Grove proves that sometimes relevant replication is more important than innovation. There is not a hint of irony in this for Grove and he believes that it’s smarter to adapt and improve on foreign ideas. “iProperty was an example. You can see that property portals were going to work everywhere. Eventually, people would stop using newspaper and would use the internet to buy and sell property. But then you realise when it comes to Southeast Asia, how do you do it differently? You can't just cut and paste the business model. What we realise is that in the Malaysia market, the majority of property sales is done by developers. In Malaysia, this seems obvious to everybody because it's the world we know.”

With Catcha Group’s aggressive agility to carve out many other markets within Southeast Asia, it has proven that by doing so, it has had an advantage over other leaders in technology with the sale of iProperty Group for US$534 million to Rupert Murdoch's REA Group.

“Murdoch has always been an idol of mine. It was just nice to finally close that chapter. You know, certain businesses get to a certain stage where they don't need entrepreneurial energy anymore, right? The business has become a chore. They have processes, they have systems, and entrepreneurs are dynamic and don't have processes and they move fast and they break things. And I probably got to that point where it had become a stable, mature business, and the need for dynamic, ‘break things’ entrepreneurial energy was getting less and less.”

Confirming that there is no industry that he does not view as ripe for disruption, Grove also boldly expanded his repertoire in 2015 with Wild Digital, a premier digital conference where attendees get “wild ideas for building great disruptive businesses”. Today, the conference has become an annual pilgrimage for tech royalty, fund managers, innovative newcomers, and unicorns-in-waiting in Southeast Asia. In fact, this is exactly where we catch up with Grove for a face-to-face interview.

“During the pandemic, we did an event called Wild3. It was Wild Digital, but only with Web3 companies and Web3 speakers. We're going to do that again next year, but physical. We believe in Web3 [and] we believe in blockchain. And we think that there's a big enough community in the region who believes in it as well.”

The group also invested in some hospitality assets in 2017: Amber Lounge (the world’s most exclusive afterparty) for which it is now a major shareholder; and wholly-owned brand, NoKu Beach House in Bali. “Both businesses are doing very well, post Covid. NoKu is consistently the number one villa in Bali for revenue every year,” Grove shares.

What’s next for the serial entrepreneur? “Look, I mean, tech is a great disruptive force. And we'll always come back. When people say tech winter, what they mean is that they're talking about the stock market is in winter. Tech itself: as in [where] people want to use the internet, people want to use apps, people want to do things online; that hasn't changed. The only thing that's changed is the stock market [which] is in winter.” There is an upcoming IPO of Catcha Digital Berhad that Grove is excited about “as a digital leader in Malaysia.”

“So you know, stock market is always very emotional. It's sometimes very happy, sometimes very sad. But at the end of the day, the ability of digital and the internet to transform every industry isn't going away. And this event (Wild Digital) is an example. We had the highest registration ever. What tech winter? We had 1,350 registrations!”

See also: Cortina Watch CEO Jeremy Lim on Maintaining Human Touch in an Increasingly Digital World

It doesn’t look like Grove will slow down anytime soon even though he is now a father of four children. “I'm really looking forward to being a parent. I want to ambitiously train my children to be entrepreneurs.”

He has three boys and one girl: “I think my girl could be so far… the most opinionated." He wants to instil in them that “everything changes all the time.

“What I'm seeing now is that disruption is so fast that what you give to your children may not even exist in 10 years. So imagine if someone said, I'm going to build a newspaper company, and then I'm going to give that to my children? I think that was Rupert Murdoch's dream. Nobody wants these papers anymore. No kid wants to take over a family business newspaper, because it’s actually a burden. I have that view that I don't build anything to give to them but I want to give them the right mindset: to be bold, to be creative, to be tenacious, to be curious, and to see that everything gets disrupted. Just make sure you're on the right side of disruption.”

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