By the time you get to work or get to school, your brain is already fried, right? You don’t have the capacity, the mind share, or the time to think of big things. So that was a big sort of insight that big things are not happening in the region because the daily friction of life is wasting potential. So that was the first part of our purpose, simplify and improve the lives of people. And then we also realized that even if you functionally simplify lives, it’s not enough. This is 2011, before all the tech mania gripped the region. We felt that this region needs a self-belief. It needs confidence that can build big things and do amazing things.
So we also added a second part to our purpose in addition to simplifying lives, which was to build an awesome organization that inspires. And it was meant in a very humble way. Not that we felt we had any license or right to inspire people, but we felt it had to be done by Special Database someone. So the purpose of Careem became simplify lives of people and built an also organization that inspires. And it was all the double click on Magnus’ desire to build something big and meaningful, not just in Careem, but hopefully many more such platforms in the region. Ranjay Gulati: So Mudassir and Magnus had their inspiring purpose, but how did they embed that inspiration in their employees.
It’s one thing for the founders and a company to be full of purpose, convincing everyone else to embrace the cause is something else entirely. This is especially hard when you are starting out and selling nothing more than a dream. How do you get investors, customers, and also new employees to buy into that dream? Mudassir Sheikha: Yeah. Look, I think hiring talent for a startup in the because as you can probably appreciate, all the smart people in the region want to work at the likes of McKinseys and Goldmans of the world. No one wants to work at a startup, especially a startup that cannot even pay them a competitive wage. So we had to put our best-selling caps on, and since we believed so much in Careem’s purpose, that was the thing that we were selling. We were basically telling people why we were doing it. And for some people, it just became a blah,