India

“We launched Duolingo in India and didn't realize, because we couldn't have unless we went there, which we finally did, that most people set their phones, phone UI in India to English, because typing in Hindi is hard, and of course there's a lot of languages th…”

“In terms of percentage of GDP that tech occupies compared to other markets, it's very promising. We're at like one third of India, one 10th of China, one 30th of the United States, meaning that, like, Tech companies can grow a lot so that they occupy that spac…”

“I think in India, when we were in 2010, et cetera, even those different people who needed to come together to build, like say e-commerce they would come from, say, FMCG, or they would come from manufacturing, and so on. And what they would have seen in their j…”

“While there's a lot of people who are going to give you know, traffic and engagement and so on, but the craft of actually choosing the right kind of paying customer who will actually come and engage and give you money is, Is, is at a premium. So a lot harder w…”

“I think till about 2000 ten-ish there were not really many products built for the Indian consumers in the first place. Like, there were a lot of products being built, a lot of technology being built but largely because it was a back office, so you were, so you…”

“We launched Duolingo in India and didn't realize, because we couldn't have unless we went there, which we finally did, that most people set their phones, phone UI in India to English.”

“I think ARPU is a function of per capita income of a country, right? You cannot make a hundred dollars per user from a country for a product when their income is, let's say, 2500 dollars per year as an average for the whole country, right?”

“So when you are not paid an hourly salary, the concept of time is not the same. And then the concept of time is not same. Paying for time is hard to do.”

“India is not used to layoffs. Like startup world is used to layoffs, but in India, if you started through layoffs, it becomes the national news and all sorts of discussions happen over here.”

“My guess is that Meta would not have more than three or four dollars per user per year monetization in India.”

“And because we have a lower female participation of labor, India is probably the only market where female fashion spends is less than men's fashion spends.”

“Today the CEOs of Microsoft, Alphabet, Adobe, which is a two hundred fifty billion dollar company, turns out, IBM, which is a hundred seventy billion dollar company, Palo Alto Networks, which is a hundred billion dollar company, even Starbucks, also a hundred …”

“India still has large arranged marriage. And if you are a founder and a failed founder, your chances of getting a person to marry is still a hard thing to achieve.”

“I was a, I funded Razorpay, which is I think the largest payment processor in India. And the TAM of that was tiny because no one was using credit cards in 2015 in India. So you had to believe that the size of the credit card industry in India would like a hund…”

“And we looked at the top 10 common names are Indian names. And like the most common name was Amit Kumar. And there was like 250,000 people a month who used Amit Kumar. Like who were like real people?”

“Facebook at the time was very Western-centric. It probably still is. It is, it was like name, it was like school you went to, like job title, right? Like affiliations, that kind of stuff. That's all Western paradigm.”

“Brazil, India, Indonesia, they're all in our top five markets, and they grow way faster than the US does.”

“We did some UXR in India many years ago, and this was something that just like did not resonate at all.”