Difference between revisions of "1415T1g1 Silicon Valley/Participant Information/Reflection/10 Dec"
(→YiHao) |
|||
| Line 557: | Line 557: | ||
==<div>YiHao</div>== | ==<div>YiHao</div>== | ||
| − | + | </div> | |
| + | </div> | ||
<!-- START OF REFLECTION --> | <!-- START OF REFLECTION --> | ||
<div style="width: 70%; margin-left: 20px; float: left; padding: 20px; "> | <div style="width: 70%; margin-left: 20px; float: left; padding: 20px; "> | ||
| Line 610: | Line 611: | ||
</div> | </div> | ||
| − | + | </div> | |
<!-- END OF AVATAR --> | <!-- END OF AVATAR --> | ||
<div style="clear: both"></div> | <div style="clear: both"></div> | ||
</div> | </div> | ||
Revision as of 21:21, 13 December 2014
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.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. 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:
The most intriguing part about Mashape was learning about how the founders come up with the idea behind the company.
Nitrous:
Nitrous stood out to me as one of the few young companies that know how to monetize their products.
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!
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!!
- 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!
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
