Sultry Days by Shobha de

Hot DAYS : A Tale of Struggle and Freedom Sultry Days is the fifth novel composed by Shobha De distributed in the year 1994. With Sultry Days Shobha De has investigated an alternate methodology in her characters which had not been found in her past books. Shobha writes in the first page of this novel; ‘For my children†¦ at last a book by me that they can peruse. ‘ L. Sonia Ningthoujam composes; ‘Sultry Days, brings us into the universe of intensity, sex and weapons, the obscure side of Mumbai privileged society. [1] In this novel Shobha has sensibly introduced the lives of youth, their yearnings their perspectives, she makes reference to in her personal history; ‘ The tale is covered with types from that stirred up decade-the so called bohemians out to change the world however not their rank clothing; the grimy elderly people men of Mumbai, all gas and little butt nuggets; the corporate women with their ‘good life' hangs-ups; the learned people, out siders and parasites who feed off the rich while spitting on their ‘capitalist esteems'. It was a pleasant book to do.And for those of us who experienced childhood in that time in Mumbai, there were a ton of recognizable echoes and reference focuses that gave heaps of diversion during the describing. I consider ‘God' one of my better-carved characters†¦ I can just lament he wasn't no doubt. ‘ [2] Shobha De amazes the peruser with her honest and authentic stories of the lives of guys and females who are attempting to cut a fruitful profession in the field of writing and news coverage in the city of Mumbai. On account of her own editorial stretch in Mumbai Shobha's Sultry Days develops as a sensible novel.Shobha says, ‘I rather loved doing this book with its basic story of destined love, basically in light of the fact that it returned me to my school days and to the edges of the pseudo-refined scholarly world I played with quickly before beating a hurried retreat. ‘ [3] The hero in this novel is likewise a female like different books of Shobha De, yet not at all like her different books Sultry Days additionally rotates around a male character. Nisha, the hero of the novel is a solid headed and vocation arranged female in spite of the fact that the novel likewise bargains practically with a male character who additionally turns into the focal character as the novel unfolds.God or Deb is the focal male character and Nisha is the storyteller. It is through Deb that Nisha finds herself. Nisha is a youthful understudy who is sharp and centered towards considers, she originates from an upper working class family. Nisha's folks don't have an extremely adoring relationship. She generally feels tense that father lacks the capacity to deal with her mom and ignores his girl. Nisha is a bashful young lady and she generally detested the glare skin pigmentation on her temple which made her look strained constantly. ‘ Was it my appearan ce? Did I look disturbed? In torment? Discouraged? Perhaps it was that skin coloration of mine.It must be that. I was brought into the world with stress lines between my temples. ‘ [4]â€â€â€ page 2 Nisha believed that she may appear to Deb as a, ‘A snobby minimal great young lady who conveyed dreadfully may books around. Quite enough, I assume. In any case, not uncommon. ‘ [5]†page 2 From the starting we become mindful of Nisha's fascination for Deb who is likewise alluded to as God by a large portion of his school companions. Deb is the child of a socialist and is additionally a socialist himself, he frequently gets captured while taking out Morchas. Nisha gets pulled in to Deb on account of his irregular personality.His appearance is ratty, wears days' old stubble, consistently scratches his ‘matted locks which were loaded with lice-homes,' smokes ‘beedies,' is a man of free ethics, ‘has had a few young ladies when he arrived at sc hool'. His disposition towards young ladies is likewise to †‘use them and leave them. ‘ I learnt rapidly that I needed to cover what small amount sense of self and pride I had on the off chance that I wished to stay nearby God. His disposition towards young ladies was basic use them and leave them†¦ As for me, I was plain moonstruck. What's more, for once in my life I wasn't going to miss out as a matter of course. ‘ [6]†page 5Despite his ratty appearance, ‘God's hands and fingernails were shockingly, slick and clean. ‘ He knows numerous dialects, for example, German, French and Spanish. He had just understood Chaucer and Karl Marx before leaving school. Deb neglects to endure misuse and subsequently rebels against foul play, oppression and frivolities. In the start of the novel Deb attests the significance of average methods and disclosed to Nisha that he was not intrigued by cash as it is just ‘means to an end. ‘ Nisha is da zzled with his habits. Nisha is really infatuated with Deb and makes a decent attempt to work their relationship.Deb notwithstanding, isn't sincerely appended to Nisha or possibly he imagines so. He primarily lives off Nisha's cash. Nisha tells; ‘I cherished purchasing things for God. It gave me a feeling of having a place. Blessings were a bond-maybe the one and only one. Endowments which he underestimated completely. ‘ [7]†page 13 Nisha's folks opposed God as they felt that God is utilizing their girl for his own benefit. Be that as it may, Nisha is absolutely stricken by Deb and lets them know, ‘I'd like Deb to demolish my life. I need him to demolish it. I couldn't care less in the event that he wrecks it. I love him. [8]â€â€â€ page 14 Nisha is extremely possessive about her mom and when Deb passes some frightful remarks on her mom, Nisha shouts at him furiously, ‘Oh, shut up! How could you? ‘ I shouted, ‘You and your smudged min d. What might you think about the necessities of women you who have no foundation, no class, you tarnished jerk. ‘ [9]†page 17 Nisha's dad is a run of the mill wolf in sheep's clothing spouse. At home he had set standards for his better half and little girl to follow. He anticipated that his better half should be dressed up in office parties as indicated by his preferences. His significant other had no choice.Nisha tells, ‘ My dad's thoughts of a fashionable spouse were really fixed-she must be hung in pastel-hued chiffon worn with a sleeveless blouse†¦ Make-up, particularly lipstick, was of crucial significance since he solidly trusted it was an indication of modernity and no snazzy lady ought to ever be seen without it. ‘ [10]†page 19 He anticipated that his better half should take care of the house and go with him for incidental gatherings. She was never urged to accomplish something advantageous outside home. At the point when Nisha's mom disclos ed to her companions that she lacked the capacity to deal with her own advantages her companion advises her; ‘That is your problem.But on the off chance that I were in your place, I would simply reveal to him that in the event that he'd needed to wed an ayah, he shouldn't have hitched you. We carry a great deal of status to our significant other and they ought to acknowledge it. ‘ [11]â€- page 24 Nisha's dad didn't endorse of ladies leaving home for work. At the point when Nisha's mom got a proposal for work from her companion Pratimaben her better half denied it immediately by saying; ‘In our organization spouses don't work†¦. They remain at home and compose evening gatherings' [12]†page 147 For countless years after their marriage Nisha's mom use to surrender without a battle with her husband.But when the fake conduct of her better half began taking cost for her detects she disclosed to her significant other furiously; ‘I have had enough of you r harassing and bad faith. I have stayed silent for a really long time. Push off with your corporate nonsense†¦. For what reason would it be advisable for you to I? For what reason would it be a good idea for me to make a fuss over you either? You can likewise take a hike with your self important talk and void brags. I am wiped out, do you hear, tired of living this bogus life†¦ Well-it's my turn now. What's more, you can hear me out for a change. I will oblige Pratimaben with anything I decide to do. She is my friend.She energizes me. She acknowledges me†¦ Whether you like it or not, from this time forward I will settle on the choices about my life. Furthermore, interestingly, I'm taking a vocation. ‘ [13]â€â€â€ page 148 Shobha De caricaturizes the deceptive couples who have extramarital relations but profess to be dedicated to one another. Deb broke the news to Nisha that her dad is engaging in extramarital relations with a Sindhi lady. Indeed, even N isha's mom affirms that her dad has broken all binds with her. Inspite of their disparities Nisha's folks arrange a commemoration party for their friends.Nisha was strained seeing this and concedes; ‘As for me, I was drwn into my mom's miserable world, brimming with self centeredness and uncertainty. I didn't have a clue what to think about the bomb she advertisement dropped. My dad kept on being ‘normal' and imagined nothing had occurred. ‘ [14]â€â€page 62 In this novel Shobha De illuminates the empty existence of film and displaying world. Deb gets no pocket cash from his dad, he does independent detailing just as editing. After school Nisha joined an advertisement organization and she turned into somewhat occupied in her life. At whatever point she had time she met God and making the most of his company.As God got aware of his inventive forces, he began composing sonnets. Nisha felt enchanted seeing God moving in the class of contemporary artists. God is l ikewise pleased with his beautiful sensibilities. God began going to workshops in which novice artists accumulated and displayed their work. Shobha De gives an extremely reasonable image of this layers of up and coming ability. She alludes to such workshops as; ‘The meetings were channeled I soiled corridors where the coordinators didn't need to pay any lease. Everyone lounged around on awkward lawn seats or on the floor†¦Others who were available normally were a genuinely diverse parcel of battling essayists, a Grande Dame of Verse, baffled duplicate authors and so called pundits. ‘[15] †page 26 Nisha never felt calm in the gatherings of Anglo Indian Poets Association. There were some hopeful ladies individuals additionally in the gathering. Ladies like Chandni, Sujata, Pramila and so forth needed to get name and notoriety in the field of news coverage. These ladies needed to get

Belonging the Crucible.Hotel California Essay Example For Students

Business and Society for Water Privatization -myassignmenthelp.com

Question: Examine about theBusiness and Society for Water Privatization. Answer: Business and Society Water privatization (Yes) Truly, on the grounds that water is considered as an asset identified with gracefully and request and it ought to be considered as monetary great. Water can be put away through the wellspring of downpour, however it must be assembled, overseen and handled by contemplating costly arrangement of channels and preparing plants. It is significant that filthy water and human waste ought to be evacuated and treated in sanitation frameworks. It is broke down that water ought to be treated as a financial decent then just it is considered as a waste. On the residential level, on the off chance that unmetered get to is made by the buyers, at that point it implies that they are not paying as indicated by the amount they devour. On the national level, inefficient techniques and unseemly yields are supported by mulling over the sponsorship given to ranchers and enterprises (Tortajada, Gonzlez-Gmez, Biswas Garca-Rubio, 2016). For example: In California water hungry cotton is developed that give uns afe impact on the earth. Setting value as indicated by its genuine expense would assist with empowering productivity and practices that are natural benevolent. For example: dribble water system utilized in horticulture (Bakker, 2014). Issues identified with water gracefully ought to be thought about with tremendous speculation particularly in the developing nations where people can't get to clean water. It is seen that additionally in created nations water is squandered through the spillage in channels and maturing framework. It is examined that open division can't offer money for this venture so private segment inclusion is fundamental. Along these lines, privately owned businesses ought to be allowed to acquire benefits through real water charges that mull over expenses of flexibly. In the event that there is successful guideline, at that point factors like quality and gauges identified with nature ought to be overseen appropriately (Harris, Goldin Sneddon, 2015). It is assessed that water ought to be treated as monetary great as it is gainful for poor people. In the created nations, the state auxiliary is given to rich. Water is offered to the white collar class division and to the well off ranchers yet there is no gracefully of water in the more unfortunate territories. In this way, it is significant that water ought to be accessible in every single region of created and lacking nations (Ruiz-Villaverde, Chica-Olmo Gonzlez-Gmez, 2018). Water Privatization (No) No, in light of the fact that with the expansion in the populace development the interest for water increments. The rich class individuals squander water by utilizing it in garden shines, lavish greens, and pools. It is significant that administration of interest ought to be thought of with the goal that waste can be forestalled and furthermore it ensures that each individual can get to including needy individuals. This is the obligation and employment of the administration administrators and not of privately owned businesses. Immense venture is required to meet worldwide water target however it is seen that singular part will offer these in return for gigantic business returns. In the event that the speculation is finished by government, at that point it is smarter to privatize as they can without much of a stretch objective the destitute individuals and won't center more around the open doors identified with benefits. Water flexibly is considered as a characteristic imposing busine ss model so there is no weight of rivalry on privately owned businesses to drive up quality and decrease the expense. It is additionally assessed that in created nations the procedure of water privatization is slightly below average. For example: In the ongoing power flexibly emergency of California, it is seen that how severely the principles of private utilities can fall flat. In Australia, the water flexibly is held appropriately on the grounds that it is in the hands of general society. To regard water as a financial decent can give negative effect on poor people. The rich individual can exploit the auxiliaries (Middlemiss, 2018). The travel industry assumes an extraordinary job in manageability. In numerous nations, the travel industry is examined as a significant instrument for provincial advancement as it assists with invigorating the new financial exercises. It is seen that travel industry goodly affects the parity of installments, on business and furthermore on the general salary and creation however it can give negative outcomes on nature. On the off chance that travel industry development is spontaneous and isn't controlled, at that point it can bring about decrease of the earth and furthermore in this the development of the travel industry is undermined. It is significant that condition ought to be secured as it is the significant wellspring of improvement (Mowforth Munt, 2015). It is seen that travel industry sway on manageability is seen on the scene corruption and disintegration. Air contamination is caused because of overwhelming transportation and the utilization of power. It is broke down that th ere is increment in squander and the defilement of water in light of the sewage that is gathered from inns and pontoons (Hall, Gossling Scott, 2015). Deforestation additionally happens because of an expanded requirement for the provisions. It is seen that positive effect that is seen is identified with the security of the common excellence. The legislature and associations have invested amounts of energy with the goal that common magnificence can be kept up as it pulls in visitor towards the nation. The travel industry additionally empowers the positive effect on the neighborhood condition and economy that assists with keeping up the earth in a powerful way. For example: it is seen that travel industry has affected on the economy of Nicaragua's in three spots like GDP, work, and venture. Nicaraguan Tourism represented 7.9 of work in 2013 and it very well may be improved to 8.8 percent by 2024. It is seen that negative part of the travel industry is likewise identified with change in season and furthermore it made low maintenance employments and all day occupations (Hunt, 2016). Manageability the travel industry thinks about appropriate usage of the assets that incorporate social effects and expands the benefit of saving the neighborhood networks. It is seen that vacationer principally underlines on common habitat and fu rthermore on verifiable social legacy. References Bakker, K. (2014). The matter of water: Market environmentalism in the water sector.Annual Review of Environment and Resources,39, 469-494. Corridor, C. M., Gossling, S., Scott, D. (Eds.). (2015).The Routledge handbook of the travel industry and manageability. Routledge. Harris, L. M., Goldin, J. A., Sneddon, C. (Eds.). (2015).Contemporary water administration in the worldwide south: Scarcity, marketization and support. Routledge. Chase, C. (2016). 10 A political environment of the travel industry in the shadow of a between maritime trench in Nicaragua.Political Ecology and Tourism, 163. Middlemiss, R. (2018). HR 23: An Assault on Water Resource Conservation and California's State Sovereignty.Hastings Envt'l LJ,24, 197. Mowforth, M., Munt, I. (2015).Tourism and supportability: Development, globalization and new the travel industry in the third world. Routledge. Ruiz-Villaverde, A., Chica-Olmo, J., Gonzlez-Gmez, F. (2018). Do little districts mimic bigger ones? Dissemination of water privatization policies.Urban Water Journal,15(2), 138-149. Tortajada, C., Gonzlez-Gmez, F., Biswas, A. K., Garca-Rubio, M. A. (Eds.). (2016).The Private Sector and Water Pricing in Efficient Urban Water Management. Routledge.

The Benefits Of Student Samples Of English Essay Correction

<h1>The Benefits Of Student Samples Of English Essay Correction</h1><p>Student tests of English exposition rectification are valuable for understudies since they help them to realize how to compose a decent paper without getting their work dismissed. On the off chance that you are setting up a paper for a school or college assessment, your paper should pass a specific arrangement of exposition rules with the goal that it very well may be decided by the council. Such rules are accessible in a few structures and they incorporate the utilization of real proclamations, legitimate thinking, and the consideration of illustrations.</p><p></p><p>All expositions contrast from each other in their method of introduction, in any case, understudies who have composed short papers frequently end up confounded about the strategy for keeping in touch with them ought to follow. Composing is anything but a straightforward matter of replicating or directing. Her e and there it is smarter to get some help from tests of composing since this aides in improving an individual's nature of writing.</p><p></p><p>The subjects shrouded in the papers that are given to understudies must have some normal topic or topic. There are some scholarly measures that oversee what can be remembered for the understudy tests of paper rectification. A portion of these incorporate points that are generally found in scholarly subjects, for example, material science, science, geology, and others.</p><p></p><p>What is ordinarily utilized by essayists is the composing style known as conversational. It is described by easygoing language and is typically identified with regular daily existence. A few instances of such subjects are voyages, auto collisions, or excursions. You should be cautious while picking the subject of your understudy tests of English exposition amendment since some may discover it insensitive.</p>&l t;p></p><p>A normal point that understudies find fascinating is promoting. This is on the grounds that such subjects for the most part have a fundamental significance or thought that can help the essayist in improving their composing aptitudes. Understudies are likewise instructed to utilize the exploration strategy by having the option to compose articles on various subjects. They may decide to expound on any part of the human body, for example, how to control glucose levels by eating certain nourishments, or even in case of a characteristic disaster.</p><p></p><p>Because composing a paper on a specific occasion or subject can be very troublesome, numerous understudies use tests of composing as a guide in finishing their venture. Understudies who compose freely will in general commit errors in their expositions. These mistakes are then gotten by different understudies and make them resemble an awful student.</p><p></p><p&g t;These are only a portion of the reasons why you should utilize understudy tests of English exposition revision. In any case, they additionally make it simpler for understudies to have the option to improve their composing aptitudes by utilizing tests of English paper amendment and different assets that are accessible. What understudies need is to have a target perspective on the article they are composing with the goal that they can focus more on the significant pieces of the paper.</p><p></p><p>Many instructors urge understudies to utilize tests of writing in their expositions and the vast majority of them don't stop for a second to scrutinize them in the event that they believe they are sufficiently bad. Along these lines, it turns out to be simple for understudies to overhaul and improve their composing abilities by taking a gander at the examples of English article amendment gave by teachers.</p>

Outrageous Pcat Essay Topics Tips

<h1>Outrageous Pcat Essay Topics Tips </h1> <h2> The Pcat Essay Topics Cover Up</h2> <p>Although being able to compose influentially can seem as though an intense thing for youngsters to learn, advise them that everybody has legitimate conclusions. Expound on the most unusual thing you've at any point seen in as long as you can remember! Out of nowhere, you're in a spic and span circumstance, and should accomplish something, however you need zero thought what. Hemingway depicts Santiagos relationship with his typical condition to exhibit how his connection to the ocean and its animals spares the elderly person in his disaster. </p> <p>Better initiative signals that the ongoing pioneers are incapable. Person to person communication is a modest however proficient advertizing channel. Duty is indispensable since you need to understand the entirety of the criticalness of your choice and the test you're going to pass. Designating duties is the key to successful administration. </p> <p>Twenty percent will need to visit a nursing home. Perhaps individuals won't be in a situation to dwell in some particular regions since they'll turn out to be excessively hot. Albeit one month might be adequate for certain people, for most one month is basically not sufficient opportunity. </p> <h2> The Pcat Essay Topics Cover Up </h2> <p>Although this book may should be enhanced with an alternate report book to accomplish progressively broad inclusion of the subtest materials, it's still among the perfect PCAT prep books for its broad arrangement of training questions. Be that as it may, we furthermore offer administrations to get your exposition composed for you for a little charge. Kids should have the option to utilize cellphones in school. Shopping on the web isn't secure or secure. </p> <h2>Characteristics of Pcat Essay Topics </h2> <p>The kind of the PCAT that you take may conta in test various decision things which are implanted inside the subtests, or it may have another segment with trial items. It is essential to know that not all inquiries on the test will be contained in your score. You should know precisely the entirety of your qualities and shortcomings with the goal that you could know definitely what things to improve. Peruse the report to think about the PCAT test structure. </p> <p>Above all, the level of trouble for the offered practice questions is high, which means test-takers tend to over-get ready somewhat and could then find the genuine PCAT inquiries to be simpler. You may find that your mean score varies from peers who additionally took the PCAT around exactly the same time. There shouldn't be any schoolwork. </p> <h2> Top Pcat Essay Topics Secrets </h2> <p>These questions ought to illuminate your entire school application technique. The following are the 3 one of a kind assortments of issues you may confront. Your accounts aren't easy to refute. Attempt a couple of these themes. </p> <h2>Key Pieces of Pcat Essay Topics </h2> <p>Keep as a primary concern that you're offering yourself as a fabulous promotion to the territory of drug store. Methodical Pharmacy school test readiness will put your insight in the most reasonable request and produce your psyche clear. Depict a few errands you have achie ved in the course of the most recent two years which don't have any association with scholarly investigations. Furthermore, examines have demonstrated that people who have osteoporosis have a more prominent possibility of cardiovascular illness and stroke.</p> <p>There are some fundamental rules to follow as an approach to be in a situation to form an extraordinary enticing paper. Shortly, you should complete your paper, in this manner it's essential you productively deal with your time. You may have the option to compose an exceptional paper easily, yet you need a set time limit here. New and refreshed perusing perception inquiries for the entirety of the contemplating sections. </p> <p>So you don't really wish to find a point! It is every now and again an awesome plan to choose a subject that will in general inspire an enthusiastic response. In picking your theme, it's every now and again a decent thought to begin with a subject which you as of now have some commonality with. On the whole, think about the term theme. </p>

How to Become a Term Paper Writer

<h1>How to Become a Term Paper Writer</h1><p>One of the principle employments of a research project essayist is to help set up a last work for accommodation. Along these lines, the essayist may have a specific liking for making things look noteworthy and making a fascinating read. A fruitful research project author, in this manner, must have the option to recount to a story as a very elegantly composed essay.</p><p></p><p>One of the best approaches to expand the peruser's consideration is to cause them to feel like they are being attracted. Along these lines, it gets simpler for the essayist to give the person in question wanted outcome. The essayist should likewise give significant data to their perusers. Great writing includes telling the peruser however much as could reasonably be expected about the subject in question.</p><p></p><p>A research paper author must ensure that the data given isn't excessively straightfo rward. Complex subtleties must be uncovered in a manner that would persuade the peruser that the author has been really exhaustive in the exploration. At the point when the subtleties and the contemplations given are entrancing, the author makes certain to draw in the consideration of the peruser and leave the feeling that the person recognizes what the person in question is talking about.</p><p></p><p>Good writing includes thought and sentiments. Thus, it is very normal for a decent research paper essayist to likewise be an incredible craftsman. The person ought to have the option to pass on thoughts such that causes the peruser to feel the hugeness of the topic.</p><p></p><p>The's author will likely place certain focuses in the passages and to take the peruser from section to section. The passages ought to be as short as could reasonably be expected yet not all that short that the peruser is lost. This is the most ideal approach to t ell the peruser that the essayist realizes how to interface their musings to different thoughts that have been presented.</p><p></p><p>A great approach to get the peruser's consideration is to consistently permit some space between the sections. Along these lines, the peruser can stop and consider what is being said before proceeding onward to the following section. An author who needs to pass on a message rapidly should ensure that all the thoughts inside the section are connected to one another and to the former paragraph.</p><p></p><p>An thought for a subject can be imparted to a potential paper essayist to check whether the person has the opportunity to compose the exposition on the specific theme. Subsequently, the author ought to have the option to decide whether the person in question truly needs to compose the paper or on the off chance that the person is more keen on having it perused than composing it. On the off chance that the previous is the situation, at that point the author ought to have the option to make a decent diagram to manage the person in question through the paper.</p><p></p><p>A incredible research paper essayist is one who can move the perusers' consideration and leave an enduring impression with the peruser. Remember that a fruitful research paper essayist must be an ace of detail so as to compose an appropriate paper that is all around organized and flowing.</p>

CP11 Podcast with Tony Jamous from Nexmo about cloud-based Communication APIs

CP11 Podcast with Tony Jamous from Nexmo about cloud-based Communication APIs INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, this time we are having a very interesting entrepreneur with us, and talking about his entrepreneur journey. Hi, Tony, who are you? And what do you do?Tony: Hey thanks, Martin. I’m Tony Jamous. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Nexmo. We started the company exactly five years ago, both from here in the UK and Europe, and also in the US. My role has changed since the beginning of the company. Each phase has a different role. When you start, you start by doing a bit of much everything. Then as you hire people and build teams, your role becomes different. Thats the journey I went through.Martin: Cool. How did you come up with this business idea, Tony?Tony: I used to work in the communications industry. Nexmo is a cloud communications platform. This is where I started my career as an engineer, and later on in business development. Then I took a year off, and I went to do my business studies. During the whole year, I got obsessed with how can you make this better f or the customer, and how can you make this more scalable. That thinking process led me to build the first plan or the first idea to streamline that industry and build up more scalable, more efficient business.Martin: Great. At what point in time did you really start developing the first iteration of the product?Tony: Right away, actually. When we started, the first person I hired was a senior architect, Paul, who started coding the platform right away from day one. We were obsessed with time to revenue, because as you probably know when you’re starting a company, you want to prove your model, you want to find your market fit. Revenue was a key indicator we focus on, in order to prove to our ourselves but also to the investors that later on we’re going to raise money from, that actually you do have a good product.Martin: So if you are telling me that you’re focused on time to revenue, how many days or months did it take you?Tony: It took us probably four months from the first t ime we touched the code to get in the first customer paying us.Martin: Great.Tony: Very quick, if you compare to other entrepreneur opportunities.Martin: And how did you acquire this customer?Tony: In the beginning, it’s really about the relationship. You dont have any brand name. You don’t have any web presence. So actually, you need to leverage your network. I was lucky to have worked in this industry before in sales. So we knew you lots of customers. I knew exactly their pinpoints and as we designed the product, addressed this pinpoint, it was appealing them to talk to us.Martin: You said before that you started as a generalist, and then later on overtime became more of a focused kind of senior level executive? Can you walk us through this journey? What was it like in the journey?Tony: Yes, so, in the beginning, you’re a small team. Essentially, everybody does everything and initially you don’t need to spell out a specific plan or specific strategies. Everybody understand s the vision as it’s a small team. As you start growing and creating new divisions and have new senior leaders coming into the business, making sure that everybody is aligned, is a very, very hard problem. So therefore, you’re going to start to need to formulate things and communicate things in order to get the team with its various departments to get aligned and moving in one direction.Martin: When I talked to entrepreneurs, one thing that they often tell me is the customer acquisition cost were extremely high in the first place. And maybe you’re not often justified the revenue or customer lifetime value afterward. How did you try to decrease the customer acquisition cost through this learning process?Tony: Yes, exactly. So initially, it was based on relationships, so we needed to reach out the customer, traditional direct sales approach, which we actually developed and approved overtime in increasing efficiency of that. But at the same time, we’ve opened up the web inbound marketing channel, and that has actually enabled us to scale faster and reduce the cost of acquisition.To be honest, today if you’re in technology and you’re selling software, you need to be online. You need to be visible to be able to capture some of that demand out there.Martin: Great, today you have a suite of different products targeted for like mobile phones. With what type of product did you start out?Tony: So we started with messaging because:I came from that industry, andWe’ve seen all the problems we can solve and how we could streamline that value chain for the customer and for us to be able to scale fast.So the first two years of the company, we were focused on only one product, and then as we, as actually as the world changes, you have new technology trends, you have customer behavior changing. Then you start adding new products and actually evolving your vision that we have today.Martin: And was the evolution of this kind of product suite more driven by customer demand, or was it more like that you find out actually the basic technically infrastructure for all those different products is the same, so we could leverage our existing infrastructure by just adding one or two more products?Tony: It all starts with the customer pain points. And as we talk to customer, we’re selling them product A, based on asking them: Hey guys, why don’t you do a product B as well and product C? Secondly, we’ve also looked at the competition and what the competition was offering, and we’ve seen that we have opportunities to offer actually similar API or similar product as the competition. Lastly, we look at the market trends and what are the major technological trend that is shaping our industry, specifically, the API economy is really, the APIs are becoming the new way of building software, and also mobile is coming big time. So we started building SDKs so that our API started being compatible with mobile, be it you know iOS or Android, any platform out there.So essentially, it was a process of focusing on getting feedback from customers, understanding the competition and the trends and actually reshaping our product strategy and our vision as we move forward.Martin: Tony, how is your company currently structured in terms of locations and in terms of functions?Tony: Nexmo on the location wise, we actually were one of the few startups at the time that were global from day one. From day one, we started in the UK. My co-founder, Eric and our CTO, building the engineering and producting from here. I was in the US building the sales team in our US presence. And very quickly in year two, we opened Asia. Today we have Hong Kong and Singapore and Seoul as well. Because Asia is the fastest market in the world and in our industry and in many industries. So we really needed to have a good hold in that region. And we grew really fast in these three regions.Of course, we got into certain challenges as you grow especially with cultural differen ces, but that was kind of the initial thought is to capture the demand everywhere in the world especially with the web today. You are everywhere even if you don’t want to.Martin: And how is the company structured in terms of functions?Tony: Of course, we have engineering and product, and developer relation. This is a team that built the community of developers. This is under our CTO.We do have the finance. We have a Chief Financial Officer that also manages other admin function like HR, legal. We also have Chief Marketing Officer that’s on marketing, this is marketing communication, sales enablement, growth marketing, and marketing operation.We also have our sales force and our sales forces has evolved to become much more mature. Now we have a new business team going after a new logos. We have account management to manage the existing customer base. And last year, we built as well an insight sales team to deal with the inbound flow of request.Last but not least, we have our cust omer support team. We like to see everybody in the company is customer support. But we do have a 24/7 global customer support team. And also a newly created business operation team to help us improve the business as we grow.Martin: Cool. What are the major differences in terms of the customers and adoption rates if you’re looking at US customers and Asian customers?Tony: So I would say in the US, in Europe actually customers especially software developers are much more empowered to make decisions about which API vendor they want to use. We’ve seen lots of success in inbound marketing. Customer just singing up online and turning to become major customers, like AirBnB, or Uber, or SnapChat, or booking.com here in Europe.In Asia, however, it was much more a business development, relationship based type of sales. And we see less online demand from that market.Martin: And did you know this before, or did you have to have this as a hard learning?Tony: We learned it the hard way, yes.M artin: So what happened?Tony: Initially, we wanted to design our sales first and our sales process in Asia similar to other regions. We quickly realized that selling to Asian customers requires a different approach. Much more relationship based, much more traditional business development type of process. Essentially, the time to revenue in Asia seems to be longer because you don’t have that inbound channel that helps you to jumpstart the revenue quicker.You also get into issues of payments as well. Like for instance, today we support payment platforms like Alipay that enables us to tap into for instance the Chinese market, but at that time, we expected Chinese customers to pay us in Euro, and that didn’t really fly.Martin: Great. When you think back in the beginning of the company, how did you find investors and at what point in time did you approach them?Tony: Funding was part of our strategy from day one. We focused initially on what we call the three Fs: Family, Friends and F ool. Essentially, people investing in your company because they know you, not necessarily understand the business opportunity.So we raised a seed round of funding from people who trusted us on our plans. Later on, we got introduced through the same investors to a series of VCs. We’ve done traditional road show to be able to fundraise and you’ve got a couple of term sheets. And then we raises our fist VC round.Then later on, it was exactly the same process. So new investors that joined us on the board will help us make introductions to new VCs. and this is how the cycle starts again.Martin: Great. And as a European company, did you try to approach US investors because back then there was not a big trend of US investors investing abroad?Tony: Yes, so five years ago, the European VC community was very small. There was pretty much no funding, large scale funding here in Europe. So we knew that, so when we started the company, we registered the company, we incorporated company in the US.One of the reasons why we did that is because it’s easier for US VCs to invest in US companies. They don’t need to learn new laws and new financial regulations of other countries.Yes, luckily our angel investors had connection with US investors and therefore most of our funding efforts were focused on the US. Actually, we only have our angel investor in Europe, but initially most of our discussion with VCs were based in the US because economy of scales they have more cash to invest in companies like us.Martin: You’re right.BUSINESS MODEL OF NEXMOMartin: Tony, let’s talk about the business model of Nexmo. What are basically the customer segment that you’re trying to address?Tony: Yes, so Nexmo offers cloud communication APIs to enable software developers to embed communication into their flows. So our customer base today is composed of the following segments.The first is what we call the chat apps. All the companies like Viber, WeChat Line, are our customers and they us e us for primarily user acquisition and phone verification. You probably had that experience when you downloaded WhatsApp for the first time. You received a text message with a pin code. So we do that for many, if not all of these chat apps and we have them grow and acquire over four billion users in the last four years.The second segment we address is the travel sector, so both, the new economy players like AirBnB or booking.com or even you know more traditional travel companies like Expedia or KLM. They use us for improving the customer experience, building that communication, embedding that communication into their flow. For instance, booking.com they communicate with their hotel chains to cancel booking through a text to speech call, automatic text to speech. AirBnB uses us to connect hosts and guests over SMS and protect the privacy of their users.The third one is transportation. And again here is also the new economy players like Uber, GrabTaxi, EasyTaxi, where we enable them to connect drivers and passengers or voice and SMS. But also traditional transportation companies or transport companies, here in the case of, in Germany, we have Daimler, Mercedes Benz that use our APIs to communicate with cars. So it is internet of things use case.And we also are strong in the social networks. So many social networks like Twitter and Sina Weibo in China, they use us for user verification and fraud prevention.Lastly is the financial industry and fintech in a series of banks like BNP Paribas or Barclays and even new economy ones like Alipay and with Alibaba, they use us for their communication with their users.Martin: Great. If you look at the business model and assuming you are covering like four billion of the seven billion people in terms of their mobile phones and the communication, is this some kind of asset where you think: Okay, if most of the traffic and so on is going mobile, and you are at least tracking all or some of the mobile communications, then you c an build a platform and then offer other kind of services that are mobile communication related?Tony: That’s correct. So essentially, the biggest trend in communication is contextual communication. And because software is merging with communication, now we can do much more things on mobile than before. You can imagine adding sensor data to the communication. You can imagine adding the context into it.So for instance, let’s say you’re a bank and you want to send a notification to your customer because there’s an issue on their credit card, there’s a fraud. Usually, you block the card and then you communicate with them. Usually, you call them and they are not available. So it goes to voicemail. I need to call you back. So it’s really a cumbersome process that costs a lot of money for the bank and it’s not very cool for the consumer. So essentially that communication goes into the app, you push the notification to communicate that to the user. And the user clicks on that notification and automatically go into the phone call with the call center of the bank that will improve dramatically the experience and add the context of the communication.So this is where we see the future is heading. And because software is enabling us to enable developers to build these experiences, we believe that all these business communications is going to be disrupted by software in the next few years.Martin: So just for clarification, so that I get it right. Is this what you’re telling me that you’re trying to get this kind of API network running and owning, or is it more of that you only want to own the API related stuff which is connecting mobile phones only?Tony: There’s two aspects. There’s the ability to communicate to any phone in the world using programmatically a messaging or voice calls, right? Phone verification is one, IVR is another one. Telephony in the cloud is another one. Record Recording is another one. But we also provide a series of SDKs that s it in the app on the device and gather information about that communication, whether it’s sensored data, whether it’s the context of the transaction, and it’s connected to the information system, the CRM or the help desk software of the enterprise.To give you an example, KLM uses us China, KLM is a large European airline. They use us in China to communicate, to actually support, to help desk support to their users in China over WeChat. Let’s say you were traveling on KLM, you lost your luggage. You can follow them on WeChat which is the largest messaging app in China. Then you can actually open a ticket and interact with the support agent over WeChat. In the future, we will enable that also to be done over a messaging box essentially replacing the help desk agent by an algorithm to improve the user experience. So this is a type of examples of contextual communication we enable.Martin: Great. Tony, what do you think are the reasons why companies or your customers choose you o ver the competition? Is it more like that you are totally international and others are not? Is it that you have a more efficient, scalable, technical infrastructure? Is it your pricing? Is it your go to market strategy or is it just you? What are the reasons?Tony: Well it’s a combination of reasons. Youve touched on some important items.First, it’s really about innovation. Our vision is to reinvent how developer embeds communication into their application in the business world. So we focus on building the latest type of API that a developer can adopt really easily and reduces their time to market, it helps them to solve their coding issues.And the second item is to make it scalable. And scalable both: geographically, so today we can communicate with any phone in the world, but also from a quality point of view because it’s easy to build an app that can transact a million messages a day or months. But if you want to take it to a billion in months, then it becomes problematic. S o we do focus on enabling companies to embed these tools and make it also scalable geographically and technically.Martin: Great. Have you thought of extending your product portfolio by rating those transactions? For example if I’m a customer of you, like a call center or so, and I’m having a customer calling me, I can have the communication arranged by your API for example. And then once you have a rated information of the transaction between the call center and their customer, then you would have this kind of information for several transactions from all over the world, you can put some data scientists on that in order to put some contextual information.Tony: Yes, I think you’re hitting on an important element of the disruption we’re bringing in. We don’t necessarily provide the services, but we enable the customer to access them easily, right.So because we’re a platform and we provide our services through APIs, therefore you can start recording important data points al ong the way of the conversation of the communication. Once you’re able to record this information, you can start doing things like machine learning. You can start doing things like cognitive computing on it. But if you’re not using this open API platform, and you’re like logged into, let’s say here that has a silo system, you’re not able to do so. So we make data break free and therefore our customers get more value out of it.Martin: When I’m thinking of APIs, it sounds to me that they are very easily interchangeable. So as long as your APIs is good as mine, the question now would be, how are you increasing the barriers to competition? For example economies of scale or scope or something like that.Tony: Yes, so this comment is valid for some APIs. For others, it’s actually less valid especially when it’s an SDK and it’s embedded into the device. But we focus on value creation and the value creation is what creates stickiness. So value creation is defined in many va riables.The first one is really about the quality of a service offering. So for instance, let’s say in SMS, we do go very long way to build the world’s largest direct care network, so we actually minimize the latency. We build algorithm that manage quality and make it consistent overtime. So there’s a quality component. There’s also a customer support component. We’re really obsessed about customer support, because our customers rely on us for their most business critical communication: acquiring users, confirming the transaction. And the carrier network is not fit for these new use cases.So we essentially really get obsessed with support. Everyone we hire on the company, they go through the customer academy. They do customer, they sell customer tickets until they get the highest satisfaction rating. Then they graduate and they go to their job.I think that’s kind of the two main reasons of value creation. Also we keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible of feature s and data. For instance, our analytics platform enables the customer to view more data of what’s going on in their communication and do some analysis on that. So this is kind of how we create stickiness and we help actually. It’s really about creating more value for the customer. And there’s no magic in our business for that.Martin: Great.ENTREPRENEURIAL ADVICE FROM TONY JAMOUSMartin: Tony, now I would like to learn some more stuff about your entrepreneur journey and your learnings. So what type of learnings can you share with other people interested in starting a company so that they make less errors?Tony: So it depends on the phase. So initially, one of the recurrent theme I see with people who wants to become entrepreneur is that they believe that they need to be ready to start doing it. What I realize is that you’re never ready. So the best is to jump in right away and try to do your best. I mean that’s kind of the first learning I had.The second learning I think woul d be around going global quickly. At Nexmo, from one hand we benefited from that. We were able to get transaction and revenue across the globe. We have customers in every country today. But if you do it too early, then you’re going to start I mean at least us, we had some issues in terms of the scalability of the organization, you have remote teams. And as the team grows, you need to deliver that vision, you need to make sure they are aligned and it’s not easy when you do it across regions. I think this would be kind of the learning that in the last four or five years.Of course, it’s about it’s all about hiring the right people, and making sure, to hire people that can also help you scale the business from day one and that was an important learning. For instance, our CTO and co-founder, when I hired him, I gave him a coding task which is obviously the wrong thing to do. Because what was really important for him is his leadership skills, and that he needed to build a large te am and manage it and scale it.Martin: And what have been the major specific problems in terms of scaling the organization? Because what I’ve heard from other companies is this tribe theory that first you’re a family, then you’re a tribe, then something like a city and so on. And that in the beginning you don’t have processes and later on, you need to implement processes and then type of people might change because not everybody who is performing great at the 20, 30, 40 person company is performing great than a 500 person company. What have been your major problems in scaling the company?Tony: The first one is I said before, is about aligning everyone around one shared vision, one plan, everybody is driving in the right direction. The bigger you become, the more important it becomes to over-communicate and align.The second learning is really about putting in place the processes and structure to enable you to scale. Be it hiring the right people, putting in place the right str ucture. So its like the image I like to use is like building an airplane while you are in the air. You build one engine, and you realize you need another engine. So you need to go and build that as well. Then you need to make sure that these two engines are actually talking to each other. So that they can go in one direction and that process is ongoing, it never stops. How you learn about it is when you make mistakes, is when things are break, and you realize that: Oh yes, I need to build a process here to make it work.Martin: Great, Tony, thank you so much for your time and sharing your insights.Tony: Thanks, Martin.Martin: Welcome.THANKS FOR LISTENING! Welcome to the 11th episode of our podcast!You can download the podcast to your computer or listen to it here on the blog. Click here to subscribe in iTunes. INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, this time we are having a very interesting entrepreneur with us, and talking about his entrepreneur journey. Hi, Tony, who are you? And what do you do?Tony: Hey thanks, Martin. I’m Tony Jamous. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Nexmo. We started the company exactly five years ago, both from here in the UK and Europe, and also in the US. My role has changed since the beginning of the company. Each phase has a different role. When you start, you start by doing a bit of much everything. Then as you hire people and build teams, your role becomes different. Thats the journey I went through.Martin: Cool. How did you come up with this business idea, Tony?Tony: I used to work in the communications industry. Nexmo is a cloud communications platform. This is where I started my career as an engineer, and later on in business development. Then I took a year off, and I went to do my business studies. During the whole year, I got obsessed with how can you make this better f or the customer, and how can you make this more scalable. That thinking process led me to build the first plan or the first idea to streamline that industry and build up more scalable, more efficient business.Martin: Great. At what point in time did you really start developing the first iteration of the product?Tony: Right away, actually. When we started, the first person I hired was a senior architect, Paul, who started coding the platform right away from day one. We were obsessed with time to revenue, because as you probably know when you’re starting a company, you want to prove your model, you want to find your market fit. Revenue was a key indicator we focus on, in order to prove to our ourselves but also to the investors that later on we’re going to raise money from, that actually you do have a good product.Martin: So if you are telling me that you’re focused on time to revenue, how many days or months did it take you?Tony: It took us probably four months from the first t ime we touched the code to get in the first customer paying us.Martin: Great.Tony: Very quick, if you compare to other entrepreneur opportunities.Martin: And how did you acquire this customer?Tony: In the beginning, it’s really about the relationship. You dont have any brand name. You don’t have any web presence. So actually, you need to leverage your network. I was lucky to have worked in this industry before in sales. So we knew you lots of customers. I knew exactly their pinpoints and as we designed the product, addressed this pinpoint, it was appealing them to talk to us.Martin: You said before that you started as a generalist, and then later on overtime became more of a focused kind of senior level executive? Can you walk us through this journey? What was it like in the journey?Tony: Yes, so, in the beginning, you’re a small team. Essentially, everybody does everything and initially you don’t need to spell out a specific plan or specific strategies. Everybody understand s the vision as it’s a small team. As you start growing and creating new divisions and have new senior leaders coming into the business, making sure that everybody is aligned, is a very, very hard problem. So therefore, you’re going to start to need to formulate things and communicate things in order to get the team with its various departments to get aligned and moving in one direction.Martin: When I talked to entrepreneurs, one thing that they often tell me is the customer acquisition cost were extremely high in the first place. And maybe you’re not often justified the revenue or customer lifetime value afterward. How did you try to decrease the customer acquisition cost through this learning process?Tony: Yes, exactly. So initially, it was based on relationships, so we needed to reach out the customer, traditional direct sales approach, which we actually developed and approved overtime in increasing efficiency of that. But at the same time, we’ve opened up the web inbound marketing channel, and that has actually enabled us to scale faster and reduce the cost of acquisition.To be honest, today if you’re in technology and you’re selling software, you need to be online. You need to be visible to be able to capture some of that demand out there.Martin: Great, today you have a suite of different products targeted for like mobile phones. With what type of product did you start out?Tony: So we started with messaging because:I came from that industry, andWe’ve seen all the problems we can solve and how we could streamline that value chain for the customer and for us to be able to scale fast.So the first two years of the company, we were focused on only one product, and then as we, as actually as the world changes, you have new technology trends, you have customer behavior changing. Then you start adding new products and actually evolving your vision that we have today.Martin: And was the evolution of this kind of product suite more driven by customer demand, or was it more like that you find out actually the basic technically infrastructure for all those different products is the same, so we could leverage our existing infrastructure by just adding one or two more products?Tony: It all starts with the customer pain points. And as we talk to customer, we’re selling them product A, based on asking them: Hey guys, why don’t you do a product B as well and product C? Secondly, we’ve also looked at the competition and what the competition was offering, and we’ve seen that we have opportunities to offer actually similar API or similar product as the competition. Lastly, we look at the market trends and what are the major technological trend that is shaping our industry, specifically, the API economy is really, the APIs are becoming the new way of building software, and also mobile is coming big time. So we started building SDKs so that our API started being compatible with mobile, be it you know iOS or Android, any platform out there.So essentially, it was a process of focusing on getting feedback from customers, understanding the competition and the trends and actually reshaping our product strategy and our vision as we move forward.Martin: Tony, how is your company currently structured in terms of locations and in terms of functions?Tony: Nexmo on the location wise, we actually were one of the few startups at the time that were global from day one. From day one, we started in the UK. My co-founder, Eric and our CTO, building the engineering and producting from here. I was in the US building the sales team in our US presence. And very quickly in year two, we opened Asia. Today we have Hong Kong and Singapore and Seoul as well. Because Asia is the fastest market in the world and in our industry and in many industries. So we really needed to have a good hold in that region. And we grew really fast in these three regions.Of course, we got into certain challenges as you grow especially with cultural differen ces, but that was kind of the initial thought is to capture the demand everywhere in the world especially with the web today. You are everywhere even if you don’t want to.Martin: And how is the company structured in terms of functions?Tony: Of course, we have engineering and product, and developer relation. This is a team that built the community of developers. This is under our CTO.We do have the finance. We have a Chief Financial Officer that also manages other admin function like HR, legal. We also have Chief Marketing Officer that’s on marketing, this is marketing communication, sales enablement, growth marketing, and marketing operation.We also have our sales force and our sales forces has evolved to become much more mature. Now we have a new business team going after a new logos. We have account management to manage the existing customer base. And last year, we built as well an insight sales team to deal with the inbound flow of request.Last but not least, we have our cust omer support team. We like to see everybody in the company is customer support. But we do have a 24/7 global customer support team. And also a newly created business operation team to help us improve the business as we grow.Martin: Cool. What are the major differences in terms of the customers and adoption rates if you’re looking at US customers and Asian customers?Tony: So I would say in the US, in Europe actually customers especially software developers are much more empowered to make decisions about which API vendor they want to use. We’ve seen lots of success in inbound marketing. Customer just singing up online and turning to become major customers, like AirBnB, or Uber, or SnapChat, or booking.com here in Europe.In Asia, however, it was much more a business development, relationship based type of sales. And we see less online demand from that market.Martin: And did you know this before, or did you have to have this as a hard learning?Tony: We learned it the hard way, yes.M artin: So what happened?Tony: Initially, we wanted to design our sales first and our sales process in Asia similar to other regions. We quickly realized that selling to Asian customers requires a different approach. Much more relationship based, much more traditional business development type of process. Essentially, the time to revenue in Asia seems to be longer because you don’t have that inbound channel that helps you to jumpstart the revenue quicker.You also get into issues of payments as well. Like for instance, today we support payment platforms like Alipay that enables us to tap into for instance the Chinese market, but at that time, we expected Chinese customers to pay us in Euro, and that didn’t really fly.Martin: Great. When you think back in the beginning of the company, how did you find investors and at what point in time did you approach them?Tony: Funding was part of our strategy from day one. We focused initially on what we call the three Fs: Family, Friends and F ool. Essentially, people investing in your company because they know you, not necessarily understand the business opportunity.So we raised a seed round of funding from people who trusted us on our plans. Later on, we got introduced through the same investors to a series of VCs. We’ve done traditional road show to be able to fundraise and you’ve got a couple of term sheets. And then we raises our fist VC round.Then later on, it was exactly the same process. So new investors that joined us on the board will help us make introductions to new VCs. and this is how the cycle starts again.Martin: Great. And as a European company, did you try to approach US investors because back then there was not a big trend of US investors investing abroad?Tony: Yes, so five years ago, the European VC community was very small. There was pretty much no funding, large scale funding here in Europe. So we knew that, so when we started the company, we registered the company, we incorporated company in the US.One of the reasons why we did that is because it’s easier for US VCs to invest in US companies. They don’t need to learn new laws and new financial regulations of other countries.Yes, luckily our angel investors had connection with US investors and therefore most of our funding efforts were focused on the US. Actually, we only have our angel investor in Europe, but initially most of our discussion with VCs were based in the US because economy of scales they have more cash to invest in companies like us.Martin: You’re right.BUSINESS MODEL OF NEXMOMartin: Tony, let’s talk about the business model of Nexmo. What are basically the customer segment that you’re trying to address?Tony: Yes, so Nexmo offers cloud communication APIs to enable software developers to embed communication into their flows. So our customer base today is composed of the following segments.The first is what we call the chat apps. All the companies like Viber, WeChat Line, are our customers and they us e us for primarily user acquisition and phone verification. You probably had that experience when you downloaded WhatsApp for the first time. You received a text message with a pin code. So we do that for many, if not all of these chat apps and we have them grow and acquire over four billion users in the last four years.The second segment we address is the travel sector, so both, the new economy players like AirBnB or booking.com or even you know more traditional travel companies like Expedia or KLM. They use us for improving the customer experience, building that communication, embedding that communication into their flow. For instance, booking.com they communicate with their hotel chains to cancel booking through a text to speech call, automatic text to speech. AirBnB uses us to connect hosts and guests over SMS and protect the privacy of their users.The third one is transportation. And again here is also the new economy players like Uber, GrabTaxi, EasyTaxi, where we enable them to connect drivers and passengers or voice and SMS. But also traditional transportation companies or transport companies, here in the case of, in Germany, we have Daimler, Mercedes Benz that use our APIs to communicate with cars. So it is internet of things use case.And we also are strong in the social networks. So many social networks like Twitter and Sina Weibo in China, they use us for user verification and fraud prevention.Lastly is the financial industry and fintech in a series of banks like BNP Paribas or Barclays and even new economy ones like Alipay and with Alibaba, they use us for their communication with their users.Martin: Great. If you look at the business model and assuming you are covering like four billion of the seven billion people in terms of their mobile phones and the communication, is this some kind of asset where you think: Okay, if most of the traffic and so on is going mobile, and you are at least tracking all or some of the mobile communications, then you c an build a platform and then offer other kind of services that are mobile communication related?Tony: That’s correct. So essentially, the biggest trend in communication is contextual communication. And because software is merging with communication, now we can do much more things on mobile than before. You can imagine adding sensor data to the communication. You can imagine adding the context into it.So for instance, let’s say you’re a bank and you want to send a notification to your customer because there’s an issue on their credit card, there’s a fraud. Usually, you block the card and then you communicate with them. Usually, you call them and they are not available. So it goes to voicemail. I need to call you back. So it’s really a cumbersome process that costs a lot of money for the bank and it’s not very cool for the consumer. So essentially that communication goes into the app, you push the notification to communicate that to the user. And the user clicks on that notification and automatically go into the phone call with the call center of the bank that will improve dramatically the experience and add the context of the communication.So this is where we see the future is heading. And because software is enabling us to enable developers to build these experiences, we believe that all these business communications is going to be disrupted by software in the next few years.Martin: So just for clarification, so that I get it right. Is this what you’re telling me that you’re trying to get this kind of API network running and owning, or is it more of that you only want to own the API related stuff which is connecting mobile phones only?Tony: There’s two aspects. There’s the ability to communicate to any phone in the world using programmatically a messaging or voice calls, right? Phone verification is one, IVR is another one. Telephony in the cloud is another one. Record Recording is another one. But we also provide a series of SDKs that s it in the app on the device and gather information about that communication, whether it’s sensored data, whether it’s the context of the transaction, and it’s connected to the information system, the CRM or the help desk software of the enterprise.To give you an example, KLM uses us China, KLM is a large European airline. They use us in China to communicate, to actually support, to help desk support to their users in China over WeChat. Let’s say you were traveling on KLM, you lost your luggage. You can follow them on WeChat which is the largest messaging app in China. Then you can actually open a ticket and interact with the support agent over WeChat. In the future, we will enable that also to be done over a messaging box essentially replacing the help desk agent by an algorithm to improve the user experience. So this is a type of examples of contextual communication we enable.Martin: Great. Tony, what do you think are the reasons why companies or your customers choose you o ver the competition? Is it more like that you are totally international and others are not? Is it that you have a more efficient, scalable, technical infrastructure? Is it your pricing? Is it your go to market strategy or is it just you? What are the reasons?Tony: Well it’s a combination of reasons. Youve touched on some important items.First, it’s really about innovation. Our vision is to reinvent how developer embeds communication into their application in the business world. So we focus on building the latest type of API that a developer can adopt really easily and reduces their time to market, it helps them to solve their coding issues.And the second item is to make it scalable. And scalable both: geographically, so today we can communicate with any phone in the world, but also from a quality point of view because it’s easy to build an app that can transact a million messages a day or months. But if you want to take it to a billion in months, then it becomes problematic. S o we do focus on enabling companies to embed these tools and make it also scalable geographically and technically.Martin: Great. Have you thought of extending your product portfolio by rating those transactions? For example if I’m a customer of you, like a call center or so, and I’m having a customer calling me, I can have the communication arranged by your API for example. And then once you have a rated information of the transaction between the call center and their customer, then you would have this kind of information for several transactions from all over the world, you can put some data scientists on that in order to put some contextual information.Tony: Yes, I think you’re hitting on an important element of the disruption we’re bringing in. We don’t necessarily provide the services, but we enable the customer to access them easily, right.So because we’re a platform and we provide our services through APIs, therefore you can start recording important data points al ong the way of the conversation of the communication. Once you’re able to record this information, you can start doing things like machine learning. You can start doing things like cognitive computing on it. But if you’re not using this open API platform, and you’re like logged into, let’s say here that has a silo system, you’re not able to do so. So we make data break free and therefore our customers get more value out of it.Martin: When I’m thinking of APIs, it sounds to me that they are very easily interchangeable. So as long as your APIs is good as mine, the question now would be, how are you increasing the barriers to competition? For example economies of scale or scope or something like that.Tony: Yes, so this comment is valid for some APIs. For others, it’s actually less valid especially when it’s an SDK and it’s embedded into the device. But we focus on value creation and the value creation is what creates stickiness. So value creation is defined in many va riables.The first one is really about the quality of a service offering. So for instance, let’s say in SMS, we do go very long way to build the world’s largest direct care network, so we actually minimize the latency. We build algorithm that manage quality and make it consistent overtime. So there’s a quality component. There’s also a customer support component. We’re really obsessed about customer support, because our customers rely on us for their most business critical communication: acquiring users, confirming the transaction. And the carrier network is not fit for these new use cases.So we essentially really get obsessed with support. Everyone we hire on the company, they go through the customer academy. They do customer, they sell customer tickets until they get the highest satisfaction rating. Then they graduate and they go to their job.I think that’s kind of the two main reasons of value creation. Also we keep pushing the boundaries of what is possible of feature s and data. For instance, our analytics platform enables the customer to view more data of what’s going on in their communication and do some analysis on that. So this is kind of how we create stickiness and we help actually. It’s really about creating more value for the customer. And there’s no magic in our business for that.Martin: Great.ENTREPRENEURIAL ADVICE FROM TONY JAMOUSMartin: Tony, now I would like to learn some more stuff about your entrepreneur journey and your learnings. So what type of learnings can you share with other people interested in starting a company so that they make less errors?Tony: So it depends on the phase. So initially, one of the recurrent theme I see with people who wants to become entrepreneur is that they believe that they need to be ready to start doing it. What I realize is that you’re never ready. So the best is to jump in right away and try to do your best. I mean that’s kind of the first learning I had.The second learning I think woul d be around going global quickly. At Nexmo, from one hand we benefited from that. We were able to get transaction and revenue across the globe. We have customers in every country today. But if you do it too early, then you’re going to start I mean at least us, we had some issues in terms of the scalability of the organization, you have remote teams. And as the team grows, you need to deliver that vision, you need to make sure they are aligned and it’s not easy when you do it across regions. I think this would be kind of the learning that in the last four or five years.Of course, it’s about it’s all about hiring the right people, and making sure, to hire people that can also help you scale the business from day one and that was an important learning. For instance, our CTO and co-founder, when I hired him, I gave him a coding task which is obviously the wrong thing to do. Because what was really important for him is his leadership skills, and that he needed to build a large te am and manage it and scale it.Martin: And what have been the major specific problems in terms of scaling the organization? Because what I’ve heard from other companies is this tribe theory that first you’re a family, then you’re a tribe, then something like a city and so on. And that in the beginning you don’t have processes and later on, you need to implement processes and then type of people might change because not everybody who is performing great at the 20, 30, 40 person company is performing great than a 500 person company. What have been your major problems in scaling the company?Tony: The first one is I said before, is about aligning everyone around one shared vision, one plan, everybody is driving in the right direction. The bigger you become, the more important it becomes to over-communicate and align.The second learning is really about putting in place the processes and structure to enable you to scale. Be it hiring the right people, putting in place the right str ucture. So its like the image I like to use is like building an airplane while you are in the air. You build one engine, and you realize you need another engine. So you need to go and build that as well. Then you need to make sure that these two engines are actually talking to each other. So that they can go in one direction and that process is ongoing, it never stops. How you learn about it is when you make mistakes, is when things are break, and you realize that: Oh yes, I need to build a process here to make it work.Martin: Great, Tony, thank you so much for your time and sharing your insights.Tony: Thanks, Martin.Martin: Welcome.THANKS FOR LISTENING!Thanks so much for joining our 11th podcast episode!Have some feedback you’d like to share?  Leave  a note in the comment section below! If you enjoyed this episode, please  share  it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post.Also,  please leave an honest review for The Cleverism Podcast on iTunes or on Sound Cloud. Ratings and reviews  are  extremely  helpful  and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, and we read each and every one of them.Special thanks  to Tony for joining me this week. Until  next time!