Bull & Bear: Agora, the API Powering Clubhouse

-It wants its customers to get very big, but not so big that they build in-house

-It wants to expand to the west, but hasn’t made the proactive PR push that Zoom has to appease westerners security concerns.

-It wants to serve the broadest range of real-time engagement use cases well to appeal to the customers who need everything to just work, but faces competition from more geographically and use-case focused competitors.

-Agora is in a tricky spot, full of natural tensions:

“A technology is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates” - Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

-All of this is to say, livestreaming the technology is here, but livestreaming as a medium is not... Fundamentally what I’m pushing back on is saying that a technology will get adoption because it is big in China, when really we should be asking what made it catch on there in the first place.

Lilian's bear case:

-Acquires new customers

Agora is an API-first business, which means it grows in two ways: