1415T1g1 Silicon Vallley/Participant Information/Teams/Team4
If you have any "lobang" or information that would help us in contacting and negotiating with the companies, please contact us:
| Name | Mobile | |
|---|---|---|
| Melvin | 9232 4950 | melvinleong.2012@sis.smu.edu.sg |
| Derrick | 8228 2620 | derrick.ng.2012@sis.smu.edu.sg |
Technopreneurship Study Mission to Silicon Valley.
Our first company is Twilio!
In case you don't see Twilio advertisements that often...
These two words summarises what Twilio does rather well.
Basically, it's a company that provides cloud APIs.
This is a list of APIs you can view from their website.
Twilio simply provides us with APIs to code applications that can provide communication. For example, if you want to send SMS notifications upon certain triggers, you can use Twilio's API to help.
It's available on our laptops, desktops and mobiles devices.
When learning about a company, it's always important to know about their values. And Twilio has A LOT of values.
These are what they show on their websites.
One of the most interesting values is value 8.
Twilio has three co-founders.
Founder #1!
Founder #2!
Founder #3!
Though it seems that at that time, there were already some companies offering such services (for example, Voxeo).
We will see that Twilio is an exceptionally fast growing company through all the significant events in their short history.
Raising millions in funding within their first few years.
Funding just keeps multiplying doesn't it?
400,000 developers! "IDC believes that there are approximately 18.5 million software developers in the world right now. Around 11 million of those are pros and 7.5 million are hobbyists" That makes it 2% of the developers in the world.
They actually have a culture of helping other developers out. Don't you think that's really cool?
Idea to get yourself noticed in the tech world?
Can you imagine? Having to code an application WITHOUT ANY CODING KNOWLEDGE! That's pretty scary. But then their employees will really be able to empatize with their users.
Seriously, it's one of the funniest things ever.
Just read it!
Got Twilio into some trouble even though it was hardly their fault.
Company contacted by Prof. Ben via Mr. Aaron Tan from Singtel's Innov8. Company visit coordinated by Brandon.
| Date | Action |
|---|---|
| 9th October 2014 | Twilio visit confirmed by Prof. Ben and Brandon on 8th December, 4.30pm - 6.00pm. |
Technopreneurship Study Mission to Silicon Valley.
Our first company is Quora!
You might have used Quora before...
Why isn't there a place on the Internet where a question can be answered by someone who actually knows the answer?
Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by its community of users
The vast majority of human knowledge is still not on the internet. Most of it is trapped in the form of experience in people's heads, or buried in books and papers that only experts can access. As a consequence most people don't have the knowledge they should, and don't have the time, connections, or skills to get to the knowledge they would have in an ideal world. The internet was supposed to allow anyone to set up a web page and share their knowledge with the world. But in practice it's too difficult and takes too long and almost no one does it. Blogs are easy to start, but unless the author is famous, it takes years to build a following. More than a billion people use the internet yet only a tiny fraction contribute their knowledge to it. Quora aims to allow anyone to easily share their knowledge and in the process to dramatically increase the total amount of knowledge available to the world. As we grow, we will be able to provide larger and larger audiences to writers, cover more and more topics, and have greater and greater impact on the world. We hope to become an internet-scale Library of Alexandria, a place where hundreds of millions of people go to learn about anything and share everything they know. To do that we are going to have to expand. Today Quora is largely questions and answers, but that is not the ideal format for all knowledge. Other formats will gradually be added as we scale up.
Quora has two co-founders, and both of them came from our favourite online social networking service - yep, you guessed it right - Facebook.
Founder #1!
Founder #2!
Much like Twilio, Quora is growing really fast.
And I mean REALLY FAST.
In June 2010, Quora officially launched and it became wildly popular among the tech crowd. From the beginning, the answers consistently (and surprisingly) contained quality information. For example, a Quora user asked "What does Dustin Moskovitz think of The Social Network?" The answer came from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who said the movie was an "interesting" portrayal of what really happened. It was that kind of star power that soon attracted the mainstream. But Quora stands out with its contributors – the people answering questions on the site. They are the brightest in tech – including Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook, Marc Andreessen, the most powerful VC in Silicon Valley, and Fred Wilson, the most powerful VC in New York. "Normal" users seem to be comprised of an army of execs from hot startups and tech giants. These biggies aren't just on the site, either. They are power users.
In September 2012, co-founder Charlie Cheever announced that he was stepping back from a day-to-day role at the company, while continuing to retain an advisory role. An article in Business Insider quoted an anonymous Quora answer, claimed to be written by an insider, that stated that Cheever left the company because he wanted to focus on the user experience, whereas D'Angelo wanted to focus on growth, and D'Angelo, by financing the Series B investment mostly from his own money, acquired sufficient control over the company to have things his way. Series B: In May 2012, Quora raised $50 million in Series B funds, valuing the company at over $400 million, bringing their total funding to $61 million. Co-founder D'Angelo, who owns 0.8% of Facebook stock, also invested $20 million of his own money in the B round.
Silicon Valley heavyweights from Marc Andreessen to Marc Benioff to Mark Pincus hang out answering and asking questions on the site. A very successful design, not only visually, but also for interaction in terms of how they have built in mechanics for ensuring high quality content.For a Q&A site, it didn’t turn into a Yahoo Answers with spam answers. There’s a lot of really rich high quality content there. The challenge Quora faces in the long term is keeping the quality of its content high as it expands beyond the borders of Silicon Valley and into the rest of the world – where people care more about Justin Bieber than Justin Schafer. Answers.com is very popular with about 100 million global uniques, but it only sold for $127 million this month because its ad inventory is so cheap, thanks to its low-quality content. One prominent investor we spoke to said this is why he's shocked to hear about Quora turning down $300 million valuations.
How we contacted the company
| Date | Action |
|---|---|
| 17th October 2014 | Most likely not visiting Quora, but they might have someone down for dinner on 12th December. |
