Difference between revisions of "1415T1g1 Silicon Valley/Participant Information/Reflection/10 Dec"
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| − | <div style="font-size: 20px"> | + | <div style="font-size: 20px">Coursera, Mashape & Nitrous.IO</div> |
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| + | <div style="font-size: 15px"><b>Coursera - Bringing Education Closer to "Home"s </b></div> | ||
| + | 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! | ||
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| + | 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!) | ||
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| + | <div style="font-size: 12px"><b>Key Learning Points</b></div> | ||
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| + | <li>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!</li> | ||
| + | <li>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!</li> | ||
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Revision as of 19:23, 11 December 2014
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!)
- 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!
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 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.
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.
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.
