Interview with Mr steven Goh !!

by **riz** Mon Sep 01, 2008 9:40 pm

hellow miggers,

here I've come up with the interview reports of mr steven goh. I am pretty much sure that its gonna help you know many unknown history and story around mig33. and its certainly gonna answer lots of question that usually come to ur mind. I'd like to suggest next round admin candidates to note them down.

Steven Goh, co-founder of Mig33 on the emergence of third party services within the mobile market.

Interview conducted by Nathan C. Kaiser on Friday, April 4, 2008 in San Fransisco, California.

'm here with Steven Goh of Mig33. Steven, would you mind giving us an introduction to your startup?

Mig33 aims to be the world's largest independent mobile Internet community. Our vision is to have a few hundred million users in the mobile Internet world using a whole range of services.

What was the origin of the idea?

This is my second startup. I founded Australia's first and one of the largest online stock brokerages in Australia, which was acquired in 2003. I was kicking around some ideas with my co founder, Mei Lin, who was my marketing manager at the time, and we were looking for an opportunity on the global stage.

We saw that with the rise of application environments and the decline of the historical walled gardens that there was a lot of opportunity in the mobile space. We launched our first product in 2003, which unfortunately didn't go anywhere. We went back to the drawing board and launched Mig33 at the end of 2005. We now have over eight million users.

What would you say is the reason that the first attempt didn't succeed and why Mig33 is doing so well?

I think some of the reasons why the first product didn't work had to do with value proposition that is, having sufficient valuable for the mobile consumer and I think we were probably about a year and a half too early into the market. Having said that, we took a lot of great lessons from that experience, from the failure of the first product, and Mig33's sort of runaway success is a testimony to our ability to learn from our organizational mistakes and address them for the future.

The mobile market has matured to the point now where companies such as Mig33 can be successful.

I think the global mobile environment has matured. Over the past few years, I know everyone in the mobile industry has talked about the mobile Internet being just around the corner, and I think, in the international stage, that is certainly the case.

The mobile market worldwide, the adoption now is something like four times what it was just a few years ago.

The international mobile market is still growing very strongly, although not as fast as it has over the last five years. I think a lot of that has to do with the economics for the next billion Internet users. People buy their mobile phones internationally, as a status symbol. It's the computing power. It's a representation of their lifestyle. Whereas, in perhaps more mature, richer economies, kids might have a car, a PC at home, and a mobile phone.

And then, in these other countries, people may not have a car. A computer at home, if they had one, would be a shared resource. And as a result, their personal entertainment, their lifestyle, and their status device is their mobile phone. So it's very much the mobile phone represents the concentration of computing power for pretty much a few billion people on the planet.

On your website, you talk about Voice over IP, chat, SMS, etc. How does that work in a carrier agnostic way?

Unlike the desktop environment, where people can write applications of a certain size, in the mobile world, it's an extremely constrained device. So one of the biggest issues is: how do you produce a very tiny application that can do a lot? Our largest application, is only 135K in size. But through that, we deliver a whole range of mail, social networking services, photo capture and uploading, chat rooms, voice applications all these many rich services, all through the one tiny footprint.

Your service allows users to use services outside of their carrier.

That's correct. So, on the one hand, the voice elements may seem threatening to a carrier. But on the other hand and we have a dozen or so carriers around the world promoting our service.

For our customers we're delivering a data customer to a network operator and a very intense data user at that. Our customers typically send anything between one and 10 megabytes of data a month, which is obviously something that many carriers would love to have.

What has been the response from other carriers that have seen a number of Mig33 users in their system?

I think they've been surprised. We've literally popped up from the middle of nowhere.

In one country, we're aware of one carrier that's spent a few years to acquire some 50,000 or so data users. And then, in a period of about four months, we delivered to them three quarters of a million data users. And whilst they were initially unhappy with the voice element to start with, they did recognize that it didn't affect their voice revenues at all. If anything, it was clear that we were taking voice revenues away from a number of other prepaid, international calling card operators.

And we delivered to this particular carrier literally several hundred thousand data users. So they were extremely happy, and actually started putting us on their deck. They actually wrote to us to tell us what had happened, and we were pleasantly surprised with it.

Has the service been beneficial for all your carrier partners?

I would say for many of the carriers. It's interesting to see that a few of them have actually picked up on us and have actually started promoting the service. Once again, it started with a couple, and I think we've got about a dozen carriers which are now promoting the service.

As one of our shareholders, who's very familiar with the carrier space, describes it, he describes it as a swing product. That is, it's basically competing in a segment that many carriers barely get substantial revenues from anyway, because once again, prepaid calling cards are a feature of just about all markets. But here they actually swing a valuable data customer on board, which is something that, in many cases, they're struggling to educate. Whereas here is a compelling application that drives a lot of data usage, and they're all very happy with us.

From a user perspective, someone that is utilizing the Mig33 service: if I were a customer, am I allowed to call or contact someone via voice that is not currently a Mig33 customer, or is it just all within the network?

That's correct. You would actually use our service to initiate a call, and it would actually call back through the voice channel back to your phone, and connect the other user once again through the voice channel, if you wanted to get in touch with another non Mig33 user.

But once again, I keep coming back to something that's the theme in everything that we've done here, and that is we're giving our customers choice. And I think this is a period very similar to the 1995-1996 period, when AOL, MSN, and CompuServe were dictating what they thought was their customers' best choice for their Internet experience.

But as history has shown, people want choice. And if you look at the landscape for Internet usage now, you can see how customer choice has made the market much bigger for everyone. And it's seen such incredible companies, like Google and Yahoo and eBay and Amazon, rise from that.

What are the different revenue models that you've incorporated, or that you plan to incorporate, for Mig33?

Our customer base is growing at several hundred thousand a month and they are sending some 35 to 40 million messages a day through our service, almost entirely through our own platform.

And in the chat rooms, which is a very popular service we have 160,000 active chat rooms. We have features that we charge for within these services.

And so what has happened in the past is that we give away the service largely for free, and we've been charging for the voice elements. But as of just the last three weeks, when we started charging for kicking, that makes up nearly a quarter of our revenues now. So I think that is a sign of the future of what is to come for our company, and that is that we'll continue to deliver a whole range of these virtual goods, or these premium actions, within the service and charge for them. The important thing is to give the core of the service away for free.

From an entrepreneurial perspective, the key is to really keep an open mind as to how you could possibly generate revenues.

That's correct. So what we're not doing I think we're just trying to be very practical about how our users are growing and what are the ways to finance and monetize the user base. I know that there are many companies which are trying to build a mobile community on the speculative possibilities that they might drive ad revenues two, three, four years from now. But understanding the nature of the international markets and what are the opportunities to pay for things, we're being very practical about what's required.

So, hence there's the voice element, which people traditionally understand, because they're all socialized into prepaid calling cards. And then there's this progressive adding of other forms of virtual goods and behaviors just so that, with people's wallets, they can do more than just simply making cheap voice calls.

by **riz** Mon Sep 01, 2008 9:40 pm

You have started companies with a lot of legislative and regulatory hurdles. Is that a barrier to entry that you really focused on when you were starting both companies, once you gained market shares, in terms of your competitive advantage?

I think, for many people, the regulations may seem prohibitive and, in some cases, create a natural barrier to entry. I think a message for all entrepreneurs is that regulation is, in many cases, there to help the consumer, or it exists for a particular set of reasons. And it's important not to be scared of it. Regulation's just another part of what you have to deal with in actually building a company.

And I know that there are a lot of people which, they look at how difficult the regulatory environments may be around the world in different industries, and I think it's just something that you just, you just don't get too distracted by!

I would assume, once you do gain that market traction and scale, it does offer a competitive advantage from someone else who would be looking at starting or entering into that market.

That's correct. There are some opportunities created by the regulatory environment for sustained competitive advantage. But I think also, I suppose as a warning to people, the regulatory environment can shift and change like the weather, as it were, and it's important just not to be too distracted by it.

And in terms of your experience of starting two companies, what would you say is a key insight into entrepreneurship that you've learned? And what would you say are also the biggest mistakes that you have made or you see other entrepreneurs making?

I think it's so important for the entrepreneur to recognize his or her role in orchestrating a startup, in understanding what the opportunity is, setting the vision and orchestrating the way that the startup takes place. And by that I mean building the right team to deliver on the vision, attracting the right shareholders, building the right board, and not losing sight of that vision. Entrepreneurs play an extremely important leadership role in helping and leadership is such an important thing, that it's about making people better than what they would otherwise be, to aspire to do things they would not otherwise do.

I think those are key roles for any entrepreneurs. I think my mistakes are legion, and I think if you're not making mistakes, you're not trying hard enough. Every entrepreneur will tell you how true that adage is. I think if I've ever made a lot of mistakes, it's come down to not building a team fast enough and not running hard and fast enough, simple as that. You've just got to run. You've got to build the team fast and run like hell.

With your experience as an Australian entrepreneur, and now in the United States, what are some of the key differences in the entrepreneurial communities between the two countries?

I think there are very many parallels between the entrepreneurial spirit in Australia and here in the Valley. In Australia, resource deprivation and the entrepreneurial spirit in the mining industry, means there's a strong culture with an appetite for risk and an appetite for managing risk, which I think is a big part of entrepreneurship. I think the environment here in Silicon Valley has been fantastic. The one thing Silicon Valley has over many other parts of the world is critical mass. I think that's very exciting. I think the level of internationalism, though it's a very different form of internationalism here in Silicon Valley than it is in Australia. I think that's just another challenge to deal with.

Can you quantify that for me, in terms of the internationalism?

It's an incredible melting pot, for the best of North America and the best of the world seem to find their way here. I think there's a certain pace of competition, and the way competition works in Silicon Valley leads to there is a certain level of myopia. I don't think that's a bad thing, because the world looks to Silicon Valley for leadership.

But I think that there are some experiences which are unnatural in Silicon Valley that, perhaps, the rest of the world is experiencing. And being able to see those opportunities from what is happening around the rest of the world sometimes those sort of opportunities, they're not readily experienced here.

And as an example, we're clearly in the mobile space. And I can drive up and down the 101, and you wouldn't go 10 miles without dropping a phone call. Whereas, say, in Hong Kong, I could be in an office building, go down the lift, into the subway, underneath the harbor which is a deep water harbor out the other side into a subway, into another lift, and up a building, and I would not lose a mobile phone connection, nor would I lose a mobile data connection, as an example. So I think that's a frustration. But having said that, it's just another challenge.

In terms of the team that you've hired, what are some of the key characteristics that you look for?

I think that, since entrepreneurialism is important, we want to very much build a culture of results driven innovation here. It's so important that everyone has that sort of can do attitude when confronting new or uncertain problems, both technically and organizationally and business wise.

And I think, for ourselves, we've deliberately tried not to hire from the mobile world, because I suspect that many people who have been in the mobile industry over the past few years have been scarred by many bad network operator experiences and not through any fault of their own. But I think this new mobile opportunity requires the disciplines that people may have had from their successes in the Internet age. So we've been deliberately trying to hire people with Internet experiences and successes.

We've also been trying to hire people which have had, also, international life experiences, because, as with any company, being passionate about our consumers both here in North America and internationally is going to play such an important part, I suppose, for the key success factors for this company going forward. So, trying to create that sort of culturally rich, blended mix within the firm has been important to me.

I suppose those would describe, really, the sort of characteristics of the people that we've been looking for.

My final question is, how did you come upon the name "Mig33"?

So, in this user generated world, it's a user generated name. In getting the basic products and services out the door, we had a panel of a couple of dozen kids that we were working with to try to find what we felt was the right or the best experience for them. And we asked them to come up with a name, and Mig33 was the name they

by msilmy Tue Sep 02, 2008 12:38 am

Huge

Very nice opportunity to know how mig33 application come to us Cool

Our largest application, is only 135K in size. But through that, we deliver a whole range of mail, social networking services, photo capture and uploading, chat rooms, voice applications all these many rich services, all through the one tiny footprint.

Thanks a lot riz bro that to bring this marvelous conversation.