Picture this: Jakarta, 2010. Nadiem's working at McKinsey, doing the usual thing—helping massive companies solve massive problems with massive frameworks. But every day, he's dealing with a tiny, personal frustration that's driving him absolutely insane.

He's what he calls "an avid ojek user" (think Uber, but on motorcycles—way faster in crazy Jakarta traffic). Makes total sense when you're stuck in gridlock. But the whole system was completely broken:

Most people would have just complained about it forever. Nadiem did something different.

He talked to his regular driver.

Not to research the market. Not to validate hypotheses. Just to vent about how annoying the whole thing was. And somewhere in that conversation, the lightbulb went off.

What if you could make this work better?

Here's where Nadiem's McKinsey background actually mattered—but not in the way you'd expect. It wasn't the frameworks or the strategic thinking or the PowerPoint wizardry. It was something more basic: Consultants are professional problem-identifiers.

Think about it. You spend years walking into companies, spotting what's broken, and designing solutions. You develop this annoying habit of seeing inefficiencies everywhere. Most of the time, you just complain about them on calls with your team.

But occasionally—very occasionally—someone decides to actually fix one.

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According to this OnDeck research, consulting firms produce more startup founders than almost any other industry. Bain tops the list with 8.13% of alumni becoming entrepreneurs, followed by McKinsey at 7.75%. That's definitely not coincidence.

Plus, McKinsey alumni have founded around 80 unicorn companies as of 2023, representing about 3.5% of all billion-dollar startups globally. Wild numbers, honestly.

We're trained to see problems systemically. We're comfortable with ambiguity. We know how to break complex challenges into manageable pieces. And most importantly—we're used to walking into situations where we have no idea what we're doing and figuring it out anyway.

But here's where Nadiem's story gets really interesting. He didn't try to solve the entire transportation industry on day one.

The company started in 2010 as a call center. Seriously. You'd phone them, they'd dispatch a motorcycle driver. No app. No fancy algorithms. No venture capital. Just Nadiem, a phone line, and 20 drivers.

Think old-school taxi dispatch, but for motorcycles.

For three years, he funded the whole thing himself while working other jobs. No investor presentations. No market sizing analyses. No competitive landscape deep-dives.

Just: "Does this solve a real problem? Do people actually use it? Can we make it work?"

The smartphone app didn't launch until 2015—five years after he started. By then, he actually understood the business. He knew what drivers needed, what customers wanted, and how to make the unit economics work.

Most consultants would have built the perfect strategy first, then tried to execute it. Nadiem built the execution first, then figured out the strategy as he went.

Here's where the consultant training really paid off. Once the core ride-hailing concept worked, Nadiem started thinking systematically about adjacent problems.

If you've got drivers moving around the city anyway, why not delivery? (Hello, Uber Eats model.) If you're handling payments, why not expand that into a full digital wallet? (Think Venmo/Cash App.) If you're building trust with consumers, why not add services like house cleaning and massage? (TaskRabbit vibes.)

That's consultant thinking: identify the pattern, then scale it across similar contexts.

But here's the key—he didn't try to launch everything at once. Each new service was an experiment. Test it small, see if it works, then expand. Very different from the "comprehensive transformation roadmap" approach we're taught in consulting.

Today, this thing offers more than 20 services and has processed millions of transactions. It's basically become Indonesia's everything app. Uber + DoorDash + Venmo + TaskRabbit + Instacart, all rolled into one platform that actually works.

The company's economic impact is honestly insane - drivers' income increased 45% after joining, and small businesses using the food delivery service saw transaction volumes jump 55%. Not bad for something that started as a solution to one guy's commute frustration.

Here's where the story gets really wild. In 2019, at the height of success, Nadiem did something that probably made every business school professor weep: he left to become Indonesia's Minister of Education.

Not for more money. Not for a better title. Because he wanted to solve education problems the same way he'd solved transportation problems.

Peak consultant energy, honestly. "I fixed motorcycle taxis, how hard can schools be?"

(Update: As of September 2024, he's facing corruption charges related to a Chromebook procurement scandal during the pandemic. Which is either really bad timing or proof that government bureaucracy is even more dysfunctional than startup life. The investigation is ongoing, so who knows how this plays out.)

So what can current and former consultants learn from Nadiem's journey? A few things that go against everything we're taught about "proper" business planning:

Start with real frustration, not market opportunities. Nadiem didn't analyze the transportation market and identify an underserved segment. He got annoyed with his daily commute and decided to fix it. Your best business idea is probably hiding in whatever consistently pisses you off about your current life.

Execute first, strategize later. Most consultants want to plan the perfect business before starting. Nadiem started with the simplest possible version and improved it for years. You don't need a comprehensive strategy. You need one thing that works.

Use your consultant skills differently. The valuable part isn't your ability to create frameworks. It's your ability to walk into complex, ambiguous situations and figure out what's actually broken. Then your willingness to fix it instead of just documenting it.

Scale comes from solving the pattern, not the problem. This company didn't become huge by being the best motorcycle taxi app. It became huge by recognizing that the same platform could solve dozens of different problems for the same customer base.

Don't overcomplicate the beginning. Three years of call-center operations. Self-funded. No investors, no press, no grand vision statements. Just: does this work? Do people want it? Can we make money?

Here's the thing about Nadiem's story that gets me. He wasn't trying to build the next unicorn. He wasn't following some grand entrepreneurial playbook. He was just trying to make his daily commute less awful.

Everything else—the billion-dollar valuation, the super-app strategy, the regional expansion—came from systematically expanding something that already worked.

That's maybe the most consultant thing about his entire journey: starting with the problem right in front of you, solving it properly, then scaling the solution across similar contexts.

So what's consistently annoying you about your current life? What problem do you encounter every week that makes you think "someone should really fix this"?

Maybe stop waiting for someone else to do it.

The motorcycle taxi drivers of Jakarta are probably grateful Nadiem didn't just write another strategy deck about transportation inefficiencies.

P.S. - If you're ever in Southeast Asia and want to see this in action, just try ordering anything through their app. The speed and reliability is honestly kind of shocking for something that started as a call center in someone's garage. Classic example of how solving one problem really well can lead to solving dozens of problems really well.