 Welcome here Alan from truecaller. I know who you are. We've met on various occasions over the last few years I know your company, but maybe not everyone in this room does so can you give us a little bit of a basic description of What truecaller is? Sure. So we're a Stockholm based company me and my co-founder we started the company back in 2009 and Truecaller is basically a communication product. You can make phone calls and text messages directly from truecaller And recently this year. We also launched payments so you can pay directly From your contacts instead of to call it to your friends like peer-to-peer payments and so forth and we mainly focus on emerging markets We have over 250 million customers around the world Growing with around 400,000 new customers per day 100% organic Cool, and we're gonna talk more about that But let's go back to 2009 and the question that I always like to ask is why did you start this company? How did this come about like why? Yeah, so, you know me and my co-founder we started two other companies before Truecaller that obviously Failed, but during that period we were both receiving a lot of phone calls from different parts of the world within our work and and You know friends who moved abroad and we were discussing this problem that you don't who is this person who's calling you like How can I prioritize my time? By knowing who wants to communicate with me and what's the context of that? so we started to work on this product and building it ourselves both front and and back end and The first week when we launched it we got 10,000 customers and we were like oh damn You know, we're not the only people have this problem And so from them we decided to raise some angel capital and then resign from our full-time jobs Yeah, because this is the product that if you launch it and you say like would you color ID? It seems like a more of a feature rather than a product. Obviously, that's not the case But you say you grew very quickly. Was that happening across many markets or was it in Sweden first and then? Country per country. How did it happen? Yeah, so we saw growth coming from many markets The problem in many of our markets was that there was no public data available so we we decided to build a community where people can contribute in different ways to to make this work and Then it started to become this Network effect where people wanted their friends to join. It was also a very magical experience To be able to see who's calling me no matter where in the world the call came from So, you know, it was more like hey, I want to show you a magical thing just give me a ring and We always from the beginning saw that, you know, the phone number is a unique identifier that connects you to the world Now there's a lot of data missing about that person or that business behind that number And if you can represent yourself in a much better way, then, you know, you will increase your business you will increase your You know every every every time you try to communicate with someone you will sort of reach the success of it You mentioned today of 250 million users, which is insane, but I think it's even more insane that you're onboarding 400,000 users every single day. It's close to half a million a day. Yeah Where are these users coming from? Where are these markets? So interest it's very interesting. So our big markets are India, Middle East, whole Africa, parts of Latin America and parts of Europe But if you only look at our top 20 markets, those markets represents 2.2 billion people and Less than 30% of those countries and in many of those countries, it's like less than 10% Have a small have a smartphone So in the coming years, we'll see more and more people getting connected every single day And I would say many of those 400,000 users that joins every day are people who for the first time bought a Smartphone and got connected to the world So the growth we're seeing today is nothing compared to what we'll be seeing in the coming two years Was this something you expected because you're growing a lot in Africa Across the Middle East and India in particular. Was this something you expected when you started the company? Not really. I think we were I mean we were just focused on building a good product every single day and then all sudden one one evening A friend of mine sent a video. He was watching in the Lebanese news and he said that people are talking about you on the you know main news channel, so he sent me the link and Now me and I were looking at it and we're like Shit, everyone is talking about true colors in Lebanon. What's going on and When we started to look at the numbers for some reason we missed it because we were so focused on just building the product And and we realized at that point that six percent of the population was using true color and it was it's a small population So we you know it went so fast So we started to backtrack it to figure out why did this happen and then find our key KPIs That made this possible and then try to replicate it in more markets sure One thing that happens in this wonderful world of tech startups when you have that kind of traction and a really good product Is that you tend to attract investors? You've raised about a hundred million dollars so far for vessel like atomic oh sequoia Kleiner Perkins Not the small names I would say in investment How did that happen? so we've tried to we've been close to bankruptcy many times during these eight years I would say and Every time we tried to raise money. We failed We were bad at selling this story But every time we've raised money and been successful has been the times when they have knocked on our door All right, and I think the data has shown that okay. This is this is something this can become something big so our first investor was Sequoia and it was the sequoia India team that flew to Stockholm to meet us and we were Pretty surprised because we tried to raise money from the local Swedish investors and they all you know Denied us in some way and so we asked them up front. Why are you here? Why do you want to invest in us and they said you know when you're using the product yourself every day Your wife is using it your kids are using your neighbor is using it and you're an investor But haven't invested it haven't invested in this company then something is wrong And we were like, okay that makes sense write the check and six weeks after they flew or Stockholm the money was in the bank And that also shows the maturity of you know The the VCs like sequoia atomic oh and Kleiner Perkins that they've done this many times in the past and they know that The time of an entrepreneur is so important Don't waste it like right if you're committed just do it So I guess the secret is get as close to bankruptcy as possible and then let the investors come to you I think it's really fruitful to be close to a near-death experience a few times. I agree Let's talk about the product a little bit what used to be Relatively simple calling ideas band blocking is now become a full-fledged Communication products so what what does true color do today in a market like India, which is your number one market? So what is true color? What is the product become now? Yeah, it's messaging its payments, right? So we we believe that if we can apply our identity platform to your whole communication experience Everything from to your phone book to your call history where you might have you know calls from people you don't store And also to your messaging as message and messaging experience then we can build a great communication tool So that's sort of where it started from and today you can Manage your whole experience a communication experience directly from true color and given our markets What's really interesting is that? In the markets were big in people don't save contacts into their phone book anymore They just rely on everything being in the cloud being managed by true color Which is a great lock-in as well because you know that keeps users engaged and retained for a long time just like the browser's work I would say right But it also pits you against you know There's a lot of companies in this space communication messaging payments And it pits you directly into some of the biggest companies in tech Is that the intention like going full out and being competitive to you know the Amazons and the Google of this world? Well, you know We are competing with the big guys in many fields Obviously, we're solving a problem that they are not doing since we're growing as fast as what's up in our markets And we're the third most downloaded and engaged app in India after Facebook and what's up so we're we're solving the trust part of a communication which no one else is really doing and I don't see any other competitors looking at the world the same way that we do that For instance payments as you mentioned from true color in India. You can actually send money to your friend directly from your contacts Or after a conversation you can send money to the person even if you don't have that phone number stored in your contacts And the way we look at it is that In most cases when you send money to someone there's a conversation happening before that Either if you're buying something on a classified website or from a business and keep in mind in our market Markets things go so fast. You don't send an email if you want something to happen You have to call them or you have to send a text message not just one like ten because that's how fast it's moving And that's where true call makes a lot of sense, and I don't see any other competitors doing or Looking at it the same way as we do even though they're trying to you know step into it, but It's great to see competition coming in because that means we're doing something, right? So going back to the last eight years when you scale a company like true car, it's never linear There's ups and downs so what is some of the biggest challenges that you faced over the last eight years? And how did you overcome them? Well, one of the big challenges we had was that so me and my co-founder we built the back and infrastructure from the beginning and We were so afraid of letting other people work on it which was you know a good learning curve for us, but in 2013-14 we started to see like strong exponential growth and every week we had like two three down times And you know the servers went down for a couple of hours because the machines had to reboot the databases and so forth So eventually we said to our CTO like dude. We know you've been complaining about The back-end infrastructure and you wanted to take take it over So please do it now so we just hand it over everything and it took us a year to rewrite the whole infrastructure and since then we basically never had a downtime and We're like 10x bigger than we were three four years ago So that was I think if we would have waited one more year to refactor everything I don't think we would have made it could have been problematic. Yeah, what are some of the other mistakes? Like have you ever like focused really on a new feature or product that was completely? You know the wrong decision to make have you ever gone through downsizing where to lay off people like what are some of the other problems that you faced? Yeah, I mean I think one of the thing I reflect a lot on is We used to have three apps We had true caller true dialer and true messenger and we built true dialer as the phone app to sort of learn and understand the Market a bit more same with true messenger on the messaging side and I think we waited a bit too long to merge them into true caller and It's created a lot of The focus in the organization because it's it's really hard to think about One product every single day when you wake up till you go to bed the thing in what three products makes it even harder and Some of our advices Entrepreneurs they were giving us this advice like you should you should merge it as soon as possible It's really hard to manage several products and we were like no no we can do it. You know no problem And in hindsight, you know, they were right for sure and these are pretty experienced people from you know, Facebook and so This focus on emerging markets India Africa Middle East Would you advise other entrepreneurs to take closer looks at this market does it really depend on the product that you have? I definitely think that Companies in in Europe should start looking at those markets because I believe that Companies in Silicon Valley. They live in a bubble. They don't really understand these markets yet Which is great for for us because we can just land grab and that was our strategy back in the days Because everyone was focusing on the Western world and we said, you know what? The emerging markets will continue to emerge. They will become Ten X bigger than the Western markets So let's just focus on them while we can and then in 2015 Google and Facebook went out saying we're gonna focus on the next billion markets This is where the future is and then all of a sudden everyone was looking at those markets and we became very attractive all of a sudden That's one of our board members usually says like Growing in India used to be a bug back in the days now. It's a feature So in hindsight, I think we took some good Decisions great. How much of your time do you still spend in Stockholm? Sorry? How much of your time do you still spend in Stockholm? Most of my time? So we have a you know a team of 20 25 people in India right now So I'm spending you know one or two weeks every other month in India So most of my time is in Stockholm But then of course, you know you travel from time to time for other stuff as well And you've had two failed startups. You have a scale up Do you get involved in the Stockholm startup ecosystem to pass on your learnings to you know emerging entrepreneurs? Yeah, absolutely I think it's our Responsibility to do that. I mean we spent eight years building a network trying to get in you know in front of John The war who's on our board and and some other great people now now that we have that relationship How can we make sure that other great entrepreneurs in Stockholm can leverage that? So, you know me and my co-founder we co-invest in a few companies and we tried to find companies That are similar to us like engineers Engineering founders who like to get get their hands dirty just like Mark pink is was saying in the product So we've done a few investments In Stockholm and what do you see some of these beginning entrepreneurs when you look at them? And you decide if you want to be an angel investor in that company, but what are some of the mistakes you see them make? That you can advise them not to as an experienced entrepreneur. Sorry, I'm gonna move here. It's hard to hear you What do you see what are some of the mistakes that you see emerging entrepreneurs make most often when you? decide to invest or not well, what I see you right now in Stockholm is a lot of there a lot of great people and a lot of entrepreneurs who wants to start a company the Big trap I see is that they spend too much time at the different Entrepreneur or startup events then actually sitting on the slush for example. Yeah, like slush, you know, what are we doing here? So spending too much time here then actually sitting and coding we were Super under the radar the first three four years no one knew about us We didn't want people to know about us. We were only focusing on our own thing and that's the advice we usually give back I think these so there's a lot of Hubs that has started in Stockholm like incubators Which is a great initiative the problem I see with those is that it's also a place where you hang out and talk to people See we were working in in Namis kitchen the first, you know, 12 months and the other Two three years we were we had an office in a basement So no one could disturb us You know and it also fitted our budget as well But it was you're sort of locked in and I think you need to be that We talked about the product a little bit What we didn't talk about is that you're actually turning true color into a platform We're essentially offering SDK to third-party application developers to use true color in what way So the problem that many developers have is that when they on board their customers, they churn a lot of uses Mostly because OTP verification doesn't really work that well or you need to build like a huge platform for that And we spend a lot of time building that infrastructure to authenticate customers So we we built true color SDK Which is just a small piece of code that you put into your app and then you know You can single sign on your customer Just like you can do with Facebook login or Google But the difference is when you sign in your customers using our SDK You get their phone number you get verified information about the customer That they have put into their true color profile and that we have verified So you get more information about the customers when you onboard them So this is sort of the first step in the true color SDK Roadmap to authenticate the customers The next step of course is how can we leverage other things that we're built in true color into our SDK like payments for instance, right? so We have around 150 developers using our true color SDK one of them are Times internet group on all their 40 properties, which is a huge business Red bus, which is the largest bus ticketing company in India. So when you want to buy a bus ticket, you know, you download the app You sign in with true color So, you know the red bus company knows that you are who you say you are and then you know When you want to buy the ticket in the future, you should be able to utilize our SDK as well for that Sorry one integration that I really want you to talk about as well It's the one with Amazon and Uber in India for last mile delivery. How does that work? so we Was actually this earlier this year We launched true color priority because we saw that the problem that many of these Delivery type of companies have in India is that when the Uber driver calls you or the Amazon delivery guy calls you You might know it's those guys because true color says it's Uber calling or it's Amazon calling But you don't really know the context of it or how important the call is so we launched the true color priority program so that those big companies can Feed us with the phone numbers of all their delivery guys or drivers So when they call you will know and we will say this is a verified call from Uber. It's the driver He's He's probably waiting for you so adding even more context to the communication before it even happens And we've seen all those customers increasing the number of deliveries Picked up drivers, etc. Just rocket right well sounds to me like you're onto something with the platform there Happy scaling. Thank you. Thank you