#quettra

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RT @MyMarketingFile #SocialMedia #SimilarWeb Acquires #Mobile Intelligence Firm #Quettra https://t.co/O05CwNioNy...

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[tapstreammobilepodcast]

TMP- Episode 2: Ankit Jain CEO of Quettra

"...200 million people or 20 percent of a billion people tinkered with their phone... "

Ankit Jain, CEO of Quettra discusses messaging, machine learning and the future of mobile.

Transcript

Ankit:  Hi this is Ankit.

Mack:  Ankit this is Mack from Tapstream, how are you?

Ankit:  Good.  You still have a Canadian number, don’t you?

Mack: I do live in Canada [crosstalk].

Ankit: I mean, you do?  I thought you… I know you are a Canadian but I thought most of Top Stream was in Canada but I thought you guys are now down here.

Mack: No.  I have lived there and I spend some time there, to the point of being very loud, when I spent my time there. 

Ankit:  I see.

Mack: So that we perceive that we are there, even if that is not exactly the truth.

Ankit:  I see.  Right now are you in Canada?

Mack: Yes.

Ankit:  God, I thought.  Hello to Canada.

Mack: How are you today?  How is San Francisco?  Is it kind of foggy and kind of wet and kind of sunny and kind of beautiful?

Ankit:  Here in Mountain View, it’s always amazing.

Mack: Of course.

Ankit:  And there’s no fog, there’s a nice view of some mountains and no, things are good, busy and good.

Mack: Okay, so busy is a good place to start.  Welcome to first ever future of mobile podcast. Obviously, being the shift that I am, I thought everybody knows starting a podcast and I said, “I could probably do that,” so then I called smart people, I can think of and you were first and I said, “Mr. Podcast.” The muse said, “Okay,” so exactly the future of mobile.  To get started, I guess, I have to give you an introduction.  Mine is a back up attached in the podcast.  You’ll get your attachment well.  

Now nearly interesting is, I could tell us about what you’ve been doing before and what you’re doing these days, some sort of background and why you’re so relevant to talking to the future mobile and then the company that you’re working on now? 

Ankit:  Sure.  Pleasure to be with you and chat with you about, how the future of mobile and actually, I think what’s happening today in mobile is just as interesting as the future.  And I spent a few years at Google running a big piece of Google play, the search and the discovery and all of the storage and infrastructure for Google play.  So really everything other than the UI and the billing aspects of the play store, across all of the verticals.  I was fortunate enough to be there early, when it was still Android market.  I see it mature into Google play and the business it is today.  

So mobile is something very near and dear to me.  And I think it’s been fascinating, to see how we’ve gone from a world, where technology was in the hands of the few hundred million people can now be in the hands of billions of people.  So we are more connected, we are more aware and we’re much more powerful, in terms of what we can all achieve just at our fingertips.

Mack: Yeah and it’s, there’s an interesting idea I heard, which is something very different at scale but you start talking about like quantum physics.  First of all, physics  kind of rules of reality are different, if you’re talking about really big or really small things.  And I read somewhere, probably twitter, something recently about how technology was fundamentally different at the scale of billions and billions, than it was the tens of millions, hundreds of millions and mobile leading the charge, of this mass-adopted technology, is going to create opportunities that we can’t begin to understand, because we don’t understand what technology in the scale of billions. 

I don’t know if I agree, like I don’t really get why going from a hundred million people to one billion people, changes in that much you already are sucking covering everybody pragmatically, really 30 or pretty equip this things.  I would think, but maybe there is some opportunity for strange new growth that scale.

Ankit: Well, there definitely is and I can give you a couple of examples.  I come from a background of lot of data infrastructure, data mining machine learning, and they’re certainly outgrow them that performs amazingly well, and everybody in the tech world always talks about, “Oh my God this is the company  with great AI technology or machine learning technology,”  but a lot of times the startups never have a lot of data.  

They can prove great things at small scale and stuff works at a small scale, but the second year you throw scale at it, goes algorithms those scale.  Those algorithms  kicked too long, to process large amounts of data and so you have to simplify them and get away from, all the beautifulness of the algorithm, to work at the millions, hundreds of millions and billions of people with this scale.  I would Google and other successful technology companies are found is, once you got that much  data, the data itself becomes a very key part of the solution, where you can do very simple things and make huge impacts.  So the kinds of solutions you build, at a small scale and big scale are very different.

Mack: Okay,  let’s use that as attention and that you telling, what you’re doing because what you’re doing I assume, you’ll eventually going to do it at a very big scale.  So tell  us about [crosstalk].

Ankit:  Absolutely.  Sure, yeah, I left Google last summer and I started last summer like 2013 and started _____ in the late fall, with the goal of understanding what people are doing on their phones, because the phones are becoming more and more part of our digital life, not just what we’re doing on the phone, but what we’re doing with our phones.  Whether it is browsing or entertaining ourselves, or getting stuff done but also ordering and overpaying, making payments in store, with stuff like Apple pay or just within an apple ordering.

Mack: Or snap cash.

Ankit:  Or Snapchat.

Mack: Snap cash launch today?

Ankit:  No.

Mack: In our payments, snap cash got credit today, and from the ridiculous promo video they release, which is like over the top sort of the family guy musical thing, it looks like there’s a straight of a button in there, you link Snapchat to your bank account, ignoring the fact that they got hacked a couple of months ago from phone numbers and then you can just start debiting money around and pay Snapchat.

Ankit:  That’s great, it’s brilliant.

Mack: No, of all the people I thought, would yeah.  What do we okay? What do we okay?  Don’t look that way. That’s  my obstruction.

Ankit:  Cool.  Yeah.  So the heart of what we’re trying to do is,  understand mobile users and help improve the experience of this billions of people, that are coming online via mobile whether it’s by helping our developer and app partners, or content partners personalized offerings. Whether it is by helping them monetized their users better.  But at the end of the day, the heart of our thesis is, if we can understand users well and at scale, then we can improve the user experience, which increases long term and lifetime value, which is where there is a business. 

Mack: So is there not a bunch of smart and accomplished people like Google Analytics for mobile and Kissmetrics maybe, and Mix Panel, I mean all sorts of _____  like, is there not lots of players in this phase?

Ankit:  No.  I don’t look at us as a... what we’re offering is not just an analytics platform.  The analytic platforms of today, are great for all the power users.  But as you said earlier, there is this inflection point that’s going on, where we’re going from hundreds of millions of devices to billions of devices.  How we’re going from tens of thousands of developers to whom everybody being able to become developer.  

All of these analytics products are made for the head, are made for people that really can get into the depths of every piece of the product, but as we scale, we have to make things out work for everybody, without being an analytics guru.   So there’s parts of our product and this is again, in very early development that are just dead simple.  You don’t need to figure out what key value pairs to shoot up the Google Analytics or Kissmetrics and the other barrier, that we’re aiming to break is the barrier of your app.  This weird concept, which is today the way we’ve learnt mobile is all about your app and just keep improving your app.  But if you think about your user, they don’t think about their _____  from the,  “Oh I use Facebook between 2:00 o’clock and 2:04.” They just think about the fact, that they need to get something done and therefore they go, do that something, you’re just a part of their day.   

So how can you understand how you fit in to your user’s life?  And how you can improve your user’s life?  Those are the kinds of answers, we’d like to provide our partners with in order to improve their offerings. 

Mack: So I totally get it, because a couple of years ago, I was running a location with James Company and we flurry in our game and I was in _____ charge of girls, so I honestly had no idea what I was doing.  We’re the girl packer, we’re not around yet, so I couldn’t go to that website and I look at flurry every day and I,  honest to God I would sit there and stare at it.   So I would like, it feels slightly less sure about myself, but have no idea what I was looking at or what I was supposed to be doing or anything like that.  

And it’s five years later now, but that problem fundamentally, isn’t solve.  Right now, you get the board and I still look at it and kinda like, “Well yeah, I’m definitely up in to the right so I’m excited, but don’t have much more _____ going on.”

Ankit:  Right.  It’s not about collecting gobs and gobs of data, it’s about figuring out the one or two things, that can help you get to your next performance metric to your next milestone, to your next inflection point.  It’s not about us, staying what we’re doing terabytes of data or extra bytes of data which, we are doing things at crazy scale, but for our customer it’s about,  “Here’s the one thing that can make your next milestone come sooner.” 

Mack: Yeah.  How do you imagine that the common way somebody in San Francisco uses her phone in two years, will be different from how it is now?  Do you think they can have a lot more notifications? You think about a lot, what notifications?  Do you think they’re going to finally learn phone adequate and not for their phone all the time?  Do you think we can go even further down the rabbit hole like scream obsession? What is the next couple year of western world cellphone use, in a hyper to connect to San Francisco look like?  

Ankit: I don’t think it’s gonna change much from how it is today, in terms of adequate.  I think, people as much as we like to hit, bash on people, about how much they use their phones.  I think most people are actually pretty polite.  They don’t pull out their phone when someone is, that they care about is talking to them. I…[crosstalk]

Mack: _____ ?

Ankit:  Right and otherwise, if there’s somebody or someone who does not about you and they take out their phone, then I think that’s a message that you just got from somebody else as well. So I think that’s not gonna change.  It’s about how much you respect the person, just like right now, you and I are on a phone call.  You could also be checking twitter or you could be paying attention, that’s up to you.  Nothing’s gonna change that, and I think that’s how we are, as humans.  

In terms of notifications,that’s actually a very interesting area, I think there’s gonna be more notifications, which are smarter, which are more interactive.  There’s gonna be certain services that will be bundled into notifications, that you don’t even have to open the app some of the time. You can just do it from the notification, or you can get the information from the notification.  I think people are going to see this increase in notification and there’s gonna be a meta-level set of applications, especially on android, which come which allows you to manage notifications let’s say, “Hey, don’t send me what’s that messages, when I’m in a meeting.” Because they also understand your calendar, or in a set of these rules.   

So the first generation will be, where the user sets up rules, kind of like IFFT.  But the second generation,  this is where things get interesting is, that they’re just gonna learn and they’ll gonna apply this kind of filters. Let the machines do the work and my purpose to that is I come from a data machine learning, all that kind of diagrams, so my bios is in that direction but I think, in San Francisco, people adapt that kind of stuff. 

 I don’t think the rest of the world will adapt that kind of stuff in two years but I think we will say, “Yup, the game notifications send it to me, when I’m on my way home in Uber.  Don’t send it to me when I’m in the middle of the meeting ‘coz really I’m not gonna do it.” And actually,  if game developers are smart, they will figure out how to only send those notifications when the person is idle.

Mack: Yeah, for sure because if you send me that notification.

So here’s one of the random up ahead spinning out of that. And that is, I grew up in a computer-filled household.  My dad was building PC, computers as far as I can remember.  And he has always disliked Macs because in his mind, they’re like a toaster.  They work really well and they’re really nice, but nobody knows how to use them.   He’s like one of these old mechanics which complains with modern cars that you can’t fix your own car.

Ankit: Right.

Mack: Like there’s no access to it which gives him hard world, black hole thing

Ankit: Right.

Mack: And do you think that with and not just like machine learning in regards to mobile messages or notifications, but just to somebody who knows machine learning as a whole.  Are we going to get to the point where we’ve taught the machine how to do so much, that we don’t have to un-teach them or really get to start like you got to call in the machine learning algorithm programmer, like you call a plumber today that fix your stove because there’s still few learning algorithms to help us up?

Ankit:  No.  It’s a great point you make and I hope, we don’t get to that point, machine learning or data mining.  All these things are great but they do have limitations.  Today, machines don’t have emotions. They give them an algorithm and they work on it.  One of the things  come here like what  Google is trying to do is, replicate the human brain from neural network into the Google brain project and other companies are doing some learning things as well, to try and think like a human.

I think there is an aspect of randomness in the way we connect certain dots.  It’s random because we don’t know how that happens today, and if you know it’s too much in the direction of machine learning, you get into this world, like you don’t know how to control the machines where the average person doesn’t. 

So if I think for the next five years, we’ll probably not get there and I think a lot of people are trying to be really careful about, what goes down the machine learning pattern and what doesn’t.  But I think there are companies out there, that approves that people like to tinker and really control their experience.  So let me give you one example. There’s a lot of… in the Android world launchers and your home screens are very popular and I’m sure you’ve come across a couple of them.  There’s companies like Aviate that was set by Yahoo which is a machine learned launcher or there’s Samsung zone experience or HTC zone experience on Google now, which is probably the most popular one that comes from and built on a phone. 

The problem with a lot of these is that, they don’t give a lot of controls to the user, to control their experience.  And unknown to most people in Silicon Valley, there’s a company called [Sunji] Mobile out of China.  They’re public on the NASDAQ and a full disclosure to one of my investors.

Mack: There are also norm rules. 

Ankit: Right, norm rules but what they have is a product called GO Launcher, which allows the average user to change their wallpaper, to change what their experience are in their home screens look like, what their Gmail icon should look like and they’d had over, I think, a couple of hundred million installs, out of a billion Android phones.  That tells you, that people like to tinker with their phones in a Lan-machine-learned way.  So they know what experience they are controlling.  

So, I think there is a very clear signal that people like control and solutions that go too much into the automated domain without enough user control. You know, we’ll see, they will have their limitations and the demand for them, will be balanced by these other products that are so fully human-curated.  Did I make sense?

Ankit: Yeah.  Yeah.  And I don’t think that we know that there is like a…

The fact that 200 million people or 20 or something billion people tinkered with their phone and make it personalized. For everybody, it’s a mandatory device and battery launches. That’s fine. But you iPhone folks, it is really like you get to control the operating system. It’s not that deep. But it’s sort of middle layer of control over the experience that you have over your phone. I think lot of you do personalization. In the same way, stereotypically Asians all had a thing that hanging out to their key chains and all that stuff. They are doing that in the digital space as well. 

Ankit: Right. (Cornstalks).It’s coming to iOS in the form of own key boards and that’s just step 1. 

Mack: Yeah. The entire firm wares of Apple has always been..... We don’t need customization because we are Apple. Steve Jobs from the dead is calling out marching orders. We are designing most amazingly crafted and perfect human ergonomic design experience collaboration orgasm that we have achieved. For android, it’s a full open version source. Europe being the....

Ankit: I don’t know if I agree with that statement. I think Apple has always been giving researcher what they want, having limited number of options to the make the dead decision make it east. Now if you look at iWatch from everything we are seeing, there will be hundreds of combination to really make it something for you. And the App Store is a place again where you can make your hundreds of experience you want. So I think there are certain aspects that they like to control for a unified experience, other aspects do open up.

Mack: Yeah. But Android opens a lot more. Android just does not...

Ankit: Absolutely. I think Apple is more closed on the hardware side of things. Both platforms allow people to open up the software side. 

Mack: So to wrap this up, we can make conclusion like when you have seem learning like will be pioneered in the Android, it is so much more open that it need to be for now. Couple glitch sign of the...

Ankit: tinkering.

Mack: yeah. Tinkering. That could be the future of mobile in lot of ways. 

Ankit: I think that’s the future of western mobile. I think that’s whole new combination of what happens in the developing nations. Because lot of these worlds are just getting connected. I think Android is really doing very interesting things to get those villagers in India connected to Internet, to get the forecast of when the weather is going to certain way, when they are going to get the next water tape coming in to their building, sort of house and their village. And those kinds of technologies are going to transform 5/6th of the world in today that’s not connected. So that’s a whole combination for itself. But I think it’s also very important to remember that piece of the world. 

Mack: I think for me that is the most exciting thing we are doing right now. I have talked about you know your smart phone is your luxury. Then you hear about very difficult situations and adjusting situation in that part of the world where there is not much of resources to go around. And people are sort of given access to "do you want the Apple the suite or do you want the Apple phone charger for your phone as your Android phone. Literally, Wi-Fi is a better, smarter choice for surviving in the disastrous responsive food in a lot of places. Like mobile information is a big deal. Like you said for us arguing about machine learning is going to help us chose a next song or whether we going to do a head on lot by itself. It’s interesting is that it’s emerging massiveness.  They are going to have access to mobile. 

Ankit: So I think the future of mobile in the western world, I think you are going into the machine learned flash smarter phone in the developing and emerging world. You are going into smart phone for the first time. I think both are exciting and both are the future of mobile.

Mack: That’s sir is the perfect end note for our conversation. Thank you so much for involved of course. App screen mobile part I guess and we might offer another or 2 just to talk about new markets in mobile. Because that is such big and interesting things. It only just shown the darkness of it. 

Ankit: Absolutely. Thank for having me.

Mack: Thank you. Have a good day.

Ankit: You too. Bye.