Episode 020 - 10Web; Tigran Nazaryan, CEO

Introduction

Welcome to Distilling Venture Capital.  I am your host, Bill Griesinger

Distilling VC is a visionary podcast that provides an insightful and informed view of the key trends affecting the VC and tech startup world.  My mission is to cut through and go beyond the hype that tends to dominate the tech landscape.  And provide you with information you can use.  

Episode Introduction:

• Welcome back everyone.  Today, we have a really interesting program for you b/c I have the pleasure of welcoming to the show Tigran Nazaryan, who is the CEO of 10Web, a  
• Tigran, thank you for making the time to be with me today on the podcast.
• I am super excited about today’s conversation after learning about the company b/c 10Web has created a really interesting business model and is changing the game around the area of Web design and hosting, and is doing that through automation of an old but very reliable tool and ecosystem many of us are familiar with have used, WordPress.  
• 10Web has a very interesting history and story and what I believe is a huge addressable market.  Tigran, I thought it would be useful for you to provide us first, with some of your background, and then we can get into the interesting story around the origins of 10Web as a company
• Five years before founding the company in 2017, a small team of engineers were building WordPress plugins.  This helped you identify the biggest problems in web development, leading to the formation of 10Web.  With vision to create a platform for hosting for professionals and agencies.  
• We built an advanced, modern type of hosting technology.   Allows automatic creation of WordPress websites and powered by AI algorithms and neural networks.   We also created our own tools for optimizing websites
• We are getting a lot of momentum, growing really fast…
• Hear is a quote from a press release after your raised your Seed round last month where you stated, "Tens of millions of WordPress websites are built every year, and an average website launch takes 5 weeks!  We wanted to bring automation to WordPress development to facilitate and speed up this process," can you expand on this?
• Why did you choose WordPress automation as opposed to, say, building your own website builder tools?
• Tigran:  Old school platform, but WordPress powers 45% of all websites built.  It is really flexible and workable.  Yet, we found the experience of creating WP websites was really painful.  Flow is time-consuming and requires some deep knowledge where many web developers don’t go that deep.
• Our vision was to solve these problems for web developers.  Huge potential for automation because WordPress 
• Here is a quote from your investor at AI Fund;  “10Web has built an innovative, no-code solution utilizing artificial intelligence to automate website porting and creation.” (Perry Wu, General Partner, AI Fund)
• We spend greater than 2 years with a team of machine learning engineers to create the solution.  Not a simple undertaking.
• You use Google Cloud as infrastructure, why?  
• Tigran:  We use Google Cloud for hosting.  Clients’ websites are stored.  We also use AWS, MS Azure.   There is no fundamental difference between these 3 solutions, only difference is in details.
• Talk about achieving 90+ Google Page speed score.
• Tigran:  Page Speed score is a metric defined by Google.  Important metric.   Affects conversion, effectiveness of ads, for all web pages of the site.  Techn