When You're Successful... Everyone Shouts

When you are very successful at what you do... everyone shows up to shout at you. For some people, its better to shout at someone than to do the hard work that makes a beautiful thing possible.

We saw it today at RedCarpet, when someone (maybe one of our competitors) used the SMS service provider we use to send SMS to some of our customers (whom they were able to identify using the SMS provider dashboard at that time). The content was pretty interesting:

"Redcarpet has been defrauding you as it syncs all your pvt info like contacts, photos call logs, (check playstore) and sell it. It is in loss of Rs 9 cr and has an ultimatum from invstors to shut operations soon, so they will commit fraud to recover losses. It is fooling students as they make interns and never pay last month stipend"

Its very interesting.

So the first bit is something that RedCarpet does to the highest level of integrity and something that has been discussed in professional circles both in the US and India - how we have introduced a specific design and flow that gives the customer control over the data he wishes to share with us. Nobody in India or anywhere in the world has spent so much time trying to solve this problem... Not even Android itself. You can read about the way we work with honest credit in our Design For Honesty article. In addition, we are audited by some of the biggest financial consultants. Plus our data flows back into the Reserve Bank of India, building the appropriate set of checks and balances. We have built the right structures in place that even if the founders were dead tomorrow, nobody can commit fraud towards customers.

Pramod Verma, the Chief Architect of Aadhaar has this to say - "While data protection is absolutely necessary, empowering individuals and small businesses with their data is essential for data democracy and driving innovation.". Just like Siri or Alexa listen to everything you say and use that data to give you a futuristic experience, we believe in asking politely for some of your data to enable us to unlock credit for you. Remember RedCarpet lends to people that banks refuse to see - it is something we believe in deeply and build very carefully.

In addition, we have over-engineered some of our systems to go beyond what most other financial companies in India do. For example, the way we secure our customers Aadhaar data is by going beyond what the govt suggests. You can read about it in our Securing Aadhaar article. Being careful about our customers is something that we deeply respect and do to the best of our abilities.

We have enough money, capital and funding to easily last till the end of 2019. Powered by our ability to run engineering and product on a small, kickass, and super talented team - we think of ourselves as the Whatsapp grade team who can build anything! You can check out our brilliant team here.
In fact, in the next months we are going to be offering completely new lines of credit (in partnership with our lenders) to work with customers who have been asking us to start servicing their needs.

I think the dozens of interns who graduate from RedCarpet University every year (our top level internship program) are testament to the kind of work we do - you can check some of these stories out from students who were studying at Carnegie Mellon, and other universities. This year we received over 6000 applications for our RedCarpet University internships ranging from sales/marketing, business development, core machine learning + data science as well as film-making! You can check them out and apply here. Our college activities are well documented on our Youtube channel and something that we are going to do more in 2018. So stay tuned for some exciting new initiatives there!

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From all of us at RedCarpet, we are proud to be one of the startups recognized by the government as someone driving innovation in India. We were doubly proud when we were showcased at the GES and appreciated for our service to the nation by the ministry afterwards.

But what makes us most proud is when our customers tell us that we changed their lives for the better. We hope to keep doing that for as long as you will allow us.