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