The Story of Lapaya: Building the Future of Employee Development

Sometimes the most transformative companies are born from personally experiencing a broken system. For René Janssen, that moment came while leading operations at Lazada, one of Southeast Asia’s largest e-commerce platforms. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, he shared how witnessing systemic failures in employee development led to creating Lapaya, a company reimagining how 3.3 billion working people develop their skills.

The Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

While running Lazada’s Indonesian market, René encountered a painful reality: “The amount of people we needed to fix our problems and the amount of technical terms, warm bodies were throwing at problems made us extremely unproductive. And that also led to people being unhappy and running out of the door.” The issue became even more apparent when Alibaba acquired Lazada, flagging their people processes as a major concern during due diligence.

Rather than ignore the problem, René took an unusual step for an entrepreneur – he moved from running operations to leading HR. “It was not a common thing, I suppose, to do for an entrepreneur, for a business leader, but I thought, yeah, we have 5000 people in the company. I do think they deserve better and we can do better as a company.”

The Search for a Better Way

As head of HR, René discovered the limitations of existing training solutions. Traditional providers required employees to “lock yourself for five days… into a conference center or hotel” while e-learning solutions were “too thin” for developing critical skills like leadership and communication.

The market was stuck between two extremes: expensive, time-consuming in-person training or superficial digital solutions. René explains: “I really struggled with how do I actually help my people to become effective?” This frustration led to the founding of Lapaya in 2018.

Building the Solution

Lapaya’s approach combines technology with human expertise. “We say, hey, let’s use tech wherever we can. But since many of those skills that makes you effective at work, the skills that help you convince a client, the skills that help you collaborate with a coworker, are, in essence, human skills. We managed to blend in humans in there as well.”

This wasn’t just about making training more convenient – it was about addressing a broader economic challenge. René points out that productivity growth has dropped dramatically: “40, 50, 60 years ago, there used to be four, five, 6% more every year… Today those growth rates have dropped significantly… to zero to 1% a year.”

The Vision for the Future

Looking ahead, René sees an opportunity to consolidate a fragmented market: “Every single market around the world has local players, and the biggest players per market have low single digit market shares.” He believes the industry is ready for transformation, especially as the need for continuous skill development becomes more critical.

“If we are serious, and I think I am, that human capital is the most important asset for people, for companies who stay competitive, and that we really need to invest much more in how we battle those burnouts, keep people happy and keep people kind of productive. There’s going to be a couple of handful of players that really dominates the people development space.”

The stakes are high. As René puts it, “We as society need to find ways to turn kind of all the evolutions in tech, in data, and AI in science into reality and make sure there’s our productivity again. Because if not us, then the generations after us deserve that.”

With 3.3 billion people worldwide needing continuous upskilling, Lapaya’s journey from addressing one company’s HR challenges to building a global employee development platform shows how solving a personally experienced problem can lead to transformative solutions for an entire industry.