Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clickatell CEO Pieter de Villiers from South Africa (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: To do this on WhatsApp, what do you have from a technical layer point of view? Is WhatsApp giving you an API into which you are programming your facilities?

Pieter de Villiers: First of all, Clickatell was one of WhatsApp’s first business partners to enable brands to serve clients in this manner. You have to be a WhatsApp-authorized business partner to do these things. Number two is we provide a web interface in a cloud-managed environment where you would typically open a Clickatell account, select the channels you want to use, and start thinking through the customer problems you want to solve.

Featured Videos

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Elisity CEO James Winebrenner (Part 2)

James Winebrenner: The second principle was the ability to do segmentation across the network instead of sharing one network. There was a significant amount of interest in segmenting traffic by use case. In retail, we saw a lot of need for POS traffic to be segmented from real-time communications type traffic.

We saw the advent of a lot of third-party connectivity whether that was marketing organizations doing digital signage or contractors doing video surveillance. We didn’t start out focusing on those security use cases, but we saw them become a significant byproduct of the VSTN technology.

Sramana Mitra: Was that a consulting services company?

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Clickatell CEO Pieter de Villiers from South Africa (Part 1)

This is a terrific story of a South African team of entrepreneurs who have provided tremendous thought leadership in mobile chat commerce and have built a great company.

Along the way, they raised money from Sequoia Capital and have achieved (unverified) Unicorn status. The beauty is that this is not a glorified Unicorn built out of financial engineering but one that is firmly rooted in strong revenue growth.

Video FAQs

Cloud Stocks: Twilio’s Growth is Driven by Segment

According to a recent year, the global unified communication as a service (UCaaS) market is expected to grow 13% annually from $28.96 billion in 2021 to $69.93 billion in 2028. The growth in the industry is driven by the continuing adoption of remote working conditions globally and improved API-driven capabilities. Communications PaaS player Twilio (NYSE: TWLO) recently reported its first break-even quarter.

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Elisity CEO James Winebrenner (Part 1)

For those of you following our coverage of techies transitioning into successful entrepreneurs, here is another terrific case study.

Cyber Security is probably the tech industry’s more prolific segment. James discusses a specific approach to network security that has become increasingly more contemporary and relevant: segment-based policy.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to a bit of your background as well as Elisity.

Catching Up On Readings: Why Tech Stocks are Down

This feature from the Time magazine looks at why tech stocks are falling and what it means for the economy. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Krishnakumar Natarajan, Co-Founder of Mela Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The ecosystem has come together for sure. I’m a big fan of capital-efficient startups and fundamentals-oriented startups. In January, we analyzed 20 Indian unicorns. I didn’t consider two as overvalued. The rest were dramatically overvalued. That means that people are investing in the future and expecting that the valuation is going to get back-filled, which is the way unicorn investing often happens.

Colors: Fall Reverie IX

I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – Fall Reverie IX

Fall Reverie IX | Sramana Mitra, 2020 | Watercolor | 9  x 12, On Paper