TIMOTHY JORDAN: Hi, I'm Timothy.
RAN NACHMANY: Hi, I'm Ran.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: And you're here with "The Developer
Show" on location at the Launchpad Accelerator.
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Tell me, what is Launchpad?
RAN NACHMANY: In Launchpad Accelerator,
we work with late stage setups.
And their biggest challenge is how to grow.
Turns out, in order to build a successful business,
it's more than just writing great lines of code.
You need to work on marketing, on user experience,
on your product strategy, how you raise funds,
and how you build your company.
We have startups here from Indonesia, India, Brazil,
and Mexico.
They go back home and we continue
to work with them for a period of six months.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's amazing.
RAN NACHMANY: I hope so.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: So we're going to talk
with a few startups today, and a few of the mentors
about their experience with the Launchpad Accelerator
and some of the Google technologies
that they're using.
RAN NACHMANY: Great, sounds awesome.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Let's get to it.
So I'm now standing here with Iman and Jordan.
Iman is CEO of a startup that's at the Launchpad Accelerator,
and Jordan was his mentor.
Iman, tell us a little bit about your startup.
IMAN: We are Ruangguru.
In English, it means [? classroom. ?]
So what we're doing is that we built a learning management
system targeting to K-12 market in Indonesia.
And on the other hand, we also provide a tool for teachers
and also parents to monitor how students are performing.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's awesome.
Now what Google technologies do you use?
IMAN: One of the things that we are working on
while we are at Launchpad is actually
to build a progressive web app.
Because one of things that we figure out
working in Indonesian market is that the internet penetration
is very low there.
And the data also costs very highly.
So that's also one of the concerns that most of our users
have.
So we're thinking about the solution
to actually equip our users to increase speed and conversion,
definitely.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's amazing.
And Jordan's been helping you?
IMAN: Yeah, definitely.
It's been really helpful.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Now, how's the process been
going, adding in progressive web apps to this business?
JORDAN: I mean, Ruangguru has a very straightforward business
in network conditions like Indonesia, where there's not
always a great network connection,
where sometimes you think you're on Wi-Fi,
sometimes you're on 2G, sometimes you're on 3G.
But really, you're on nothing.
It happens a lot.
And what it allows you to do is as an app,
you can pull from the cache on the device
first before having to go out to the network.
So Ruangguru can use service workers,
use caching to create a kind of offline first application
for their web app that enables students to read content
at home where they might not have a network connection,
or on the train where there might not
be any cellular service at all.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's amazing.
Iman, thanks so much for joining us.
IMAN: Yeah, my pleasure.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Jordan, you want to stick around
for another one?
JORDAN: For sure.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: All right.
Anshoo, thank you for joining us.
ANSHOO: Thank you so much.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Will you tell us a little bit
about your startup, Magicpin?
ANSHOO: So So the name Magicpin comes
from pinning a location on the map,
and we'll show you the magic around that location.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's great.
ANSHOO: We are a hyperlocal social network,
where for our users, we get them to discover
interesting people around them, interesting merchants
around them.
And from merchants, we let them tap that local audience,
which is otherwise very hard for them to reach out to.
So they can increase new customers
for themselves, increase revenue when they are in trust,
and then also just generally connect with the users who
live in that locality.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Very cool.
And you've been working with Jordan
on creating a progressive web app.
ANSHOO: And the sessions have been great,
because in a market like India, downloading an app
is also a higher commitment.
It requires-- on an average, a user
would keep five or six apps on their phone.
And if you want to be the next job to download,
then that is a high [? attrition. ?]
There is more friction to that.
What progressive web apps let us do--
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Five or six apps?
Five or six?
I download five or six apps a day.
JORDAN: And a lot of the devices in these markets
have not that much space on device.
So you're talking about 128 megabytes of memory,
and when you add in system features,
you have maybe 40 megabytes of user space.
And if a typical APK is a few megabytes,
you can only have a few of those before you can really
have to stop downloading.
One of the great things about progressive web apps
that Anshoo was mentioning was that you
don't have to request that commitment right up front.
You can start to build a relationship with the user
through the web interface.
And over time, the web app can become more and more
like a native app.
It can be housed on a device.
It can cache content and work offline.
ANSHOO: In the last 1 and 1/2 weeks
that we have been [? here, ?] based on these conversations,
we actually launched a micro version of our platform
on progressive web apps.
On the experience is great.
Without using the app, people can get as good an experience.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: 1 and 1/2 weeks?
Good work.
JORDAN: I don't deserve any of the credit.
These guys certainly do.
The only problem is that none of the merchants
are here in Mountain View.
They're all in India.
So I will never be able to try it out.
I'll have to stop by sometime.
ANSHOO: We'll find a way for you to do it.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: We now have Sandeep,
co-founder of Red Carpet.
Sandeep, tell us about your startup.
SANDEEP: OK, so Red Carpet basically
lends to customers in India to fund their online purchases,
whether it be e-commerce or travel or anything.
Now, in India, credit and finance companies
barely service 3% of the customer base.
Because there is absolutely no data.
There's no credit bureau data to score and profile
these customers.
Now, Red Carpet has actually access
to much more data, which includes
the data on your mobile phone.
Therefore, we are now able to service customers
who have never had credit in their life before.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's amazing.
SANDEEP: So India is basically a country
where 90% of the economy, which is a trillion dollar economy,
is cash, which includes e-commerce.
E-commerce is 90% cash.
So banks, even if they look at your bank statement,
have no data to process anything.
There's no transactions.
The only transactions that come up is on your mobile phone.
And that's what we access to build a profile for you.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: OK.
And you've been using machine learning over the last couple
weeks to help out.
SANDEEP: Yes.
So Francisco-- and we talked a lot
about how we can leverage machine
learning-- Red Carpet is fundamentally a data science
company.
We are one of the very few companies that combine a people
graph, like I'm connected to you,
with historical transaction data.
Now, this falls outside the realm of traditional machine
learning.
And it's not something that you can just slap package
on and have it work.
So we're a Y Combinator startup.
And when we applied to Launchpad,
one of the key things we were looking for
is access to the crown jewels of Google,
which is like the people who drive the machine learning.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: This guy right here.
SANDEEP: Now, Francisco and I talked, I don't know,
for a couple of-- at least an hour or so.
And we came up with a new way to combine
graph and traditional data into a new way
of doing machine learning, which was pretty freaking awesome
FRANCISCO URIBE: So Sandeep's example
illustrates really the flexibility of TensorFlow
programming model.
Historically, we have seen in the market
that certain tools specialize in one type of machine learning.
And the idea with TensorFlow is to provide
a unified computation platform so that a team can experiment
with models for [? sparse ?] features, for dense features,
or in the case of Sandeep, look at more complex things
like graph analysis, incorporate all of that
to provide more accurate predictions.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: So what's next for Red Carpet?
SANDEEP: We want to take all of this learnings back to India
and we're probably going to build India's largest fintech
company.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: That's exciting, man.
Thanks for joining us.
SANDEEP: Thank you so much.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Ran, we just talked
to some amazing startups about their time
at Launchpad Accelerator.
They're using progressive web apps, machine learning
with TensorFlow, even Firebase.
If there are startups out there that
want to get involved like these, where do they go?
RAN NACHMANY: So check out our link down below.
And we invite you to apply to the next batch of Launchpad
Accelerator.
We really hope to see you with us.
TIMOTHY JORDAN: Awesome.
And if you'd like to check out some of the technologies
that we talked about, we'll link those below as well.
See you.
RAN NACHMANY: Bye.
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