1415T1g1 Silicon Valley/Participant Information/Reflection/10 Dec

Home Course Info Trip Itinerary Cast & Roles Project Teams Organization Reflection

7 Dec

8 Dec

9 Dec

10 Dec

11 Dec

12 Dec

13 Dec

Aaron

Aaron

Learning Nitrous Apes

Coursera was actually one of the companies that I was more excited to visit before this trip. I’ve been passionate about education and the vast potential it holds to solve problems for the less fortunate around the world. Coursera’s model might be the key. We were greeted by a friendly host, Jun Jie, and it’s a bummer that we were not able to take many photos in the office. That said, he was quite lenient about it. Many in the engineering team are Singaporeans, surprisingly. I don’t think there are many teams with that many Singaporeans in Silicon Valley. With further probing it’s glaringly obvious that their main priority now is not to make education more accessible to the masses. Let me clarify. It is true that making information free online does make education more accessible but I believe that they can do better. Certain initiatives include features that increase engagement, optimising the bitrate for videos and minimising cheating. These features might improve the product but I am unable to see how this ties in with their mission, “We provide universal access to the world’s best education.” Part of me feels that they are taking the easy way out. It’s not those that already have the internet that need more education and the world’s best education might not come from universities. It’s just my personal opinion but they might be right eventually. Of course, this might be personal because I don’t support the current model of certificates perpetuated by brick and mortar institutions that are usually self-serving. Coursera seems to be just following the age old model of education. Interesting? Yes. Makes the world a better place? Yes. Disruptive? I doubt so.

Mashape was the next stop. I’m definitely not a major user of APIs but I’ve definitely heard of it before, though TechCrunch or something, and even have an account on it. It’s a novel idea. A marketplace for APIs. That guy must be pretty smart to have come up with it. Christina, our host, brought us to a meeting room where the CEO, Augusto, came to have a chat with us. Apparently, now, it is not just a marketplace for APIs but also provide value added services such as analytics and permissions. From where it started, Mashape is definitely big but it isn’t resting on its laurels as it tries to continually differentiate itself from its competitors. Something that struck me was how small the team was, 11 people! Augusto is also well versed in the API space as he answered most of our questions with his personal insight. If anything, the CEO should know the market best and he is good example of one. How Cristina ended up in Mashape was fascinating too. She took CS and Business as a Double Degree but dropped CS in the end. Now, she’s heading of Growth and Marketing in Mashape. I guess knowing a bit of CS helps and this might be something I can consider.

Our last stop was Nitrous.IO. I didn’t really use it before though I have an account. And it has popped up on news articles a couple of times over the years so that’s how I’ve heard of it. Essentially, it’s a user-focused IDE. They have since developed desktop apps to compliment the main product as well. Their growth model is like Dropbox and it has worked really well for them. Similar to Mashape, they have a small team. With a hoodie and an exercise ball as a chair, Andrew Solimine comes across as the most laidback CEO I’ve seen thus far. Yet, it’s clear that his standards for his employees are high. Despite a small team, their impact on developers is huge. It’s enabling developers to set up environments in seconds. Of course, this also means that many of them are not serious developers which then poses a problem for the team when they are trying to find out what their product is most used for. Like what Andrew said, that will be the most difficult challenge for them yet. With 7.7 million raised so far, and a revenue stream from premium users, they should have enough lead time to solve it.

Amanda

Day 3 of company visits!

Coursera:

The general impression that I made of Coursera from our visit was that their culture is still quite influenced by Singapore's work culture, despite being a startup in Silicon Valley. This was probably due to the rather strict rules for visitation and also because the hierarchy is quite clear to me, when Jun Jie allowed Ngiam to answer all of our questions once he came into the room. The Singaporean influence was probably strong due to the large number of Singaporeans working in Coursera. We talked about how the founders of Coursera decided to be a for-profit company instead of being non-profit. Some of the reasons stated were that both models presented problems to the company, and the founders decided that they did not want to have to deal with fundraising. Also, the universities were not going to allow them to use their material for free. One problem that I observed in Coursera and actually in a few other startups was that the companies had problems trying to figure out how to monetise their products. However, this problem is especially challenging for Coursera because of their mission to give people universal access to knowledge from some of the best schools.

Mashape:

Mashape is a company that provides an API marketplace for developers. We almost did not get to visit the company because it was flooded. The first floor of the office was really nice, there was an area for employees to relax, and since the building that they are housed in used to be a bank, there was a bank vault in their office which they turned into a poker room. The most intriguing part about Mashape for me was learning about how the founders come up with the idea behind the company. They were actually inspired by Yahoo Pipes, which was not successful in its attempt to provide the same service. The founder also told us about how the company did not receive much support from the Italian community, so they decided to try their luck in SV. They seem to be doing pretty well now, so what I realised was that the environment in which a company is located in plays a huge role in defining its success. Sometimes, startups fail not because the idea was bad, but because the environment in which they were in did not have a pressing need for the solution that they were providing.

Nitrous:

Nitrous provides a cloud-based IDE, which allows developers to access their work anywhere, from any device. Their solution also eliminated the need for developers to constantly having to do reconfiguration every time they changed their machine, or when there were new employees joining the company. Nitrous actually started in Singapore, where they still have an office in Chinatown, and then they moved to SV. Since they have offices in different countries, they needed someone to manage the employees in Singapore, which is what Timothy is doing. He told us about how it was a challenge for him, since they were operating in different time zones, and had little visibility on what the employees there were doing. As such, they always try to employ people who can be trusted and who are self-driven and require little guidance from their bosses. Andrew also mentioned how it was becoming difficult for him to hire people due to the competition from other startups for the best engineer. They stood out to me as one of the few young companies that know how to monetize their products, where each user is given a basic set of tools and they paid extra to buy points which can be used to exchange for any other add-ons that they require.

Amanda

Benedict

Benedict

Day 4: CourseMashNitrogenic Palooza!

Coursera

Coursera is a well-known company that launched its web product in 2012, the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC – commonly pronounced as ‘MOOKC’ * something I found out from the Coursera team) web application. Actually, to be honest, I was very excited to meet the team at Coursera. I am very honoured to be given the chance to host the liaison with Coursera, and I am extremely grateful for this opportunity. Coursera has been a popular name in the academic circle, in fact, many of my friends who are in the teaching line were so jealous of my opportunity to be have corresponding contact with Coursera. It was almost a pinch-me feeling when I finally had the chance to be at the Coursera HQ. So what exactly is MOOC? It is an open source content of knowledge that is literally free online. It is accessible by anyone and it does not need any prerequisite to take up the courses. So Coursera is one of the big 3 MOOC company, together with Udacity and Edx. However, Coursera wins hands down in terms of the content, and as of October 2014, it has over 800+ courses available. Jun Jie, our host for the session in Coursera, explained briefly to us what is Coursera currently doing. He went further on to give an overview on their pilot programmes all over the world which includes Singapore and Brazil. He also talked about their user demographics and most of their intent in participating on Coursera. Most of the users ranges from age 18 to 35, and commonly, they are graduates who wants to further upgrade their skill sets. This is a new insight to me as I perceived Coursera as only an outreach program that spread knowledge to less developed countries which are rudimentary in their education system. This idea came up in me because I recently watch the TED show which featured Coursera’s founder Daphne Koller, whom talked about the idea of helping less developed countries. So this insight was very interesting because it means that education and learning doesn’t stop after getting a degree. It is also heartening to know this because learning is after all a passion, and more people are cultivating this good culture through the use of MOOC. As much as there’s good in Coursera, the team did mentioned that they do have some trouble in improving the web application of Coursera. They highlighted one of the problem was the session based system of courses. This is a huge dilemma because there’s no right or wrong, and an almost impossible solution to this issue. It is problem yet an advantage as well. I was really enlightened by the team because this issue is essentially a continuum, this is because a session based system allows the user to have more interaction with their online peers as well as the instructor. There are also datelines to be met which doesn’t allow the student online to take their time to complete the course. However, the downside of this is that the students that are interested to sign up for a particular course might not have immediate start on the lesson, but have to wait for the next opening of the session to start the course. This will cause a lot of inconvenience to user especially in today’s fast-paced life, people do not that patient to wait. Without the session system, the effect is inverse then. This problem is very peculiar and I believe that it is very difficult to find a settlement for it. Coursera is a for-profit organisation that deals with humanitarian works as well. This is because the founders of Coursera believe that monetary sustainability is vital for the company to maintain well. However, I find it difficult to find a compromise between money and humanitarian. Presently, Coursera is unable to breakeven, and this is because they are a service that offer free lesson. It is very difficult for them to engage in monetary business because not many are willing to print the certificate, which they believed to be the solution to their profit problem. Personally, I think that Coursera should have a focus, choosing between a for-profit or non-profit. What would be detrimental will be that Coursera is in this tug-of-war fight, battling between helping the community and earning profits.

Mashape

It was an honoured to have the chance to listen to the founder of Mashape, Augusto Marietti. He is such a charismatic person, and explained Mashape business in very detailed depths. So Mashape is a market place for API of REST web service. It is place for people to upload their API’s of their web service or for users to search for APIs that fit their needs. It is a new generation of searching catered to the purpose of software engineering. Kristina, a NUS graduate, who works at Mashape, brought us into the amazing company. She invited us into the company even though they had a recent flood in their basement. The company is stationed in an old bank building right smacked in the centre of the central business district of San Francisco, and it right next to the notable Transamerica Building! They have an old bank vault that is converted into a poker room and living lounge that looks like it has been ripped off a home-deco magazine. In a nutshell, Mashape is a beautiful company to be in. I had a very dying question for the Augusto on their decision to shift from Milan over to San Francisco. I am glad he answered my question quite reasonable well. He said that there’s very limited opportunity in Italy and the rest of Europe, and so he felt that if they were to move, they had to move to the best. His intention really got me thinking about how unsupportive we are back in Asia. If Europe was already that bad, we in Asia are way worse than them. It is always about saying how one thing won’t work then encouraging. His philosophy of moving also did sadden me as the world is so big, yet the only place to gain support is only situated at the far west, the Valley.

Nitrous IO

Nitrous IO is a start-up that has its presence in both Silicon Valley and Singapore. It specialises in its web-based IDE that supports many developer’s codes. They believe that they can make a difference by maintaining consistencies that Windows/Microsoft lacks. Having to visit their company, it is one of the smallest among all the other companies that we have been visiting. However, they are also one of the more down to earth host as well. They talked about the difficulties in surviving in the Valley as a small company. They are unable to find great talents in the valley as the bigger companies are able to pouch away better talents with higher wages. This is very sad because it means that the control of power lies on the monetary capability after all. However, as idealistic as I hope it to be, it is very hard to change this culture anywhere. Mainly because bigger companies have better reputation and the salaries are much higher. How can one reject such as offer? I supposed if there’s a more sense of belonging with the company, the employees may not leave, but it is very difficult to inculcate such a feeling especially when money is such a powerful driver. I believe this is mostly common in start-ups. They all have the similar problem of earning profit through their work. It almost feel as though IT engineers are modern day artist that have beautiful ideas but are not earning any. What is even more detrimental is that codes can be replicated easily and not need the same person to do it personally. Nitrous IO is a very hospital company. They gave us many freebies like stickers and tee shirts! It is very important that we continue to support them as a community and help them spread the company’s name widely. I had the chance to have a one to one conversation with Timothy Goh. He spoke to me about the work environment back in Singapore, which is indeed very different from the valley. He also mentioned that the office space is way smaller but much more convenient. I guess we in Singapore has its pros and cons. Although we may not be the hub of IT right now, we do have other advantages of food everywhere and convenience.

Brandon

Coursera, Mashape & Nitrous.IO

Coursera - Bringing Education Closer to "Home"s

Our day began with a visit to Coursera, we were hosted by our Singaporean counterpart working within Coursera - Jun Jie, a developer(monetization) within the company. Coursera is considered an MOOC(Massive Open Online Course) and its mission is to provide universal access to the world’s best education, which is a noble and really admirable mission. In light of this, they charge literally $0 for anyone who wants to pick up courses from any of the universities that they partner with (Offering close to 900 courses from reputable schools including Stanford - which the founders came from) and only charging a minimal sum if one seeks the certification of the university on the course that they completed. This reminds me of what i learnt from BitTorrent the day before, about building something for the good of the world (The Altruistic thing). Coursera has a non-profit goal but has a profit approach to its business which makes it particularly interesting. The profit approach is to make it sustainable so that it can fulfill its non-profit target. Unfortunately, as mentioned by Jun Jie, they have not broke-even but i believe that if they are able to hit the right spot of monetizing their current product/service breaking even nothing to a company with such a huge user base like them. Hopefully, they'll make it and more people/business can use Coursera as an example of a business that does good while also making big bucks!

Furthermore, Coursera is different from many of the other start-ups within the valley, one main reason i believe would be that it's generally a Singaporean company within the valley, mainly cause 1. some of their founders is a Singaporean 2. There are quite a bit of Singaporeans working there. It's what i believe to be the epitome of a culture fusion company, mixing the Valley's technology company culture of being flat open and innovative with the fast pace and performance driven based culture of a Singaporean firm. It's truly interesting to see how a Singaporean-style company can be infused with the valley's culture and style. Also, it's good to see a fellow Singaporean excelling and impacting the lives of many even while they are working to survive! (Taking into account that, i personally also see myself working overseas in the future! - Hopefully the in the Valley too!)

Key Learning Points

• It's difficult to balance between having a profit and non-profit approach to a business, but if it's possible why not! Coursera's a good example and an example that can make big money!
• Taking Coursera as an example i believe that there are other companies has the influence of their founders within the valley and the fusion of the different cultures(Both Valley and their own) can make to make magic!

Mashape - The Italian Job (especially since it's in a bank!)

Our second company of visit for the day was Mashape (Situated in an old bank building next to the iconic Transamerica Pyramid), a company providing an online API market for developers to search for online APIs and for providers to make known/provide & monitor their web services which they create. The company was founded by 3 Italians, Marco Palladino, Augusto Marietti and Michele Zonca, who sprang up with the idea of creating an API hub drawing inspiration from the old yahoo technology of Yahoo Pipes which served to try and provide a similar API hub in the past but failed. Similar yet different to Coursera, this was a firm that has an European & Valley fusion of culture. We were hosted by a fellow Singaporean working within the company Christina, and also one of the three founders, Augusto Marietti who generally explained to us everything there is we wanted to know about Mashape. We were brought around the office which featured a bank vault which they changed into a super cool poker room and a flooded basement which featured many StarWars murals/drawings (it was super cool). We had a really meaningful exchange with our hosts during the hour long Q&A session which we had in one of their meeting rooms, and Augusto shared with us his experiences and also his thoughts on his company and the other firms within the valley.

One main point i got out of the exchange was that, as per what Augusto said that the idea of Mashape was not as well received/supported back in Europe as compared to here in the Valley and that things only took off when they decided to take the risk and fly all the way across the world to the Mecca of Technology. It shows me that even though an idea might fail or isn't as well received in one context, maybe we should look at bringing it to another context where it might actually flourish and bloom. After all, as can be seen from most of the companies that we have visited it's about taking risks(testing it in another context) and seeing if it work if it fails we try again and we use it as a learning experience!

Personally, i believe Mashape is a very prospective company, the service they provide as the middle man for APIs, bringing together the developers and the web service providers very efficiently(since it's super easy to use, search and monetize web services), is an excellent idea. It makes for easier development for developers while at the same time encourage web service providers to share their services unlike the past it's much easier to monetize their service they provide. Why didn't i thought of such a brilliant simple idea!!

Key Learning Points

• Ideas/Businesses Ideas may fail in one context but may be successful in another, we shouldn't just simply give up that easily especially if we have a brilliant idea like Mashape!
• An idea can be anywhere and anything, it could be as obvious as linking party A that needs requirement B from party B (as per Mashape) everyone can see it but it's the person that actually come out with a solution to link the two that's when everyone would say "Ah! should have thought of that!" when actually it was always staring at us in the face all the time - So keep our eyes & minds open!

Nitrous.IO - Fueling the masses on the cloud!

Our last stop for the day was Nitrous.IO, a small company which develops a cloud-based development platform. We were hosted by two of the main and developers within the company, AJ & Timothy. We were brought into their warm cosy office which i felt was really welcoming since, everyone would be working together in the same area. We were brought into a living room like concept room in which we had our Q&A session with our hosts this made the office feels more homely and welcoming than anything else! Our hosts shared about how Nitrous works and how they monetize their product (the free unless you need more capacity kind of approach & their dropbox space-race kind of outreach so that more developers will use them). They have two offices currently, one in Singapore (Chinatown) and the other over here! Tim generally communicates and coordinates the operations between the two offices and it was particularly interesting to hear about how he does it and his opinions on it. One thing i got out of Tim was that he's more company employee centric whereby he hopes to work with the rest to their best capacity and also to make the entire staff grow as a family together. AJ on the other hand, shared with us about his take on his entrepreneurial experience & spirit. He mentioned things like, he did not want to work in Google making minor UI changes to button but wanted to make more impact and change he could see, and that he would be working in another entrepreneurial venture if he weren't working on Nitrous.IO - To describe AJ, i believe would be that he's very driven towards ensuring that Nitrous does well as a product while also he has a very strong entrepreneurial spirit and energy, always trying to do something game changing and looking at things that are causing us trouble and seeing them as opportunities for a business. There were some parallels between Mashape and Nitrous.IO in terms of their shift of context to from an area which does not favour them as much to the valley which breed and enables them to flourish better. Another thing that AJ mentioned to me about after the Q&A was that it was increasingly getting difficult to get good help around the valley since most companies & startups are offering more & more lucrative paychecks to talent and these talents are more drawn towards these money instead of whether the business has a good idea and an self-fulfilling interaction with themselves.

Key Learning Points

• One key thing i learnt was the passion and drive that both AJ & Tim showed in their own ways as mentioned above. The staff centric concern(Tim) and the business idea/product focus(AJ)
• People should look more towards a self-fulfilling/life-goals oriented aspect rather than the monetary returns aspect of joining companies when they decide to join a company.

Brandon

Brindha

Brindha

Meant for all, Meant for developers

Coursera

Size of company: 120ish employees Office Space: Two levels of office space, but with cubicles! Just like Singapore companies! Coursera gave me a good example of how a startup would form: it all began with friends who were close to one another and could rely on one another, who were passionate about an idea together, and who were great at their technical capabilities. One big challenge is that Coursera's business model is that it is a fine line between a non-profit social cause and a for-profit partnership with universities, with an aim to provide "universal access to the world’s best education” (their mission). As of now, they charge users for the certification and that is how they earn money. But the business model is complicated because of this fine line. Which stresses what I learnt previously; of thinking about your business model concurrently with your amazing creative idea. This would help determine the main way in which your idea would become a business or not and whether your company would be sustainable, if it were to become a company in the first place.

Mashape

Size of company: 10ish employees Office Space: Two levels of office space with an open concept, a cool poker room that was previously a bank vault, and a love for Star Wars Mashape is a great example of a tech company that thought of the great idea and the monetisation of their idea; by using a freemium model and by earning some revenue from API providers who charge users for use of the APIs on Mashape. The CEO, Augusto, then explained to us his idea of the analogy of an industrial revolution of electricity and cars and used the analogy to describe cloud computing and APIs respectively. Despite experiencing a flood in their basement, he seemed calm about it and the employees went on with their usual tasks and did not seem to be deterred by the flooding incident that resulted in the need to re-carpet their basement. My main takeaway from Mashape would be the need to think about the business model together while realising your dream of making your idea come true.

Nitrous.io

Size of the company: 10ish employees Office Space: A part of the office space in a level of a building with an open environment It was cool to find out that Nitrous.io actually started off in Singapore before eventually coming to the Valley. And even cooler to know that such an intricate developer-focused environment was built by a small group of people! Their monetisation follows the freemium model, and just like DropBox, when you refer friends to use Nitrous.io, you get N2O points. My main takeaways from this humble company is that independently-driven people with an aim can achieve so much, even though they may be underpaid. That they believe in shared responsibility and no finger-pointing by practicing code review by another coder to give you assurance that your code works. That the length of a week is the most optimal for sprints. That your employees may forget what you told them at the start of the week, and in the case of small start-ups, it is very apparent who is pulling most of the weight and who is slacking. That in small startups, your expertise and efforts are paid off and it is visible to you. That small little things like being praised for your idea, or meeting people who use your software can make you happy. Quote from the Nitrous.io: Usually people “Make something people want”.

But it would be great if you could “Make something people want to pay for”.

Derrick

Coursera, Mashape & Nitrous.io

Coursera - Online Courses that provide Certifications

Originally, I was sceptical about the value of Coursera as I believe it couldn't take away the value of classroom learning, but our visit shed new light on Coursera and led me to understand them better. At Coursera, we learnt that they weren't really trying to take away classroom learning but to supplement it with the online courses. They want to help people achieve useful qualifications that may not have been part of their studies. This is because many companies actually don't require their employees to have degrees but rather specialised skills - especially in the engineering field and for skills like Android Programming that isn't taught as part of a degree in universities. Also, Coursera aims to be able to teach a larger group of people because the one of the founders, Professor Andrew Ng, found that he would only teach 600 students a year in his machine learning course but there were 10,000+ people who were interested in picking up the machine learning course. In this case, it would take him 10+ years before he can even teach everyone. By making it an online course, it would help him to teach a lot more people.

We also learnt that people in America have been pretty receptive to Coursera. Recruiters are also quite accepting of the certifications provided by Coursera. However, the team at Coursera did note that the Asian countries are less likely to be convinced about these courses and their certifications. Furthermore, with Coursera there are also some drawbacks with being unable to have a better grading than pass/fail for their certifications - so when people do courses without obtaining these certifications, Coursera does not get to make money and this seems to be a business model that may not be very sustainable. While this does not lessen the potential impact Coursera can actually achieve, Coursera is in need of converting unpaid users into paid users if they want to continue to further their cause of providing universal access to education.

Mashape - API Library

The idea that Mashape has of managing the APIs of companies and developers in a single marketplace is one that most of us would be familiar with in another context - the idea of retailing. By being an "online retailer", Mashape helps both API providers and API consumers to have to know less people in their network, all they have to do now is to know Mashape. Developers will have an easier time to search for APIs in Mashape's API library since this library would contain a huge number of APIs they may want to incorporate into their projects. Small API providers who want payment will also be able to reach more potential users through hosting their APIs on Mashape. Additionally, Mashape acts as an external API manager for huge companies by hosting/managing large amounts of APIs for these companies.

Unfortunately for Mashape there are some problems that they have to face by being the middleman between API providers and API consumers. They have to be careful about the risk of API providers no longer providing the API web service and then not knowing that it is no longer provided until a long time later, causing their consumers much problems. Thus, one of the ways that they go about preventing this is to check scan through their API library monthly to look for dead ones. Another risk they have to worry about is a channel conflict whereby consumers will look up certain APIs in their library and then call the APIs directly from the API provider. In this case, they try to solve this risk by getting API providers not to host APIs on their own but use Mashape instead. One other problem they face is localization whereby APIs are directed to the US server but they may be called from a far away land like China instead. This is still an ongoing issue for them but they mentioned that they will be addressing this in the near future.

One thing we could learn from Mashape is that they could not really find success in Europe and were unable to raise any money because nobody believed in their idea. In Europe, they could also hardly find talent that could help them with their work. Subsequently, they moved to the US market which were more susceptible to the idea of an API marketplace and found success quickly when people invested in them. Although Singapore does have some great opportunities we could seek for our own start-ups, a common pattern we see with the companies here is that it would be much better to come to Silicon Valley for growth.

Nitrous.io - A new age of coding with Cloud-based IDEs

Nitrous.io is a cloud-based IDE which provides you some extremely useful functions that local IDEs cannot. My personal favourites are the functions like collaboration, coding language support and it's simple user interface that makes it really easy to use.

One interesting thing about Nitrous.io is that it's actually closer to home than we think. Nitrous.io started out in Singapore and moved to the valley when their investors wanted them to. At some point in time they were even housed in SMU'S IIE in their early stages! It was even cooler to note that a few of the founders even did a guest lesson for cloud computing in SMU SIS. The coolest thing was them giving us free t-shirts though!

For Nitrous.io, they are rather content with being a growing start-up as they feel that it allows them more ownership. One funny thing they commented on large companies was a very good engineer only working on changing the colour of a button to see improvement in site traffic. Also, they find that being small allows them to have better control over their employees although they mostly function on trust rather than micro-managing their employees. Like most other companies in Silicon Valley, they have a rather flat hierarchy and will not blame employees for their mistakes.

The business model that Nitrous.io uses is the freemium pricing model like Dropbox. This model worked out really well for Dropbox and rather well for them at the moment but I personally think that Dropbox is able to cater to a larger amount of audience whereas Nitrous.io can only target single developers. The difference is that Nitrous.io will then make a lot less than Dropbox can in terms of profit. However, if they were to start charging everyone instead, people would most likely stop using it and switch to a free cloud IDE. Thus, it seems to me like Nitrous.io may not be very profitable in future. One thought I had that Nitrous.io could implement was to allow teaching and learning materials to be incorporated into their IDE so that they could use it as a teaching tool as well (much like codeacademy) and in that case, they would be able to find other ways to make money too.

Derrick

Hakam

Hakam

Changing Behaviour

In Coursera, it was the first company that we had to sign some non-disclosure form. Security was stricter here. We were not able to take pictures of the interior of the building. This is also that first company that had cubicles as part of their office space. Our hosts were Singaporean themselves, two of them being there since Coursera first started. Coursera had the intention of providing such courses online for free or if they do charge a fee, the profits would be shared with the author of the course. While they had a simple and noble idea, providing the courses for free and having no consequence of skipping the course/ ending a course results in a very bad business model. Similar to many of the startups we visited, monetising their product is one huge problem they have. However, it's great that the people are willing to for go profit in order to deliver a better product to their customers. It really shows how different the employees are here compared to Singapore.

The first thing when we visited Mashape was the gorilla logo pasted on the front door. Upon being inside, we saw a huge room with a few people, in a focused mode, coding diligently. There was also an actual vault door from banks that had a poker table stored inside. Upon going down to the basement, we saw the reason why we almost didn't visit Mashape. Apparently, rain managed to seep pass and flooded the whole basement. What we saw was just a large room with all of its carpets removed. Fortunately, they had insurance. After listening to what the founder has to say about Mashape and life here in Silicon Valley, I learned how special Silicon Valley is compared to the rest of the word. In Silicon Valley, getting funded is quick as investors here are more willing to take risks. In other countries, Venture Capitalists tend to follow guidelines before investing on a company and if there's a new technology but there might not be a market for it yet, most VCs outside of Silicon Valley might not invest in the idea. The hierarchical structure here is very flat. Like in Mashape, the CEO can just go around and just share his frustrations with his employees or just give comments about anything.

Final stop for the day is Nitrous.IO. They provide an environment platform in the cloud for developers to create an application on the fly. They even have an office in Singapore. I didn't really understand what they said when they answered on how they monetise their product. They did it similar to dropbox. When users share Nitrous and get sign ups, they earn N2O (currency for Nitrous). The more N2O they have, the more environments they can have in a single user account. I'm guessing that by exposing to more users, there might be a small chance that a user would want to upgrade to a premium member. However, such strategy can be misused which is probably why Nitrous.IO would ban users if they see an anomaly in the way they get N2O. Somehow, I don't see how this way of monetisation will work effectively. It's like throwing a huge net with big holes and hoping that you can catch a big fish.

JiaDong

Coursera

Coursera is the first company we visited that actually has a critical social impact on the society. The vision for it is “education for everyone”. It actually has quite few competitors, each one of them has different approaches to MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses) industry. Khan Academy and Edx are non-profit websites, they provide online courses for free and do not charge any money. But Coursera is a for-profit organization. Personally, I feel this is a great vision for human kind since education is so precious and limited around the world, specially in developing countries, but this sounds like a very heavy vision for a company, I see them being quite innovative by providing free courses, yet earning revenue from certificate. By doing this, they can still follow their vision but also stay sustainable. However, more and more people are putting expectations on them, such as providing education to developing countries or even 3rd world countries. Although they are growing fast, I feel they are struggle with balance social responsibilities and sustainability. Perhaps, it will be a better option to limit their scope, or at least state the clear short term goals, maybe focusing on certain countries and achieve sustainability, instead of aiming the whole world at once since we understand developing countries have their own characteristics, it will be really hard to provide a single solution for all of them.
Personally, I was quite amazed by the manager of engineering team. Other engineers seemed to be not so good with talking and conceptualizing business related stuff. But he can catch the context very quickly and provide very detailed answers. Moreover, he has clear idea about Coursera’s vision and future direction, he was able to go through those points with us systematically without any preparation. The valley definitely has thousands of such managers and their skills do not only limit to technical aspects, his talents remind me of so many things that I need to work on. Hence, we should probably prepare ourselves in business areas as well for long term career growth.

MashAPE

This is another company that provides platform as a service. Combined the experience I learnt from Twitch, I realize many of the companies which succeeded actually focused on platform services. Facts have approved that this is another possible approach for startups other than the competency model. This is supported by Innov8 as well, the Managing Director Jeff actually said that they like companies which provide platform services because it is sustainable, the products on the platform may die, but the platform will still be there. I think I understand his meaning now when I see the hyper growth of MashAPE over the period of 2-3 years. Such platform can hardly be replaced once the number of users which provide content on it achieves certain scale, users who search for content will get sticky with the platform and experience reluctance if some other platforms are trying to attract them. And MashAPE has done well in attracting users to post content on it, all services are free, expect analytics which does not affect the proper functioning of API, by doing this, developers can generate revenue with almost no cost, this hence attracts more consumers and more developers want to post their API for profit. Such cycle seems to be growing and will help MashAPE achieve success.
However, I feel the CEO needs stronger sense of business for MashAPE to grow. When I asked him what the biggest challenges are for MashAPE from both technical aspects and business aspects, he said there wasn’t any business yet and the technical challenges involved managing different projects and talents. I believe the challenge he meant is actually business challenge and no technical challenge was mentioned by him, he also said the management here is messy. This may still be fine for now since MashAPE has been established officially for only 2 years plus, but such ambiguous management may be critical when they become bigger.

Nitrouse.IO

This is probably the smallest company that we visited in San Francisco. It is actually great for us to have the chance to talk to the founder of the company and t is only possible because the company is quite small. Our host Andrew shared much experience they had, the one interested me is their management style. Same as many other technology companies in the valley, they let the employees work on a very independent style and minimum micromanagement is done in the company. Andrew emphasized that they put trust in the people they hire, they want the employees to take responsibilities, but when things went bad, they trust that the employees will take care of it. Think of myself as one of the member in the team, I will really appreciate such management style and be motivated to finish more work with greater quality, simply because I feel such trust can extend to personal level, I will enjoy it very much if I can work in a team that everyone have trust in each other. Although such management style may be the fact that they have no choice since the amount of work is significantly more that the human resources they have, but I think such team spirit is critical to a startup, especially a small one, to make everyone has a sense of belonging and take their own responsibilities.

Jia Dong

Jovin

Jovin

Have a noble mission, take big steps and observe

Visiting Coursera really feels back at a Singapore company. This is probably due to the background of the founders and the founding team who are Singaporeans. I’m really impressed by their mission and goal of providing universal education access to the world. One of the most important lessons I learnt is that every successful startup/ company must have a very noble/ambitious goal in order to succeed. Such goal not only motivates the employees working in the company, but also shows the scalability of the company and its potential to reach out globally. Like most startups, I also learnt that monetizing is not the most important aspect of the company at the beginning, what’s most important is customer acquisition. When we have a large user base, there will be tons of ways to monetize and fund raising will be easy. In this case, Coursera not charging for courses is the key to customer acquisition. This is also in line with what they believe in, universal access to education regardless of income.

Mashape is a really cool company, simple concept, very useful product. Creating an APIs for the market place is really a good idea, especially for developers in today’s concept where everything needs to move fast and beautifully. One important lesson I picked up is that, an idea need not be complex or coupled with great technologies, but more importantly something that people will use extensively. What Mashape has created is a simple marketplace which truly serves the need of the developer community. In addition, I also learnt that being a founder, you must know what is good for the company growth and expansion and be willing to take big steps. From the founder we spoke to, he mentioned that he had to leave his hometown and start in Silicon Valley as he believed he can get the best talents and resources for the company. For me, it is a really big step as I am kind of family oriented and leaving my family for long period of time is just difficult. I think at the end of the day, it depends on how much you really want it and if I think it’s really better for the company, I think I will probably do the same as Mashape founder.

Visiting Nitrous IO is interesting for me as it is a small startup which has yet to prove itself. This is different from the other startups we have visited thus far. Just like Mashape, the founders have really taken a big step moving from Singapore to the Valley to tap on the massive talents here as well as the resources they can get. The seed for the idea of creating a user friendly cloud IDE came from a pain point faced by the founders. Apparently, the available cloud IDEs are really difficult for developers to use. From this, I learnt that more often than not, we always have our pain points when facing situations in life, however, most of us tend to brush it off or not even observing it because we are so used to the problem. In fact, I feel that we should always take notice of what is happening around us and a minor problem we are facing can eventually become a business. One take away is to be open minded and observe!

JunMing

Coursera, MashApi and Nitrous.io

Coursera - Free Education for All
Coursera was the first company we visited for the day. Our host JJ brought us around and shared with us how is it exactly like for a Singaporean to work in a startup in the valley. They have hopes to revolutionalised the idea of teaching and one simple way is to make less popular university standout by having their courses on their platforms. They have a vision of making education universally available and at a current cost of $0. They shared with us their business model and explained about the possible challenges that they have. The first point was that their main source of income comes from the certification of courses. Since certification of courses might not be compulsory and that there are high dropout rates, it is certainly not wise to rely on certification as it's main profit generator. The second point is the difficulty in getting such certifications to be recognized globally. The debate whether getting such certificates can equate to a university degree opens up even more questions. Although a huge part of their users are from developed countries, Coursera still keeps to their mission of making education available to the developing nations. I think it is remarkable how they are able to juggle fulfilling both the social expectations of making content available to everyone and their business operations. One thing to note might be their sustainability as their current monetization strategies do not take into consideration the absence of funds from VCs. If a suitable monetization strategy can be in place, Coursera can potentially be reaping high amount of profits.

MashAPE - Free Market
The second company we visited was Mashape. Their main role in the business is to be a unified hub for the growing numbers of APIs in the tech world. Like a repository for codes, they do regular checks and maintenance on their APIs so as to ensure that they can always be picked up readily by developers. Augusto also shared with us his experience from forming the company in Italy and eventually settling in the valley. Many people initially have doubts about his business model of building an API market place, charging fees for using APIs. That is mainly the reason they were unable to get any support and funding in Italy because people simply do not believe in crazy ideas. He eventually decided that the valley might be a suitable place to cultivate his ideas and that was when they started receiving monetary support. Their company culture is quite similar to other startups we visited in the valley. Employees here are always encouraging each other and mistakes are always seen as a learning opportunity. I believe Mashape can eventually grow into a big company by focusing on making APIs that are catered to only specific developing countries where they could also bring huge amount of confidence to their investors. From our discussion with Augusto, we learnt that nothing great can possibly be achieved if you are always afraid of failing. It is when you dare to take the risk and try something out of the norm, then can you come out with something original. It is a pity that the society we live in does not encourage risk taking and condemns failure.

Nitrous.IO - Small Growing Company
The last stop of the day brought us to a small startup that specializes in web based development platform. Our host Andrew first explained their business model and what the vision of the company is. The company seeks to bring flexibility to developers through a cloud IDE such that they can access it without their own computers. Although nitrous is still small, we can see that they are continuously trying to improve many aspects of their products and operations. We also get to learnt that the working culture in nitrous is very open, everyone is encouraged to take risk and try new stuffs. The employees are very much willing to help out if a particular employee faces any obstacles in their work. The main takeaway here perhaps is the way how small startups manage their business operations both internally and externally, given that they have limited resources.

Jun Ming

Luqman

Luqman

Coursera

Corsera is a company that relies on the mooc, massive online course. I have come across coursera and mooc before. What attracted me to coursera was Prof Ng's machine learning course. Fortunately or unfortunately SMU does not teach machine learning. But coursera does and most importantly it's free. However, done reason why I have not taken the course is because the course is only available during selected times if the year and those times available are during the schooling term. This is a problem coursera face that they need to fix - not everyone is available at the times they set but at the same time there are other considerations that they need to work on such as the social aspects of the course such as peer learning and class discussion.

Unfortunately coursera has not break even. Could it be that the company has not found a good way to monetize on the courses they offer? Could it be because their random method of pricing their certificates? While they are relying on VC how long can they last, if the company has yet to find more ways to monetize their services. Could it be that it is better for them to charge the instructors for their usage of coursera, since they are essentially using their services?

This is probably one of the few startups focusing on education. I have seen other universities doing mooc but they are pretty small scale with probably 10 courses Abd they only teach courses organic to the university. How can they improve this?

It is interesting to see a silicon valley startup consisting if only Singaporean founders.
Mashape
Mashape works on a model where they wrap APIs for companies to and allow users to consume services easily. It is amazing to see that it is a service provided for developers in mind. Usually we visit companies that say provide a lifestyle service like Twilio. It is however important to understand that now the world is moving towards making applications lighter by relying on a back service to be consumed. While it is important to understand this so companies are increasingly seeing the need to protect their APIs by letting only quality applications to access them.

Mashape move is timely by providing analytics to the api owners and letting them optimize their platforms that hold the APIs. At the same time, mashape helps companies and developers make certain processes easier. But there might be some questions to worry about - certain services such as credit card payments are heavily regulated. Mashape should find a way to then ensure that their services cater to all the requirements of the different regulation bodies that control the payments industry. And it will be worst if many countries have different regulations this means more work for mashape in maintaining the infrastructure and api requirements.

Nitrous. Is the second company that help developers make things easier and faster for them to get code into production by reducing the time needed to set up the environment.

Nitrious works on the fremium model - free for up to a certain level but if you need more services you pay. This model is not new to us, Dropbox, works on this model too. This model is popular with a lot of people, as there is a lower barrier to entry for people to use the service, benefiting the company itself by getting to understand the customer demographics. Therefore the fremiun model is a good one.

However, I am not too sure how well will the model take off - code is poetry, therefore code is intellectual property rights. If the open public uses nitrous does that mean that enterprises will definitely use their online IDE? Yes, for someone who’s looking for an online IDE might use nitrous as the solution, but it would be better for the someone to trust the product if a big enterprise/bank were to use it. Maybe Mashape might consider convincing big players to use their products. By this, they may need to setup an on premise private online IDE so that the companies do not have to worry about online security and do it like how they said Google does it, ssh into a server and code from there.

Melvin

Day 3

We had great time interacting with our host in Coursera, interestingly not only were they Singaporeans, they were one of the first few to develop the system we see today. Massive Open Online Courses and people learning from this source as compared to conventional schools is gradually a trend that’s on the rise. I believe what is most surprising to me is the type of people who opt to learn on Coursera. People who are seeking a job change, and empowering people with little to no access to education are some of the target groups of Coursera. Interestingly, people already with a degree also go online to be learn more, which supports the saying “One is never too old to learn”. In Singapore, it seems one of the top 3 courses is an entrepreneur course that most Singaporeans sign up for. It seems more people back at home is getting interesting in being an entrepreneur. Peronally I have used Coursera on a number of occasions and while the barrier to entry is very low, being able to keep up with the course is a challenge as I would always prioritize my offline work higher and as we all know, work can never be completed. Hence, when our host mentioned an interesting solution to the problem, having courses conducted at the timing and choice of the consumers, that would eliminate the issue but at the same time bring in other issues as raised by the host. Apart from the issue about the strength and integrity of the community, some other issues I thought were the ineffectiveness of peer review if the size of the cohort at that time is small or whether the course were to remain an interactive and peer-learnt one if such a concept was applied. In addition, the Certificates is an option for students wanting to receive an acknowledgement from Coursera on the completion of their course. However, is it not too early to reveal this option when the acceptance level of this types of certification from MOOC’s are still low. Take Singapore for example, I sincerely will find it hard to believe that employees one day will start comparing between a certificate from Coursera and another from a traditional school, unless it is for specific skills such as Android programming. While I subscribe to Coursera’s goal and mission, to be able to make it more relevant to any future employers, Coursera still has many minds and hearts to be won.

For Mashape, who would have thought just aggregating and providing an interface to interact and control the various APIs could be made into a business. From one of the founder’s story of how the company was first started, it says much about how companies were first started due to a problem they met and a solution not readily available, prompting them to pioneer the solution. As a developer myself, I can imagine how useful and powerful it would be to use such a repository Mashape provides. However, the problem of Mashape being used as akin to a shopping cart remain unanswered. Unless Mashape is only targeting enterprise level clients, it would be difficult to restrict access to independent and small-time developers when such APIs are already readily available and free to implement.

Like Mashape, Nitrous was conceived when a founder met with problems trying to setup his local environment. While this company was started in Singapore, the shift to the Valley seems to be one of many steps ahead. Nitrous strikes me as different as compared to other startups in the way they spoke of work-life balance. I think as a small team, they have to be work/goal-focus and may want to put more attention to the work-side of the equation. While some might feel this to be atypical of a startup, it represents the drive that all startups have and should adopt. However, by doing so, Nitrous risk losing potential partnerships and sponsors that may contribute to their growth by networking and getting to know more of the inhabitants in the Valley. What makes Nitrous unique in my opinion is the fact that they have 2 teams, a local one in the Valley and another in Singapore and it is the value of trust, this secret sauce, that our host said was an invaluable asset to the function of this company. Knowing that someone has your back when doing peer review of codes and knowing that with trust you can be trusted to be self-directed on projects of your own, definitely speaks volumes on the culture and emphasis given on the personal level the people of Nitrous have with one another, regardless if they are here in the Valley or overseas.

Melvin

Mus

Mus

Coursera, Mashape and Nitrous.IO

Coursera A company of goodwill but still need to focus on how they will want to move forward. At least, that is what I feel after meeting up with them. Coursera mission is to provide universal access for education for everyone. By partnering with top universities, they are able to provide content to the masses for free and only charges the “students” for certifications. Coursera wanted these certifications to be accredited and increase in value over time, to a point that it became renowned to their respective industries. This itself already gave Coursera a few challenges because of the limitations of technology which is not comparable to a physical class. For example, the “exams” taken requires a lot of work to prevent cheating. Coursera overcome the problem of having too increase workload on the lecturer to grade the work of those who took the exams by making the students themselves peer reviews their fellow classmates. While Coursera makes claims that it works as the grades are close to an actual lecturer’s grading criteria, I am still not convinced in this model.

I believe that Coursera also have some other issues that they have to overcome in order to be successful. To make their certification accredited, they have to regulate the certificates they give out. I am giving a perspective of a typical Singaporean who knows what companies in Singapore would do. The host themselves mentioned that it is beneficial for people to pick up the course for the skill which they could achieve in a few months as compared to picking up a diploma or a degree in a related field. A typical company in Singapore would love that because they need people of certain skills that they are looking for and yet they do not need to pay the employee just as much as they would have to to those are awarded a degree or a diploma from an actual institution. If this happens, it could impact these educational institutions and those who have already achieve proper diploma or degree and may eventually meet resistance. And if they dish out their certifications like hot cakes, given at the price point they set for their “exams”, they would still need to think through whether it will help in increasing the value of their certificates.

I am convinced with Coursera mission to provide education access to developing countries, especially to those who do not have the means to be in the University, because it will help those capable students make a difference to their own country or at least to the others around them but I certainly do not agree with their conflicting plans to “partner” with universities and provide certificates on the ground of securing a job, especially on developed countries. But what I believe they could do is to enable their certifications as a preamble to the universities that the students choose, have a part in the admission exercise and becomes a factor for awarding scholarships for students who are truly capable. At the very least, I could see this as a true partnership and could possibly meet with lesser resistance. Coursera, at the present, has not yet broke even. Coursera has plans to maximise their revenue and profits and I do hope that Coursera need not exploit their current model and increase prices and go against their own mission to achieve this.

MashApe Ma’Shape' or Mash’Ape’? Apparently, it is both. Mashape provides the service to unify public and private API (web services) into a single repository where developers can choose search, compare and eventually use. Mashape will become the proxy for these developers to communicate with the actual API. Their current monetisation model is to charge the consumers for additional features (like in-app purchases) which could be turned on. They also make their revenue from API providers by charging them through different schemes which will determine the percentage of “sales” made by the provider. But the founder of MashApe believed that the current model is not working as well as they would like it to be and they are currently figuring other ways to make the services work and start to roll them out somewhere in 2015. I believe that Mashape is facing the issue right now because the marketing Mashape as a single repository for API is not enough to convince developers to jump onto their bandwagon. Even with those additional features such as analytics could have already been provided by the providers themselves. While it is perhaps easier to contact only one point for all the API, Mashape have to realise that developers will always the consider the cost-benefit analysis and perhaps have decided that the services provided may not be worth the price. If that is the case, then Mashape could begin looking into other services that they could provide as an alternative source of revenue.

Nitrous.IO An IDE on the cloud. That is new. The founder, Andrew, has pointed to us the benefits of Nitrous.IO - that it is capable to deploying project environment once on the cloud and be used across different computers at different locations and allows collaborative environment for teams. They charges accounts by different tiers of subscriptions and they introduced the points systems which allows accounts holders to throttle different aspect of the systems. Andrew said that while the company is still healthy, it is not become as popular as he hoped to be. I believe Nitrous.IO could build more powerful tools because there is a limit as to how much javascript and HTML will be able to do as compared to services offers by competitors. This includes delivering the product at the end of the development cycle.

Participant

Day #4

Coursera

What’s remarkable about Coursera is its well-renovated office space. Coursera has better office space and location when compared with most of the other startups that are still in the early stages of growth.

Coursera’s story is interesting to me because part of the founding effort was by Singaporeans. It stands out as one of the SV startups that have the most amount of Singaporean engineers. It is humbling to see many fellow Singaporeans doing well in SV.

Coursera has the potential to be a very profitable company although it’s current business model is doubtful of scaling to large profit margins. Coursera has credible educational content from top universities around the world is a popular platform for free online educations. It has build technologies to cater online learning to countries with slow internet connections and thus has the potential to become the most favoured “e-learning” platforms around.

MashApe

MashApe is an interesting company that is simply an API repository. It is indeed time for a revamped API “store”. The traditional UDDI or WSDL models of enterprise API listings are incompatible with todays cutting edge and sexy application development environment.

MashApe’s service is a programmer’s heaven, it fast-forwards development and increases developers’ efficiency. This idea of repository is seen in the Linux world where there were open-source software repositories, then there were code repositories, then there were app stores, and now there are repositories that sell or share building blocks for developers.

Like many uprising startups MashApe is struggling to increase it’s monetization abilities. Drawing from the lessons of BitTorrent, if there’s a large user base, small monetization efforts return big revenues. I think MashApe rather should primarily focus on growing it’s user base further in all regions of the world. Especially in development intensives regions such as China, India, Indonesia, US, Russia, etc. I think MashApe’s monetization efforts that is planned to begin next year might be too soon. But it will definitely obtain the confidence of their investors.

Nitrous.io – It’s a long road to success

Nitrous.io is one startup that is yet to attain its success. It has a straightforward, premium monetization strategy (you pay for extra computation power and features). That, coupled with NitrousIO’s low user base has exacerbated its financial growth. Although the company has existed for quite some time, it’s slow adoption with developers (their main target audience) has not been aiding it’s business goals.

Seemingly, the company has focused too much on development efforts, which is evident from it’s lack of business related job roles and staffs. The leadership constitutes mostly of engineers which might not be ideal for a middle-aged startup that is aiming to grow it’s business and earn revenue. The company would have to think of a different monetization strategy or target a wide range of audiences other than just developers.

Being the NitrousIO user myself, I can appreciate the efforts the engineers have put in to create it. It is one of the most stable cloud IDEs out there. It is easy and fast to set up. As a student developer, I am satisfied with the free features and I am not enticed to pay for the features of NitrousIO. If it ever comes to paying for the features, I would probably move to some other similar cloud IDEs. In my opinion, this is the case for most student developers. Professional developers are mostly accustomed to their own personalized development environment and are unlikely to move into cloud IDEs. Perhaps cloud IDEs will be a norm in a decades time. Till then, NitrousIO has just got to endure.

TengYu

Teng Yu

Day 04. - Sixty Four Dollar Question

Coursea

A very noble startup with a grand idea: to provide free education to the world. In order to keep their mission in check, they are making sure that, at least for the time being, all the courses that they provide are free. At this point in time, they have yet to break even, which goes to show that it is still very difficult to make money out of a sociable cause. However, everyone in the company is very passionate about what they are doing and take pride in their work. It is heartening to see so many people believing in the company's mission even though it may not be the one that generates the most revenue. It was interesting to hear from their perspective on how important it is to work with similar people and the same mindset. Being in the business for almost two years, they are at a juncture of knowing whether if their business model is sustainable. It will be an exciting to observe their progress for the next few years as that will determine if they can make it eventually.

Mashape
Mashape has a very similar business model to Twilio: selling APIs to developers. However, what differentiates them is that they have a Marketplace of APIs, where both public and private APIs are available for consumers/developers to use. One of the key difference between Mashape and the other startups is that their founders are not from America itself, and they are from Europe instead. This actually goes to show how strong Silicon Valley is an influence for those with keen entrepreneurship interest. Like all the other startups, they encourage openness and are very supportive of their employees actions. The CEO told us that they never hide from their mistakes, so if they screwed up some aspects, they will tell their customers that they screw up. This spirit is very commendable as willingness to take responsibility is lacking severally in Singapore companies. Everyone is trying to cover up nowadays in order not to be penalised for their mistakes.

Nitrous.io
Nitrous.io is very different from the other startups that we have visited so far in terms of business model and the kind of technology provided. Their money capitalisation method is simple: provide a service for people and charge them extra for more in-depth services. They have been in the scene for quite some time but the user base has not been increasing much. As a result, it will be increasing to see how will things pan out for Nitrous.io for the next few years. One interesting point is that the founder started the company in Singapore's Chinatown originally. Similar to many other CEOs, they subsequently moved to Silicon Valley to further develop their product. The advantage that Silicon Valley has is in the huge amount of talented and like-minded people to provide feedback for their app. At the end of the day, just by surrounding yourself with like-minded people, it will be better for your ideas and products.

YiHao

Day 4: Coursera, Mashape, Nitrous.io

Coursea

Coursera is a company that offers online courses by forming partnerships with the universities around the globe. It was founded with the aim of providing universal access to education. This will be particularly useful for people living in rural areas who do not have a chance to attend formal education.

Currently, Coursera earns its revenues by charging a fixed fee for the specialisation track / certificate. Other than that, the remaining courses are free-of-charge. As such, it is still trying to figure out the optimal monetisation policy before the venture capital funds run out. According to the hosts, Coursera does not rule out charging the remaining courses in the future.

Moving forward, Coursera hopes to improve the online learning experience by giving the users a flexible timeline to complete the course. This means that the users can choose the time to do the course as and when they like. This is not the case now since all the courses start at a particular time i.e Jan 2014 and ends in Jan 2015. So, if the user misses out on the Jan 2014 course start date, he or she will have to wait till Jan 2015 which is rather inefficient.

Another aspect that Coursera is working on is how to improve the feedbacks given by the peers. Since this is a massive open online course, the only feasible way that the users can learn about their mistakes is through the feedbacks provided by their peers.

It is not easy to achieve a non-profit goal with a profit maximization model. In order to achieve that, more recognition have to be given to the specialised certificates. At the same time, it is vital for Coursera to improve their monetisation policy to be profitable. Hopefully, Coursera can a find optimal solution and provide online courses that will impact many people around the globe.

Mashape

Mashape is a market place for the customers to consume api and a platform for the developers to provide the api for the web services that the consumers require. I am intrigued by the idea that Mashape has as I have no knowledge prior to the trip to Silicon Valley.

Mashape was initially founded in Europe. After some time, the founders decided to move Mashape to Silicon Valley as they believe that Mashape will grow faster in Silicon Valley due to the array of support and infrastructures that Silicon Valley has.

During the discussion, the founder gave an example of how the api can be used in real-life context. For example, the weather api can be used together with the transportation api when asked whether consumer can use two apis simultaneously.

He also gave us a quick overview of the monetisation policy for Mashape. For example, whenever people consume a paid usage api, Mashape will receive a revenue share of what the api provider is providing.

Personally, I believe that Mashape will be successful and profitable if they can obtain the optimal monetisation policy. I feel that there is a great demand of web applications from the companies in Silicon Valley and possibly around the world. The apis will be greatly sought after if the apis have high qualities. Furthermore, the apis will reduce the time needed to code out a web application, allowing the web developers to build more web applications and earn more revenues.

Nitrous.io

Nitrous.io is cloud-based development environment platform with a web based IDE startup. Nitrous.io was founded because AJ is impatient and always has many problems in installing the programs and the configurations required for the normal IDE to work.

Nitrous.io encourages its employees to take calculated risks. AJ believes that “If you do not take risk, there is very little chance for the startups to be successful”. This is the difference between the Silicon Valley and Singapore culture. In Singapore, the people are generally risk-averse and prefer the safe route of working for others instead of a startup.

Nitrous.io does not micro-manage its employees. The employees will be given tasks that they need to complete. As long as they complete the tasks by the deadline, they can literally do anything that they like.

Nitrous.io has two branches, one in Silicon Valley and the other in Singapore. Most of the time, these two branches have to collaborate and work together. Tim who often communicates and work together with the people in Singapore branch told us the biggest challenge was the time difference between Singapore and Silicon Valley. Because of the time difference, he starts his work on a Sunday evening in Silicon Valley.

Although Tim and AJ have different aspirations for Nitrous.io, their aspirations do not hinder the growth of Nitrous.io. AJ hopes to see increasing number of people using the online IDE while Tim hopes to build a strong engineering team in Nitrous.io. As such, AJ is more of the visionary person while Tim is more of the technical person. Thus, I believe both of them have complementary skills. When the vision and the technology are in sync, it will be more likely for a startup to grow and be successful.

Yi Hao