APIs and Biz Dev 2.0
The meme about BizDev 2.0 first started on Aug 16th, 2006 with this blog post by Caterina Fake about an email correspondence she had with Fred Wilson. From Caterina's post:
"We (that is, Flickr) probably didn't have the space on our schedules to engage with [small scrappy startup] in any meaningful way, but that they should feel free to apply for a Commercial API key and build something off the API. 'BizDev 2.0' I call it."
This concept has obviously snowballed since then and many large tech companies (Facebook, Google, Salesforce, etc) have leveraged this principle to crowd-source their feature development cycles and BD relations. We propose discussing the minimum requirements and best practices involved in releasing a API and then fostering an environment in which people use this API to integrate their company into yours or scratch a itch they have on your platform.
Many of you are pioneering innovative APIs to create value for your users beyond the walls of your businesses. Some of you simply offer an API so that your customers can extract analytics from their use of your services that help them to use the service more effectively. Some of you have radically open API policies, and some have no APIs at all. We think we could all benefit by hearing each other about each of our API strategies.
Some of the things we could discuss include in no particular order, 1) the minimum requirements for an API, 2) how to promote and API, 3) What to make available and what to keep to yourself 4) Is there a difference between offering access to your data and offering access to your services, 5) What is the goal of your API? 6) How has it worked to date? 7) What is the most surprising thing someone has done with your API, 8) Has anyone used your API in a way that would negatively impact your business? 9) How have you reacted to that? 10) Is your site being scraped today or is anyone using your data or services in a way you did not intend? 11) Have any of you created an API to simplify a use of your site that someone else had pioneered without talking to you (by scraping for instance), 12) How has your API affected your business, 13) how has offering an API affected your communications, storage and CPU requirements? 14) What support to you offer to people who use your API?
Please add any questions you would like to get on the table.
[Fred] What about building services that utlize APIs? Clickable has spent countless hours working on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft's ad network APIs. Mark Pincus has built a casual gaming network on top of Facebook's APIs. What are the benefits and risks associated with building a business that is entirely reliant on the APIs of other companies?
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