Kunal Shah: evaluation

Transcript context

…Fascinating. There's something else along these lines of DAUs and ARPUs and efficiency that you talked about that I love, which is this idea that focus is a curse in Asian markets, that in the US there's often this advice. “Focus, build one thing that's amazing that everyone loves, try to make that work, scale that, and then, only then, build a new product or build something, build a new big feature.” And your advice is in India and Asian markets in general, it's the opposite. And I think it's because you make so little per user. Could you talk about that? Yeah. I think one is you make very little per user, so you have to do many things. But also all low trust markets, and let me define low trust markets as where consumers are a lot more wary of trying new things because there are no institutions that protect you against bad behavior done by a company. So for example, if I ever had a fall in a coffee shop in the US, I can think about suing them and making money off it. In India, you're only worried about “I'm going to pay for my thing.” You don't even think about suing the coffee shop or even hoping that you'll get any money for that. So what happens is in a low trust country, and all developing nations are low trust by design, because the institutions are not strong enough to really, really take care of many things. What happens is there is concentration of trust. So you will see that super apps, superstars, super companies all exist in low trust markets because the lack of trust creates concentration of trust, and therefore you will see one app can do 400 things. For example, we have a company like Tata that can do salt to car to jewelry to anything and people will buy it because it's a Tata brand, because it comes from a low trust society trusting the brand and not being, “Oh, I'm going to prefer this new brand. ” The joy of trying new things is not so high in low trust nations. Wow, I'm learning a lot here. I didn't know all this. So essentially the brand is even more, exponentially more important in Indian markets.…

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