 start by maybe correcting that we are not American we are actually of Swedish origin very few companies coming from Sweden and if you call them American then I think they're not very happy but I think this is a 10 years old start up you would say which changed the you know the streaming industry completely and brought music from pay piracy to paid just about me personally glad to be here is anybody using Spotify here hey great thank you if you that's a few please use it and give us feedback thank you so much so let me give you a bit of background over myself I've been in the space I've been an international business with a cross-border word that I picked up from the title here kind of relates to me because I started my journey in international business entered into internet around 2000 first a couple of years into B2B I was working with Bazi and eBay but which was acquired by eBay for about five and a half years worked with OLX built OLX nine nine and a half years and took over the Spotify journey last year we just launched four and a half months back and I think thanks to some of you here we've been facing a pretty interesting and you know response from everybody across the country and we are you know we are still working on developing it further what I'll touch today is about you know two three things I think one is that what I've learned personally over this journey what I see as an entrepreneur as a professional also on what's been happening across the last few years because India India internet India I mean I can I'll talk more about internet and e-commerce maybe I think there are a lot of entrepreneurs who have talked about other stuff so I've seen internet from the year 2000 2003 to now I think at that time also we used to say we used to talk about how big India is or in how big India could be I think we haven't changed much we still are talking about how big India is and how big India can be the difference is that I think that all that hype which used to be there maybe ten fifteen years back is not a reality reality so we're talking about 500 million internet users which can go to about seven to 800 million addressable markets anywhere from different businesses from 200 million to 300 million it is a sizable audience and I think no wonder not only startups coming locally from here but companies all around the world who are who made fantastic businesses are all looking at India as one of the markets where they want to invest so what I'll talk about is maybe why India is you know why India is interesting for these global companies how the global investors looked at India how they've invested and how they're investing today and I can share with you a bit about Spotify on how we are kind of a building India and I think through that you can kind of a take a lens of our global company looks at India and builds the Indian market so the first part is about how India is generating why India generating so much of interest so I touched base on the total addressable market but I think the bigger thing is that we have a very evolved market base I mean there's about hundred million people in this country were quite evolved they've traveled around the world they have kind of a speak English so I think the products that we use globally they're so easily replicable in this market I think that's the first fundamental thing which brought many of these internet companies in India they didn't even have to change their product too much the UI interface is still in English and I think you look at the social networks the search product you know so many of them not much alteration was done in in the product to start off it but as we move down they are actually moving to India to they're looking to you know go down India three they're looking to go down and make that changes to the product the other other piece the other piece about there is how how these companies have actually looked at India from what how the middle class is developing so if you look at the GDP itself GDP per capita I think we are slated to be doubling this in the next four to five years so that means more and more people can afford for experiences for products which they never used to be able to do earlier I'll give you example of two per companies I worked earlier at eBay when I was there you know 10 years back 10-12 years back eBay globally in US used to be a lot about products people were collectibles and so on in India people are not collecting products people didn't have owned enough products out there in the last company also I saw people were the ownership of goods in this country was not that high so if you see this as the income rises people are able to afford more products and I think at Spotify we are seeing people also in the media entertainment industry people also able to afford experiences how many of you watch the World Cup match India semi-finals yeah so all of you so how many Indians were sitting out there in you know in the stadium so many of them you felt you felt it was happening in India you know so I think the number of Indians traveling abroad people coming here I think people are moving around the world I think so many so many of these evolved users are sitting out there they have money to spend on experiences and that's where the global companies are getting interested in India the startup ecosystem so I think if you go back to maybe 10 15 years back there were few founders who had built companies rather than struggled actually to succeed because of the penetration of the internet overall but over the last seven ten years I think we've seen IPOs come up I think I'm probably come a couple of them spoke on this forum maybe yesterday or today so the there are so many role models who have built successful companies in the last seven ten years who have shown that big companies can be built in this country so that's I think is a big thing I remember it's a very interesting case of Roger Bannister in 1950s or something he broke the four minute mile so nobody was able to break that and he broke the four minute mile and after that in the same race I think five people more you know broke the same record so same thing is happening I think people when you go back nobody thought that you can build a billion dollar unicorn in this country so when few people few founders came in and now you see many companies many people have developed a belief that they also can do that and that's what international companies are looking for so when they're coming to India they're looking for way to invest they're looking at either coming organically or developing your setting up their own setup here I think Spotify has chosen that route I'll talk to a bit more about it but there are many companies who are coming to India to look at okay way to invest and I think the second that's the big area where I think if you are an entrepreneur's here you should you should look at developing companies where you should look at back for an investment there could be an exit route to sell to these companies there could be an exit route to build it through an IPO that's a choice you know people can make but I think the international companies are not only looking to build businesses but they're looking to also invest in businesses so if I look at the last seven eight ten years companies like Google Facebook I think they all build their businesses here Spotify has chosen the route to build the business here but there are many businesses which are like I mean Walmart came in they bought Flipkart actually so there are many other such international companies will come in they will not have the patience or the will to develop a business so let me come to Spotify a bit and come back to some of the other things why Spotify has chosen to build and I think what we are doing today so we've been four and a half months into the business we before we came in we actually did a lot of consumer research around what India is how people are consuming music because we are not a business which wanted to bring a same playbook that we use globally and just bring it and paste it here I think we have seen in the past experiences that many of those situations failed for people so if you think what works in America will work here in some cases it will it's shows you know the search the net the Facebook's and you know the WhatsApp everything it is working here with a certain products which may or may not work you may not need to tweak it to your local taste here so at Spotify what we did was we went about building a local inside team then we second piece is about how do you build a local team how do you empower a local team so if you look at many other companies they they feel that they come to India we can bring expats from outside you don't know businesses it works sometimes but I think you need to have local talent we didn't even have local talent in India we built local talent in our global teams so as I said we're a Swedish company so if you go to Sweden now and I think you see how many people are working on the product and some of them are working on the India product you see some of them are Indians in fact a lot of them are Indians so that I think is very critical to as you look at the country and you develop a country you need to make sure that you understand the country the third reason you look at why you feel that you would want to go on your own is when you realize that there are many people having same product offerings but if you look at the actual usage of the product it is not as much so one of the data points we found very interesting and I quoted very often is that on Spotify globally we see a usage of 30 minutes per month on the Spotify app globally in India we saw that most of the players who are there the average was about a one hour a month so that I think saw gave us an opportunity that it means that we whoever is trying to build the business here and they have great companies out there but they're not yet corrected they're not been able to you know get that connection with the user to be able to convince them to come back and use the product and use it often so that piece is something that we are working on and I think it luckily for us Spotify actually invest a lot on personalization recommendation so what we are doing is we are focusing on you know focusing on those kind of things the third area where we feel I think is about localization especially in a business like ours I talked about global companies in India they look at India from you know one length sometimes that may be wrong because there are there are very nice articles I'm encouraged you to go and search for it of how India is actually not one India is about India one which is about hundred million users who are quite evolved speak English there's India two and then there's India three which is the largest population which I think maybe around one billion or so so how does how do you build product for not only for the India one or India two or for the India three can you build your product which kind of a goes and satisfies all the three audiences or do you are able to only capture one or two so some product some companies are able to do one some are able to go into all these products Spotify we believe music is for everyone so our intention is to start with the India one India two but at in the long run we want to see that how we can actually make a build a business which can go to the India three and I think that's one of the reason we've chosen to come on on our own the other other piece that I that I see about about the trends I see in from what we see from Spotify is that there are a lot of opportunities for Indian creators to come in so if you look at number of songs that are globally available there are about 50 50 million songs of 45 45 million songs globally available out there but in India there is about a million or two million songs approximately which Indian artists are there they're not many artists in this country as you start looking at their deeper into the music industry you like to start realizing it's all about Bollywood music film music and so on so I think that you know companies like us or global companies what they bring in they bring in a perspective on what's happening globally and globally I think there is film music is not big it's the independent music which is big so we hope that in India will also we'll change see that trend and hope Spotify as part of that trend and bringing more artists to the fore more not only within India but actually taking them outside India we're also looking at you know something on the side of podcast so podcast is a is an emerging field just the way you seen OTT space open out with companies like Netflix and globally coming in here we see the space of podcast opening up in this space so here you will see a lot of potential developments happening you'll see companies use you'll see startups at Spotify we'll probably look at more deeper into this globally we are looking into it a lot and those are areas for potential growth out there so broadly I think that if I look at global companies coming in India I think the investments are happening across sectors now I can talk about the internet stage but I think there are every sector you pick up you'll find I think the one big trend that we are seeing around is also that people are not only getting into larger total addressable markets but they're picking up small niche markets they are actually looking at sometimes only couple of cities because our city is equal to one country globally so you can actually build products for one city and if that does well you can scale to the next city and so on so you will see all that happening and hopefully more models will emerge and I think more more people will come in more companies will come in the whole ecosystem will get developed in a better way