Conversations with Guang Ming Yong, Co-Founder of Social Wok on TechCrunch 50

During this year’s TechCrunch 50 2009 conference in Silicon Valley, our local start-up, Socialwok made Singapore proud by becoming the winner for the Demo Pit in the event. To recap, Socialwok is an enterprise based social networking service to make organizations and companies more productive by helping them connect, share and collaborate within themselves and with the world. While the team is now busy taking the company forward to another stage, we manage to catch up with Ming Yong, the co-founder of Socialwok to sit down with us and tell us the adventures of Socialwok in TechCrunch 50 and Silicon Valley, the new developments to the Socialwok product and what’s next for this company.

BL: Hi Ming, great to have you again on SGE since your last interview with Socialwok with my fellow colleague. Once again, congratulations with Social Wok winning the Demo Pit award in TechCrunch 50. What prompted the Socialwok team to pack up the bags and fly to the US for TechCrunch 50?
Guang Ming Yong: The original aim of Socialwok’s USA trip in sept was not TC50 but meetings at Google that we have arranged for as well as the presentation we had for the Silicon Valley JUG meeting. Hence, we did not plan to apply to TC50 till the last few weeks when the application was due. As Socialwok was not in stealth mode given that we did a version 1 launch in may 2009 at Unconference 2009 in Singapore, our TC50 application was turned down but we were offered a place at the TC50 demopit.

You can view our photo album for TC50 here.

BL: What are the changes in the Socialwok product that have transpired since our last interview with you?
Guang Ming Yong: Since we last interview in June, we focused on finding distribution for Socialwok; we observed that there is a large population of 18 million Google Apps users who are yearning for a social layer to integrate the different Socialwok components like Google Calendar, Google Docs and etc. Hence, we revamped version one of Socialwok to have tight integration with Google Apps and email. Socialwok became the missing Social application for Google Apps users.

Here are some of the key integrations with Google Apps:

• No signup needed. Just login with you Google Apps or Google account at http://socialwok.com
• Share Google Docs/Calendar or any google component in a feed
• Share emails in a feed (compose or forward emails to post@socialwokmail.com)
• Access Socialwok from the mobile web. Point your mobile web browser to http://app.socialwok.com
• Collaborate with external parties outside of your organization using a feed
• Fast consolidate keyword search for your google apps domain.

For a video demonstrate of Socialwok, please visit our Socialwok Youtube video channel.

BL: What is the pitch that your team used to convince the judges that led you to the Demo Pit award?
Guang Ming Yong: We are quite happy that Socialwok won the 2nd day TC50 demopit award as this award is based on the votes by the TC50 attendees. TC50 is a two day conference and each day there are over 50 demopit companies. Each TC50 attendee is given two TC50 poker chips to vote for their favorite TC50 demopit company out of a total of 100 companies during the two TC50 conference days. The demopit winners chosen by the audience would then go onstage to pitch to the audience. There would be 2 demopit companies chosen for each day of TC50 conference.

We basically kept the message as simple as possible focusing mainly on giving a demonstration of the top 3 key features of Socialwok. We demonstrated how easy it was to use existing Google Apps or Google account to login to Socialwok. We also demonstrated the sharing of Google Docs/Calendar or any google component in a feed. Lastly, we demonstrated how you can access Socialwok from the mobile web off an iPhone or Android phone by pointing your mobile web browser to http://app.socialwok.com

BL: In TechCrunch 50, what are the important lessons you learn from looking at other teams in the same exhibition area?
Guang Ming Yong: If you have never been to TC50 before, try to do the demopit on the second day so that you can observe what other startups do to get traffic to their booth. Make sure you have some 1 page simple picture explanation of your service that you can give to people in the exhibition area. You are fighting for the attention of the TC50 attendee with over 150 startups at the conference!

BL: If a start-up will to ask you about heading to the TechCrunch 50 next year, what will you advise them to do?
Guang Ming Yong: Make sure you are in stealth mode before you apply to TC50. You cannot have much public information of your product or service before the TC50 event. Otherwise, they will not consider your for TC50. If you want to be at TC50, plan in advance your product roadmap so that your launch date will coincide with TC50 that occurs annually during middle-end of Sept. If you get successful at TC50, there will be a tremendous spike in web traffic to your website, make sure your service is highly scalable. To increase the effect of publicity for your service, do follow up meetings with tech bloggers who have shown interest in your product or service.

(Source of Photo: Majento in Flickr)

BL: Given with the new developments with Google Wave and the focus of Socialwok as a social network platform for enterprise, do you see relevant and interesting innovations? Any glimpse for the future?
Guang Ming Yong: During this trip, we were also able to meet the Google Wave advocacy team as well as attend a few Google Wave meetups. Google Wave has a lot of potential as the defacto live collaboration protocol. In particular, Google Wave has a lot of value in specific user cases such as live customer support or live document collaboration.

For a more detailed analysis of Google Wave, see Robert Scoble’s article on Google Wave and his comments on Socialwok in relation to Google Wave.

Currently Socialwok already integrates with Google Wave, we allow any user to embed a wave in a Socialwok update.
Going forward, we intend to create Socialwok wave robots to demonstrate interesting live collaboration use cases like live customer support.

BL: Did you spend some time within Silicon Valley meeting venture capitalists and business angels? Any interesting story to share?
Guang Ming Yong: At TC50, I had the great fortune to meet various influential people of Silicon Valley. I personally got to meet the Barney Pell (CEO & co-founder of Powerset that got bought by Microsoft), Satish Dharmaraj (ex-CEO & founder of Zimbra, got bought by Yahoo), Yossi Vardi (”Super Angel” of Israeli startups), and Ron Conway (”Super Angel”) and Reid Hoffman (founder of Linkedin).

We also got to meet various influential bloggers like MG Siegler of Techcrunch (who reviewed Socialwok in TechCrunch) and Robert Scoble. Robert Scoble wrote a review of Socialwok “How Microsoft Office 2010 will be locked out of my toolbag?”

You can see the pictures on our meeting with Robert Scoble in this album.

Since 14-15 September, my team and I have been on the road for over 3 weeks in the valley meeting potential investors (VCs & angels), potential large customers and corporate partners. I got to meet Jeff Clavier of Softech VC , Mike Maples who invested in Digg & Twitter. We got to meet reputable VC firms like Sierra Ventures and Benchmark Capital. Our most interesting story was what happened to us the day after winning the TC50 demopit award when we went on stage to pitch.

While we were on Google’s campus, there were several occasions when random googlers would come up to us and congratulate us on our win (we were wearing the Socialwok t-shirt)! Check out our pictures here too.

BL: With TechCrunch 50 over, what’s next for Social Wok?
Guang Ming Yong: For the next 6 months, Socialwok is focused on executing on our freemium model. We are fanatical about growing our free user base of small medium businesses. It is crucial for us to find and simplify the “hooks”; what are the key features that our user’s use Socialwok for? Once we are comfortable with the free user growth trajectory, we will focus on rolling out and tweaking our paid subscription packages to address the conversion pain points of our free user base.

BL: Thanks once again, Ming Yong for taking your time to tell us the success of Socialwok in TechCrunch 50 and your adventures in Silicon Valley. We wish you all the best in securing your next round of investments and do let us know the latest developments and news about Socialwok.

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