Dharmesh: For me, Whatsapp feels like Dmart. You go inside, and there are a bunch of friend groups, family groups, and—if you’re a small business owner—there are business groups, customers groups, and vendor groups. All of it, right? Just like how Indians love going to a Dmart, you can get everything from one place. You could be there and shop for cookies, you could shop for slippers, you can shop for apparel… everything in one place, right? So Whatsapp, for me, feels like that.

And I think, to some extent, Indians love that sort of chaos, and that’s why those mental models actually work here. Now, for a lot of us in metro cities, we see Whatsapp as a tool, right? I have observed that across the board, for many, Whatsapp is still more of an entertainment platform. I have had conversations with consumers who say, “Every night before bed, I open Whatsapp and watch all the videos my friends have sent in the groups.” Right? 

For some people, it is a place where business happens. For others, every day, they religiously wake up in the morning, put up a Whatsapp status, or send forwarded good morning messages, right? So it’s like a supermarket where you can get everything done in one place.

Swapnika: No, absolutely. I think the way I think about it is: why did Whatsapp take off in India versus a bunch of other chat platforms?

I think a couple of reasons it worked very well, especially in Southeast Asian countries, Latin American, etc., was that Whatsapp has always been mobile-forward. So if you think about the early chat platforms, they were all very desktop-forward. Whatsapp came at a time when mobile penetration was going up. They have never looked at a laptop, but they have a mobile, right? So that worked well. 

I think the second thing that’s amazing is the no-cost aspect. It’s no-cost and frictionless. It depends entirely on your phone number. So unlike Facebook, where you are like—“Oh, I need to send someone a friend request with my username and someone needs to accept it…”—none of that is there. The moment I install it, all contacts that are already on my phone are now my chats, right?

So it has made it so idiot-proof—for lack of a better word—and simple for users, so frictionless for users, that their adoption just went crazy.

Swapnika: If the future is agentic, and agents talk to each other with orchestrations happening behind the curtain—where you are essentially just telling the assistant what to do—then the point of entry becomes very important. That’s essentially what everyone’s fighting for, right?

ChatGPT is asking, “Am I the point of entry?” Meta is asking, “Is Meta AI, across Facebook, etc., the point of entry? Is this where you talk to your personal assistant?” Is email the point of entry, where the personal assistant then goes to all the different systems, consolidates everything, takes actions on your behalf, and gives you the output in the same place? 

So, whoever cracks this, whoever can say, “I am the point of entry; I am the place where someone’s most-used personal assistant lives,” that is incredibly valuable. It’s valuable for monetisation and for a hundred different reasons.

I think that’s the goal for Meta. They are essentially saying, “Across the board, can I become that point of entry? Can I be the place where you first talk to an agent, and then that agent talks to a Makemytrip agent, talks to your email, and handles everything else?”