Markets have unique cultural rules

Focus is a curse in Asian markets. In low trust markets, there is concentration of trust, and therefore you will see one app can do 400 things.

Profit pools of a country tell you a lot about what the country values. Trying to copy somebody else's profit pool to your country will not be a wise idea.

Ray Cao, a TikTok executive, is discussing how companies expanding internationally need human cultural understanding beyond just algorithmic optimization.

If we do have a ambition to go global, you have to do one more thing is actually take your step into global. Rather than having the machine do the heavy lifting, you have to really understand in local culture.

Don't just copy, because Gojek was not an Uber clone, even though that was kind of how some investors or analysts talk about us, we were focused on a solution that was uniquely an Indonesian phenomenon, the motorcycle taxi driver.

Every country is unique. You can't just take your US-based approach and drop it into another country. Other countries find it insulting. It doesn't matter how much success you've had here. Everyone always believes rightly or wrongly that their local context is special. And you have to respect that.

Build for the world from day one. Understand that there are going to be some nuances that you'll have to solve as you drive adoption in certain markets, but don't over index on building market specific solutions, because consumers have moved on from that kind of a model.