Cow paths or roads? Infrastructure for the new age!
History’s earliest infrastructure projects were roads. Nomadic hunter-gatherer populations were builders, creating monuments of complexity like barrow mounds but creating and maintaining a system of roads would not have been worth the energy. Permanent infrastructure was less important than moving freely the herds. Roads became important after societies went through Agricultural Revolution. Settled communities built around farming needed clear, consistent routes for trading and traveling.
Infrastructure builds connections between human groups or activities. With infrastructure, people can work together and provide specialized services to one another. In this way, robust infrastructure supports complex societies.
However, once we had the required physical infrastructure in place, we went to the other side- digital infrastructure. Internet is the biggest example of that.
Tech Infrastructure startups have led the change for the new world to remove boundaries and make work possible between humans and societies from far-off distances.
Over the last few years, a lot of companies have come to make this infra strong and has led to the emergence of a multitude of other startups:
Stripe: Payment Infrastructure for the internet
Stripe makes moving money as simple, borderless, and programmable as the rest of the internet
The company primarily offers payment processing software and application programming interfaces for e-commerce websites and mobile applications
$95 Bn startup valuation with ~$7.4 Bn revenue
Companies like Lyft, Uber, Facebook, etc. use it
Scale.ai: Data infrastructure for AI
Specializes in helping companies label and curate data for artificial intelligence applications
Calls itself Stripe for AI
$7.5 Bn company valuation with $70 Mn revenue
AWS: Cloud Infrastructure for companies
Ethereum: Infrastructure for blockchain-based products
Plaid: Financial services APIs infrastructure
Twilio: Communication infrastructure(APIs)
Above are some of the coolest and biggest products built on simplifying the basic infrastructure play, on the top of which everything can work. This helps them set the base, become irreplaceable, and not get impacted by the competition or products being built on top of it.
Though some of the above companies have done a great job in making the place of the person immaterial, the new remote world needs new infrastructure. It also needs infra to enable data- ensure its security, smooth payments, legal contracts, etc. across countries with the click of a button
The new remote world needs new infrastructure.
Payments are multi-currency now: Now one entity sitting out of the US has to pay its workers sitting in 10 countries. Thus, the current infra which charges a high fee, takes a lot of time to transfer funds won't work here and thus, it needs a new better solution that can make it as seamless as domestic payments.
Benefits are multi-country now (Insurance, social security): The US entity mentioned above also has to provide insurance and other benefits in different countries. It needs a solution that can help the US entity do it in different countries instead of them trying to figure it out in every geography.
Logistical Infrastructure- Now you want to provide gifts to your employees but it is not as simple as they coming to the office and you handing over the gifts to them- gifts have to travel boundaries.
Cybersecurity: With laptops being delivered at home and people working in co-working spaces and cafes, data has become much more vulnerable.
Contracts are multi-country: There are legal complexities involved in sitting out of India or Brazil and working for a Silicon Valley startup.
Communication is written and remote: The role of written and asynchronous conversation increases in such a setup. Is Slack the best way to do it? Maybe or maybe not.
Work tracking is remote: Performance management and tracking of goals are also remote. This will also need some solution to do a company-wide tracking.
Infrastructure around us enables us to work in a more efficient manner and such startups bring enormous value-add to the entire ecosystem. Excited to see how some of the remote infra startups will emerge and change the way we work.