Founder & CEO - @temple Founder - @zomato and @lataerospace Championing @feedingindia and Blinkit Ambulances
India
Joined September 2009
- Tweets5.8K
- Following11
- Followers1M
- Likes3.2K
Also, just for the record.
In my entire history of building Zomato, Eternal, and now Temple – we have never asked anyone to post anything online, for money or otherwise.
I type all my posts myself. Everything you see is pure "building in public".
A lot of founder friends have asked me so many times to engage with some agency or the other to manage the narrative and infuse supporting posts. I always refuse.
Exception: we sometimes ask our internal teams to repost our posts if and when they want. Compliance is up to them, nobody is tracked and vilified for not doing it.
Yours to believe it or not. But that's the way I prefer building in public.
Again, Happy Diwali! 🪔
Hello everyone. Happy Diwali!
Thank you for your criticism, your support and your time over the last two days. Gives me much needed clarity on what we need to explain better:
1. Temple is not made for India. It’s made for the world. Please check pricing. We don’t expect any more than 1% of Temples being sold in India.
2. If you are upset that the pricing is too high, I am sorry. There’s a lot of work that went into Temple, and we priced it at what we think it’s worth. If you think its overpriced, you can wait for user reviews to decide if its worth your money.
3. Please do not support us because we are an Indian startup. We want to compete globally. We don’t need/want nationalist support. Support us if you want to support early innovation, which could help you live a better life, and will continue to add more proof to its science over the years.
4. There are different audiences which buy products at various levels of proof. Proof goes from whitepaper -> pre-print -> peer reviewed. You are free to sit on the fence until peer reviewed proof arrives. You are free to not believe it even then. Nobody is forcing you to buy. Making announcements is our right; and if we overclaim anywhere, we will inevitably fall into regulatory trouble everywhere in the world.
5. We didn’t make any medical claim. Doctors primarily see things from a medical lens, so they see every claim as a medical claim. I repeat – Temple is strictly a fitness + AI device, and we've made no medical claims. Temple is not proven to diagnose or prevent any disease. It doesn't do anything which replaces the need for you to see a doctor.
6. The main point of Temple is NOT Brain Flow. That’s what we just started Temple for, and studies on Brain Flow are the first ones getting out.
7. The main point of Temple is Entropy (I shared the HomeScreen of Temple three months ago with Entropy as the main thing). Our emails to our waitlisted users only talk about Entropy. We haven’t published anything on Entropy yet. We will. If you want to buy Temple before that, please do. If you don’t want to, don’t.
8. Roomdeaf AI is an expansion of the device’s capabilities, and our vision for Temple. It is not a pivot.
9. Social media is not the regulator for Temple. Wherever we need regulatory clearances, we will have them before we make any claim needing them.
10. I will post a detailed note on how we calculate Brain Flow, its uses, and most importantly, its limitations in a bit (tomorrow).
Pre-order at temple.com; first 10,000 orders never pay a subscription to use Temple.
Deepinder Goyal retweeted
i LOVE what deepinder is building with temple.
as someone who overthinks, gets distracted easily, and has 100 things going on in her head, i've always wanted something like this.
and i genuinely believe there's a huge market for it.
we're at a point where people want to spend less time on screens, escape the constant noise of the internet, and have more space to think, articulate their thoughts, and actually do something with them.
when everyone's busy building another AI wrapper or replicating what's already working, it's refreshing to see someone thinking this differently.
really rooting for this and excited to see where this go
Apologies where they are due: last night, I should not have bucketed all Indian doctors into one single box. We work with so many of them. Even my elder brother is one of them.
All my emotion last night was directed at a few influencer doctors, who are more influencers than doctors. They did not read our research in detail, and spread twisted facts to call something new a scam. They get views by piling on us. They wouldn't do that to a startup doing the same thing from some other first-time founder, because it would not get them views.
That's actually more a reflection of their petty mindset, than other doctors, our country, or our team.
Happy Diwali everyone! Have a good one. Keep building. We have a long way to go.
Deepinder Goyal retweeted
Just looked it up – In 1953, a scientist named Colin Cherry asked how we manage to follow one voice in a room full of people talking. He called it the “cocktail party problem”. Every voice device since has had to solve it the hard way: record the whole room, then try to subtract everyone but you. 73 years later, Temple skips the problem entirely. It never hears the room. Only you.
Temple is an ambitious project. The team is delusional enough to think we can build this. And we will.
Here's what we are building. Join the ride.
A lot of you have pinged me to ask - why are you doing Temple? Why did you leave a ~$35b company you founded 18 years ago to chase a niche health wearable? This doesn’t sound rational.
Why did I leave Eternal? What are we building at Temple? What’s our vision statement? What do we have in store for humanity?
I am going to tell you in 4 hours from now (drafting the note as we speak). Stay tuned.
PS – holier-than-thou Indian doctors can skip this lol.
A lot of you have pinged me to ask - why are you doing Temple? Why did you leave a ~$35b company you founded 18 years ago to chase a niche health wearable? This doesn’t sound rational.
Why did I leave Eternal? What are we building at Temple? What’s our vision statement? What do we have in store for humanity?
I am going to tell you in 4 hours from now (drafting the note as we speak). Stay tuned.
PS – holier-than-thou Indian doctors can skip this lol.
Deepinder Goyal retweeted
I love my Temple.
78 days since I started wearing my Temple
Keep doing what you are doing @deepigoyal and team!
Dear Concerned Indian Doctors,
I see your rage against Temple on X. I have a few points
to make:
1. First and foremost, a business lesson: if Temple were a scam, and any of what we said weren't true, people would know it in just a few days of using Temple. We have 14-day, no-questions-asked returns (which even Apple doesn't offer in India). If the product doesn't work, it fails out of the gate and the company dies before recovering a tenth of its R&D.
2. We have already spent $30m building Temple, $20m out of which is my own money. Selling a few thousand devices recovers a small fraction of this investment. A scam that pays nothing is not a scam anyone would run.
3. I left the Eternal CEO role to chase purpose with Temple. This is not about money. I have enough of it to last for generations. My incentives are fully aligned with getting the science right. I am not staking a reputation earned over 20 years on making a quick buck.
4. Our employees bought into our round a few months ago. The round we're raising now is mostly our customers. Scams don't build that cap table.
5. Most wearable companies start with internal studies. Whoop shipped its band in 2015, and the first published validation followed a few years later. We hold ourselves to a higher standard; pre-prints are a step prior to peer reviewed publications, and they are coming up.
6. At some point you have to stick your neck out and say: we believe in our science, and the product is now valuable enough for people to pay for and use. We believe we are there. More validation continues in public.
7. We are confident that we are building something that the world is going to be positively astonished with. We stand by our science and our methods. Each of our claims is easily verifiable by individuals and institutions alike, and you will see a lot of independent studies come up on their own when the device becomes available to use.
Last but not the least, the most ground breaking features in Temple are not even public yet. And some of them, thankfully, have nothing to do with doctors 🤭
Hope this addresses some or all of your concerns. If not, keep raging 😘🤗
Also, just to be clear because I am seeing a lot of "give me clinical evidence". Temple is a fitness tracker, and wellness device. We are not a medical device. If at some point, we clinically validate any of our metrics, we will let you know.
Dear Concerned Indian Doctors,
I see your rage against Temple on X. I have a few points
to make:
1. First and foremost, a business lesson: if Temple were a scam, and any of what we said weren't true, people would know it in just a few days of using Temple. We have 14-day, no-questions-asked returns (which even Apple doesn't offer in India). If the product doesn't work, it fails out of the gate and the company dies before recovering a tenth of its R&D.
2. We have already spent $30m building Temple, $20m out of which is my own money. Selling a few thousand devices recovers a small fraction of this investment. A scam that pays nothing is not a scam anyone would run.
3. I left the Eternal CEO role to chase purpose with Temple. This is not about money. I have enough of it to last for generations. My incentives are fully aligned with getting the science right. I am not staking a reputation earned over 20 years on making a quick buck.
4. Our employees bought into our round a few months ago. The round we're raising now is mostly our customers. Scams don't build that cap table.
5. Most wearable companies start with internal studies. Whoop shipped its band in 2015, and the first published validation followed a few years later. We hold ourselves to a higher standard; pre-prints are a step prior to peer reviewed publications, and they are coming up.
6. At some point you have to stick your neck out and say: we believe in our science, and the product is now valuable enough for people to pay for and use. We believe we are there. More validation continues in public.
7. We are confident that we are building something that the world is going to be positively astonished with. We stand by our science and our methods. Each of our claims is easily verifiable by individuals and institutions alike, and you will see a lot of independent studies come up on their own when the device becomes available to use.
Last but not the least, the most ground breaking features in Temple are not even public yet. And some of them, thankfully, have nothing to do with doctors 🤭
Hope this addresses some or all of your concerns. If not, keep raging 😘🤗
Dear Concerned Indian Doctors,
I see your rage against Temple on X. I have a few points
to make:
1. First and foremost, a business lesson: if Temple were a scam, and any of what we said weren't true, people would know it in just a few days of using Temple. We have 14-day, no-questions-asked returns (which even Apple doesn't offer in India). If the product doesn't work, it fails out of the gate and the company dies before recovering a tenth of its R&D.
2. We have already spent $30m building Temple, $20m out of which is my own money. Selling a few thousand devices recovers a small fraction of this investment. A scam that pays nothing is not a scam anyone would run.
3. I left the Eternal CEO role to chase purpose with Temple. This is not about money. I have enough of it to last for generations. My incentives are fully aligned with getting the science right. I am not staking a reputation earned over 20 years on making a quick buck.
4. Our employees bought into our round a few months ago. The round we're raising now is mostly our customers. Scams don't build that cap table.
5. Most wearable companies start with internal studies. Whoop shipped its band in 2015, and the first published validation followed a few years later. We hold ourselves to a higher standard; pre-prints are a step prior to peer reviewed publications, and they are coming up.
6. At some point you have to stick your neck out and say: we believe in our science, and the product is now valuable enough for people to pay for and use. We believe we are there. More validation continues in public.
7. We are confident that we are building something that the world is going to be positively astonished with. We stand by our science and our methods. Each of our claims is easily verifiable by individuals and institutions alike, and you will see a lot of independent studies come up on their own when the device becomes available to use.
Last but not the least, the most ground breaking features in Temple are not even public yet. And some of them, thankfully, have nothing to do with doctors 🤭
Hope this addresses some or all of your concerns. If not, keep raging 😘🤗
I started Zomato with a spirit of service. Blinkit Ambulance is what that spirit of service looks like today.
In the last 2 years, we have served ~20,000 emergency cases (~42,000 cases in total). We haven't charged a single rupee for any of them. And we want to keep it that way.
With everything free, a growing share of bookings are for routine checkups, hospital visits and hospital-to-home transfers, trips that an Uber or private transport could have handled just as easily. Every such booking keeps a fully equipped emergency ambulance with paramedics off the road when someone's life may depend on it.
So we are making a change from now onwards: Emergency transfers – free, as always. Non-emergency transfers – ₹2,500, charged after the trip. Broadly in line with what private ambulances charge. This money goes to Eternal Foundation, which runs these ambulances and will help us scale them even further.
We hope that this charge will dramatically drop the usage of our Ambulances for non-emergency cases. 10-minute ambulances have saved and can save thousands of lives, and we need to keep them available for emergencies that need them the most.
One more thing. Scaling high quality ambulances is hard. The biggest bottleneck is trained, empathic paramedics. Our training academy is scaling as fast as we can without compromising on quality, and @albinder and team are committed to bringing Blinkit Ambulance to all major cities in India in the next 2-4 years.
Stay well, and I pray you don't need us. @sparsh_sehgal – I wish your grandma a speedy recovery, and I am so glad we were able to be there on time.
Learning from our communication mistakes yesterday, here’s a retake on our HR benchmarking study:
Temple tracks heart rate more accurately than standard-wear ECG chest straps in Zones 4 & 5.
A Polar H10 chest strap is considered to be the ECG-based gold standard for industry benchmarks. However, when we put it to test, we saw drops in readings. We wanted a more accurate reference for ourselves. We therefore taped the chest strap to each participant to avoid any drops due to motion or contact loss, which worked.
We then compared Temple with five existing flagship wearables and two Polar H10 chest straps (one being the taped reference, the other being the standard wear industry reference).
Temple was by far the most accurate wearable amongst everything we studied. We even beat the industry reference chest strap in normal wear conditions, in Zones 4 and 5 (which athletes care the most about).
Every other wearable has always only tried to get as close to the reference as possible. At Temple, our goal is to become the new reference.
Everything you need to know about our study can be found here: t.pw/hr
More independent validations are underway.
Skeptics are urged to wait before buying. Everybody else who wants an edge on their training, write to us at athletes@temple.com if you want to know more.
Btw, I am tempted to follow the global standards set by Apple and not offer our current 14-day no-questions-asked return policy in India. I will sleep over it.
Pre-order at temple.com now.
Deepinder Goyal retweeted
Got through! Excited about this.
Too much traffic on temple.com - we are trying to get on top of it. Orders are working on the app though.
Website is back up. I hope it holds. Don't rush please.
temple.com
Too much traffic on temple.com - we are trying to get on top of it. Orders are working on the app though.
Deepinder Goyal retweeted
Today, for the first time, you can pre-order Temple.
It took two years. Our founder, @deepigoyal, and a team of scientists and engineers set out to build the best health wearable ever made, right from day one. I am proud and delighted to be part of this team.
In our treadmill study, Temple was the most accurate heart rate wearable tested, ahead of Apple Watch, WHOOP, Garmin, Fitbit, and Oura.
It also shows how blood flow to your brain changes through the day and gives you a live stress reading. See how you respond to a meditation, a tense meeting, a hard workout, or a bad night's sleep.
Star Trek imagined one small device that could read your body. We want that future for everyone, with your health in your own hands.
At Temple, this is just the first step. The vision is much bigger, and we are only getting started.
Too much traffic on temple.com - we are trying to get on top of it. Orders are working on the app though.