Interview With Jonathan Chua, Co-Founder Of Klout
May 14, 2009 by Gwen
Filed under Entrepreneurs, Interviews
With the much awaited unConference 2009 happening this Saturday, SGEntrepreneurs catches up with one of the startups presenting at the event, Klout. We interview one of its co-founders, Jonathan Chua.
Hi Jonathan, tell us, what is Klout all about?
At Klout we believe that every person who creates content online has influence. Our goal is to understand how big the audience is that a person influences and on what topics they are influential.
Influence is a tricky term, how do you measure a person’s influence?
Unfortunately there is no simple influence calculation but there are a lot of clear signals of influence we are able to identify out of the Twitter stream. An example might be if a high percentage of my tweets about video games were retweeted then there is a good chance that I have some level of influence on the subject. Our engine focuses on identifying these signals like this that might indicate influence in the 25+ variables that we track. Knowing that influence is subjective we also allow customers to customize how the factors in the calculation are weighted. If your company is looking to drive conversation you could weight @ messages higher and find the people who really know how to keep a conversation going.
Essentially a Twitter influencer measurement tool, can Klout be said to be tracking influence “across the social web”?
Our engine works on most social sites (Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, etc) but thus far we have focused on collecting data and proving our methodology on Twitter. Most social sites are connected to Twitter in some way so do have a fair sense of how influential someone is across the social web. For example, most people will share links to their blog posts or new videos on Twitter. We are able to measure how people react to these link to understand how influential they are on these on other sites. It’s not perfect but our analysis has shown that it gives us a good starting point.
Can you give us a few examples of who influencers are and how they behave online?
Go to search.twitter.com and look for “rt @guykawasaki” and you will get a sense of the power influencers have to spread information. Influencers seem to have a unique ability to surface interesting data (links) and package it in a way that makes people want to not just click through but co-opt the information and make it their own through retweets. The influencer seems to be at the top of the pyramid of knowledge dissemination.
What is Klout’s main competitive advantage?
Our proprietary analytics engine performs semantic analysis on tweets and utilizes machine learning to measure influence between social graph nodes. Creating actionable data like we do is a non-trivial task that will cost any company a lot of money and time.
Who makes up your team?
Joe Fernandez is the CEO of Klout, Binh Tran is the CTO of Klout and Aung Si Thu Hein is the Lead Developer of Klout.
My role on the Klout team is an technology and business advisor. As much as I’d like to get involved in the heavy lifting, I still have to run the rest of Duration.
What is the structure of Duration and Klout?
I have known Joe Fernandez for about 6 years and have worked with him on other projects. So when he was starting up Klout and told me the idea, I was like, “hellz yeah, I’m in … and I wanna participate in the company.” That’s how Duration became a co-founder of Klout.
I run Duration as CEO and as both technical and business advisor for Klout. All of Klout’s development is done by Duration and led by Aung Si Thu Hein.
Aung has been an employee of Duration for 5 years and one of the best developers I know.
How has your team been funding Klout?
Self funded with a small seed investment from Oxstein Design Labs.
Will you be raising funds?
Yes, in the process right now.
If you had to pick, Marketing or Technology?
The nerd in me says technology but the side that likes to make money has to go with marketing.
Looking back, what has been your moment of greatest euphoria?
Presenting in front of 500+ people at the New York Tech Meetup and as a finalist in the Innovator competition at SXSW was both euphoric and terrifying.
Has there been any time that you felt like quitting?
Never. We adjust, but we never quit.
Where do you see Klout in one year?
A year from now you will see Klout all over the place as influence becomes integrated into all sorts of apps.
Would you have done anything differently?
I’ve learned a lot from the various (actually countless) mistakes we’ve made but thankfully none of them have thrown us too far off the mark and they’ve all helped get us to the place we are now so I don’t think I would change anything.
Klout is only one of Duration Inc’s many products right? Can you share with you the other products you offer?
At Duration, we get turned on by building great software products. In addition to Klout, we have built applications on the web, desktops and mobile devices for both the public sector and private sector. One of my personal favorites is building all the technology products (7 product lines) and platform for OnBoard Informatics. The guys at OnBoard are forward agile thinkers and we helped them grow from a 3 man shop operating in a basement to the premier geographic data and software company in the United States.
Two upcoming local products that we are releasing soon are Weather@SG, a collaboration with NEA and Microsoft; and Visual History of Singapore, a collaboration with National Library Board.
Top 3 qualities an entrepreneur must have?
This is what I think makes a “good entrepreneur” …
1. Truly care about what you do.
2. Have no fear.
3. Must be a little crazy … cause it’s really really hard to do well.
Thanks to Jon and your team! Good luck and see you this Saturday.
If you would like meet the team of Klout in person, attend the premier startup event in the Asian region, unConference Singapore 2009.
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