Category: Singapore

iCarsclub :: Review

~ michael_msft ~ 16 Comments

I have been quite vocal about my experience with http://www.icarsclub.com because I was looking forward to taking advantage of it in Singapore. People outside of Singapore may not know that owning a car in Singapore is for rich folks or people who don’t mind 1/3 of everything they make going to towards their car. I see in my own condo building, not high end, very expensive cars that look to be rarely driven. I am sure these folks are car poor cause if I had that kind of money I would probably be living in a bigger pad. In Singapore some locals choose to live cheap but own a car – I guess some sort of status symbol of sorts. All that being said though, it is nice to be able to get in a car once in a while, especially when one has a family. Sometimes the public transit thing is just a lot of work if one wants to roam around town on errands or go somewhere slightly further than normal – like the Kranji countryside for example. Taxis are okay in Singapore but if you were to use one all day it would be cheaper to rent a car – even UberX is awesome (prices in Singapore are the same as a taxi right now) but yet using Uber all day would still be more than renting a car.

So the idea that I can share someone else’s car for a day at reasonable rates without the hassle of dealing with a rental car company is appealing. Enter iCarsclub. Find a car near you, rent it online, go drive it and return it. Sounds great but what I discovered is the promise is so much better than the execution. I will add I successfully rented a car yesterday and all in all was a great experience but the issue is dealing with the service and the company – not the driving experience.

The way it works with iCarsclub is to go online to their site and submit the docs you need to get verified to rent cars. No biggie – it says it takes 3 days. Right. It actually took 3 weeks to get approved which I assume is just cause there is either a backlog or no one working on it. The frustrating part is when I used their support to check in on things – there was never any reply. To this day actually not one support email has been answered. Then I took to twitter – no replies. Left a message on their Facebook page – no replies. Again – to this day there has never been any replies to any of my social media messages. None.

Approved and ready to rock I started to find a car. The selection is actually pretty good and I was surprised to find some pretty cool cars but I was looking for cheap and no too far away from me. This is where I found the service to be badly implemented in that it looks like pretty much all cars are always available but what happens is that the owners of the cars are not blocking their own usage. It only shows when someone else has rented the car. For the first car I rented, which means you have to pay all the fees associated with it – will discuss the payment stuff more later, everything appeared to work fine. Yet moments after reserving the car and paying for it the system would sms tell me the owner rejected my request. Of course being the ass that I am I would sms the owner back to ask why – first owner said his car was in use every Sunday and I asked him why he didn’t block it as so. He said he wasn’t aware of needing to do that. So the owners are just accepting or rejecting based on their schedule versus updating the system to say the car is blocked. Lame. What’s lamer is I as the user can’t leave a review on that car since one can only leave reviews when you have rented the car already. This is silly.

So minutes later I found another car, I got the refund from the last attempt which is not a refund but a credit to the rental account. This is not a huge deal but when you get rejected a lot this could be frustrating but it seems there is a way to force a refund but I didn’t try it. The next rental went the same way – the user rejected it mins later. I again sms’d them and the owner said they were using the car for personal use. Again I asked why they didn’t block it and they didn’t reply. It seems the owners are not at all aware of how to use the system properly.

Finally I rented a car and everything was confirmed for Sunday at 2pm. Around Sunday at 12 I sms’d the owner to confirm pickup spot. Owner replied that he had canceled the rental due to car trouble. Did I get a cancellation message – no. Owner said to call iCarsclub but I didn’t have a number. No where in all the emails and sms’s did I see a number. While this was happening someone called me from iCarsclub. A no caller ID call that I almost didn’t pick up – I don’t get why they can’t use caller ID so that one can at least see a number and call back. I answered and they said they were canceling the car and the money would be back in my account and that I would need to find another car.

Since I finally had someone on the line I decide to go all in and ask what the fuck was wrong with them.

Let me summarize some of this:

Q/A –

Why is no one responding to FB or twitter :: They don’t think they need to reply to social media. Plus they are busy opening China.

Why does no one respond to the online help system (powered by Zopim) :: They never got any emails from me. (I sent 4).

Why do the owners constantly cancel versus blocking their cars :: They probably don’t know how or are lazy.

Why can’t we complain in same way about these owners :: They don’t want any bad feedback about owners since they may leave the system.

Isn’t the users renting just as important as the owners when it comes to service :: No comment.

I tried to dig in more but the guy obviously didn’t know much and said he would try to find another car and sms where it was. I still needed to go online and book it.

Which I did and the request was confirmed by the owner. He sms’d me to say where is was, same as what the system was saying, and that it would be unlocked with the keys in the glove box. Now this is where it is weird in that with a country like Singapore this might work but in most countries I would want that car locked until it unlocked for me. How else would you know you are safe or that someone did not tamper with the car resulting in some damage that I might have to pay for. For this transaction it was on a nice street and in broad daylight but who would want to rent a car at night that was unlocked for example? Not me. This is where I am not sure if they don’t have the tech to remote unlock and lock stuff or if this is just how the owner does it. It worked in this situation but I don’t think this is scalable or would work outside of ultra safe countries like Singapore.

I grabbed the car and settled in. One thing I forgot was to get my own cash card for ERP and parking – I don’t remember this being in the tutorial but is pretty important in Singapore since pretty hard to get around without it. Fortunately I could stop into any gas station and buy one. Small Singapore formality that cannot be forgotten. I used the car almost all day and even extended it by 30 mins cause we were late getting home.

The return consisted of parking it back on the street in that same place and putting the keys back where I found them. Of course the car was unlocked since that is how I found it. I did use the system to end the time and stop the insurance but this did not involve remote locking it. Once again I see where this could be problematic – what if someone stole it right after me or took something from it. My time would be marked as over but would it come back on me in any way? The system should do remote lock and unlock or something more secure.

It cost me bout 85 SGD for everything. I don’t know how that compares to a car rental – I need to check but my experience with any car rental is this was less hassle. All of our trips on public transit would obviously be much less but I don’t think we could have covered the same ground by bus and train in the same time period. Taxi’s or uber covering all the same ground would be much more. A combo of transit and uber would be much less and doable but still the hassle factor is much higher.

So this worked for me. I got to use a car for a part of the day. We will most likely do it again and I don’t think there is another option besides iCarsclub but this product could use a lot of help. On the payments since this service suffers from what a lot of services in Singapore suffer from – they only accept PayPal for credit cards via PayPal. No drama since credit cards are the norm here but the process is so cumbersome and web only. Payments in Singapore for online services need some competition from the likes of Strip and others ASAP.

ICarsclub needs to hire some real product folks to make this work.

Consumer services update – iCarsClub, veggies, and broken iPhone 5

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

So after about 2 weeks http://www.icarsclub.com finally approved my application for their service. I think it normally takes 3 days or at least that is what they say. Still no replies to my support emails or tweets. A fail then on all levels for customer service – what if I start using the service? How do I reach them?

On the vegetable front I tried this place :: http://www.greencircle.com.sg. In general it worked well but I think they could communicate a little better. I did the online order form which sends you a confirmation email. After that nothing happened but then my wife rang me to say someone left a box of veggies at our door. We didn’t know when they were coming and yes, get this – I never paid them. Still need to work that out. Veggies are good though and I will use them again. I might even pay them too. 😉

Last but not least my little girl dropped my iPhone 5 face down on the train yesterday and shattered the glass. I hunted around for someone to repair it near where I live and found this guy :: http://mworks.weebly.com. He quoted (130 sgd) over the phone and I went right over. Fixed it in like 20 mins and put a nice screen cover on it. Very friendly guy that Vincent and does awesome work. Even corrected one of the dents on the side of the phone so the new glass could lay down all the way into the phone. I may take him my bashed iPad mini and my other iPad with cracked glass. Highly recommend his work.

back to work…

Consumer services in Singapore…

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

I tweeted this yesterday mostly out of frustration with trying out a consumer service here in Singapore with horrible customer service. Looking at you http://www.icarsclub.com/. I signed up over a week ago – about 2 weeks now – for their iCarDriver service where you get access to automated short term car sharing. My app is still processing:

iCarDriver
To rent and keyless enter nearby cars affordably
PROCESSING

Okay – no drama. I user their online customer support email thingy twice. No replies.

I tweet at them in a friendly, like is anywhere there kind of way, and no response. Nothing. How does a consumer company not answer any emails or tweets? Appalling.

Seems they have not tweeted in 30 days. How is that possible?

Check out the tweet search about them – just all stuff about funding and nothing about customers, traction or customer service.

Yet this is a company recently funded – https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/car-sharing-startup-icarsclub-raises-035538613.html

Maybe they are just annoyed by me, wannabe paying customer, asking for help. I just don’t get it.

But this brings me back to my other feeling about the local ecosystem coverage. There is not much depth to it. It is announcements about starting/funding, then the buzz about someone doing well and then the general industry coverage. There is not a lot about actual reviews of the service, report cards on how companies are doing and a little, but not much about the failing companies – how they failed and what the peeps at the failed places are now doing. I am not bashing the coverage or the people that cover the scene – just highlighting what I think is missing.

Will anyone with a bigger voice than me look into the iCarsClub weirdness? Probably not.

Next I will look into one of these organic vegetable services.

How to become a product manager

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Just got the chance to check this out :: http://www.slideshare.net/isouweine/how-to-become-a-product-manager

I had the distinct pleasure of working with Isaac some at Yahoo as well as just chatting with him a bunch when he lived in Singapore. And yes – I have missed him a ton since he left.

It’s a great deck and one that I think about a lot since at Spuul I don’t have any PM’s but someday we might. I always wonder how a startup grows into acquiring or growing PM’s and how I would transition over to letting them manage things instead of the way we do it now.

I think a longer post needs to be written about the PM in a startup versus the PM in an established company. I am sure Isaac has lots to share there given his time at Yahoo and his new tenure at Frank and Oak.

Thanks for sharing Isaac!

JFDI 2014A

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I am back to trying to focus my efforts outside of Spuul in one place again this year – which is JFDI batch 2014A.

http://jfdi.asia/portfolio/

Last Thursday I met with with a few from the list but I think some have already changed their names. I will wait to see who I end up spending the most time with since it is usually up to the teams to ping me for follow up.

For now I have had the most conversations with http://storyroll.co/ and http://stylehunt.com/ . Storyroll is fascinating since it is some guys from Lithuania coming to singapore, frying their asses off, to make a go of the program. I figure I can help a bit given my video and consumer product background. For stylehunt I am always partial to the Thais and it turns out I am from the same part of the world as one of the founders which is cool.

We shall see who continues to bug me as the program rolls on and I will see what kind of impact I can have. Exciting stuff!

Before I get to my tiny advice column I will recall the dinner we had with Werner Vogels and some of what we learned from talking to him. The key takeaway I had was that Amazon is still lots of small teams working on lots of projects. As big as Amazon is today the small team ethos is still going strong. I dig that. The other thing Werner mentioned was how the team still writes the marketing one pager, the FAQ and the press release before any code is written. I love this. I should try to do this at Spuul as well.

It’s good advice to focus on what you want the customer to experience and then work backwards to make it happen. I am sure there are tons of ways to do this or to manage the process but the basics are pretty clear. Don’t code or draw pictures first. Take the time to write out what you hope to build before building.

Obviously this may not work for everyone who has already started making something or is in the program however I think for those who are in the JFDI program there is another way to handle this.

This is the advice I was giving out on Thursday to the companies I met individually with. I have seen a few batches go though the system and generally if one can keep themselves organized and productive leading up to investor day then the odds of success, as far as the program is concerned, are much higher. Fall apart, lose track of time, bicker, try to build too much, or lose sight of the product – will lead you to a bad investor day.

One could hope for breakout success, killer metrics, a sick viral loop or a crazy amount of pr – but pinning your success on the things that may not happen is not very smart. If these things happen consider them a bonus but instead focus on the event. The investor day. Imagine yourself or your team up there presenting, have a vision for what you want to say, make a few slides now that will be the boilerplate for that final day and focus on projecting now what you will accomplish on that stage.

Then work backwards to make it happen. Manage each week precisely enough, don’t go crazy about it, to ensure that you are meeting your weekly milestones that will add up to your successful investor day.

As a member of an accelerator program you are in a time compression chamber. Manage it will and you will succeed.

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 3

~ michael_msft

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

Open Hack Day is probably the event that lead me to looking more seriously around the region for interesting companies – having never really spent time looking for companies to acquire I can’t say there is some rulebook or process to follow. I am sure others have some but in this case I was simply looking at the list from the IGTF team and thinking about areas of growth for Yahoo. With that in mind it was just a matter of getting out there and looking. People might laugh when they read this since they might be expecting some great process or process driven method but I was just planning on keeping my eyes and ears open since I was not expecting to ever do an acquisition in SEA. I won’t get into the specifics but Yahoo had tried to acquire in the region before but it didn’t work out for various reasons. So the expectation was that finding the right company and the right deal was probably never going to happen anyway. I was just excited to even be thinking about trying to do it.

On a side note – lots of companies in some parts of the region tend to have funky company setups or have not always been a legit company which can make an acquisition by a public American company almost impossible.

Yahoo Open Hack Day, http://developer.yahoo.com/hackday/, is a long standing tradition in the company but something I never followed until joining Yahoo. I was sent to Open Hack Day New York within my first few weeks of starting work with Yahoo. It was awesome to be on the road again, in New York and seeing lots of old friends. The idea was to study the event some to see how we could pull one off in SEA since I think at that time only India and Taiwan had hosted one. So at some point during 2009 it was decided that Indonesia would be the place for Open Hack Day Southeast Asia and that we would need to host it in Jakarta.

Wheels were now in motion.

One of my ideas for Open Hack Day was to showcase a few local products/companies who would have integrated with some of Yahoo’s Open APIs but the problem was most of these API’s were not that useful in markets like Indonesia. I won’t waste your time by digging into the Yahoo APIs or the pitch we had for developers since it wasn’t that great but we did have a lot users and most of our users would sign into Yahoo to use Yahoo services. So offering developers a chance to use Yahoo’s login credentials and get some press from Yahoo was not a bad thing for a startup.

So in prep for Open Hack Day I ran (mostly by plane) around the region trying to drum up interest in the event, helped to run a contest (managed by e27) to bring a developer from each country in the region to the event and evangelized startups to try and build something cool on Yahoo that I would highlight at the event. The idea was to find a cool startup (or 2 if possible), most likely in Indonesia so they didn’t have to travel, and use that company to show off the Yahoo APIs. I just felt like using a local to talk to locals made more sense than having someone from Yahoo do it. Of course lots of Yahoo folks fly in for the event to offer ground support but I was hoping to show off a local company more than show off Yahoo.

Given that in Indonesia and the Philippines we had a country manager and local teams, it made it easy to talk to the local Yahoo people to get some intros into small companies that they found interesting for whatever reason or another. Once I had that short list I went to those companies to intro myself, pitch them on Yahoo and lay out my OHD offer. Build something on Yahoo, get up to show others how and get some free press for your startup. That’s all I had to offer folks and for a lot of startups I knew it wasn’t enough to entice them or that they were too busy to bother with it but I wanted to try anyway.

As luck would have it not too many cycles into visiting places I was introduced to the Koprol guys. What can I say other than we just clicked – it was fun to meet them, learn about their product, their staff, their office and their way of looking at the local market. They also loved Yahoo and were just great people to hang out with. We left the meeting with Koprol promising to get back to me soon to see what they could do with the APIs and confirm whats possible to demo. In the back of my mind I was already assuming I had found my local celebs for OHD. I felt an immediate connection to the team, the product and the fanatical user base.

Sure enough the team got back to me to confirm what they could build or fake what I needed and I met with the founders to work out the plan. It is easy enough for anyone to Yahoo, or google, to find out what happened with OHD but looking back I am pretty sure everyone saw the event as a success. I also think Koprol got a nice uplift from it and was being seen as a cool company to talk to in Indonesia. It is important to highlight that OHD did not make Koprol but I think it was good for them and good for Yahoo. Enuff said.

Here is the slide deck from the event: http://www.slideshare.net/daniel.armanto/koprolcom-yahoo

With the event in the can, it was time for me to move on to other things but for some reason I always found myself visiting the Koprol office and staying in touch with the gang. It is through these meetings and hanging out that I started to feel like we should do something more with them but of course it was tough to figure out exactly what. I started asking the local corp development team what they thought, this is a rockstar team based in Singapore managing a lot of the International acquisitions for Yahoo, and was educated on the process for working with companies. Yes – I needed the education because I had no idea what the process would be. I talked to the Bizdev team in Asia and the other product managers to get some sense of what we might be able to do with Koprol. Keep in mind I did not immediately think acquisition but was more open to any working relationship that could benefit both parties.

Ideas could be:

– promoting the product
– integrating the product into some other yahoo product – things like messenger came to mind
– seeing if we could evolve advertising around the product – think deals or location based stuff
– license the product as a yahoo product or whitelabel it

In general the thought was just see if there were any worthwhile possibilities to explore.

So of course I started talking to folks from IGTF and the product team in Sunnyvale. At this time the product team for things like messenger and mail was being run by the same guy who created or at least managed IGTF. The core group around this time was also very connected to one of the top technologist at Yahoo, a VC now, and it wasn’t long before they suggested trying to acquire. The idea was messaging (conversations) was interesting, location is interesting (maps, user generated POIs, location based news) and that Indonesia was interesting. As a side note there was also the theory that Yahoo explore having more engineering outside of the normal India/China offices. At the time, now also gone, was an engineering site in Brazil.

So pretty much in a short period of time the basic idea was to see if we could acquire Koprol since it checked a few boxes for a few teams. I will add though that foursquare envy had nothing to do with this exercise. I, for one, never used foursquare and never really even compared the two products. I saw Koprol as location based conversations and more focused on non smart phones and emerging markets than trying to be like foursquare. I think the Koprol team will tell you they built it before foursquare and were fans of dodgeball. Point being is that the whole idea that Koprol was a backup for a failed foursquare acquisition is comical. I was never privy to the foursquare discussions or can even confirm they happened but I doubt Dennis would work for Yahoo – whatever the price.

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

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/

As ? aims to become the world’s number one Internet services company …

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

A lot of people not in Asia will probably not know who the company representing the question mark is. I myself didn’t really take notice of this company till they bought Viki – just due to the fact that it was a Singapore deal in the video space. Anyone who has ever been to Japan will have heard of Rakuten and of course all around Asia they have been launching various initiatives and buying up companies.

Now they buy Viber for some serious cash.

Where is this going?

This is their statement regarding the Viber deal:

“As Rakuten aims to become the world’s number one Internet services company, this acquisition will enable Rakuten to penetrate new markets with multiple digital content offerings, in combination with its e-commerce and financial services platforms,” the company says.

At first you could just pass that comment off as PR hubris but when you look at who they are buying and if you have ever heard Hiroshi Mikitani talk, one must take the statement somewhat seriously.

Rakuten wants to go global and it looks like they are going to buy and build whatever they need to get there.

I still don’t see the cohesive vision or how all the pieces fit together but for sure they are trying to make it happen.

This is going to be fun to watch.