We've just closed this financing, although it still feels like Day 1. We have a lot more execution to go before we build a generational company for our customers and shareholders. Back to work :)
P.S. - We have built an excellent selection of Gold and Silver coins for customers this Dhanteras. Do check it out!
https://t.co/HVXVMA3l9E
It is easy to criticise consumer internet startups in India, especially when you compare them to the deep technical excellence being built in US/China. Using our example, the reality is this: there are almost 1.5 Lakh real people who are earning livelihoods on Zepto today - a company that did not exist 3.5 years ago. ₹1,000+ Crores of tax contribution to the government per year, over a billion dollars of FDI brought into the country and hundreds of crores invested in organizing India's backend supply chains (especially for fresh fruits and vegetables). If that isn't a miracle in Indian innovation, I honestly don't know what is.
Why doesn't India have its own large-scale foundational AI model? It's because we still haven't built great internet companies. Most technology-led innovation over the past 2 decades has originated from consumer internet companies. Who scaled cloud computing? Amazon (originally a consumer internet company). Who are the big players in AI today? Facebook, Google, Alibaba, Tencent etc. (all started as consumer internet companies). Consumer internet companies drive this innovation because they have the best data, talent, and capital to put behind it. We need to build great local champions in internet that are generating hundreds of millions of dollars in FCF first if we ever want to get a piece of great technology revolutions. The startup ecosystem, the government, and the owners of large pools of Indian capital need to actively support the creation of these local champions, not pull down the teams that are trying hard to get there.
Zepto is still far away from being a great Internet company that can hold a candle to the global best. But we are executing day in and day out to get there. I can promise that any capital we generate from this business (and it honestly looks like we will) will be invested towards long-term innovation and value creation in India. That is essentially what I am dedicating the next few decades of my life to try to do: create dynamism in the Indian economy and our capital markets, in the same way the Americans have for decades. We have the talent and capital; we just need the execution.
Ten Principles for Growth as an Engineer by Dan Heller:
“These are the most important lessons that I wish I had learned ears earlier than I did; I sure wish someone had sent it to me when I was 22.”
1. Reason about business value: Reason like a CEO. Understand the value of your work to your company, and take responsibility for reasoning about quality, feature richness, and speed. Your job isn't just to write code; your job is to make good decisions and help your company succeed, and that requires understanding what really matters.
2. Unblock yourself: Learn to never, ever accept being blocked; find a way by persuasion, escalation, or technical creativity. Again, your job isn't just to write the code and wait for everything else to fall into place; your job is to figure out how to create value with your efforts.
3. Take initiative: The most common misconception in software is that there are grown-ups out there who are on top of things. Own your team's and company's mission. Don't wait to be told; think about what needs doing and do it or advocate for it. Managers depend on the creativity and intelligence of their engineers, not figuring it all out themselves.
4. Improve your writing: Crisp technical writing eases collaboration and greatly improves your ability to persuade, inform, and teach. Remember who your audience is and what they know, write clearly and concisely, and almost al-wavs include a tl;dr above the fold
5. Own your project management: Understand the dependency graph for your project, ensure key pieces have owners, write good summaries of plans and status, and proactively inform stakcholders of plans and progress. Practice running meetings! All this enables you to take on much bigger projects and is great preparation for leadership.
🎉 Amazing Update! We are overjoyed to share that
@Firebase Official Blog has featured our article about app and API security written by Chingari's Principal Android Engineer! 📷
https://t.co/73Xrkjdlhk
🔒 Protect your app from malicious activities with Firebase App Check and Play Integrity! Our team's latest blog dives into how @Firebase App check tackle bot detection, app tampering, and root device detection.
#appcheck@AndroidDev
https://t.co/lIKhG0xDMA
Exciting news for the @pepecoineth community😍
@Chingari_IN, the world's fastest-growing Web3 social dApp, invites the $PEPE community to join the app and invite friends to Chingari circles.🔥
#PEPETO10Billion
We are @Chingari_IN, world's fastest growing Web3 social dApp. @pepecoineth is world's fastest growing culture meme. Imagine if we both join forces, things could explode for both. We invite the $PEPE community to join Chingari app and invite your friends over to Chingari circles. We are a 360 degree social media app with short video features like tiktok/instagram reels, Circles like facebook and Audio rooms like Twitter spaces, with over 125M downloads globally, We are second largest token on Solana in terms of number of holders with 2.7M active wallets. With this partnership we would like to build some social utility to $PEPE which the pepe community needs most at the moment along with the virality, https://t.co/YqGYm7A3Oo - this is a special link for PEPE community to join Chingari app, all in-app revenues, ad revenues of Chingari users tracked by this link and generated on the Chingari app by PEPE community will be bought back and burned weekly, making pepe a deflationary token. Weekly burns will be announced on Chingari twitter account and on-chain proof will be posted. For eg. If the ad revenues generated by PEPE community weekly is $10,000 for the time spent on the app, we will burn $10,000 worth of PEPE weekly and all proof will be posted on-chain and twitter as well on the Chingari app. In future when we have decent Daily Active users from the PEPE community, we will introduce in-app txns via $PEPE like social gifting, which the pepe community can benefit from, all txn fees will also be burnt weekly. If you are a famous tiktok/instragam PEPE-r , you can also import your content on chingari and mint the videos as Video-NFTs and sell them at https://t.co/4CG1f7NnA8, all the fees from the pepe community will be burnt weekly. We are brainstorming more ideas and will keep the pepe community updated as we roll them out and add more utility to $PEPE!
https://t.co/lpHiJlU5D0
Circles are live on @Chingari_IN
App now, invite your friends and earn gari tokens together! Circles is on chain Facebook/Instagram! Share your digital life with your web3 friends on-chain! https://t.co/bP1qYdlcDT
Eng team 1: “We do what product or the business folks tells us to do. Not our job to decide what we work on!”
Eng team 2: “We work with product and the business folks to help decide what to do. Our job includes making sure we work on the right thing for the business.”