Julia Rhee-[M1 Conference NYC] The key to investing in Android and Facebook is 'Population rate

Julia Rhee / Founder and Managing Partner of Alpha Institutes
Q: Let's talk about the penetration of Android versus… What should we actually compare this to right now?

Ajay Rajani / InVenture CMO
A: I think what's Android's doing is amazing. I think it's made more amazing by just the massive prevalence of a social platform like Facebook. For example, in the venture, when we choose new markets we look first at Android penetration. Then we look at Facebook penetration

Q: Why Facebook?

A: Because Facebook, if you have it, you check it a lot. And it's very easy to reach people on Facebook. Their self-serve ad platform, I think it's one of the most powerful business tools that's ever been created.

Q: But, in most cases, it's just my opinion, Facebook has been mostly used by the younger generation. So let's assume that obviously, these GDP-rising locations do have a significant amount of younger people, but what if they are not very into it? What if you have the wrong data?

A: I think it's certainly not everyone, but if you look at it, Facebook users actually track exactly 50% of the global internet connections. So there are about 3.2 billion people in the world with access to the internet and Facebook users about 1.5 billion.

Q: But what about China? They don't really have Facebook at all.

A: It's a very fair point. So like Facebook is just an example. I'm using it conveniently now because we have experienced it a lot. But I think anytime you have something that you can reach people on that they use very actively, it's incredibly powerful, right? Otherwise, it's really hard to distribute a product, especially in the early stages in markets you don't have a physical presence.