Matt Dalio explains how Endless brings full computers to emerging markets by using phones as processors and monitors. He shares customer research across 18 Asian cities and the core lesson: go talk to users directly about what they actually need.
Chapters
Just out of curiosity, I have a feeling this is going to be a very low number, but how many of you have heard of Endless before this? Endless? Endless. Okay. Sounds like a movie. Endless is a company. Endless is a computer. Endless is a mission. So first I want to tell you a little bit about sort of the idea, the principles of this company, the mission of this company, why we exist, and the business model behind the company. Then I wanna tell you a little bit of the journey of how hard it was to be where we are and where it is that we are today with all of the thorns and hair and challenges and triumphs. We'll give you some stuff that we're not telling anybody yet. And then my lessons, and my lessons are pretty simple. So first, in order to understand the journey The business that we're in, I'll talk a little bit, very briefly about myself. My background, when I was 11 years old, I lived in China. I lived with a Chinese family, I went to a Chinese school, I ate lots of dumplings, I biked to school, I was a Chinese kid for a year. When I was 16, I spent a summer in an orphanage and discovered that there was a lot of need there. And that for like $500, you could give a child a cleft palate surgery which then made them adoptable, which then gave them a family. And now all of a sudden for $500 you've radically altered the trajectory. You have changed someone's life. And so I raised a small amount of money to provide that, to put kids in foster families, and that evolved into a larger amount of money, which evolved into children's homes, which evolved into one of the larger foundations working with orphans in China. So here it was this sort of emerging markets, background. Fast forward through a career in the for-profit world of real estate, private equity, and things like that, which is very, very relevant, I landed at Stanford Business School, the heart of technology. So here is a world where there is no technology, which is mostly my background, and here is the world that is the heart of technology. This is where innovation and advancement, so much of it happens. There's a reason that you guys, many of you, have come from all over the world to this place because this is the epicenter of it. And when I went to India on a trip with a group of people like yourselves, I had a really simple insight which is, so 4.5 billion people don't have computers. Computers, like all of us have computers. Computers, we we we wouldn't be here if we didn't have the power and the tool that a full computer had, right? Not just a smartphone. We wouldn't be here if our smartphone were the thing that we had. And so here it is: most of the world, most of the world doesn't have computers. And the really simple insight that I had in India was looking at the wall, and there was a television, and looking down at my phone and seeing. my iPhone and realizing, wait a second, that's a CPU tower, that's a monitor. Add a keyboard and mouse, and you have a computer. All of the creative power of that device— word processing, Excel, all of the things that you'd want to do in a full, potent computer. And so I started to think about this. So that was the really, really simple insight. I spent about a year and a half trying to figure out whether that idea made any sense. Actually, I saw Jack Dorsey speak, and I will pass on his advice to me because it was very valuable advice to me at this— to me collectively in an audience. The advice he gave was whenever he comes up with an idea, He's got all these different ideas. It's not that he goes and tries to make that idea work. He actually goes to try to kill the idea. And the way he put it, which was so elegant, was, I just try to kill the idea so I can move on with my life and so I can forget about it. I've got this thing that's nagging me, it's gnawing at me, and my goal is just to put myself out of it, put it out of its misery. And so I had had this idea at business school. And it was gnawing at me. There was no way of answering it other than to go and find out the thing that would kill it, to actually actively try to kill it. And so I loved this idea. So I said, great, I'm gonna go try and kill this thing. And so, okay, the technology's not gonna work. Android, which operating system would you use? You'd use Android, and Android can't do this. And the business model doesn't make sense, and how would you distribute it? And I would go, and what I found was that a lot of things actually worked, a lot of things made sense, sense and then I would find the thing that would kill it. You don't have a business model. Okay. Professors say, nope, if you don't have a business model, just don't even begin starting your business. And so I'd say, okay, great, it's done. And a week later I'd realize, wait a second, what if you did this? And all of a sudden you're like, okay, well, shit, it's not dead anymore. And so it sort of kept evolving in that way. And what it ultimately came down to was a question of whether people even wanted this. Do people even want computers? Especially in emerging markets where it was very clear. It was funny. One of the pieces of feedback I got in the early days, one of the most consistent pieces of feedback to kill this thing was people in emerging markets, they don't want smartphones. they're not gonna be able to afford smartphones. And so clearly that didn't play out as true, and it's just very funny to look back and sort of see like, okay, markets and movements, when you can see a trajectory happening and you can know where that trajectory is going so long as you know the characteristics and the drivers behind that trajectory really well. If you know, okay, smartphone prices are going down and you know emerging markets and you know people in emerging markets, markets, all of a sudden now you can start to see smartphones clearly they're going to be across emerging markets. But there was this still very important question of do people even want computers? So I spent about 3 months traveling through 18 cities, I think in like China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Thailand to try to get at this question. Here would be a piece of advice if I had any, humble advice, but speak to people, ask your users. You won't know sitting here whether people want it. Go ask them and the truth becomes so clear so fast. I reserved 3 months to figure out my answer. I was like, I am not going to come to a conclusion until the end of this thing, and within 3 days I had my answer. And it was because every single person that I spoke to, it was just so apparent.
