Zepto: How Two 17-Year-Olds Built India's Largest Seller Of Fruits and Vegetables

If you remove all constraints, and you just remove all the laws of physics,

and you just think from first principles,

what's the most extreme positive customer experience you can give?

And you start from there,

and then you work backwards from how can I make that possible?

>> So, Aadit, everyone in this room knows Zepto.

Almost everyone uses the product, many of them probably every day.

I don't know how many people know the true story of how Zepto got

started.

So, I thought we'd start there.

How did you end up starting this incredible company?

>> Well, firstly, you know, Jared, thanks for having me,

and it's a privilege to be here at YC Startup School.

I mean, you know, we started our journey, Kaivalya and I,

watching Startup School videos in my bedroom in at home,

and so it's it's wonderful privilege to be here.

I think, you know,

the the thought process starting this company at the beginning was you know,

we didn't really start with the intention of building a company, as you know,

right?

We were, you know, two kids.

>> How How old are you?

>> We started, I think, working on it when we were 17.

Right?

So, uh we KV and I uh loved building when we were kids.

You know, we've been friends for quite some time, and, you know, we said,

"Wow, around 15, 16, we said, you know,

people in Silicon Valley are doing this for a living,

building out cool products for a living.

So, why don't we explore doing that?"

And so, you know, when we were 17, we applied to study in California.

We were lucky enough to get into a good school there,

and then COVID happened.

And once COVID happened, we found ourselves back in Mumbai,

uh which is where we're originally from.

And at that point, you know, we really had nothing to do,

because we were not in person in Silicon Valley,

which is where we wanted to be.

And so, we said, "There's no point doing COVID college, online learning."

And so, we took a year off from college, and said,

"Let's just work on a project."

And that's how it started.

And I think really the big problem at the time,

first wave of the pandemic, was people couldn't get groceries in their regular neighborhoods,

right?

Like the the small mom-and-pop stores had, you know, issues with labor.

The big guys that were delivering next day, you know, all backlogged.

And so, we just started a a WhatsApp group chat where we used to

deliver for our neighbors in Mumbai.

And that slowly kept evolving until we made it into an app.

And the first rendition of the app was called Kirana Cart.

And then it kept going from there.

And then that's when we were we stumbled onto YC.

>> So.

And I remember the first time I met you, Aadit,

this is a story that I don't think has been told very often.

>> Yeah.

>> Um you were just about to start as an undergraduate at Stanford.

You'd gotten into Stanford, amazing school, and you were going to leave India,

go to Palo Alto, and start at Stanford.

This is just a couple months probably before you really um >> Two,

three months before matriculation.

>> Yeah, like two

or three months before you you started the company

that was then originally called Kirana Cart.

And I remember you asked me basically,

"Should I go to Stanford or should I drop out and start this company?"

Maybe for anyone in this room who's maybe thinking through sort of a similar

sort of question in their own minds,

how did you think about it?

How did you end up deciding to start Zepto rather than going to Stanford?

>> Yeah, and then that's true, Jared.

I think And by the way, for everyone here, you know,

Jared has been pretty instrumental in getting us off the ground.

He was our group partner in YC and, you know, he's been >> Really,

the only thing I did was convince him to not go to Stanford.

Everything else he's done.

>> No, no.

He He did a lot more than that, but uh but yeah, I mean,

I think in the early days, you know,

really a lot of people ask me this question

that you dropped out of college,

should I drop out of college and do the same thing?

I mean, actually, I have a less heroic answer,

which is that we we thought of it a little bit more tactfully, right?

Where we said, "Okay,

obviously it's a risk cuz going to college is a good opportunity, etc., etc."

So, I think we took a year.

And in that period of the year, you know,

we did a a of a lot of work to be able to get

to some level of PMF.

I mean we got to maybe a very early sign of PMF,

I think 8-9 months into the journey.

And that's when we started saying, "Okay, there's retention, there's compounding in the business."

And only up until we got to the point where we started doing about

10,000 orders per day.

I remember that point.

But that's when we said, "Okay,

this is a real business

and this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity

and we should go for it,

right?"

So we I think we took our time before we took the big leap,

right?

Um and so that's usually what I tell folks is

that should have some product market fit.

You should have a real product that's working

and you you shouldn't take the risk before you have the proof of concept

of something that's actually working.

And to In our case,

we got to like a decent like 60-70 crore revenue run rate

or GMV run rate scale before we said,

"Wow, we should go for this business opportunity."

And also we were lucky enough to get, you know,

investor interest at that point when we got to that scale.

So we said, "Okay, we've got a term sheet,

we've got a business that's working, customers are liking it,

we should go for it."

>> One thing that's interesting to me about the Zepto story

that I think might lead to a good lesson for everyone in this room

is when you started Karanacart originally,

grocery delivery was not like some new idea in India.

There were already what,

two or three billion-dollar companies doing grocery delivery in India at huge scale.

What made you think, "So what?

I'm just going to do this anyway."

What made you feel like it was worth launching something that competed with them?

I feel like a lot of people in this room would look at a

market like that and say like it's too late,

I missed it.

>> No, I think it's fair.

So I think you know,

we started this company in 2020 or we started working on it in 2020.

And at that point, there were, you know,

multiple different models that existed in this space of grocery delivery.

Because grocery as an opportunity in India to digitize grocery,

to build like an organized player is a very large opportunity

and people have been chasing it not just for 3-4 years,

they've been chasing it for 20 years, you know, even in the offline world,

right?

And so there were some large more players out there.

Nobody really had the model that we were doing.

There were some players that were doing sort of, you know, doorstep delivery from,

you know, other stores.

There were some players that were doing next-day delivery, two-day delivery.

But, we didn't really think about it as, "Oh, we'll try a different model."

That was not really the thought process.

What gave us conviction that we should do it was just bottoms-up.

Like, when we started that WhatsApp group in Andheri in Mumbai,

and most of the deliveries Kaivalya and I used to do ourselves.

And in that process,

we would talk to a lot of customers at the doorstep organically.

We would give them a pack of groceries and say, "Hey,

you have 2 minutes to chat."

And then we would talk to them and say, "Okay,

why did you use us?

Why don't you use ABC?

Or why don't you just do it yourself?"

And that's when we learned a lot

that when you actually spoke to the end customer,

they were not satisfied.

There was no real compelling player

or compelling model that really was hitting their needs,

including us at that time, by the way.

So, that first rendition of Kirana Cart,

we had not nailed the product-market fit.

And so, customers had this okay, we you don't have all the selection,

your pricing is too high,

the delivery times were not in our control at that point.

And so, we would just speak to customers and say, "Okay,

what do customers really care about?"

At the end of the day, they care about speed, quality, selection, and price,

right?

And so, how do we push the bar on all four of those things?

And that's when we started for the first time, you know,

trying to do these mini warehouses or mini dark stores.

And that's when the customer experience significantly improved,

and that's when we saw product-market fit.

>> Yeah, let's let's talk about this

because a lot of people probably don't know

that Zepto is really a pivot from what you started with,

which even had a different name.

You even like changed the name of the company

when you when when you changed the model.

So, all during YC, you were working on this thing called Kirana Cart.

Maybe maybe explain to people what the original idea was.

>> For sure.

So, look, I think from our lens, like I mentioned,

we we never started with a thought process of building a company.

We started from a thought process of just solving a problem for like the

30 aunties in our neighborhood,

right?

And that's why we started initially with the easiest solution was just a WhatsApp

group chat where we used to deliver from existing stores,

right?

And so, we would just go around the neighborhood,

deliver to people's doors

when they asked us for it

and we would pick it up locally,

right?

But then eventually we made this meaningful pivot I think early 2021 where we

said look if you're just doing doorstep delivery from like a mom

and pop shop to the customer,

you've got no control on the customer experience, no control on the delivery times.

You can't really And you can't solve the problems

that people were telling us at their doorstep.

So that's when you know, KB and I basically you know,

picked up a a bunch of stock

and we put it into his his uh apartment.

And then that was the first mini warehouse in the way.

>> Oh, your co-founder's apartment was the first dark store.

>> Yeah, yeah.

It was.

It was.

So we started from there.

And but what we noticed is

that okay in this like small area where we could you know,

control the customer experience, the response was phenomenal, right?

And that's when we took it to the next level where we said okay,

let's try to do like a mini cardboard version of a warehouse

and we did that in in Juhu

if you're familiar with

that.

And then finally we actually launched a proper warehouse.

And then we saw the the pivot point for us was

that controlling the customer experience,

you know, we thought okay, you improve the delivery times incrementally,

you improve the the speed the quality incrementally, the selection incrementally, the pricing incrementally.

There'll be like a little bit of an improvement here or there,

but we saw a 10x.

Like the one neighborhood where we were doing a dark store versus all the

other neighborhoods that we were doing just mom

and pop shop delivery the one area where we were doing it from a

dark store had three,

four times the volume of the rest of the city for us.

And so we said wow, there's really like a lot of customer demand here.

And so that's when we made the pivot saying

that we need to control the customer experience.

And so that's when we started going into these mini warehouses.

Uh so that was the thought process

and at that time the idea of doing these like mini warehouses

and delivering to people's doorstep at least back

then,

obviously now it's fairly commonplace, but back then didn't really exist.

So we didn't come in from a lens saying okay, you know,

XYZ player is doing it like this.

I'm going to try doing it like this

or this guy is going to do it like this

and I'll do it like this

and we'll see.

It was more like okay,

customer is not satisfied

and I would just we would just obsess over what can we do physically

to get that customer satisfaction up.

And then that led us to this mini warehouse model, which by the way,

when we started, a lot of people said, "Oh, no,

this is not the right way to do it.

This is not the right way to do it."

But the customer was telling us that yes, this makes sense.

But all the pundits were not, in a way.

>> When people were telling you

that it was the wrong move to build your own dark stores,

what were their reasons?

>> A lot of people were building, I mean, in our business,

people were building the business initially backwards from a supply chain

or from financial goals,

right?

Which obviously, you know, makes sense to do.

And that's what we do day-to-day.

But really, the starting point of any business has to be the customer.

So, what we said is So, what people were saying is that, "Okay,

this is the model that's viable,

and this is what I'm going to give to the customer.

This is the best that I can do,

and this is what the customer's going to get."

We started from the opposite.

We said, "What is the most extreme that the customer wants?"

And that's why this concept of 10-minute delivery, right?

>> Which is a crazy idea at the time.

I mean, 10 minutes still blows my mind.

Like, somehow I order something in Zepto,

and like 10 minutes later it shows up.

>> And you know, by the way, the the thought process,

I remember Kevin and I discussed this.

We had that similar discussion that, you know, Brian Chesky, Airbnb uh concept,

where he said, "Five star, seven star."

I remember that.

So, basically, it was about where can you just If you remove all constraints,

and you just remove all the laws of physics,

and you just think from first principles,

what's the most extreme positive customer experience you can give?

Like, what's the most unbelievable customer experience you can give?

And you start from there,

and then you work backwards from how can I make that possible at scale?

That is a better way than starting saying that what is possible for me,

that's the best I'm going to give the customer.

But what we realized is that if you nail the customer experience,

you get so many other advantages in the business that are impossible to forecast.

For example, right?

Because we nailed the customer experience of 10-minute delivery, doing the right selection,

doing the right pricing, and doing this mini warehouse model,

we got far more throughput

and far more volume in our warehouses than people expected.

And when you get to such a high volume in the same mini warehouse,

all your costs become much lower by nature, right?

And without going into any specifics.

And so that was something

that people didn't imagine

because they didn't imagine

that much demand,

right?

And so when people are pulling the product from your hand instead of you

trying to shove it down their throat,

right?

Then magical things happen even on the business side.

So at the end of the day,

I think it's impossible to build a financially viable, profitable business without customer delight.

Customer delight is where financial value starts.

Starts with the customer.

>> One of the things

that I remember that stood out about you Audity during YC was

that you were constantly trying things

and constantly experimenting.

Like this is the first time This is the first time

that I heard the story

that the first dark store was literally your co-founder's apartment.

>> Right.

>> And I feel like

that anecdote really encapsulates the way

that you iterated on Zepto,

which is instead of having some like grand strategy from the beginning,

you just like started with this WhatsApp group, you started like delivering groceries,

when things didn't go exactly according to plan,

you like iterated on the like exact design of like how how you did

it and you just kept like tweaking the model

and going out there.

You did a lot of deliveries yourself.

You were super on the ground understanding what was happening.

I guess my question is how did you know to build a startup in

that way?

How Was it just instinctive to you

that that was the right thing to do?

>> No, I mean you're giving me more credit than is due.

I think Jared is also skipping all over all the failures, right?

I think it At some point in the batch,

I remember one of our group companies, we were like the worst or something.

We were like not able to get any of the tasks done.

I remember this very vividly.

But But yeah, I mean I think the the You know,

we we didn't really have, like you mentioned, a grand insight or strategy.

In a way, you know, like Justin Kan says, right?

The naivety of knowing how to build a company was a big advantage.

Like we were extremely young and naive.

And the advantage of being young

and naive is that you don't know how difficult it actually is,

right?

So And you don't know all the complex ways

that people have tried

and failed before.

The only thing that was real in front of us was us

and like the neighborhood neighbor down the road

that wanted her groceries,

right?

And so when when you just cut out all the noise

and in a way being in COVID locked in a room,

it cut out all the noise of startups

and VCs and this is the way to do it

and you know,

read this blog post.

It was just like this person just doesn't like us

and we would just sit

and talk between ourselves of why doesn't she order from us?

Why does he order from us?

Why can't we get everybody to order from us, right?

And so it was

that like singular focus on this like 30 40 customers at the very beginning

that was super super advantageous,

right?

Because it was just a no noise in our life.

And so if the only goal

that we had was how do we get the 30 people around us to

order from us?

And that was how all the questions are.

So it was nothing else.

It wasn't about VC wants this funding

and this guy wants this

and you know,

this blog post told us to do that.

That all was scrapped.

>> That that's super powerful.

I I I don't know if folks in this room know,

but one of the like iconic pieces of YC advice is instead of trying

to get thousands of users,

just try to make a hundred users really love your product.

Um and it sounds like that's exactly how you built up to is you

just focused on like those hundred users

and and that's how you ended up knowing

that Karanacart wasn't the right model

and you have to go to Zepto is

because like those hundred users just weren't happy enough with Karanacart,

yeah?

>> Exactly.

Exactly.

So that was the thinking and you know, we obviously, you know,

YC also kept us accountable,

but I think the big thing like you mentioned is we were able to

just create this insulated environment where there was only us

and the customer and

then there was nowhere to hide.

If a customer was not happy,

there was it was right in front of our face.

And so that was a big advantage.

>> Most people's experience with Zepto

as a consumer is probably like like the app experience is like like a

a digital product.

Uh but a lot of people here don't realize

that you don't really see Zepto fundamentally

as like a soft

as like a a consumer like app company. you see it

as a logistics and supply chain

and like traditional retail company.

Could you talk about the incredible supply chain

and infrastructure that makes it possible for you to deliver one bottle of Coke

to somebody in 10 minutes?

No, absolutely.

So, I mean that we we we say this to each other all the

time,

right?

If you remove all the software

and the tech and the dark stores I'll use a bit of Hindi,

but if you remove all the software and the tech and the dark stores,

fundamentally we're an atta dal chawal company.

You know, we sell sabzi and doodh, right?

We basically sell day-to-day groceries to the customer.

And if you still talk to the customer

and we still talk to the customer every day,

the customer is like, "You're my atta, where I get my atta from,

where I get my rice from."

They don't think of us as some grand, you know,

software company and technology company, right?

And so, that that clarity is helpful.

And that's what we focused on.

So, just to go into Jared's point,

so there's there's a lot of depth beyond this just the front end of

the application.

Like, obviously people are not aware of the dark stores,

but even within the dark stores,

there are hundreds of minute design decisions from the way

that you design the selection,

the way that you orient the store, the infrastructure that you build there,

the way that you build replenishment algorithms, the way that you build, you know,

the trucking on the back end, how you manage the tasks.

You know, today, thanks to Y Combinator, you know,

we employ north of 200,000 people, right?

And so, how to manage those people efficiently at scale, including delivery partners, pickers,

packers, drivers.

So, there's a lot of, you know, efficiency that goes in there,

including the back end supply chain.

And you know, we've talked about it publicly as well, where, you know,

we've built out industrial grade automation on the back end supply chain.

So, if we are getting, you know,

products from a Unilever or a Procter & Gamble or a Coca-Cola,

how can we move

that through our supply chain with the least amount of people

and keep shipping it to the dark stores

as fast as possible,

right?

So, it's at the end of the day a logistics company.

There's There's of hardware, robotics.

Actually, there's a decent part of our tech team now works on hardware, right?

And some of the like, you know, the videos that we saw today.

And so, there's a good amount of work

that we're doing on the back end.

And the thought process there is also not just for the function of again,

right?

it starts from the customer.

Why am I doing all of this?

I'm doing all of the depth in the supply chain only

because every rupee of cost you save across the supply chain by becoming more

efficient is a rupee you've saved the customer

or a rupee that you can invest in better selection,

better delivery times, etc.

And the last thing that I mentioned also for us,

the biggest culmination of this is our fruits and vegetables supply chain.

Without going too many specifics,

but we run one of India's largest or you know,

at this point the largest fruits

and vegetables supply chain in the country

and we source,

you know, millions of units per week from farmers across the country.

Everybody from Mahabaleshwar for strawberries or let's say outskirts of Karnataka,

a few outskirts of Bangalore and Kolar Gold Fields or beyond.

>> Can you give people a sense of the scale that you're operating at?

I mean, the numbers are just jaw-dropping.

I just learned today

that Oddity at 23 years old is the largest seller of fruits

and vegetables in all of India.

>> On the platform.

On the platform, yeah.

No, so I mean,

we have like a a decent amount like Jayant mentioned on the Zepto platform,

there's millions of units per day of fruits

and vegetables that we sell

and of course all sorts of other products,

but you know, I mean,

we're at a point where today we've got a customer base you know,

in the crores right of monthly transacting users.

There are millions of people

that order every day

and we do millions of deliveries per day.

Um and we've scaled to I mean, you know, publicly available information, right?

We scaled to, you know,

tens of thousands of crores of top line or billions of dollars, right?

And so, from our lens, uh obviously long way to go candidly.

I think that there is uh I mean,

we're in the grocery market

and there's a huge amount of scope to run this up

and there's a lot of work

that we still want to do on squeezing out more

and more efficiency from the supply chain,

squeezing out more efficiency on you know, the consumer part of the business.

I think we discussed today as well,

but we also have a meaningful advertising business on the app itself where the

top brands in the country like Coca-Cola

or Pepsi or Nestle bid on search keywords.

So, we're doing you know, hundreds of millions of ARR in ad revenue today.

So, there's so many big opportunities in the business

and right now we're growing quite fast

and so we think

that we still have a few more years of high growth

and high amounts of operating leverage

and efficiency that we can unlock

and new big things.

Like for example, this ads business you know,

was very small 2 years ago

or inconsequential and now it's become a very big part of our journey.

So, there's a long way to go, but you know,

we we we're still in day one.

>> Can you talk about the long-term vision of Zepto?

I think a lot of people maybe haven't really thought about what Zepto could

become in the future

and I think it'd be really interesting to hear what you imagine it could

be in 10 or 20 years.

>> Yeah, so the way

that we the way

that we look at it is we want to build an urban grocery platform

and we want to build urban grocery infrastructure for the country.

If you look at it, every, you know,

major country in the world has their own form of grocery infrastructure, right?

Or, you know, logistics

and supply chain and retail infrastructure for day-to-day goods.

Like people in the US or people in Europe are buying much more sophisticatedly,

right?

Their costs are much lower.

The sophistication they have on quality control is better.

It's much more organized, right?

We basically think of ourselves

as an organizing force in the grocery supply chain in the country.

Obviously, we deliver a delightful experience to customers, but the the big vision is,

I guess, over the next 4-5 years to be a large grocer in the

country and do that in the top 40 50 cities.

And if we can do

that then I think we can build India's like homegrown version of Amazon

or any other e-commerce platform,

right?

We want to build, you know, an e-commerce platform that's unique to India.

And if you look at the key,

nobody's really been able to do this hyper-local e-commerce format anywhere in the world,

right?

We think it works beautifully in India.

We think it's the right model for India.

And so if we crack it

then we can build a very large outcome

and hopefully also play a part in,

you know, growing other businesses along with us.

I think one of the other key things that I'll mention is that,

you know, Zepto and all these other quick commerce platforms, not just Zepto,

have become a platform for a lot of startups to build their own consumer

brands,

right?

And so, you know,

eventually down the road

if we can create 10 more large outcomes in day-to-day consumer brands,

maybe someone here will start a consumer brand.

Why not?

You know, that happened in the US 40 years ago with a Walmart

or a Costco and all these other players.

We're still at the beginning journey.

So, we want to be part of that journey.

The last thing I'll mention of course is the people

that we employ on the ground.

I think if we keep scaling this business,

we keep creating more employment on the ground

and we think it's a wonderful thing.

I I I'll thank, you know, Jared here.

I told Jared that, you know,

everybody wants to meet Y Combinator

because they think of YC

as a very good positive force.

A lot of people have told me

that all these investors are creating lots of jobs in the country

and we it's true.

You know, so So, yeah, we're We're here creating employment,

helping build a small part of India's infrastructure.

So, that's our thought process.

>> Um so, next I want to talk a bit about AI.

So, even though Zepto got started before the whole AI boom,

you guys are now really deep into implementing AI at Zepto

and really on the cutting edge of like what companies here are are are

doing.

Uh You telling me this morning about all the ways

that you've transformed your internal operations with AI.

Can you talk about like what's how how how you guys are using AI?

How it's changed things for you?

>> Yeah, I mean I think so there are two parts of it.

Obviously there's the customer side and there's the supply chain side.

And so from our lens there's a lot of work

that we've done on this on the supply chain side.

So for example, we we showed Jared today one of our dark stores.

And you're basically walking through how it used to take a team of people

you know days to manually forecast the entire supply chain.

But now we've built out a machine learning algorithm

that runs you know millions of units per day

and doing forecasts without any humans in the loop.

And what that's made is that made that's made my supply chain more agile.

I'm able to dispatch faster.

I'm able to do more throughput in the same place

because my forecast accuracy is

so high and I'm able to forecast much faster.

So it's purely as a function of a lot of work we've done on

the machine learning side.

On the consumer side,

one of the big benefits for us has been the ads business.

So we've seen a big bump in ads over the past 2 years

because a lot of products

that we're building for our brands are AI led.

So let's say on the search platform for example,

there are lots of things where we're giving people the opportunity to generate keywords

or we give them sort of we've built out a model

that helps you accurately predict what keyword is going to give you the best

return on ad spend.

And so there's a lot of work

that we've done there

but we've seen huge results

because once brands see

that their marketing dollars are getting put to use in the most optimal way

and they can see

that objectively in their advertising efficiency spends like return on ad spend

as you call it in the industry.

Then it's been a huge bump in advertising revenue.

So building out the search stack of advertising with GenAI tools has been massive.

And the last thing that I'll tell you is internally,

internally we've been able to achieve a lot more with less head counts.

Like in our corporate office,

hopefully some of you you know have interacted with our team

but you know in our corporate office we've been able to do a lot

more with the same head count.

You know the engineering team

that we've had I mean obviously everyone says this

but I see this on the ground

and it's mind-blowing to me.

The amount that we're able to build with such a small team is crazy,

especially like all the SaaS bills that we used to have.

I was telling Jared this, you know, I can say it publicly.

We've cut almost all our software expense to zero.

We've cut, you know, a lot of our managed services expense.

We've been able to reduce a lot of inefficiencies

and manual tasks in the system.

Right?

That were happening with people.

We've been able to automate it now.

And so, my overall organization, if you could walk into the Zepto office,

there's so many more tools that are automated,

and there's no outsourced tools at all.

So, we're saving like literally hundreds, I mean,

huge amounts of costs on that on that side.

So, it's great for us.

>> What is the software team like it's up to, and are you hiring?

>> Yeah, we've got about 500 or so engineers,

and another 150 people on data science, analytics, uh product management, designers, etc.

So, you know, we're very much hiring and, you know,

actively in the market always for the best talent.

So, if anyone here is is keen, let us know.

You know, we're still very much at the beginning of the journey.

We consider ourselves an early-stage startup.

So, we're not a big old slow company.

So, if you're excited to come into a startup environment, please do join.

>> Okay, and we're we're running out of time,

but my my last question for you, Addit,

is in order to run this company,

you had to master an incredible number of skills,

and you had to do it at a very young age.

I mean, you started this thing at 17,

and now you're running like a massive cold storage supply chain.

You've got trucks and warehouses

and physical sorting machines

and 250,000 employees you have to manage.

Um how did you keep upgrading yourself as a person and a founder?

Keep learning these skills

so that you could like do this incredible work at such a young age.

>> Again, you know, they you know,

there's a that's a very generous way of looking at it.

I tell the team this all the time

that it's good that we're a Y Combinator company

because I've got exposure to what's happening in Silicon Valley

and after everything we've done,

we feel like peanuts compared to what people in the US have done sometimes,

right?

You know, like Uber or DoorDash or Airbnb.

Still a long way to go still.

I think the the big thing for us has been that I mean,

both Kevin and I have just been incredibly lucky with the people

that we've been able to surround ourselves with since the earliest stage

and you know,

without exaggeration since the group partners

that we had with you

and Tim and and Surbhi at Y Combinator.

Um but every stage of the journey we've just been lucky to have incredible

people that have been surround

that have surrounded us

that we've learned from.

And most of them most of the learning has come from our management team.

So, I think what the the luckiest we've been is

that we've been able to find a team,

whether it's our CFO, our chief operating officer you met today, our CTO,

you know, our head of growth and marketing, our chief business officer,

our you know, leader in the product function.

All of these people who have got decades of experience

but are still hungry

and believed in the vision very early on despite being much more senior in

tenure than us.

Having them join early in the journey

and learning from them was the biggest one.

So, I think we woke up every morning and we said, you know,

if I'm working shoulder to shoulder with this exceptional leader in finance

and this exceptional leader in operations,

then I need to pull pull up my boots, right?

And I have to learn from them.

So, you just have to be you just have to surround yourself with people

that are smarter than you

and just keep learning from them

and keep asking And I even today,

like with our finance team for example, I ask the most basic questions.

How does accounting policy work?

Or the ops team, I ask them, how does this hardware software work?

So, you know, we also look very stupid a lot internally

but then that's been good

because we shamelessly ask questions,

we shamelessly learn and

then you end up aggregating information from a lot of people

and then you grow.

So, surround yourself with people

that are smarter than you

and learn from them shamelessly.

As as simple as that.

>> I did I

and everyone in this room is in awe of what you've accomplished.

Out of pallet to everyone.