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Royston Tay co-founded Zopim in Singapore in 2007 with Wenxiang Wu, Yang Bin Kwok, Qing Ru Lim, and Julian Low, who all met whereas finding out overseas at Stanford College by way of the Nationwide College of Singapore Abroad School program.
Having caught the entrepreneurial bug, they labored on a number of concepts earlier than deciding on their most promising one, Zopim, a Stay Chat product for the numerous small companies simply coming on-line. After graduating, they lived a Spartan life-style for greater than two years, subsisting on US$410 per thirty days as they tried to develop the product. When the co-founders determined to change to a freemium mannequin, they had been stunned by what number of of their present clients transformed to the paid product. Inside just a few years, Zopim was utilized by 120,000 web sites in over 100 nations.
In April of 2014, Zendesk acquired Zopim for US$29.8 million, partially in money and the remaining in widespread inventory. Tay was absorbed into Zendesk as common supervisor of Chat, and Zendesk had an preliminary public providing on the New York Inventory Trade only one month after the acquisition in Might of 2014. Tay labored at Zendesk for greater than three years earlier than leaving in late 2017. In the present day, he’s an energetic angel investor and startup mentor within the Southeast Asia startup scene.
Gracy Fernandez: You occurred to fulfill your co-founders throughout the NUS Abroad School Program. What formative experiences did you will have collectively whereas overseas that might later inform your pondering round Zopim?
Royston Tay: The NUS Abroad Faculties [NOC] program has created a gradual stream of entrepreneurs who went on to create family names, like Carousell, Shopback, 99.co, and MoneySmart. It’s no exaggeration to say this program modified all our life trajectories from unusual undergraduates to passionate, decided entrepreneurs.
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Zopim’s story isn’t any completely different. Earlier than NOC, I used to be en path to graduating with honors in engineering, earlier than becoming a member of my mates in engineering or consulting jobs. In 2005, I used to be accepted into NOC and headed out to Silicon Valley for a yr. It began off badly. I interned at a good startup, however my job as QA engineer was lifeless boring. I did get actually good at enjoying ping-pong. I signed up for additional lessons at Stanford, which I used to be neither hard-working nor intelligent sufficient to excel in.
However there was this different group of NOC college students who barely talked about work or college. Each night time, as a substitute of heading residence, they had been on the market attending occasions and meetups, and networking, organizing, pitching their startup concepts, and pretending to be startup founders. “That’s higher than pretending to be a QA engineer,” I assumed.
I joined the group’s management group. Everybody bought fancy titles. I used to be the VP of Mentorship. Armed with our fancy personas, we hosted occasions and meetups the place established founders or early staff of red-hot startups like Fb and YouTube shared their experiences with us wannabe entrepreneurs. It was intoxicating to lastly really feel a part of the hallowed scene. NOC additionally gifted me my co-founders, who had been already sensible coders and hustlers. I used to be the least completed of the lot. Someway we clicked and spent weekends dreaming up concepts and growing prototypes. We’d pitch them and invariably get shot down. Upon returning to Singapore, it appeared pure that we’d proceed doing that collectively. Of all of the principally crappy concepts we had, just one didn’t get shot down as a lot. That was how Zopim began.
On reflection, one lesson stood out—entrepreneurs aren’t made in a single day. In contrast to many different professions, there isn’t a profession ladder main there. Particularly for younger inexperienced founders, pretending to be an entrepreneur whereas ending up a level, or working a second job to maintain the lights on is a crucial ceremony of passage. It’s tiring, exhausting, and demoralizing to have concepts and prototypes ridiculed by others. However in the event you can’t abdomen that, or in some way see the sadistic thrill of it, you received’t be capable of embrace all of the crazier challenges that comes after.
Fernandez: Are you able to share the expertise of doing a literal “elevator pitch” to famed enterprise capitalist Tim Draper?
Tay: Tim occurred to be in Singapore, and somebody organized a closed-door pitching session for him. We weren’t cool sufficient to be invited, however we had been shameless sufficient to point out up. He was bigger than life, dwelling as much as his popularity by breaking out into an impromptu rendition of a tune he wrote for startups. Fortunately, he’s significantly better at his precise day job as a VC.
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The pitch was in a speed-dating format, a handful of entrepreneurs had about 5 minutes to pitch their concepts to him earlier than one other group was rotated in. It was Tinder on steroids, if he preferred the thought, we may comply with up for the subsequent date. There have been two of us at that occasion—Wenxiang, considered one of my co-founders, and me. We had a number of concepts at that time, so to maximise our possibilities, he pitched Zopim, and I pitched one thing else. I don’t recall Tim listening a lot to the opposite pitches, however he actually preferred Zopim and wished to see our prototype. We had written precisely zero strains of code at that time however confidently promised to point out him one thing “quickly.” A few emails later along with his PA, our second date was set two months later.
Fernandez: How did you and your co-founders handle to construct a prototype in as little as two months? What did Zopim appear like right now? What options did it have, and which did it lack?
Tay: Proper from day one, we wished Zopim to be a straightforward manner for anybody with a web site to simply chat with clients on it. “Why would you not wish to chat with each scorching lead?” was the pondering.
It wasn’t a brand new thought. “Stay chat” had been round for some time, however it was very costly and complex to arrange. Solely Fortune 500 firms with massive IT and help groups may afford to make use of it. Driving on the wave of rising net applied sciences at the moment, we believed two radical enhancements would disrupt the business, making “dwell chat” out there to all.
Firstly, we believed it was doable to construct a chat widget that anybody with no coding information may set up on any web site. Secondly, it was doable to construct a totally web-based chat utility, so companies not needed to obtain any software program. They might chat with clients on any pc with an internet browser.
In the present day, these are business requirements, however again in 2007, these had been huge technical challenges. chunk of the 2 months went into deep analysis, displaying up for end-of-semester exams and common procrastination.
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Two weeks earlier than, we lastly holed ourselves in a darkish dingy room to code day and night time. Being engineers, our first eureka! second was after we lastly managed to ship the primary message from our experimental widget to our experimental net utility, and again.
We had cracked large technical challenges underneath the hood, however aside from that, Zopim had not one of the options that finally made it commercially profitable. It was additionally ugly as hell. We spent our previous few days frantically slapping lipstick on the proverbial pig, coding up until minutes earlier than our second date with Tim. Junliang —one other co-founder, who was nonetheless in Silicon Valley— was ready exterior Tim’s workplace after we lastly launched the demo to him.
For sure, we bombed it. Tim politely spent fifteen minutes with us and stated, “Come again when you will have extra traction.”
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This story has been excerpted by courtesy of the writer from Asian Founders at Work by Ezra Ferraz and Gracy Fernandez (Apress, 2020).
To buy the guide, please go to Amazon.
Picture Credit score: Thomas Drouault on Unsplash
The article was first revealed on January 22, 2020.
The publish Ebook Excerpt: How I survived an elevator pitch session with Tim Draper appeared first on e27.
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