Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I think 2010 was when it started because... Look, there were a few products that were built before that also, and I think somebody said this clearly that usually, when modern consumer internet starts coming in countries, it usually starts with travel, so you do have... Basically, any country, we would start with, usually, the first travel company. So I think India started with some companies like MakeMyTrip and so on way earlier. There were a few very interesting products being built in India which were solving uniquely for the Indian consumers that were in the matrimony side which is Shaadi.com, and Bharmatrimony.com, and so on. We're like, "What do you think about Tinder?" India is famous for arranged marriages, so a product that would really understand that, "Hey, if you're a parent, if you want to get your kid up for matrimony, how would you solve for them?" and that marketplace of matchmaking, et cetera started. So a few blips here and there which was following uniquely for India. I think 2010 was a decade or time when I can very clearly imagine that's where a lot of people started building for India. So I think, again, Flipkart started that kind of journey, but in a couple of years, then they were like, say, Ola which was, in a way, similar to Uber, what they were doing elsewhere, and then a whole bunch of other startups that started coming in. So, for example, in food delivery, when I was working at Swiggy, that came in like, say, 2015, 2014, in that timeframe. Now, you see a whole bunch of startups which are trying to do not only things which are... what could an Uber for India look like or what could a DoorDash for India look like. Very different and also, very innovative. So I think now is the time when you see a lot more product building around that area. Where are some numbers of just like companies in India, people in India's money spent in India? I don't know. Things that would be like, "Wow, that is a much bigger opportunity than I thought." Okay. This is a very wide question, so I'll tell you. Before the opportunity in India, I think I'll talk about the complexity in India which I think a lot of people don't understand. India has what? 1.4 billion people. So there were three waves, really, that happened in India, but also, in the globe. I think first wave was from desktop to mobile, and then even from mobile to smartphones. From smartphones, there was what we call the Jio revolution. There's an Indian company called Reliance Jio that basically got internet at the cheapest prices for smartphones. So because of this, a whole population came onto the internet which was hungry for newer products, newer content, completely different ways of interacting with each other, and using internet for all sorts of different things. That was one of the waves. The other part is really what the Indian government really enabled which is... especially in digitization of a bunch of absolute core fundamental citizen-related machinery which is either through digital payments, which is a whole bunch of Indians now started having a bank account by default, and something called UPI. So even if you do not have a bank account or that bank account is linked to your mobile phone number, but now everybody would pay through that, and that brought in a very different kind of revolution. So even if 5 rupees, that is basically 10 cents or less than that, that would be paid through UPI, and people started moving away from cash and so on. There's something called the India Stack that is all of these things coming together, which is social security, identity, payments, and so on, that a whole bunch of other apps can now use to build their own layers on top of that. So many interesting cases started coming about. So that's one which is just a number and the infrastructure. Now, the other thing to look at is India is very diverse, so the number of languages spoken here, even the official languages is so high, and they say... There's an elders' quote in India like, "Every 15 miles, the language will change, and the people and the culture will change, and it's a huge country of so many people." So your traditional ways of thinking about products also, the "Who I'm building for?" is very different. "Are you building for this person or that?" Et cetera. So a bunch of frameworks break down because it's not even that the same language will apply. While English is a language that is used by the people at least who have the money and who have the dollar to even give to you, but you have to think way more widely. The other thing about India that is interesting is the price that people are willing to pay. Generally, it does look at the per capita money that people have. It is very low. It's in the two, two and a half thousand dollar range compared to US which is maybe 30 times more and so on.…

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