Justin Kan and His Experience as a World Class Entrepreneur

Last weekend (30/01), a world-class entrepreneur from the United States who had previously successfully founded Justin TV, Twitch, and currently holds the position of Partner in venture capital Y Combinator Justin Kan was present in Jakarta for a session Ask Me Anything held by fintech services Xendit and @America. DailySocial also attended the event and observed several important points about his experience as an entrepreneur.

The name Justin Kan, of course, is no stranger to startup actors and activists. His success in pursuing a career as an entrepreneur has started since he first created Kiko, an AJAX web calendar with his partner Emmet Shear. With a simple business model, Justin managed to sell his idea to investors to get funding.

“When doing fundraising, make sure you are the startup founder leave an impression on investors if they don't invest in your startup you will lose big and lose valuable moments, said Justin.

However, once it started running, webcalendar His property is not used by the public too much. To be able to return the funding provided by investors, Justin and his colleagues finally sold their company via eBay to Tucows.

“The experience certainly made me more confident and learn from the mistakes that have been made. It turns out one of the keys to success to become a successful entrepreneur is to make a good product, pitch the idea to the public, said Justin

Justin's unique way of selling the company through eBay has paid off. It wasn't long before his first company was officially sold.

After failing to build his first business, Justin then began to develop ideas for building a new business. Come up with an idea to make live streaming reality showsJustin TV. This unique and relatively fresh idea was well received by Paul Graham from Y Combinator, who was then willing to invest in Justin to develop Justin.TV.

The presence of Justin.TV then gave birth to the idea to make Twitch, video platform and community for para gamer. Gamers from all over the world can connect to the system from Twitch, they can broadcast, watch and chatting with anyone and from anywhere when playing.

"Twitch built on feedback that we receive from Justin.TV users. They threw the idea it would be nice if they could see the gamer professional is playing and live online live stream, we finally started changing the platform and making Twitch," said Justin.

Justin claims that currently Twitch users worldwide have reached 100 million people every month. In 2014 the giant Amazon bought Twitch for $970 million. Twitch videos have reached over 13 million gamer. On average, according to Justin, users watch 106 minutes per day.

"Create a business idea that is unique and of courseniche' to start startup, the next stage, when the idea has been determined, create an attractive product and immediately launch the product to the public, "said Justin.

Southeast Asia and its potential to become an integrated startup region

Currently Justin Kan is a Partner at Y Combinator. One of the tasks assigned to him is to look for new startups that have the potential to be invested by Y Combinator.

So far, Y Combinator noted that from 12 thousand startups that sent pitch deck-In fact, only about 100 startups were eyed by Y Combinator (0,8%). Currently Y Combinator has produced 800 startups, 1600 founders with a total value of $65 billion (around IDR 890 trillion).

Startups that have received funding from Y Combinator include airbnb, Dropbox, Twitch, Xendit, wepay, 9gag, reddit, codeacademy and many more. In addition to the United States, currently Y Combinator has invested in countries such as India, Indonesia, China, Singapore, Latin America and Africa.

“We always choose a variety of startups to fund, starting from e-commerce, fintech and others. Make sure you clearly know the business you are running and a Founder must have insight and skill good for developing their startup,” said Justin.

Southeast Asia is a market specifically targeted by Y Combinator at the moment, although not many startups are funded (roughly only about 1% of them). Justin sees Indonesia has great potential for investment.

"There are many Indonesian people and most of them use smartphones regularly. This market is what we are aiming for as an extraordinary market,” said Justin.

When asked what kind of startups have great potential in Indonesia, Justin said: fintech is a promising sector. The fact is that currently there are still many Indonesian people who have not bankable, is a market that has great potential to be targeted.

Another sector that also caught Justin's attention was service on-demand as has been done by Go-Jek, Uber and Grab.

“In the United States it is very expensive to hire employees, so it is difficult to develop a business model like Go-Jek, namely by partnership. No wonder when the service on-demand such as Go-Jek is quite popular and liked by the public and of course used every day, "said Justin.

On this occasion Justin also saw that the Go-Massage service presented by Go-Jek was quite interesting and had the potential to be big in the future.

Good growth vs bad growth

One of the important points that Justin also shared is how to differentiate between good or bad growth in startups. Good growth or good growth Of course, it is when the startup product is liked by users and has a number of active users every day. However, if your current product doesn't have significant traction, it doesn't hurt to keep it.

“Is it bad to make something that doesn't make money? If the product proves useful and is used by only a few users, look for investors who have the same vision and mission to develop. If there isn't a lot of traction at the moment, it's likely that one day it will have the potential to be successful," Justin concluded.