Category: Silicon Valley

Thoughts on SEA ecosystem and location

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Lots of twitter activity over the this post :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/08/28/hong-kong-versus-singapore/

As mentioned I wanted to follow it up with some thoughts on this post :: http://thenextweb.com/asia/2014/08/23/time-founders-southeast-asia-accepted-location-used-advantage/

Let me preface I did not attend GOAB nd I don’t know Mona. I used to follow her on twitter but she broke my follow rule of never replying to my replies. One of my twitter rules is if I reply a few times to folks – famous or not and they don’t ever reply back then I figure there is no point in following. The point of twitter is reasonable discourse – at least for me anyway.

Mona nails well the recent rise of the SEA ecosystem and how one can most likely build a startup anywhere. Totally agree! However I think there are still some issues.

I will add that this is a tough soapbox to get on for me these days cause I will admit I am NOT in the scene as much as I used to be but this is also one of my weird opinions on the local scene. People talking about the scene and eventing tend to get more attention than those just heads down actually building a startup. Maybe that is just my personal feeling but the local media tends to focus on funding, rumors and covering events talking about the scene more than going deep on what is getting built, by who and the obvious failures that can happen. If I had more time I would do a few things – start a podcast talking to folks building things about how they got here and why they are building what they are building. I would start a review service going deep on all the consumer facing products that are coming at us everyday – some good and of course some bad. An investigative service trying to uncover why local startups fail so we can all learn from it. Alas – I don’t have the time. I am too busy with Spuul and my family to take on any more tasks. I will keep up my mentoring and writing as I see fit. The podcast idea is still brewing cause I miss TWIA and figure there is still some local demand for a good audio feed.

That being said, unlike my time at Yahoo, I am not running around at events or attending many startup focused conferences. Which leads me to another need in the local ecosystem, there are not many events or communities to lean on for those in the local startup land that are a few years in and maturing. This will hopefully improve over time.

Back to some of my thoughts on the article…

– I think seed funding is getting pretty easy to get. However it might all depends on your definition of it. Let’s say less than 150k USD for starters as a rough estimate. I think anyone with some connections, a good idea and some perseverance can land some money in this range. But anything past this I think is hard – there are some trends that buck this. Do something in ecommerce or transportation and for some reason the money is just flowing. Try to do anything with a large risk portfolio, hardware or enterprise and I think the money is much harder to find. Jump in the 150k to 1 million range and unless you have rockstar metrics, a super connected angel or crazy PR – it gets quite hard to find. This is from my personal experience and what I hear from companies I either mentor or talk to a fair amount.

– Location is still tricky. We at Spuul experience this some. The local press tends to pass us up cause they don’t see us in Singapore much. The Indian press always wonders why we are not in India and the USA press tends to overlook global plays from Singapore in general. I think the funding conversations take a similar tact at times. I think for location to work well for you it might make sense to be sure that you can dominate in the market where you have your HQ. Then figure out your regional play and maybe the globe later. Saying you are here and working on the globe might not work for those that like a tangible way to grok things. Of course you may have built something killer or viral that just works for everyone. I am speaking in terms of products as well – not the notion of outsourcing or being a vendor.

– The silicon valley stigma. I look at this one from a different angle than others. I base this on doing some focus groups with yahoo and talking with anthropologists who also study tech. If you get in a room in let’s say in Indonesia. You have a set of normal people who use tech and the internet. You present them with a novel product idea, some screens and user stories. You ask some of these people would they use this if it it came from Indonesia. Or Singapore. Then ask some of them would they use it if it came from Silicon Valley. What happens is they almost always get more excited about the product from the valley. Always. I don’t think this will change anytime soon. It is no different than people loving a Hollywood movie. It is not about what is better but just the cultural aspects that appeal to folks. I think startups in the region have to contend with people on a very local level to win or doing something very unique. If you build something similar to something else that comes from the the valley I think it won’t be successful. Granted this does not pertain to closed or unfair markets like China or say Vietnam who don’t allow truly level playing fields.

The local scene is exploding – just figure out where to make your mark.

How I try to Product Manage… (part 1)

~ michael_msft ~ 2 Comments

I am usually brutally honest. I am the first to answer I don’t know when I don’t and when I think I know I tell it like I see it. I probably need to take my own advice here more often and getter better at the soft middle of knowing and not knowing. Hell – we all can get better at what we do right?

That being said the role of product management is like a craft one hones over time. I don’t think it is easily taught and I don’t think it is easily learned. It comes with time, experience and lots of mistakes. I excel in the lots of mistakes category so I guess in some sense I am still learning and trying to improve.

I try to listen to lots of podcasts, still haven’t found a good PM podcast, and I read a lot. Plus – I try lots of products. I use my own as well. Personally I am always baffled when you hear people give product advice and you find out they don’t use a lot of products apart from the main ones everyone uses. There is no right or wrong when it comes to product taste since it is a taste and I think taste improves with experience. So I like the school of hard knocks when it comes to acquiring taste – you have to have built some things and you have to have used a lot of things. Of course this is not relevant to the folks who have an idea and build their own stuff – I think that is a different form of PM. I wish I was talented enough to have the coding skills to build my own stuff but alas I don’t. Probably never will.

All that being said I am always looking for tools and techniques to get better at what I do.

Over time I keep settling on the same stuff:

– email
– dispatch
– evernote
– asana
– slack
– spreadsheets
– keynote

I use lots of little things for idea tracking or idea generation or I guess note taking, but still don’t have something I love:

– paper with the paper stylus
– vesper
– IA writer
– probably other things I can’t remember and also just a normal notebook

So I use the tools to manage the team and other tools to convey ideas to the people in the company. I guess then the rest of it is the things I use to manage myself, my ideas and my communication. Communication is so huge and this is why slack is just taking off like a rocketship. Communication is key. Really interested to see how slack will tackle email. Asana is partially tackling email but I will admit that a lot of my interaction with Asana is actually via normal email.

Looking for any comments or ideas on this stack of ideas or products.

I will follow this up with a post for how I manage the team so to speak. Or shall I say unmanage them…

Koprol – The Inside Story. Part 5

~ michael_msft ~ 3 Comments

Part 4 :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/03/25/koprol-the-inside-story-part-4/

Yes – we closed the deal. My hope was to bask in the deal closing success and enjoy the moment but unfortunately there was not a lot of time to do that. All sorts of stuff needed sorting from deciding how to announce the deal, to sorting out the structure of operations and of course just dealing with all the demands placed on the newly acquired team. Koprol was now our emerging markets baby – everyone inside of Yahoo wanted access and people outside of Yahoo wanted to interview the principals. All good. I think Yahoo’s bonus from the deal was the huge amount of positive, organic pr. Something Yahoo was not normally used to.

As far as the event itself – the announcing the deal to the public, we planned for a medium sized private event where all the regional bloggers and media where invited. At this time there was some notion of activity around Koprol and Yahoo but there had not been any leaks and no one had forecasted what had actually happened. I was proud of both the Yahoo and Koprol team for not having leaked anything. I am sure many people suspected something but no one called it. The event allowed the Koprol guys to announce the deal and the APAC management to introduce themselves to the community at large. Corporate stayed out of it and the excitement of the deal took center stage. All in all I was proud of the moment and of Yahoo.

Post deal announcement my friend from the IGTF and I spent some time in Bali hanging and trying to come up with some basic plans. Apart form this celebration and a few post deal parties at some of the regional events the air of celebration was exhausted quick since the need to get down to business was at hand.

Fortunately the IGTF lead for the deal was still at Yahoo and focused on making this work – this along with the APAC team focus allowed us to plan next steps. The goal being to grow the product in the region, learn from it and see what the team could offer Yahoo in ideas for emerging markets. Apart from the this the rest of the details needed to be worked out.

There were lots of open issues:

– what to name or brand it?
– long term reporting structures
– dealing with logins – yahoo users
– scaling points of interest
– platforms to grow into
– how to scale the team in Indonesia
– how to engage the rest of Yahoo
– how to spread in the other Yahoo regions

Post closing the Yahoo APAC marketing team started to discuss the branding and of course wanted it to be called Yahoo Koprol. Part of me resisted this cause I felt that the best way to conduct the experiment in the large would be to not overly influence it. Koprol was tiny and Yahoo was huge and it was assumed everyone knew Yahoo and no one knew Koprol. The idea was call it Yahoo Koprol and everyone would feel better about it. The focus groups mostly alluded to the same answer but for me I was more interested in using the resources of Yahoo but yet trying to not over Yahoo everything.

This was really the entire crux of our new found paradox – how does one take advantage of all that Yahoo has to offer and get shit done but not be saddled with all the bullshit of Yahoo that is notorious for not getting anything done. This is where my Yahoo career probably nosedived as I stated to assume the role of protector as someone wanting to do the right thing for everyone but yet having to piss people off along the way.

There was the local team, the Koprol team, the users, Sunnyvale and the world all watching and everyone wanting a piece. Yahoo wanted to learn from the team, the world wanted to interview them, the users wanted a growing product and the Koprol team wanted to try and please everyone – there was no easy way to do this but my full time gig become trying to make all this happen. I am sure I failed – but I learned a lot along the way and I think everyone else did to.

Decisions were quickly being made – the product would be called Yahoo Koprol, the product would keep the multi login system although would need to make the Yahoo stuff the real login and we would start throwing some marketing dollars at promoting the product in Indonesia. In theory this was all good but there can be too much of a good thing since the product was still really new. The idea of marketing a hong product might make some sense but the offer on the table was to do a TV commercial for Indonesia. At first reaction one thinks hell yeah – let’s do that but then reality sets in and one realizes that the product may just not be ready for something like a TVC. Here is another decision that needed to be made in that we wanted the marketing help but we honestly wanted it to come later however the TVC budget was there and needing to be used ASAP. Looking back I think we should not have done the TVC since it made us put off some product evolutions to prep for the TVC and we were forced to make some decisions around the features or the marketable features so that the TVC would have the message Yahoo wanted for the region.

Essentially it meant accepting more compromises for what the team would be working on and how the product would be presented by Yahoo to the region. It was all too soon really since we wanted to experiment around product features and we wanted to grow it more organically or within the Yahoo ecosystem prior to doing any hardcore marketing. Yes – the TVC was well done and it made a huge difference in users but it was probably also the wrong kind of user and it meant Koprol was getting a huge amount of attention both within the company and around Indonesia. Other groups at Yahoo were slightly peeved at such a young product getting so much money since marketing money had to be shared around the region and the product was having to deal with rampant growth without the time to work on engagement and making it a better product. It was a mass tradeoff that in my mind wasn’t worth the hassles.

This began the journey for what ultimately started to cave the entire experiment – Koprol was now expected to be the hero product for the region with the idea that market it enough and it will be big rather than building the best product and figuring out how to make it something the region desires versus flogging it. This is actually a typically Yahoo dilemma since there are ways between marketing dollars, PR and the front page to unleash a firehose on something within or outside of Yahoo that will result in mass traffic but won’t king make something that is not ready or is not a good product. Koprol now had the firehose but it really needed more time to mature first.

The Black Box from the developer perspective

~ michael_msft ~ 1 Comment

This is a great post :: http://stratechery.com/2014/black-box-strategy/

WHY TV IS SO ATTRACTIVE
As I’ve written multiple times, the scarcest resource for consumer tech companies, especially ad-supported ones, is user attention. There are only so many minutes in the day, and their consumption is zero-sum: a moment spent doing activity A is not spent doing activity B, and then that moment is gone.

Meanwhile, TV continues to monopolize a significant amount of that user attention. Although digital products have overtaken the amount of time spent on TV, primarily due to the accretive time spent on smartphones, the absolute time spent on TV has remained stubbornly persistent at about four-and-a-half hours per day per U.S. adult (source).

That four-and-a-half hours really is the gold at the end of the rainbow for tech companies: just over the next hill/technical hurdle, yet never actually attainable.

TV really is a cool spot to work in – or video to be more blunt. However what really annoys me is that every article from a tech angle is normally very US centric or US content centric. Of course there is a reason for that – America is where the best content is coming from, where the most ad dollars are and where most of the tech companies playing in the space reside. No argument there but the world is not just America and some of us are playing in the video space from other parts of the world with the hopes of attacking the global stage.

I won’t do a Spuul sales job here but just state that we are global and we are doing it from Singapore. Not easy but fun.

So the article breaks down the TV battle by naming the dominant players who are hacking on the problem. What is telling to me is what or who is not listed – Smart TV’s. I think in theory if you are skating to where the puck is going then possibly you can leave them out but if you are dealing with the video space today you can’t. They exist and users want to see your app there on whatever Smart TV they have but boy, oh boy what a mess. I don’t want to bash here but we know why most of them are not listed as players for the future – they are not going to make it in the future. Their ecosystems are just brutal – they want a cut of payments but they don’t have payment engines. They want a cut of ad revenue but they don’t have ad ecosystems. They have brutally ancient build and deploy systems that look like the early web development days. Frankly – they build shitty software and they are at risk of just going away or being dumb glass. They could fix it but it doesn’t seem like they want to.

Moving down the list we get into Apple TV:

I agree in that this is the one to watch – I don’t say this due to apple fanboyism but mostly cause it works well, they distribute internationally and for developers this stuff really is mostly magic. It just works. The work we go through to get chromecast to work is night and day when it comes to Apple TV which is dead simple. Apple has room for improvement though. They need to get into carrier billing, they need to open up their stuff for the rental market, and they need to open up Apple TV to apps. I don’t see all this happening but it would be awesome.

Amazon:

I don’t have a fire to play with so I can’t say much. Usually with Amazon though their international focus is lacking but when it comes to being open and such they do a good job. Since Amazon has video I find working with them tough because they favor their stuff and then America – but for them to win I think they need more content players on the box. I think if Amazon could make the fire really awesome for developers it would help but that remains to be seen.

Google:

What can I say but keeping up with Google and TV stuff is challenging. There was google tv the web based stack, then the Android 3.2 made for tv stuff, then chromecast and now supposedly a new Android TV. Very hard unless you have insider status to get good info here. They favor America for content and partners and their international stuff is opaque. But the hardest part with Google is they compete with all of us using Youtube, they reward piracy and they make it hard to want to go deep with them but you must go deep with them. There is no choice. On the plus side they have a better ecosystem for developing, they have some carrier payments, they are being open about other payments in android apps and they tend to try and break down the incumbents. We see this with adx, chromecast and the like – so Google is evil but you must work with them on some levels. Android is huge – bottom line. I hope Android TV is killer, truly open and Google courts international developers at some point.

Roku:

Roku is always the one I find interesting in this matrix – first off they are only in America and UK. Of course big markets but it can’t stack up to the other global players in any regard. Worse though is since being invested in by DISH the entire international content library is controlled by DISH. So if someone like Spuul wants to get on Roku we have to go via DISH who usually says no cause they have their own international content packages that they foist onto Roku. So when it comes to Roku being a player – I say not until the DISH deal is done. Roku is one of those funny things that purports to want to give the best experience to users but is really no different than a cable company deciding what you get and what you don’t. Roku claims now to be gaining ground by getting into all the TV’s but I don’t buy it. They should have opened up when they had the chance and gone big – now I think google and amazon will have their way with them.

Microsoft:

Oh what could have been. To me they should have created something akin to the media center PC by creating a cheaper version of the XBOX just for the TV but they wanted TV and Games – both suffered. Now they appear to be tilting back to the gamers which means the TV will suffer. XBOX is cool but MSFT has to step up their game or build a home entertainment to rival the others. I will say this about them though – working with them is getting easier and they are trying hard to build stuff for media companies. If they open up playready DRM more and really cloudify the DRM plumbing then they could become a platform for streaming companies. Time will tell.

All in all the streaming world is booming but to me it is very US centric and I am waiting to see who will change it or maybe it can’t be changed but if so then I will be watching what the international players do more than the US centric ones since the playbook seems pretty well known at this point.

Koprol – The Inside Story. Part 4

~ michael_msft ~ 4 Comments

Part 3 :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/03/04/koprol-the-inside-story-part-3/

The process for acquiring Koprol was kind of a chaotic one at best. For my part all I could do is step aside and let the corp development team work their magic. I was involved in helping to complete the technical due diligence process and to act as a chaperone for all the comings and goings to the Koprol team. I was not involved in any of the deal negotiations at all since that is the responsibility of the corp dev team and by design the people agreeing to the tech or the initial product desire are not involved. This is to keep it from getting personal and to make sure there is no funny business.

One of the big worries was how much strain the acquisition would put on such a small company since the needs and wants of the Yahoo deal could easily put too many requirements on the small team. My singular worry was that in the event the acquisition did not go through how would Koprol survive? This one was tough cause the due diligence process and the post acquisition integration needs were already keeping the senior management quite busy but the rank and file needed to keep working like nothing would happen. So my goal, not sure I kept it, was to try and stay close enough to keep the acquisition moving forward and to help mitigate any issues while encouraging the team to keep building according to their plans and goals. Of course I was in and out of their office all the time and was talking to the management team daily. There was much to do in both prepping for the acquisition and planning for post acquisition activities.

At this point the process of closing the acquisition was in place and it was just going to take time on the due diligence side plus working through the negotiation and legal process. So in other words I sat back and let the corp dev machine do their thing. We had lawyers, integration specialist, security specialists and even had the Yahoo APAC marketing team working on the acquisition message plus post acquisition marketing. Even the outside PR companies were brought in – will talk about the post acquisition press plans later. It felt pretty incredible but also scary as shit since anything could go wrong and of course something did.

This is something never mentioned in the press or the public story cause no one was suppose to talk about it, it nakedly exposes how big companies are so messed up, but as we neared the due date we suddenly lost our core sponsor. To be clear the due date is the CFO of Yahoo being presented with all the info, the price, the plans and then deciding at the moment to sign or to bail. My feeling was as we neared this point there was no bailing out but turns out even at this juncture it is quite easy to not close the deal.

As I stated in the beginning the person running product at the time and who also was overseeing the IGTF was the sponsor of the deal. Without a sponsor there is no deal but I never really thought about what would happen if prior to closing the deal we would lose our sponsor. I don’t blame our sponsor at all – life goes on and people leave companies and at that point more people were leaving Yahoo than ever. Of course the sponsor did the best he could to transition the deal and to make sure that the CFO knew what was going on but unfortunately at big organizations the sponsor is key and without the sponsor deals generally just die.

I remember the call with trepidation – all of us involved with deal, on the line from various corners of the world with the CFO making a case that the deal was almost concluded, the IGTF would go on, the corp dev team was still for the deal but that yes – we lost the sponsor. Shit. Already I was coming to grips with how to tell Koprol and how to unwind something that was months in the works. I was a nervous wreck. The Indonesian country manager and I were discussing how to tell the market if the news leaked out that we tried to buy Koprol but pulled out knowing that no matter what we would say the market might paint us as the big evil company. Keep in mind, as stated before, Yahoo already tried to by one Indonesian company but pulled out for various legit reasons.

What can I say other than I am very thankful that at the time the APAC Yahoo management, who used to carry a lot of power, decided to lobby heavily to keep the deal alive. They had plenty of good reasons – Yahoo could use a good SEA story, Indonesia was (is) a hotspot and the ramifications of a failed deal might be worse than a small deal, closed, possible going south due to a lack of sponsorship. In theory APAC stepped in to play the sponsor role. It took a lot of convincing and unfortunately the downside was having to agree to some APAC metrics that now forced us to push things a lot more than the original IGTF plans. In hindsight this is another juncture that probably influenced the overall outcome.

We did the deal with the devil. Deal was closing but now we had to push things harder and faster than what made logical sense.

Part 5 :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/04/27/koprol-the-inside-story-part-5/

Koprol – The Inside Story. Part 2

~ michael_msft ~ 6 Comments

Part 1 :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/02/28/koprol-the-inside-story-part-1/

The path a company takes with the products and services they offer to customers is highly dependent on who is running the organization coupled with how the organization is constructed. At Yahoo this is no different but in my experience it might actually suffer a bit by how the company is organized at its core. This is an important topic to cover since this ultimately influenced how Koprol was managed – it also points to some of the core issues with Yahoo in general.

I must confess that I am 2 years plus out of Yahoo now with many of my good Yahoo friends already working at other companies. So my inside knowledge is obviously much reduced. This means I am going on what I personally experienced but from all outside appearances the overall structure of Yahoo has not changed much in the last few years apart from better food and phones.

Yahoo primarily is broken down into 3 distinct regions – America, Europe and Asia but there used to be an Emerging Markets group that covered Southeast Asia, Middle East and India separately. The HQ for that group was in Singapore which at the time made Yahoo one of the biggest players in the region and with a big head count in Singapore. What this meant was their was bizdev, legal, sales and even some product folks were aligned especially with the needs of that region. This can be seen as both a good thing and as a bad thing depending on the angle since this group would focus entirely on growth but at the same time the Sunnyvale HQ was not always supportive of the separate region. I think it was for the most part a good thing since it meant the team would move fast and try to evolve quickly enough to keep the region growing but Sunnyvale wanted to start reeling things in to make the company function better as a global unit. This was a tough time for the region cause it meant that SEA and India would now fall under APAC and the ME went to EMEA. Tumultuous times all around.

Once this decision was put in place the Singapore HQ started to let folks go and move people around to fit the new world order. This actually was a good start to get the region receiving more attention from HQ but it also meant a lot of changes. Looking back I don’t think this transition went all that well and might even be a good marker for the overall downward trend for Yahoo in some of these markets. However in a lot of places the downward trend was already happening anyway but I think what made the old organization unique was the ability to act quickly and make a lot of independent decisions. That autonomy was now gone.

For Yahoo Southeast Asia it makes sense to give you some overview of this org and the countries it operated in since this lead a lot to my decisions for where to focus my efforts on looking for small acquisitions.

Yahoo HQ for SEA was Singapore but also home to Yahoo Singapore. This group was a pretty good size since the revenue from Singapore was the largest when I was there even though the audience size was the smallest. This is important to note since it always made for an awkward situation of having to decide where to focus resources – on an area where the users are but not the dollars or where the money is.

Yahoo Malaysia was another proper office that had a small editorial team and sales. Yahoo Malaysia had lots of room for growth but there was always the issue of how much to localize and how to find the right mix to attract the local users. I didn’t spend much time there at all so I can’t really speculate as to how well it was or is doing but it was never really booming for Yahoo.

Yahoo Thailand was never really an office. Used to be some Thai folks would help to manage it from Singapore with some Thai content but it never really grew. When I was there I helped a few times, I didn’t lead the effort but was supportive of it, to try and push harder in Thailand. Anyone could look at the stats for growth of the internet and mobile internet and make a case for trying to take some market share. Problem was MSFT practically owned some of the market and Google was quickly taking over the rest of it. At some point in time Thailand was very Yahoo friendly with people advertising with their Yahoo email addresses or their Yahoo messenger ID’s but those days were long gone. Yahoo couldn’t make a valid case for trying to go back in and win. Yahoo Thailand looks like now it just points to Yahoo.com – so essentially they have given up on the place.

Yahoo Vietnam was one of the early success stories of going in with a local office and hitting it hard. The numbers looked good and the growth was good for a while but this came with it’s own complexities due to the rules in Vietnam. I won’t get into it much cause I am not a legal person but essentially once you setup shop in Vietnam with feet on the ground you are subjected to some level of government scrutiny and intervention. This makes is hard to really try and go big in the region. Yahoo’s work in news/entertainment is labor intensive and requires localization so it means that to build a great business around that you have to be as local as possible but that also means you are competing with truly local companies who might be willing to do what a multinational cannot. I will leave it at that. So Yahoo did quite well there but suffered some black eyes with the closing of some very local products and just dealing with trying to be a big local presence. At some point one could argue Yahoo owned Vietnam with products like Yahoo 360, messenger and email but I am sure those days are gone.

Yahoo Indonesia was another place the local org chose to focus on due to the size of the market, the relative openness around news and the fact that Yahoo seemed to get a warm reception from the population around Yahoo products. So Yahoo Indonesia became another decent size local office and there was even a lot of attention from Sunnyvale. Revenue wise though Indonesia was a tough nut to crack at the time. High user growth but low revenue makes for interesting times. At the present time I think Yahoo is fairing well in Indonesia but has lost a lot of employees and I think the competitors are beginning to cement a solid lead over Yahoo in many areas.

Yahoo Philippines also was a large local market with a decent size local office. This country was largely getting the same treatment as Indonesia since the brand was doing well there and the country was big. It had some of the same issues of needing to grow revenue but also to try and just grow the user base. The news/entertainment market was vibrant and fit well with the Yahoo suite of products. From what I remember, like Indonesia, the growth was good but Yahoo was beginning to lose share in some core products cause there was now competition in the marketplace where there was not before.

So with that background in mind I figured I would focus my efforts for scouring the region in Indonesia and the Philippines. Vietnam was out because it was too sketchy to put an engineering org there due to lots of legal issues. Personally I had a hard time connecting with Malaysia and just didn’t feel equipped to make a difference there. Singapore felt like it was going to be an expensive place to acquire and didn’t check the boxes for a place to expand engineering long term. Thailand was out cause we just didn’t have a big enough presence and with all my personal experience there – I just don’t trust Bangkok as a place to invest in. Look at current events to get a sense of that. I love the country but would I convince a large multinational to go all in – not with a straight face.

I even considered ways to look into Cambodia and Laos but the general consensus was Yahoo wasn’t going to try and expand the region. Keep in mind Yahoo was known for doing joint ventures to expand in some regions – this is how Yahoo Australia and Yahoo Japan were created. There was some people at the time who felt Yahoo should have done more of this. I tend to agree even though it is hard to create the joint ventures. Yahoo can offer brand, technology, and consulting – the other side of the venture brings local expertise, money and government connections. Many of us felt Yahoo could have pushed into a lot more countries with this model but it is probably too late now.

Small side journey – Yahoo was very early in all these regions and probably could have been a lot bigger if it tried to buy or build more things locally. I think this is the crux of the issue with the emergent markets versus the stable or developed markets. Yahoo’s core product suite wasn’t really appealing to the emerging markets young generation and if the region was left alone quite possibly the strategy would have been to build products, acquire, partner or white label whatever was needed to try and win the region over for the long haul. Instead what become the strategy was to take whatever Sunnyvale made and try to shoehorn it into the region. Not sure anyone can answer what would have been the best thing to do but if it were up to me – I would have probably tried to tweak for the local market as much as possible. This is what Yahoo did in Taiwan and for the most part it worked however the strategy stopped at some point and it looks like the market share in Taiwan is falling. I don’t think it will be like Korea where Yahoo made a full retreat but I doubt it will return to its former dominant position.

Deciding whether the global command and control technique of building products for the globe is better than localizing for the region is an age old question. If one looks at facebook or google you see very little localization apart from language and for those companies it has worked. Yahoo for a long time was straddling both fences of localization and global products but not doing either well. It seems under the new regime it is going to be back to global products with language and content localization. It remains to be seen what will turn Yahoo around at this point. My opinion is the the current management is mostly focused on the USA and to some extent Europe while waiting to capitalize on the Alibaba IPO. Apart from the core aspects of Asia it seems me Yahoo is now withering on the vine some in places like SEA and India.

Part 3 :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/03/04/koprol-the-inside-story-part-3/

Koprol – The Inside Story. Part 1

~ michael_msft ~ 4 Comments

What kicked this all off :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/02/27/thinking-about-koprol-2-0-2/

I think enough time and emotions have passed that now is the moment to start writing some of the story about Koprol. I have had two larger than life moments in my tech career. The first was being a systems (sales) engineer at Weblogic which eventually got bought by BEA Systems, later acquired by Oracle. I still am in touch with many of the people I took that journey with and much of that success helped me arrive to where I am today.

Small side trip – karma, whether you believe in it or not – is very real. What I mean is the relationships you foster in your career with people you work with or encounter while working will inevitably lead to being useful or destructive to your present career. I fondly remember where I was an ass when working or where I was being a nice person. I should have been nice more but fortunately the relationships I made at Weblogic are very much intact and basically lead to my short career at Yahoo.

I need to, at this point, give you some more background about myself. Also I have decided that the best way to tell the inside story is to only name myself. There are so many people involved in this story but I don’t want to point fingers, celebritize, or ruffle any more feathers than I already have at this point. The thesis for writing about Koprol is to possibly explain some of what I was trying to do and to hopefully share the experiences of acquiring and trying to make something big out of an emerging markets product and team.

A slight bit about me. I was in Thailand for about five years trying to make a go of being a non-techy. Let’s just say I jettisoned from Hong Kong and the enterprise software scene to see if I could make it as pub owner who dabbled in tech. Well – take a look at what is happening in Bangkok now and put yourself back a few years to when this first happened but imagine trying to run a business in that very same climate. Let’s just say I didn’t do to well and realized that I was better off being a techy.

I learned a lot about myself and other people, which I think is why I am better at what I do today – I am also not afraid anymore. You might ask what that means but I will just simply say that I think a lot of us might be afraid of what people think or are afraid of the powers that be. After my years in the trenches of the pubs of Bangkok I am just not afraid of the normal work world or the startup scene. I have a lot more confidence now.

So there I was in Thailand and needing a job. I put out my feelers and turned the bat light back on. Sure enough it was the people that I knew from my Weblogic days who helped me out. I was out of work for five years and suddenly I had a few bites. I hopped on the plane to Singapore and within a few days had a written offer from Yahoo. Some very special people in Sunnyvale and Singapore took a chance on me and I am forever grateful to those people. I was back in the game and loving it. Great title, awesome pay and a charter to try and help Yahoo win back some audience and developers. Of course this was a doomed mission cause Yahoo was doomed (I learned this later) but I will save that for another thread. I didn’t care so much cause I had a line to Sunnyvale and I was looking at all of Southeast Asia as my playground. Rocking.

How does this all lead to Koprol? Good question.

On my numerous trips to Sunnyvale, Yahoo HQ, I happened to get connected to a very cool team called the IGTF. I am sure the team involved made up their team name just like I made up my title – Director of Global Tech Initiatives. The International Growth Task Force had an awesome charter. They traveled around the globe studying other products and trends to see if they could figure out ways to get Yahoo’s core products growing again and to see if there might be new ideas to experiment with. They had a list of interesting trends or concepts that they shared with me to see if I could spot any companies in SEA that might fit one of the trends they were focusing on.

One of the trends was:

People/Location/Conversations.

Ding!

So with that need in my head and the team willing to sponsor a small acquisition, my job of running around SEA talking about YDN (Yahoo Developer Network) suddenly was more interesting. Since the hope was I could find a small company in SEA that might jumpstart Yahoo’s work around – People/Location/Conversations.

Part 2 :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/03/01/koprol-the-inside-story-part-2/

Thinking about Koprol 2.0

~ michael_msft ~ 2 Comments

//storify.com/dreampipe/thinking-about-koprol-2-0.js?border=false&header=false&more=false

Is Path slowly diminishing in global relevance?

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I will admit to being a fan of Path but I used to use it more than I do now. I have no specific reason for it but I tend to open it less and less. However when this latest issue happened, http://en.dailysocial.net/post/outrage-over-announcement-that-path-accepted-investment-from-bakrie-group – one of the first things my Mom said when I was complaining about Bakrie was that my Dad would be bummed if I started to use Path less. My Dad uses it to keep tabs on all of us and to see pics of his grandkids. Basically this is the only reason I use Path. My Dad is not on Facebook and Facebook is so complicated these days that a product like Path serves a very real purpose.

Problem is Path has become a social mobile network with privacy being less important than it was originally was. Usually now when I look at Path I just see a mini version of what people are doing on Facebook. I have taken to removing anyone that I don’t want to share moments with and I probably need to prune it down even more.

Now add the Bakrie thing into the mix and I feel less enthusiastic about Path. Long story short is Path raised another round and part of the money came from the well known corrupt Bakrie family. To me this means one of two things. Path is not doing well and they knew Bakrie was a mess but they just want the money. I tend to think this is the reason. The other reason could be Path and it’s execs were not aware that the Bakrie family has a bad reputation and just didn’t realize the ramifications. I find this hard to believe since a simple google search will quickly show you what the world and Indonesians think of the Bakrie family. Not well regarded.

My take is Path is blowing through tons of money on advertising and on growing. However I think they are growing in pockets or specific regions and the global appeal of the product is waning. Taking money from Indonesian investors and focusing on Indonesia only further cements that view in my mind since if Path was growing well globally they would not need an Indonesia specific focus. My point is Path shot for global dominance and didn’t make it. So now they are retrenching some to grow where they are strong but if that country is Indonesia it would mean that Path is stepping down a bit cause Indonesia for a company that was on a global path is not the great prize – it is just another large country to add to the list. Meaning the monetization is low and the bigger they get in specific countries, like Indonesia, further diminishes the global appeal because a product becomes too focused on a country versus the globe.

I could be all wrong on this but I feel Path is struggling to find a global footprint so they are beginning to focus more on where they are having success. That to me is not what Path set out to do. Now add in the Bakrie thing and it all looks a little desperate.

Or perhaps it is just all about greed. Which leads me to think that Path and Bakrie make good bedfellows.

In the meantime I moved Path off of my home screen.

Video: 3 Growth “Hacks”: The Secrets to Driving Massive User Growth

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

This is an awesome video:

http://growthhackers.com/videos/3-growth-hacks-secrets-massive-user-growth/

It’s obvious Josh has a wealth of experience and was able to hone is craft at the beginning of some amazing companies. I bet sitting across from him at a pitch meeting is tough – he knows his shit. I have watched this once and I am planning to again while taking some notes.

However – it seems to me a lot of his ideas stem from working on social networks. I always struggle to see how best to apply theories like these when the product is not a social product. It may be easy to think everything is social or uses social but not everything at its core is a social network. FB, LinkedIn and twitter are.

Don’t get me wrong – there are ideas to apply that might help any product but I am grinding on how to tease the best out of this on a non social network product. Not as easy. Let me define what that means to be clear – yes someone can share something to a social network but it may not be that users see each other or each other’s activity in every product. So there may be users but they are not networked within the product.

It leads to me some thinking – maybe everything needs a little of the network poured into it – even if your product is not a network.

Back to grinding…