won't do it. They don't want to build companies in 6 different low income country with a total of 500m population or so. Normal people would just target the US or EU, which has more people and more money.
But Rocket goes into these countries. They have a lot of emphasis on leadership. They drop a scalable playbook for the locals. They grow it fast until it hits a cap before they sell it off to something like Alibaba. They do have some dark patterns as well. Whatever caricatures people have of China, Rocket does it better - they work longer hours, work people harder, build things for extreme scale, do what the Chinese won't.
It is not the funding model that GP speaks of. But it is a fairly successful model of creating and exiting startups. It's quite autocratic to my understanding. I don't have that kind of work ethic and I feel like there's a hint of envy when people call them copycats. They don't have a good presence on the English Wikipedia though.