Bull & Bear: Agora, the API Powering Clubhouse

-All of this is to say, livestreaming the technology is here, but livestreaming as a medium is not... Fundamentally what I’m pushing back on is saying that a technology will get adoption because it is big in China, when really we should be asking what made it catch on there in the first place.

Lilian's bear case:

Agora does a ton of engineering work and spends a ton of money on co-located data centers behind the scenes to make real-time audio and video just work. The result is that someone on WiFi in Ghana and another person on 4G LTE with spotty signal in Florida can sit in the same Clubhouse room with thousands of other people and hear the conversation cr... See more

-Agora is in a tricky spot, full of natural tensions:

Agora is an API-first business, which means it grows in two ways:

Agora is not for static video or audio. The next YouTube, Netflix, or Spotify won’t be built on Agora. It’s for interactive, real-time video and audio, like one-to-many livestreams, audio chat rooms, or one-on-one use cases like telemedicine or tutoring.

-Acquires new customers

-It wants to serve the broadest range of real-time engagement use cases well to appeal to the customers who need everything to just work, but faces competition from more geographically and use-case focused competitors.

-It wants its customers to get very big, but not so big that they build in-house