After you become number one, will you start over again?

Recently I had the chance to chat with a senior I really respect, and finally got to know Chong, co-founder of iPay88.

We talked about a lot, from running a company and managing an organisation to how AI is changing industries now, and Chong gave me a lot of ideas and advice. But today I won't talk about my own business. Instead I want to share something from that conversation that kept me thinking all night.

The years Mobile88 paid for iPay88

Chong told me he worked at The Star Online for nearly ten years. Back then the internet was only starting to spread, and he already believed it would be the big trend of the future.

So after leaving The Star Online, he started up with a few partners and built Mobile88 and iPay88.

Mobile88 was consumer-facing: one of Malaysia's best-known mobile phone sites at the time, with the latest phones, reviews and news, making money mainly from advertising.

iPay88 was a payment gateway.

Mobile88 is a fun childhood memory for me.

It was still the Nokia era, and I'd secretly download ringtones and picture messages. Every download was charged. My phone bill exploded, and my parents scolded me badly.

I never imagined that years later I'd get to know one of the founders.

What's more interesting is that, back then, the one actually making money was Mobile88, not iPay88.

Today everyone knows payment gateways are important, but twenty years ago it wasn't like that at all.

Very few SMEs had websites, there was even less demand for online payment, and a payment gateway simply couldn't make money.

For the first three or four years, Mobile88 basically earned the money that kept iPay88 alive.

If you only looked at the P&L, it was definitely not a pretty decision.

But Chong and the team believed one thing.

Online payment would happen. It was only a matter of time.

So they kept going.

Wave after wave, already standing there

Then the first opportunity came.

Group buying took off. Groupon, LivingSocial, GroupMore and other platforms came into Malaysia one after another, and almost all of them used iPay88.

That wave started iPay88's rapid growth.

Then the second wave came.

Marketplaces took off.

Rakuten, 11street, Zalora, Lazada and others entered the market, and iPay88 again became one of the most important payment gateways among them.

Many companies would have felt that was enough by this point.

They didn't stop.

When e-wallets started to rise, they moved early again, launching a solution that let merchants integrate many different e-wallets in one go, instead of building and connecting each one separately.

Looking back today, every time the payment ecosystem changed, they were almost always already standing there.

What impressed me even more is that Chong has already exited. Yet he told me the company won't stop because of that. It will keep growing and keep innovating.

The innovator's dilemma

After talking to Chong, a book I read recently kept coming to mind: The Innovator's Dilemma.

Many people think the book is telling founders to keep innovating.

But I think what it's really saying goes a bit deeper.

Many excellent companies don't fail because they made the wrong decisions. They fail because they kept making the "right" ones.

The board looks at the P&L and keeps putting resources into the business with the highest profit, fastest growth and best return. New opportunities that are still small today, or even losing money, naturally struggle to get resources.

In the moment, every decision is correct.

But when the next wave really arrives, it's already too late for the company.

What I really admire is that after they became market leader, they kept a founder's mindset.

The first wave came, they didn't stop. The second wave came, they didn't stop. The third wave came, and they still didn't stop.

Even as market leader, they kept doing product development, kept trying new directions, kept preparing for the next opportunity, instead of just guarding today's most profitable business.

Real competitive advantage was never how much market share you have today. It's whether you can restart yourself, on purpose, after every success.

We all hope our companies will one day become market leaders.

But the truly hard part was never becoming number one.

It's whether, after becoming number one, you're still willing to challenge yourself and keep investing in things that don't look profitable today but may decide your competitiveness for the next ten years.

Maybe what The Innovator's Dilemma really wants to remind us of isn't just not to fear innovation.

It's that as your company becomes more and more successful, don't let today's success become tomorrow's biggest burden.