Real-time APIs for Real World – Todd Greene, PubNub

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome back to techstruck TV. I have got a new company to tell you about and it's kind of my favorite kinds of company.

It's one of these like eight nine year old overnight success stories, right? Because many entrepreneurs or many people aren't entrepreneurs thing that you know, you start a company and you strike gold and in six months or a year someone comes by and says, oh your company's worth a billion dollars or something, but that's not the way it works for most times for most companies it is entrepreneurs starting out not taking salaries sometimes and You know just work in it working at work and it and they put in five six seven eight years, but they build a business and and you know, it's much as I've done here at Tech strong actually, and I I appreciate those kinds of efforts. Let me introduce you to a entrepreneur like that right now.

Todd Green Welcome to Tech strong. How are you? Really?

Good. Thanks so much. I appreciate being on the show.

I appreciate you having you here. So I I hope I didn't embarrass you but tell us your story now. You're absolutely right.

I mean, we love to talk about overnight successes, but most strong business is a good businesses are built up over time, you know from Lessons Learned and growing customers and and all of that and that's you know, what we've done at Pub knob I I came out of funnily enough. I started my my I started my career, you know Computer Science Background as as a Management Consultant that price Waterhouse PWC did not really appreciate coding and a suit and tie every day. So as soon as the internet really exploded, you know in the early to mid 90s I left to go to my first not my startup but I started called net Dynamics which ended up being the first app server for the internet, which was pretty exciting.

I think I was employing number 12 over there and that really yeah. I was a I don't know if you've heard of you here. I was gonna start look at your background.

I was like he was there when I was there. So we you know, it was it was really exciting because I found that my my strength was really basically being able to connect sort of you know, the technically strong technical concepts with sort of business speak right with with what people are trying to do and and vice versa. So I've always kind of been in that area between the the customer and the technical side.

So I was you know solution architect and a product manager and those sorts of things and got the bug to start my own company. So after we sold to son Microsystems I left to start a company we called Cascade Works, which was a one of the first SAS products ever. We started in 2099 2000 and we eventually sold it to what's now upwork who went public a few years back and about 2003.

So I've always done those kinds of entrepreneurial things. I was before Pub knob the founder of a company called loyalize, which was one of the first companies to create an interactive experience white label experience that you would On your iPad or your your iPhone or Android device while you're watching a live TV program? And we realized that there were more companies wanting to do this.

Right but there were two problems with that. What are the creative ideas that you need to you know to to build so that you can have 100,000 people or a million people in and out together and they feel like they're collaborating and so on. What does that look like?

What's the creative aspect and then technically how the heck do you scale that in real time? So million people's you know interactions are somehow shared and streamed back and forth in a scalable way. We sold loyalized to the owner of American Idol.

I I started pubnub to really be the platform. So many people could build those kinds of applications without having to focus on all the core Tech and that's really been kind of the Genesis of now last 10 years. What I've been here doing here at pubna.

Excellent. What a great background man. Congratulations.

Thanks, so. 10 years ago, you start Pub nub, and and the idea is give people I don't want to use the platform where because it's an overused word. Yeah, but give people a head start on just and not having to be down in the guts.

I'm building an application, you know with some great functionality. Yeah. Well, okay.

So if you think about the differences here a real lease called them real-time apps interactive live real-time apps where you know, you do something and I see that thing show up instantly on my screen whether it's a digital whiteboard or a chat message or the location of your car moving or anything like that those you know it turn out all share some commonalities and what we strive for a pump that was to figure out what are those core building blocks that you could use whether you're doing a live mapping application or a digital whiteboard or synchronizing a Google doc style approach or just a simple chat application and we you know over the last you know decade we've really been releasing these these core building blocks that we find that people need for those Ops the key one, of course is some way of synchronizing people together instantly and that's kind of where our core technology is. We've got like over 60 patent claims now approved from the government you just and that's all around thinking of synchronization as Loosely coupled messaging distributed around the world. So rather than When you launch an app simple apis for just app developers public subscribe.

It sends a message into our Network and anyone subscribing on that channel gets in another 100 milliseconds anywhere in the world. 3 million people in the same virtual room subscribing to the application. So that's the core that kind of core bus of what we do is that Global Network of pub/sub messages to fly around they get used for chat applications location data iot control signals, like turn my light bulb on my door lock right and then instead of other building blocks like public functions, which lets you actually add logic between the publish And subscribe so you can manipulate filter out say, you know use AI to filter out bad words and a chat room or translate from French to English or whatever presence detection.

Are you online? Are you offline and a whole bunch of other kind of core building blocks so that you can build any kind of interactive app across any scale. So those are kind of the ways that we encourage our gonna developers to kind of to think about building these Locations and that's been very successful.

You know, we've got you know 3000 customers about 800 million monthly active devices hitting our Network and about I think north of three trillion API called transactions on our Edge every month. So like I said, you've probably used pubnub many times per day and not not been aware of it. That's fantastic.

What a great story man. I love this. So.

You know one of the things let's let's keep though. Our audience Todd is very technical audiences that developer audience. They may probably know Pub nap.

They may not know the whole story but there's the entrepreneur entrepreneurial crowd out here, too. and then just people who you know business Founders and marketers and what have you how do you I mean, it's one thing to build the product that has that kind of scale. Right, you've got to build a scalable product.

But how do you get to Awareness. How do people say hey I need this functionality. Pub nub that that's it that gives me what I need.

That's a great question. Well, there is by the way we could talk for hours on how do you build an auto scaling globally distributed network with the ability to start data and virus regions for compliance issues and the ability to Scale based on 10 million people came in because the Super Bowl just started and you got a make sure that there's enough capacity and then scale that down so you don't go out of business and there's a massive amount of technical challenges that we've solved over the last 10 years to operate as a you know, as a business that doesn't lose, you know the money but in terms of the the awareness side, I give credit to really my co-founder right? I came out of the world of Enterprise where you actually went and and you sell to businesses, you know sort of person to person but he really pioneered one of the first companies to be really great at developer awareness online.

And so, you know our first I don't know I'm gonna call it seven to 10 million dollars of Revenue was without a sales team. It was literally online marketing releasing sdks that work in any development environment. So what really using you know PHP Pearl python JavaScript iOS Android whatever platform you're using we had sdks that worked.

We went to those meetups. We we talked about it online and we got people to sign up every single one of our apis was free to try out everything single. One of our sdks.

You could download all of our documentation was available online and that Grassroots growth really allowed us to scale the early days of Pub nub without kind of a traditional sales motion. crazy It is you know what we were all things go, right it goes, right? Yeah, absolutely.

And you know, I think we were scratching an itch that needed to be scratched right? If you think about the world before pubnub, you know, what are some of the well-known multi-user apps? Well, there was in the gaming World there was World of Warcraft right?

There was WebEx was one of the first you know systems and you know for you know collaboration there there are a number of these but most of those companies had 60 to 70% of their developer spend an effort on the core infrastructure and just you know, maybe 30 to 40% Max on the actual experience itself. You know, now you look at customers we have today from you know metas one of our customers through their subsidiary customer, we've got you know food delivery companies like swiggy and India just eating the UK we've got just so many game companies like Moon active and pocket gems they can focus 100% of their development on the experience, right the end user engaging experience and let our Global Network just cover all that synchronization and all the apis for that. You know for the infrastructure piece.

a great great, so Again talking to you CEO to CEO. So you have an amazing customer base. If I don't want to say infinitely, I love it if it were infinite, but yeah, but highly highly scale.

Yeah platform. How do you keep the business growing? I think you know we are barely scratched the surface right these right that well.

I mean, I'll tell you, you know, having interactive experiences with an apps was already growing before covid. But when everyone went online and you were using an app that you had to literally reload or ask someone to send you an attachment and then it reopen that if you didn't have that kind of Google docs real-time synchronization that kind of experience all of a sudden people weren't using your app anymore whether it was a SAS product or a BTC product or a game or iot product whatever and so the priority of those interactive features has jumped up to like priority number one for most product managers around the world. So there's that huge Tailwind from that but there's another big challenge we found that whenever a population of people can get you know, high speed data for less than you know, two gigs for less than you know, one two percent of their monthly income.

They change the way they live right? We you know, we're used to it in the US but food delivery, you know the ability to get Uber. Of products the ability to stream data online to have interactive experiences with their friends that explodes and you're seeing that decline in bandwidth costs in Southeast Asia in South America in some parts of Africa.

So every time we start to saturate one region another region explodes with demand and so right now, for example, we're seeing huge growth in Asia and parts of Asia where there's just a race to localize the kinds of experiences that have become popular in the US and Western Europe. They're now exploding in other parts of the world. So really, you know, I think that we're really are just still scotching the surface.

love it God for anyone developers managers watching this thing. You know what this sounds like a great thing for us to kind of harness. What's the best way to engage with putting up?

That's a great question. You know as I mentioned in the early days of public we didn't have a Salesforce to speak of and that was both good and bad. I mean, it's always great to see people signing up telling you they love their product your product and just using it but as we've expanded from one or two building blocks, like core messaging and maybe presence to now, you know, persistence layers and and events and actions which actually launched yesterday a whole new service for for exporting data in real time and functions to manipulate data the the you know, I was joke.

It's like Spider-Man with great power comes great responsibility, right? Yeah. And so what we found is that by providing free, you know included solution architect work, you know and solution engineering kinds of work with our customers.

It just creates much more success on behalf record. They're using us more optimally they're scaling better and those kinds of things so, you know, like I said before Pub number is still completely free to sign up every one of our apis is available to try out. The documentation is amazing.

We've got a great talk steam that said if you're doing anything substantive and you want some hand holding, you know, call us contact. To us. We don't charge for that we find it's a win-win and and that's typically now how we engage with our larger customers and some of the names I can't talk about but some of the largest game companies the world now have signed up a company recently.

You may have heard of in Europe called The Zone da ZN which is kind of like the ESPN for Europe. They're building all their own interactive experiences on top of now and so, you know, we're really working with companies like that on Tech strategy and architecture to make sure they're making the best use of and best design patterns for these kinds of things. You know what?

I don't think we we mentioned the website though. Did we? com, you know six letters, you know domain name.

There you go. All right enough and you know an easy Google search will will find out I think you know, the common use cases extend from you know, in-app chat is what we like to call a gateway drug, meaning that people always want chat within their app on the side somewhere, but they never wanted to end there right? They want that to be the entry point into interactive experiences.

But if it's a social app, they may want to push pulls and trivia questions and send them an analysis. But if it's a doctor-patient, you know, we're HIPAA compliance. So there might be a waiting room application or you know, how long is a doctor in each room.

So, you know those become also live Maps is another one. We actually also power quite a few iot products from Vivint to August locks to Logitech Harmony. If you use any of those products, all of that signaling is going right from the device on pub now through the internet out to your to your phone to servers everything else.

com is the place to go. There's been great man what you know, and I feel like I uncovered a lost secret of the internet here an unknown. Secret power right powering this whole thing.

Keep up the great work. It's a great story come back and keep us posted about Pub dub too, though. Actually our audience would love to hear more.

You know, we've got some really exciting as we've really been expanding our product footprint and we've got some exciting things coming out later this year. I'd love to reconnect and share some of the things we're doing so we should do that. You've got an open invitation that come on.

Alrighty. Appreciate it Todd grade Todd Green Pub knob here on texture on TV. We're gonna take a break.

We'll be right back in a moment.