ETL Seminar_Oct 3
MS&E 472 Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar ("ETL")
Confession of a Stanford Sloan Fellow Series EP17
MS&E 472 Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar ("ETL")
The two co-founders of Smule gave us an interesting presentation. CEO Jeff Smith is a serial entreprenur-turned-Stanford PhD student; CTO Ge Wang is an assistant professor of Stanford.
Their company Smule has produced a variety of innovative iOS apps that combine music with mobile technology, with clear source of revenue. One of their flagship apps is a karaoke app called Sing!. It's gotta be the grand-daddy of the massively popular Chinese karaoke iOS app - 唱吧, which is not available to iTunes US users. Sing! falls into the same app category as Instagram - they really should have been invented by me. I have every reason to strike that idea first and bring it to the market before others do, but I did not. Shame on me!
Something else stroke me during his presentation: all the applications/softwares that exist today are meant to connect people at the same time, ie. in the same physical universe/time dimension. Smule is a classic demonstration of the kind of power and beauty such connection can create. What if we try to connect people in different time dimensions? For example, imagine Smule runs for 1,000 years, and fuses voices/singing of people from different time era together. What kind of effect will that create? Are people willing to pay for a dim wish to talk to/sing with people in the future?
Before the session started, I was chatting to C on Professor Schramm's Executive Communication class and the feedback he received. During Jeff's presentation, Jeff mentioned that in the first 30 seconds of an app's user experience, the app has to grab the user with excitement and comfort. This sounds very similar to the crux of executive communication, ain't it?
Question: what was your strategy? Answer: we had no strategy when raising the first round. The investors took a gamble on us, even though no one really believed in our business plan then (that was the time when Nokia still ruled the world of mobile devices)
Question: how was your business model evolved? Answer: business model changes, product changes, the team and the culture are the only things that matter in the long-run.