Tag: Tencent

Posted on

Kik adds executives: plans to double workforce

Waterloo-based Kik announced two all-star additions to its executive lineup today.

Kik-team

Jae Kim, former head of strategy and operations at the U.S. headquarters of Line, the Japanese messaging, will manage Kik’s growing U.S. operations and the roll-out of services on its popular mobile messaging platform. He will be based in Los Angeles.

Alim Dhanji, tasked with scaling Kik’s workforce and culture, will assume the role of Chief People Officer, based in Waterloo.

“What really drew me and the rest of the team to them was the fact that they were great culture fits – humble, hardworking and team players – which is extremely hard to find when hiring for senior roles,” Ted Livingston, Kik’s CEO, said in a news release.

Kik’s recent raise of $50 million from Tencent, the holding company of China’s WeChat, created a need for new high-level executive roles to advance the company, now valued at more than $1 billion, to the next stage.

Doubling Kik’s workforce from the current 110 in the next year will be quite the job, but Dhanji sounds ready to take it on.

“My experiences have really been about scaling an organization, both organically and through mergers and acquisitions, and working with leadership teams to build the right capabilities within the organizations,” Dhanji told Communitech News. He has held senior executive roles at Citigroup and KPMG, and most recently was a senior vice-president at TD Bank Group.

Scaling culture is a stumbling block for many high-growth companies as they transition from startup to full-fledged company.

“Our emphasis is on making sure we continue to foster collaboration and communication in all our offices,” Dhanji said.

Some tactics include HR programs that “help unify our culture” and the continuation of Friday standup meetings, which connect all Kik offices via video conferencing, but Dhanji said it ultimately comes back to recruitment.

“We’re a knowledge-worker organization; we don’t produce widgets that you can get on a shelf, and so for us it’s really about finding the best talent and finding talent that fits within our culture,” he said, adding that people are a competitive advantage.

And Waterloo Region is a great first stop for talent.

“Waterloo continues to be a really core area to attract the best talent,” he said. “We have just been enjoying exceptional talent from the university, but also Waterloo [Region in general], given that it is a hub for tech talent.”

Kik will be looking elsewhere as it rounds out its teams in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Although Dhanji has his work cut out for him, he’s looking forward to the new opportunity.

“It’s really a compelling product and it’s exciting the potential that Kik has to accomplish in the West what WeChat has accomplished in the East.”

Posted on

Kik valued at $1-billion

KIKMessaging app gets $50M investment from China’s Tencent

Canada has another unicorn – a startup valued by private investors at $1-billion. Waterloo, Ont.-based chat app Kik joins the rarefied ranks of Shopify and others to become one of the few Canadian companies to garner the label following a $50-million (U.S.) investment from Chinese Internet giantTencent. The company said the investment brings its total valuation to $1-billion (Canadian).

Kik’s messaging app is immensely popular with 13- to 24-year-olds in North America and has 240 million registered users. Tencent is the $200-billion Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. arch-rival and owner of WeChat, a Chinese social messaging platform that Kik has aspirations to become. It’s a strategic partnership to help the startup win mobile messenger supremacy, and perhaps put Waterloo, home of BlackBerry Ltd., back on the map.

Mobile chat apps are central to today’s smartphone-governed lives and increasingly offer more than just chat functionality. Many Asian messenger apps have already evolved, such as Kakao (South Korea), Line (Japan) and WeChat (China). Recognized as the most sophisticated in this space, WeChat allows users to do things such as browse e-commerce stores, read the news, pay bills and order taxis or takeout, all alongside the app’s core messenger and social-media functionalities. In a nutshell, it’s the all-encompassing app, the platform within a smartphone.

And Kik is set on becoming something just like it for North American users. Last November, Kik founder Ted Livingston published a piece on the Medium website titled The Race to Become the WeChat of the West. It’s a race the company is intent on winning, which is why in April the company hired well-known Silicon Valley investment bank Qatalyst Partners to help it find the right partner – Tencent was a natural choice.

“What they are doing in China is what we want to do in the West, and they said they could help us do that,” Mr. Livingston said. “It was really a mutual coming together.”

Although the company is not yet profitable, its collects revenue from brands that sign up for accounts on the app, Mr. Livingston said. The high valuation is not rare for companies in the mobile space, where much of the value is tied up in the so-called network effect – the idea that by building a massive number of users first, revenue will follow.

The funding will be used primarily to grow the Kik team and to expand offerings on the app, and is not a precursor to a sale. “This is just a straight financial investment,” Mr. Livingston insisted. “There’s no strings attached; it’s an investment as a venture capitalist would make, but we will benefit from the informal advisory and sounding board Tencent will be for us.”

The money and advice will certainly be much needed in this so-called race, which, while still early, has already whittled out other contenders.

“It’s about building a chat ecosystem, with all these services from food to shopping to games … that live and exist and grow on top of the core chat,” Mr. Livingston said. “And I would say the only two companies that get this in the West are us and Facebook.”

Boris Wertz, founder of Version One Ventures and a long-time watcher of the chat-app space, believes Kik did well by knowing early on that it would be a platform, although even with the lead “it’s difficult to out-Facebook Facebook,” he added. “[Facebook has] so much scale and funding and on top of that is running a very aggressive product with Messenger. Kik needs to find a large enough niche to build its platform around.”

So far, Kik’s niche has skewed young (the company claims about 40 per cent of U.S. teens use the app), which is a benefit in terms of capturing the future market, as well as helping shape user preferences and habits early on. “It’s with youth that we see the opportunity to build an ecosystem; we are not trying to get them to switch services, but to adopt services.”

Nevertheless, whether North American users will embrace this next-generation chat app still remains to be seen. “Sure, people look at WeChat and think, ‘How cool that you can get all these products and services,’ but it might well be because there was no bigger social network that took off in China,” Mr. Wertz noted. “Can it work as well where you have very strong social networks already in place?”