![\"\"](\"http:\/\/microsites.engineering.nyu.edu\/cie\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2022\/02\/coopsite.png\")
<\/p>\n
Thomas walks me through his typical day. \u201cIf I were to wake up and let\u2019s say I want to eat breakfast. Usually there’s Uber eats, right? Well, there’s actually, Uber eats owned by either Alibaba or Tencent. Then if I want to pay for something right, let’s say I want to pay for that food, then you either use the wallet by Alibaba like digital fintech or Tencent. Let’s say I want to go outside and I want to rent a bike. Oh look, I now use the Alibaba bike or this is the Tencent bike.\u201d This includes all purchases. \u201cWant to pay for the metro? Want to buy tickets for anything, like a concert? Maybe even go to another province in China\u2014you buy the airplane tickets using this because it is owned by them. You buy the rail tickets because it is owned by them. So everything is just very much interconnected.\u201d<\/p>\n
It’s crazy how related everything is from a data stand-point. Since Thomas is American, he acknowledges that this may seem very \u201cantitrust,\u201d having all your purchases connected to just two corporations, but from a technological standpoint this has many advantages. There is simply more \u201cpotential for newer solutions that can come out\u201d due to the data.<\/p>\n
Thomas clarifies the concept to me further. \u201cA form of a new business is something called Community Group buying. It’s the combination of big data plus delivery plus ecommerce. Essentially it’s pretty much finding a way to lower costs on groceries because they have all the control on the supply chain.\u201d Thomas adds that it\u2019s like \u201ca whole fleet\u201d because they have control from all the way on the top until the delivery at the bottom. When delivery is usually considered a luxury, since they have the \u201cunderstanding of the entire pipeline, they\u2019re able to somehow lower the costs by more than 20 to 30%,\u201d thereby appealing to lower income communities as well. Therefore, more data becomes more accessible by everyone.<\/p>\n
Thomas goes on to add that \u201cit would be difficult to have this in other places because it would be very economically invalid,\u201d, an observation of the data-driven market system from which their idea and business model has derived.<\/p>\n
So, what is Coopsight? It began with a question: \u201cwhy aren\u2019t ecosystems and this idea of sharing data between each other, between different companies and startups not already exist?\u201d They thought \u201cmaybe there is a chance for us to test out whether start-ups and companies would be interested in building their own microcosm and ecosystems.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thomas goes on to say that for big tech companies, an ecosystem already exists. An obvious example is Amazon, which also owns Whole Foods. \u201cAnd, if you look at their revenues, they’re not really e-commerce. That’s not where their money comes from, it’s actually AWS, their cloud services.\u201d Looking at Apple, \u201csome people are suggesting they might make a car someday.\u201d Simply put, \u201ceveryone is trying to diversify.\u201d So, the founders of Coopsight thought why not bring the forces of start-ups together so that they create an ecosystem together?<\/p>\n
Initially, this is exactly what Coopsight aimed to do. Prior to the sprint, they had about 500 start-ups that were matched with each other. But they had trouble tracking the relationships of the start-ups that were connected. Working with the advisers at the Start-up Sprint program they also realized that their idea was \u201clike a million feet above the air.\u201d Obviously \u201cpeople care about this\u201d but they were confronted with questions like \u201cwhere do you find the people? Who would really benefit from this? And how do you convince them?\u201d<\/p>\n
So, while their initial idea was a \u201cplatform for startup founders to try to connect with each other to make an ecosystem\u201d they were confronted with the fact that \u201cstartup founders generally don’t have the money to do so and second of all these founders usually don’t have a product yet.\u201d Although \u201cit would be easiest for start-ups to integrate their products,\u201d to build an ecosystem, the feasibility of start-ups to fund building an ecosystem is still very unlikely. As a result, Coopsight had to shift their idea to fit the needs of their consumers.<\/p>\n
Thomas explains this to me using chemistry as an analogy: \u201catoms are businesses, compounds are partnerships, and a mixture of compounds is an ecosystem.\u201d So, to build their idea top-down they first decided to focus on singular partnerships\u2014the relationship between one company with another. This allowed them to discover \u201cthe business for partnerships.\u201d Looking at examples in Silicon Valley who are already employing successful partnerships they realized their target consumers: \u201cmidsize to large-scale businesses.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a result they have become a stepping-stool for these companies to take their businesses to the next level. Surveying the field in more detail, with many interviews with field experts, the founders of Coopsight are now more aware of the problems they face when building partnerships and that is \u201cpartner acquisition.\u201d For the consumers of their partnerships, a good question is always going to be \u201cwho fits me best with the products I can offer?\u201d So, Coopsight is intending to do more than LinkedIn, which wastes a lot of time. Their goal is to use their understanding of the market data and historical partnerships to create a map of which partnerships will work in order to optimize and ease the route of new partnerships.<\/p>\n
Today, if you were to go to Coopsight with your company, they would intend to determine \u201cwho would be the best partner to match you with\u201d based on the data with an automated platform that they are building. On their website they call it \u201cgrow together by matching with peers.\u201d With a brilliant but very large area, the founders of Coopsight have come a long way. As CIE<\/a> we wish them the best of luck in their future endeavors!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By: Alara Tuncer Co-founders of Coopsight, George Chichua, Thomas Yee and Erol Bickici, are participants of the NYU Sprint from NYU Shanghai. Thomas Yee begins our conversation by saying that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/microsites.engineering.nyu.edu\/cie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/microsites.engineering.nyu.edu\/cie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/microsites.engineering.nyu.edu\/cie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/microsites.engineering.nyu.edu\/cie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/microsites.engineering.nyu.edu\/cie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1492"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/microsites.engineering.nyu.edu\/cie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1600,"href":"http:\/\/microsites.engineering.nyu.edu\/cie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1492\/revisions\/1600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/microsites.engineering.nyu.edu\/cie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/microsites.engineering.nyu.edu\/cie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/microsites.engineering.nyu.edu\/cie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}