By 2012 I was betting the phone in your hand was the whole bank, and the whole shop.
By 2012 mobile card readers and payment apps were turning ordinary smartphones into point-of-sale terminals, years before UPI made cashless payments the default across India. In August, Curiosity completed its sky-crane landing and began exploring whether Mars once offered conditions suitable for life.
By 2012 I was running ideaTree and on the board of ePaisa, and the bet underneath both was simple: the smartphone was not a small computer, it was the whole store and the whole bank, folded into a rectangle in your pocket.
In the West this looked like Square, turning a phone into a card reader. In India it meant something bigger, because so many people had a phone before they ever had a bank branch or a card machine. You could skip a whole generation of infrastructure. The corner vendor who never had a till could take a digital payment. The person who was never worth a bank’s time could finally be served.
This is the pattern I find most beautiful in technology: the leapfrog. The places that were behind do not slowly catch up. They vault the missing steps entirely, and sometimes land ahead. India did not build out card terminals for decades and then add phones. It went from cash to phones, and the ground I was working on in 2012 is the ground UPI later paved into a superhighway.
I have never been interested in serving the people who were already served. The interesting market is always the one everyone else wrote off.