Sramana Mitra: What was the project? What was Ragic and your master’s thesis that you were trying to productize?

Jeff Kuo: I was studying semantic web and AI-related subjects. Back then, Semantic Web was quite popular. Ragic came out of Semantic Web to map information data in a graph-based model so that it can be shared between different organizations.

Originally, we were studying how to make it easy for these data to be shared between organizations quickly. But then, we found out that these graph data structures can help us build very flexible Database Systems very quickly, and they can be changed dynamically. It evolved into a way to rapidly prototype database systems. The master thesis is about rapidly prototyping database systems and taking advantage of the Semantic web to share it between systems.

Sramana Mitra: So now, this pitch is not going to work in the commercial world, right?

Jeff Kuo: No. That worked well in the academic world. Yeah, we wrote a pitch.

Sramana Mitra: What was your pitch to the commercial world? What customer base did you target with that pitch?

Jeff Kuo: During the first four years of my career when I was working in the IT Department, I thought that I needed to get into the customer’s mind. I needed to know what the average enterprise IT department thinks about. It’s a good thing to really understand your customers.

In the beginning, I presumed that most of our customers should be IT departments or IT managers. That’s kind of the rational thing for this type of product. My work in the IT department kind of confirmed my guess that the user should be an IT department or IT manager. But in the end, the guess was proved to be not entirely correct.

It kind of confirmed my guess because I saw that IT departments were overwhelmed by requests from different departments. Sales department would say they need a CRM and the HR department would say they need a better HR system. All these different departments have a lot of requests, so the IT department is always overwhelmed, so they can never finish what other departments are asking for.

I thought, with this tool, they can develop all these database systems quickly. Back then, there were not a lot of no-code applications, and we were able to do that without coding. I thought that this product would really be great because the IT department can just purchase this and teach the other departments how to create these database systems for themselves. That would save up the IT resource. Enterprises typically never have enough IT resources; developer resource is always scarce.

Sramana Mitra: So, your core value proposition was no code semantic databases, and you wanted to offer it to IT departments to cater to all the needs of the different other departments within the enterprise. That was your original hypothesis, was it?

Jeff Kuo: Pretty much. But we removed the semantic part early on because I realized that sharing these databases having a common ontology to talk to each other is not a very high priority for the enterprise systems.

Back then, they had data net and ebXML that were all talking to each other. It was a popular topic back then, but it didn’t really catch on, especially for small to medium enterprises.

So, I removed that component early on. It stayed on my paper though, but not in the actual commercial product.