Reconnecting Series: Arun Thampi
Back in November 2016, the team at NUSEA caught up with Arun Thampi, a National University of Singapore (NUS) Alumni and former NOC Silion Valley student. We talked about what he is working on right now, his journey since his own NOC experience and some advice for the next generation.
Arun Thampi was from the 3rd batch of the prestiguous NUS Overseas Colleges Silicon Valley Programme. He took part in NCSV more than 14 years ago and did his internship at Palm, Inc. as a software engineer. Today, he is the co-founder of Botmetrics, a data analytics and engagement platform for bots. His company is currently based in the Silicon Valley Bay Area.
Arun Thampi came across as a sincere entrepreneur with a clear understanding of what he want to achieve. He was forthright in sharing that clarity in what he wanted to do did not come naturally; he simply took the time and space to discover what he want. Furthermore, his advise on not doing entrepreneurship for entrepreneurship sake brought in a dose of reality check on the otherwise overhyped term. His candid nature was a delight to interview.
Below is the conversation that we had:
Tell us a little about how you came to start Botmetrics here in the Bay Area.
I first moved to the Bay Area about 2 years ago, as part of a team of 3 at a company called Nitrous.IO. We raised USD 7.5 Million from Bessemer Ventures and 500 startups, DFJ, crunch fund and others. Slowly, we grew the team to about 25 people.
I left Nitrous.IO back in December 2014 and switched to working on bots (currently Botmetrics). We started with building a Slack Bot called Nestor.
We had great response after we launched and was even featured on the Slack app store one week after it was launched. More than 2,000 teams and organisations are using it, even very large companies are using it. Yet as we were building Nestor, we realised that analytics and engagement for chatbots is an unsolved problem that no one was tackling. Then, there were many mobile tools but the did not work for chatbots. We found that the problem existed for various chatbot makers as well. Therefore, we pivoted slightly to build a new product called Botmetrics, an analytics and engagement platform for chatbots.
Why have you decided to come to the Bay Area to build your product?
Nitrous.IO came to the Bay Area for 2 reasons: Firstly, Nitrous.IO was a developer platform and it just made sense to be here to leverage on the tech innovation. A simple meetup event has over 100 developers from different companies attending so you are literally speaking to your target audience. This is different from say if you were building a marketing product, you should probably be speaking to agencies in New York.
Secondly, all of our investors are from the US so it was a condition that we are in Silicon Valley as well.
How did the idea for Nitrous.IO and Botmetrics came about?
It mostly came from my own personal experience. I realised that the team was sending a lot of time on messaging (Slack). When I am in consumer mode, I spend a lot of time in Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. At that time when I was working on bots, it was simply still not a thing, not even on slack. But slack had a small trial bot option, so it became clear to me that as this (Slack) picks off, more and more people will use bots and thereafter demand all the other services inside the messenger.
It has since been validated that most Americans now no longer download that many new apps and everyone just download the same set of apps as soon as they get a new phone. It is an app that belongs to Google, Facebook, Uber or food delivery apps. There is a narrow category of apps being downloaded. More people are interacting with services inside social networking or messenger apps. This bet has come true; we see Facebook Messenger announcing that they are investing in a bot messaging platform/service.
Share about a challenge that you faced operating your company.
Getting new talent to join your team is a big one. That was especially difficult because we were complete outsiders and we did not have the connections. We did not study here either. If you studied here you can get your friends to join you or start a company together. Or if you worked in companies here, your ex co- workers can join you. We had no brand in Silicon Valley, unlike in Singapore where we have ties to more successful startups. My co-founder used to be a co-founder of Viki, so we had more of a name back in Singapore and it was easier to recruit.
So how did you tackle this challenge?
We got a bunch of friends (Singaporeans) who were interested to move to the valley, they did not have family obligations and were happy to move here to apply for a work visa. We also started to recruit aggressively here in Silicon Valley and depended on a few remote employees to assist. The good thing was that they truly believed in the product and our vision.
We also leveraged on our VC connections in getting a bunch of business-side individuals to join Nitrous.IO. In fact, my co-founder at Botmetrics was our first business hire at Nitrous.IO. It is what I mentioned; once you worked with people and formed a relationship, you are able to move it into future ventures.
How did your NOC Experience aid you in your entrepreneurial journey?
At that time in NOC, i had no ambitions to start a company. My internship then was with a company called Palm, a company that made HP PDAs and their first smartphones. It wasn’t really even a startup, it was a fairly big company. But what NOC made me realise was that I really wanted to build things.
The strong engineering culture i experienced in NOC made me certain that I want to be an engineer. I realised that I truly like building new products and building a small team that can have a huge impact in the organisation. In Palm Inc, I experienced a lot of autonomy in doing the things I really liked and I wanted that when I went back to Singapore. So my first job out of University was with a startup called wego.com; they are like a 100 person company right now. But at that time, I was employee number 13.
I was not so fixated on taking the general path of an engineering graduate and join an investment bank or a consulting company.
Any difficulties that held you back in pursuing entrepreneurship? It is after all, the path less travelled.
It is not that difficult though. By the time I finished NOC, I had a year in NUS to figure myself out. The only thing I was fixated on was being able to have an impact on a product. In fact, it did not really had to be a startup. I was more interested on having a big impact. So in my final year, I even took interviews with big companies like Creative and AutoDesk, simply to find avenues for these opportunities. But they did not seem that exciting at that time. Then the opportunity with wego.com came about. They were based in a shophouse in Boat Quay, had amazing culture and we were basically doing something then that was never done before in Asia.
Have you caught the entrepreneurial bug? Will you continue to be in this space?
I will not say that. It is not about whether you want to be an entrepreneur; it is about what you want to do. I get the most enjoyment when I am working with a small team, building a great product and having a great impact getting that product into the hands of customers. So if that is possible in a larger organisation, if that is the way one get satisfaction from a career then that is what everyone should strive for. Or if you think that starting a company is the best ways to get to your intended end point, do it. It (Starting a company) should not be the end (goal). Anyone can start a company. You need to worry about so many things that if nothing in the whole process interests you, you simply should not do this.
Any advice for NUS Student, anyone coming for the NOC programme?
Take some time to think through what you actually want. Do you want to build new products? Is becoming a CEO important to you? Think about what your actual goals are and think about whether entrepreneurship fits into that narrative as oppose to saying: I want to be an entrepreneur, how do I make my life revolve around it. That seems a little backwards. You think about what you want in life and see how it fits into that framework.
In terms of NOC itself, one thing I regret not doing more of is to form more connections with people; not only just in my company but also go to meetups, hackathons, and form connections with people from Silicon Valley. That is by itself a huge part of social currency. In Silicon Valley, there is certainly a culture of paying it forward, an unspoken rule of you helping people who are new to the bay area and passing the goodwill forward. So that is something all, including those currently in University, can tap on. I should have tapped on it more, and I certainly encourage all to tap on them. To socialise beyond the NUS Bubble.
Arun writes on Medium as well. You can follow him here.
