The Ledger, every show

“Now play the same thing on Uber and Lyft. I find the barrier to exit for the user on Uber or Lyft to be really low because I'm not the one choosing the driver. So if I'm on Uber today, and if the prices are surging, I'm going to check lift automatically, and a…”

“I think Silicon Valley will continue to play an important role in the tech ecosystem. However, I do think in the future, you will actually see the tech ecosystem be a triangle between Silicon Valley, Beijing, and Bangalore. I don't think it will, it'll no long…”

“One interesting thing that I learned in my recent India trip is that 90% of the funding is actually from foreign money and it's not from domestic.”

“For example, to give you an example, when you look at a series A, U.S. Startup, or a series B, if, you know, you sort of get surprised if they say I have 150 people or 200 people. Like, that's a lot of people. In India, it's quite common to say I have 650 or 9…”

“They first launched in Harvard, and there was a lot of craze about the app. A lot of schools demanded that Facebook be available in those schools, yet they did not launch it for almost 18 months, and the simple reason being, the one metric they measured was ho…”

“There's a very good example in Uber where, you know, the whole premise was it's a cashless transaction app. And they went to India, which has no credit cards. And the growth team actually ran an experiment by turning on cash to figure out how much it helped wi…”

“The second mistake, which we've seen pretty much hundred percent of YC companies do, including the founder who's going to talk after me, which is Josh and Gusto, you should ask him, is they all underprice.”

“So for the first entire year, I was actually shocked at the stat. Can anyone guess how many customers Gusto had? Any guesses? Two thousand? 50? That's a wide range. What's that? One million. Okay, from your mouth to God's ears, we still have to hit a million. …”

“There's another company that went through YC called PostHog. It was one of the most successful open source product analytics launch that they did through YC. Top number one on Hacker News. 30,000 signups. James was extremely confident that when he turns on the…”

“So we've done 35 investments in seven years.”

“In fact, the top three breakout companies in India in the last two years are all YC.”

“The first three years of Airbnb was a real slog, because it's a global marketplace and they were trying to build supply. At the same time, they were also trying to build demand, and they needed to sign up the homes. They needed to make sure that people were, p…”

“I think this was the first, I would say, like a massive game that showed light AR meaning You could get some experience of rudimentary augmented reality without an additional hardware.”

“The one metric that he really focused on in the first two years was Retention, and the way he measured retention was daily actives by monthly actives, and if you see their chart in the first 18 months, it kept going from 52% to 55% to 57%.”

“If someone was connected to 10 friends in 14 days, they were much likely to return to Facebook.”

“I think for Airbnb, supply was really hard. So they were, they spent dollars right from the early days to acquire the host.”

“Amazon itself says that their delivery costs, for example, as a percentage of transaction in the U S is a lot lower than in India.”

“30% of net sales in India is delivery, versus Amazon in the U.S. Says it's about 10 or 11%.”

“The Indian central government has a two factor authentication protocol as a result of which what happens is it's the conversion rate obviously gets impacted because you have more steps to close the transaction when it's online.”

“And to add to that, Didi also invested in Ola recently in their latest round, and so this just goes to show how a player in China also has, you know, global ambitions, and it's no longer just the U.S. Companies trying to enter the various markets.”

“You don't have an Alibaba yet in India. You don't have the buy, the Google of India is Google. The Facebook of India is Facebook.”

“A product that's not like Facebook, but it has that same network effect is Airbnb, right? Because it's a marketplace and obviously it's a matching of hosts and guests, but over time they've built so many reviews and ratings, both about the guest and the host. …”

“Amazon is the prime example of a large company that started off as a first party business, which had no network effects, and they've done phenomenally well as they've scaled it.”

“So Airbnb, when they first launched, I mean, they didn't have vital growth. I mean, they really struggled for the first three years to build liquidity in their marketplace, but”

“Patrick Collison from Stripe often says this, which is for every senior exec role that he decided to Hired. He first spent time with five or six execs in that role to really understand and establish what is best in class.”

“Zapier, way from Zapier, Never believed in fundraising, and I think that's why he hit default alive with one and a half million. He's never had to raise money. He doesn't need to because he prints cash.”

“50% of our batch is international.”

“We have around 4000 companies and more than 8500 alumni.”

“And remember, the median age of a YC founder is 27, which means they have probably managed a sum total of three people in their life before they founded the company.”

“You know, our acceptance rate is still below three percent, but yeah. Our acceptance rate has only decreased.”

“Because, so they like, they know the Andreessen Horowitz fountain, they know the fountain behind the Rosewood Hotel. They also know, they take information on climate and weather conditions, you know, for the gaming aspect of it, they decide, you know, if you'r…”

“Historically, the in-app purchases, it really came from what they call the whale users, which are less than, like.5% of what the app users are”

“For the longest time, even to this day, they hardly spend money on acquiring users, right? And especially in the initial years, they spent zero dollars.”

“They did penetrate almost 80% of the colleges in 18 months.”

“It almost took 36 months for them to build critical mass and see network effect.”

“For the non-viral posts, medium is actually the biggest source for the traffic, which was, you know, early indicators that they are able to match.”

“Credit card penetration in India is only about four percent.”

“The average data speed is like two megabits per second, and mobile is even worse than web.”

“Cash on delivery is still predominant, and depending on who you ask at any point in time, people would say it's as high as 50% or 70%.”

“I think if you look at internet usage globally, like the number one country is China. As Connie mentioned, it's like six hundred and fifty million users. The number two is India. So United States is actually number three.”

“When they hit around fifty million MAUs, They realized that most apps in that era, around 2007 and eight, had plateaued at fifty million MAUs.”