Inside Facebook Marketplace with Bowen Pan

Paul Spain:
Greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host Paul Spain and in this episode I’m joined by Bowen Pan, who has recently returned to New Zealand following an impressive career in Silicon Valley, including establishing Facebook Marketplace, which has grown to reach over a billion users and attract more people each month than other US platforms such as Amazon and ebay. We delve into Bowen’s inspiring journey through his education and founding an early pre Facebook social network in New Zealand. Joining, joining Trade Me and learning valuable lessons before making the jump to Stanford University and Silicon Valley and ultimately having impressive success in multiple areas of Facebook, Stripe and Common Room. Along the way, Bowen shares lessons on failure pivots and the importance of nurturing ambition. As he discusses returning to New Zealand and our burgeoning tech scene, we gain fresh perspectives into how global experience can fuel innovation. Whether you’re fascinated by product management, the evolution of local tech startups, or the impact of bold moves in tech, this chat is packed with stories and advice to spark your own ambitions. A big thank you to our show partners, Workday, One NZ, Spark, 2degrees and Gorilla Technology.

Paul Spain:
Now let’s jump in. Bowen Pan, welcome to the podcast.

Paul Spain:
Great to have you here in the studio.

Bowen Pan:
Thank you. Great to be here.

Paul Spain:
Now, first up, would like to start during your school years and really looking back at those, do you see some of your entrepreneurial and tech leanings coming through at that time?

Bowen Pan:
So when I was doing my kind of schooling years before uni, I’d say that my focus was like pretty, pretty simple, which was like I was a good Asian kid who wanted to study hard and get really good grades and then figure out what to do later after that. Yeah, yeah. So I was already pretty interested in software and in computers. So the entrepreneurial things I did back then was like pitching to the school that they should take down what I thought was a really badly designed website and allow me to remake it for them and then help with different school production like marketing and all that kind of stuff. So I had a lot of personal interest in that and I did some freelancing design on the side as well. So that was nurtured, I think, during the school years. And that was actually nurtured initially because my mom was doing a master’s degree in information systems and during a school holiday she saw me playing too much computer games and she’s like, oh, maybe I can try to hook up up with things that are a bit more useful on how to design websites. And so she gave me a module as part of her master’s work on HTML design and CSS and JavaScript and stuff.

Bowen Pan:
And I just took it and I ended up finishing the module myself. And I thought, oh, this is really cool. You can actually make stuff. And so that’s how I really picked up my initial interest in tech. Yeah. And then when I got to uni, it was really being introduced to this group called Velocity, which you may have heard of from University of Auckland. It was called Spark back then, but they had to change the name because. Well, because of the telco.

Bowen Pan:
But that was a really, really amazing group of folks who. I think that was the first time I was exposed to essentially uncapped ambition, where there were just these people who are students who used to study at University of Auckland who then went on to found companies. I remember Fatty was a few years before me, who then funded Power Proxy Priv Bradu, who was the inaugural CEO of Velocity, who then went on to Harvard Business School and ended up founding Blue Oak, which was one of the early pioneers of E waste recycling. And so seeing these people just completely opened up my world of saying, wow, there’s all this possibility out there that you didn’t have to just get good grades and then go and work at a graduate role at, like, a bank, which is, you know, I’m not doing that. That’s fine. That’s totally a legitimate career. But that’s not the only choice. Yeah, there’s a lot more choices in the world that’s possible.

Bowen Pan:
And. Yeah, and found a lot of really great mentors. So you may have heard names like Jeff Witcher. He’s a mentor to a lot of young folks, including myself. And even to this day, where we’re still working, still very close.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s great.

Paul Spain:
And so what was your.

Paul Spain:
Your first, you know, real entrepreneurial endeavour? Was that, you know, something that you. You did while you were studying, or was that, you know, post. Post study, yeah.

Bowen Pan:
So I founded my first startup at the end of my first year at university, and it was a venture called Uni Friend. As the name suggests, it’s a social networking site for university students.

Paul Spain:
What year was this?

Bowen Pan:
That was in 05. Wow. It was very early, Very early. We didn’t know what Facebook was. I think Facebook may have been just founded or very early in a few Ivy League universities. And the idea of. I think at the time there was this whole wave of kind of niche social networks where you focus on particular Networks. So, like, R1 was like, oh, cool.

Bowen Pan:
Like, you just get a university email address to validate and then that will form these university specific networks. And so that was. That gained some level of traction and I decided to essentially take a one year leave from school where I reduced my workload to I think only like one or two papers for the whole year. And I don’t think at the time University of Auckland has an official policy of allowing to pause your degree. But I was able to essentially promise university. My final year I did a conjoint degree. So my final year I actually did double the course load in the end to finish. It wasn’t the same, but I took one year leave to see like, okay, let me really give this a crack.

Bowen Pan:
And at the end of the, my first year when I founded Uni Friend, we ended up being runners up for Velocity and that kind of opened up a whole different set of opportunities around mentors. And that was when I was first introduced to the Ice House. And I remember Andy Hamilton was the CEO then. It’s very early days of the entrepreneurial ecosystem here, so that was really fun. But thanks to Facebook, I had to go back and graduate because obviously it didn’t reach a level of success after Facebook entered New Zealand, but. But we learned a lot of really, really great stuff there.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Yeah. Wow, that’s great. So after you graduated, what did you decide to do?

Bowen Pan:
So I graduated in 08, which is not the best time to graduate. And I think like, yeah, so in the end the only real, the only interesting like role I could take was the offer that I got from my internship, which was at Deloitte. And so I did just over a year there and it was actually pretty interesting because it gave me a view of what corporations are like, what government entities are like and how change happens. So I spent a year there and then after that decided to fulfil my dreams of working at a tech company. And in New Zealand, the dream then there was only one company and that was Trade Me. There was no other scale company at the time.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, Xero was really just in its earliest phases, wasn’t it?

Bowen Pan:
Yeah. When I joined Trademe, Xero wasn’t even public. And then later I think right before I left Trademe, they went public, but it was really to raise venture funding at like 50 million market cap or something. And I was like, oh, it’s like a random accounting software kind of. Random. Yeah. Cloud was like very early back then. And I spent just over two years at Trade Me where I really, really enjoyed my time there was post acquisition.

Bowen Pan:
Fairfax had given Trade Me a lot of leeway to just do its thing and it was one where we had a pretty small team, like 150 people, which by New Zealand standards, not small, but you can stay pretty nimble. My job was very broad. My job was to basically be the kind of shared product and strategy resource across all of Trademe and so, and helped with like data analysis so that we would look at how do we drive more, how do we drive more like real estate agents to upgrade their property listings one day to how do we have like more folks sign up to the dating site and make sure like that they get like matches and they get replies. It’s just like so broad. And that was really, really interesting. So I think that gave me a really good grounding in an intuition in marketplaces in how consumer products work. And I had just enough scale, even in New Zealand was small, but just enough scale and trading had over 80% of domestic traffic in New Zealand at the time and enough kind of. It wasn’t a public company.

Bowen Pan:
So I had a lot of freedom to try things and do stuff and also help them to launch a few new businesses as well. So back then it was the deals, the daily deals craze. Yeah. So we launched one for Trade Me as well that eventually got spun off and yeah. So I really enjoyed my time there and I left a few months after they refloated on the stock exchange.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Okay. Any other big lessons that you. You walked away with?

Bowen Pan:
I think I really, I really enjoyed like how much latitude and autonomy that was given to like a relatively inexperienced like essentially one year out of school to go in and to propose some really bold ideas and big things to try, I think, and also like tolerance for failure. I remember I had, I worked on this massive pricing change for Trade Me. That was a really big deal back then. And we had. I had spent like a month or two modelling every possibility out with all the different elasticity of like where the pricing might be with these changes. And we rolled it out and it was a huge failure. Oh, was a massive failure. Like it did not work at all.

Bowen Pan:
Because even though the mass said it would work, what ended up happening, basically it was about how do we change the price of gallery listings? So gallery listings basically, like being able to show the photo on the listing itself, that’s like a really valuable thing. And but what we found is like, oh, like the value of a gallery listing is different depending on what you’re selling. Like, like if you, if you sell a really expensive piece of furniture that way more than piece of clothing. So why don’t we make the Price different. Why don’t we make it so it’s cheaper for some stuff and more expensive on other things? That rationally makes sense. But the problem with pricing something like this is that you introduce complexity and when you have multiple tiers, even though you drop the prices on some things, but some things have increased. When people look at complexity and they look at something have increased, they just assume everything is worse. And that’s just like the general, immediate, general backlash.

Bowen Pan:
The numbers never recovered and we had to roll the entire thing back. But my point isn’t just the pricing learnings, but also the fact that I was mortified, obviously as a new grad, but that did not hurt my career at all. In fact, everyone’s just like, well, we learned some stuff, let’s keep going. Let’s make sure we don’t make the same mistake again. But there was no kind of stopping or slowing down of the intensity of which we moved.

Paul Spain:
And then you moved on.

Paul Spain:
Was it Law Spot that you were.

Paul Spain:
Involved in co founding?

Bowen Pan:
Oh, yeah. That was a fun one. Yeah. So Law Spot was when I met my girlfriend and now wife at the time, and we were in obviously in Wellington with Trade me. And she was working as a lawyer at Russell Mac. And I remember her just complaining about kind of volunteering at the community Law Centers. And she’s like, oh, you know, this is like so inefficient. Like, it’s, it’s during work hours and actually like a lot of the folks who like, need the legal advice, like, it’s like really expensive for them to take time off work to try to get legal advice.

Bowen Pan:
Like, so it’s very counterintuitive. And then it’s also hard for the volunteers because you have to physically go to the law centers. And it’s like. And I was like, ah, sounds like a tech solution. So we partnered. She was a CEO, which is a wise choice. And I help on the tech side. And we basically built out a tech platform that essentially was under the legal umbrella of the Community Law Center.

Bowen Pan:
So that gave you legal immunity.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Okay.

Bowen Pan:
But all the questions and answers would be in an online bank, essentially. So it’d be a bank of questions and answers. And now every time you ask a question, it will search for what’s already there and it will just have a library of anonymized answers. And now volunteers can do anywhere.

Paul Spain:
Great.

Bowen Pan:
Yeah, they can just do it at the office. And that was set up pretty quickly. So that was done in about six to eight weeks, I think from scratch. Built the whole thing and launched it. And. And then, and then my, my wife ran it for like another year before. Before she, she left for the U.S. yeah.

Paul Spain:
Okay. Okay. And then what happened from there?

Bowen Pan:
Yeah, so. So after I finished up at Trade Me, I. I looked around and really felt like unlike, unlike now, there really wasn’t much in the tech scene for New Zealand.

Paul Spain:
Right.

Bowen Pan:
This is as we just talked about before, like very early zero pre Rocket Lab and otherwise. Not that many software business, I think like Orion Health and Datacom, it was those kind of companies. But no real kind of global venture scale businesses and no venture capital industry either. And so it’s always been a dream of mine to work in Silicon Valley. I used to always read TechCrunch even back then on what’s Happening and I really wanted to give it a crack because of all the examples that were set before me by all the folks that I met at Auckland Uni. And so I decided to say, well, what’s the easiest way to go? So my first path is I applied to various roles and obviously they’re like, who is this random Kiwi I’ve never heard of Trade me? And so that didn’t work. And the second path was, well, maybe I could try to go through via school that would give me a visa. And that’s what I did.

Bowen Pan:
So I was very fortunate through mentors like Jeff who introduced me to other people and other people at the school who talked with me. And so in the end ended up at Stanford doing the MBA program. And that was my way to land in Silicon Valley and graduating there. Then give you like an additional 18 month, essentially like a grace period to work while you apply for the work visa in the US and then so I ended up at Facebook.

Paul Spain:
So how did that come about in terms of getting into Facebook? How hard was it to get those sort of graduate types of roles and so on?

Bowen Pan:
So it’s easy once you are in the in club. It’s very hard when you are not in. And so the way that I got into Facebook actually was not directly via Facebook. It was actually first initially via the internship program where I was interning at Dropbox. Once I interned at Dropbox, There’s a very clear pecking order in Silicon Valley of the brands of how hot a company is and the type of talent that those companies tend to attract. People don’t talk about it publicly, but there’s a very clear tiers of where you’re at. And Dropbox was very hot then. The level of hype is up there with OpenAI now that was kind of the hype back then.

Bowen Pan:
And so because of the fact that I interned at Dropbox then, I just got so much inbound. I just got all these approaches on LinkedIn and one of them was Facebook. Yeah. And I had no interest in working on Facebook at the time, but I really wanted to see their campus. So I decided to check out their campus, but was really pulled in by the people that I met. And the level of ambition and the talent was just something different and just really different from everyone else that I had met before. And so eventually decided to join Facebook.

Paul Spain:
And so walk us through your journey.

Paul Spain:
At Facebook because I think there’s probably a fair bit packed in there. And tell us about how you pitched the idea for Facebook Marketplace.

Bowen Pan:
Yeah, so my time at Facebook is divided up into roughly three episodes. So there’s the first four years. So I was there for six and a half years. The first four years was Marketplace, so we can talk about that. And then the second episode was a relatively more unknown, but actually a pretty interesting piece, which is short form videos. So that’s a whole story about TikTok and launching the first version of Facebook short form video experience that eventually got rolled up into reels. Facebook and Instagram reels. And then the last part of my experience there was building out the live gaming experience, building out live streaming and like a Twitch competitor where people watch other people play games.

Bowen Pan:
Sounds strange for folks who are not in the space, but it is a very popular, very popular kind of entertainment category. So that’s how I spent my six and a half years. The first four years, Marketplace was the most formative. And it was just a really special time at Facebook. I would say it was a time when the level of reach the company has, but to the number of employees it had was unprecedented. I think for every one engineer at the time, there were something like 2 million users or something. Like the ratio was crazy. And they were growing so fast that it was.

Bowen Pan:
I remember that when I signed my contract with them to when I started, which is about a semester, they had doubled in size.

Paul Spain:
What?

Bowen Pan:
Like in that time it was just. It was just nuts.

Paul Spain:
Crazy.

Bowen Pan:
Like it was just growing like crazy. So. So that was the first part is Facebook was like in a really interesting time and I would say one of the real golden times of the company where you could move at blazing fast speed but at massive global scale. And I think every era you get one of these companies or a few of these companies. I think OpenAI is one of these companies. Now. Facebook was a company of its time. And then before then, maybe like Microsoft, I think there’s just different companies in the spotlight under that kind of environment.

Bowen Pan:
There was a lot of appetite for folks to experiment and try things. And one of the ventures at the company was that code wins arguments. That was literally like a poster that was put everywhere.

Paul Spain:
Code wins arguments.

Bowen Pan:
Code wins arguments, as in, if you can ship it and the users use it, then you win. It’s better than anyone arguing, better than any exec trying to figure out whether someone would use it because people actually use it.

Paul Spain:
You’ve got the proof?

Bowen Pan:
Yeah. You got the proof? Yeah. So code later that became data wins arguments, but same thing, right?

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Bowen Pan:
And so. So I think that was kind of the precondition for, again, a relatively new MBA grad going into Facebook as a pretty junior product manager. And so when I went in during the company’s induction period of about eight weeks, they call that boot camp, where you learn about the company system and process and how. How data systems work, et cetera, et cetera. I had a very strong personal interest in commerce social networking sites, probably because of Uni Friend and Trademe. And just through me, trying to find every nook and crevice of where could there be a spark of something, because surely there’s something when there’s a billion people on a platform. And that’s when I came across a piece, like a little nugget of research that suggested that one third of people in Indonesia, which is where these researchers went for that particular report, treated Facebook as their primary e commerce site.

Paul Spain:
So this was an internal Facebook report.

Bowen Pan:
This is a research report? Yeah. So Facebook didn’t do this research report all the time. The report was for something completely unrelated. But this is one of the random, surprising things that they filed away in the appendix. And that kind of sparked just a curiosity of where could that be happening? That seems pretty anomalous. And so decided to just use my time during onboarding to really do some research. And very quickly honed in on Facebook groups. And Facebook groups was the only place where people could buy and sell stuff that was not like your friends.

Bowen Pan:
And so did that. Ran a few queries, realized that, oh, my God, there were tens of millions of people, but fragmented across hundreds of thousands of groups that people are just organically creating. But there’s definitely a way to think about how do you aggregate all this together and really create a centralized marketplace. So that was a start. One of the ways to accelerate this was to really leverage these internal hackathons at Facebook, where you basically for two or three days. You don’t have to work on any of your day jobs. You can do anything you want.

Paul Spain:
And.

Bowen Pan:
Then you can ship it to Staging just means it’s not public, but it’s enough where it’s real enough on the Facebook site. We can showcase it, demo it. And then we decided to leverage this hackathon to recruit other people and also as a way to try to get it in front of more execs to show, like, not tell. And so we built the prototype and then we ended up being one of the folks to be able to present this to Zuck because Zuck at the time would review like top 10, like demos.

Paul Spain:
Right. So there’d always be hackathons going on, but only sort of a pinnacle of those would get in front of because.

Bowen Pan:
It’S like too many. There’d be like hundreds and hundreds. Right. And Zuck saw it’s like, oh, yeah, it’s pretty cool when we’re shipping.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Bowen Pan:
Yeah, we’re like, oh, we don’t have a team. And so we put forward some headcount from next year and it was like very small teams, like three or four people and that formed the core engineering team. And I was the first product person to then form that, to then build out the first version, which was essentially detecting whether you’re buying or selling something in a group and then turning that group into a for sale group. And that was a building block of a marketplace, which then later on about, I think it was about just over a year later then led the launch of the Marketplace tab itself. And we launched it to all English speaking countries to about 350 million like monthly active users. And then scaled it later to other verticals like cars and rentals. And when I left Marketplace, it was at about 850 million monthly actives. And then I think now it’s got about a billion monthly actives, which is, yeah, so surreal.

Bowen Pan:
It’s still surreal. It’s surreal even for me because those numbers are, even for Facebook. They are big numbers. And never in my wildest dreams would I imagine that I would see headlines today where they say, oh, Gen Zs are using Facebook because of Marketplace. Yeah, but it’s really cool. I think it’s every builder and product person’s dream to build something that becomes way bigger than the team and you. And it’s just like a thing that exists in the world. And yeah, you can say.

Bowen Pan:
And the satisfaction of feeling like. I still remember those really early moments of like drawing up the plans and diagrams and how Things would work to like, like, to, to, to fast forward that, to see this just become a thing that people just. Yeah, of course, you buy and sell on Marketplace if, like for certain stuff. Yeah. Is very satisfying.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. And what do you think? Sort of caught that initial attention of Mark Zuckerberg at that, you know, that point where you demoed it? What do you think you had got, you got it right. That was enough to attract his attention when there were, you know, I guess hundreds of these, you know, things being built.

Bowen Pan:
And I think the pitch, the pitch is the pitch at the thing that often works at Facebook, and I think this is generally true for a lot of consumer facing companies, is that these are what the users are telling us. It’s an undeniable kind of set of user demand that’s pulling us into that direction. And you can actually apply this to B2B as well if you feel this undeniable pool of the market. And I think the equivalent of that pool of the market for Marketplace was the fact that when you added up everyone who was buying and selling in these groups, there were more people than Craigslist. And Craigslist was the equivalent of essentially like it’s a classified site. Right. And I think Craigslist had more than 80 million monthly actives at the time. And so when you added up these groups, it was bigger.

Bowen Pan:
And then once we started launching the buy and sell features in groups, we, we could quantify every time Taiwan market sold so you can get an approximation of a gmv, your gross merchandise value. And that was really big. It was actually sizable and comparable to even ebay. And that was undeniable. And then we showed a very clear path to how that could be built as a destination and not just locked away in these groups. And so Zucker actually did something pretty rare, which is essentially he came over and came to us and said, I’m convinced that this is something that people want to do. We can build something that’s really world class in this and I’m going to reserve a spot for you in the app and you don’t have to worry about how that spot comes to be. Like, I will instruct the right teams to clear the space for you.

Bowen Pan:
That’s your space. But I want you to ship within like X amount of time to make it happen. You go and make it happen.

Paul Spain:
And how difficult was that period of.

Paul Spain:
Going from, you know, convincing him that there’s an opportunity to actually building it, figuring out the data and working out what it should ultimately look like and all the other Challenges because you’ve just come in as a new member of the team and now you’re involved in something that ultimately ends up being really key to Facebook success.

Bowen Pan:
I think it’s. Oh, definitely wasn’t easy, for sure. And we would go into these multiple, what we call lockdowns, different from a COVID lockdown. This is pre Covid, which basically means that you don’t leave the room until you solve the problem. So everyone literally moved their desk and computer into a garage looking room inside the Facebook office, and you stay there until the problem is solved.

Paul Spain:
How long are you talking?

Bowen Pan:
6, 10, 12 weeks. You don’t sleep there, but pretty much every other waking hour you’re there. Wow. Yeah, so we did all that, but there were also lots of other things of like, we had a small team and I think it was like the fourth pivot or something we didn’t have. I think we were like running out of time in terms of the deadline that was set, and we had to move fast and we couldn’t afford building the experience out on iOS and Android natively. This just takes too long, requires too many people. And so we threw a hail Mary and we said, let’s try this experimental technology called React Native. And React Native team at Facebook at the time was in.

Bowen Pan:
They were in the crevices of Facebook settings and stuff. It was very small. We talked to the team and we’re like, hey, this is your time to shine. Do you want to be exposed to 350 million people? I think overnight they doubled their team and we worked hand in hand with them. And so React Native was basically plugged out of obscurity and Facebook Marketplace became the first true scaled React Native product. And that’s how we built the initial launch version of Marketplace in 10 weeks. And it was largely because of React Native.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Bowen Pan:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
And you didn’t just do Marketplace while you were there either. So maybe just a quick touch on what you did with the rest of your time.

Bowen Pan:
Yeah. So really quickly after Marketplace, a few of our early Marketplace folks kind of essentially went around Facebook to say, what other cool stuff can we do? And we noticed that there is this app from Asia that was spending millions and millions of dollars every day on Facebook to the point where when they spend particularly spiked in certain areas, like you could see engagement impacted. Wow. It’s really clear what was happening. They were siphoning off Facebook traffic. Right. And so, yeah, as I alluded TO earlier, hindsight’s 20 20, that app is TikTok. And TikTok was initially built on the back of YouTube and Facebook ads.

Bowen Pan:
And so we looked at how this app was behaving and what became very clear was that this app worked in very different ways from Facebook where it was what’s called unconnected content. So it’s content that is from people you don’t know. That’s a very novel concept for Facebook at the time. And it’s also very difficult for Facebook to comprehend and to evaluate this app as well, because the retention curves of an unconnected media app looks more like cable television than it does a social network. So the retention curves and all the acquisition economics, they’re just different. It was easy for Facebook to write that off and say, oh yeah, it’s going to be a fad look at the retention curves look very different. But we looked at that and realized, oh, this is actually a public space where, where people are essentially just performing to each other. And the point is that you don’t know them because if you knew them, that will probably be a social inhibitor.

Bowen Pan:
And that’s fundamentally challenging to the Facebook model. And there are ways to solve for this because you can create a space on Facebook to do this. And probably not Facebook, probably Instagram, because the population was better then. And so anyway, we had a series of long back and forth discussions and ended up initially launching this as an experiment, separate app. So that was Facebook’s first foray into short form videos. And we built out Facebook’s first short form video creator program. I think it was a group of like 50, 60 creators that I, I actually when TikTok acquired musical ly to enter the US I had heard that there were a lot of folks who are not happy on the UI side. And so I flew down to LA the next week and I hired the first short form creator person who used to work for Musical Ly.

Bowen Pan:
She helped me to put together a team of creators. I used to live stream with these creators once a month to give them product updates and for them to ask me questions. So this is like a really new muscle for Facebook. And then also we built out a whole panel of raters of saying how entertaining is this piece of content? Because it was a cold start problem because there was no data to feed to see what was good and what was bad. So these were very useful for very useful learnings for Facebook to then take all this to get rolled up to launch reels, which is essentially Facebook’s official initial scale response to TikTok. And those products are a reasonable defence where TikTok is no longer an existential threat. To the company. So did that for about a year.

Bowen Pan:
And that entails a whole different set of things. Like I had to testify to the FTC later about all kinds of funny things, which we can go in another time.

Paul Spain:
There might be another episode.

Bowen Pan:
That’s another episode. Yeah. Which FLTC or the FCC. But we just lost, actually, so I can more publicly talk about it. And then the last one and a half years, a lot of our marketplace folks then all went into gaming and that’s when we built out the live streaming experience. So we took a lot of the experience, we learned from show form videos, and we built out a live gaming community and we grew that to be the third largest streaming platform in the world. And so Microsoft had a platform called Mixer back then.

Paul Spain:
That’s right.

Bowen Pan:
And they shut it down because of Facebook and they migrated all their users over to us. And that’s still a pretty thriving community today.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Spain:
So much packed in.

Paul Spain:
We could probably go a lot deeper there. But keen to hear a little bit more about what else you did before you came back to New Zealand. You had a period as head of product at Stripe and also after that you were at Common Room, so maybe you can tell us a little bit.

Bowen Pan:
So after Facebook, I went to Stripe, which is a fintech company that does payments. And I went there because I wanted to really see and test myself on how much of the skills I learned at Facebook is actually like real product leadership and not just me getting good at how to do Facebook stuff. And it’s as different as you can get because I worked it’s a fintech company and I was working in developer experiences. So I built two different products there. One is I built the Stripe apps, which was essentially a B2B app store where Stripe had aspirations to become a the central nervous system for small to medium businesses. And so they already had payments and transaction information and then they built this app store. So all the other financial apps and the ways to operate your company can plug into Stripe directly. So you can run your business on top of Stripe.

Bowen Pan:
So this includes Xero and everything else as a central operating system. And that was really a really great experience. So we built that from scratch, I think, from start to finish, eight months. And we launched with 50 partners who built their own apps. And now there’s like 400, 500ish apps, which is a pretty important part of Stripe strategy. And then the second piece that my team is responsible for is building out Stripe Dashboard, which is the UI layer, essentially. Like, if you don’t use Stripe for APIs, then Dashboard’s the only way for you to interact with Stripe.

Paul Spain:
To see what’s going on.

Bowen Pan:
That’s right, yeah. To see what’s going on. And that’s also really critical for stripe’s SaaS ambitions. So stripe has this huge ambition to build out a big SaaS business because Stripe is one of those businesses where the bigger the customer gets, the worse of a customer they become. Because you get margin compression on payments. Right. So, so they really wanted to expand into SaaS businesses and that became a pretty core UI layer for that to happen. So we completely refreshed the dashboard and built the foundation for SaaS businesses to become a thing.

Bowen Pan:
So I did just under two years here and it was fun, but also it was a good grounding in payments. But I also felt like two years in payments was good for me. Yeah, it was good. And then I really wanted to build out and experience B2B SaaS. That was the one piece of the puzzle that I just did not have really solid experience in. And so that’s where I went to Common Room. And Common room is a B2B SaaS platform for sales and marketing, specifically helping you to build pipeline for sales teams and. And account based marketing for marketing teams.

Bowen Pan:
And there was a really fun time. I can’t say good enough things about the folks at Common Room. If I was in the us I would have been there for a very long time. But the time I was there was quite a pivotal time for the company because when I joined the company, that wasn’t what Common Room was doing. Common Room was a community management platform.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Bowen Pan:
For social media managers and community managers. But I had the core pieces of technology that was very useful for go to market. So I went in and I worked with founders to essentially execute a complete pivot of the company and essentially gave out. The company had about a million ARR us in community management, which we basically completely gave up.

Paul Spain:
You destroyed your existing revenue?

Bowen Pan:
Yeah, we didn’t completely destroy it per se, but we basically had to pivot the entire company away from it and now it’s a very small proportion of the total revenue and built that out to be essentially the poster child for AI go to market startups. And now Common room serves about 60% plus of Cloud 100 companies. And a lot of the AI companies you might know as well. So, you know, companies like Atlassian, Notion, Zapier, Anthropic, their sales team all use Common Room to build their pipeline, which was really fun because that gave me also a grounding in building out, go to market.

Paul Spain:
That’s great.

Bowen Pan:
And then after that, my wife and I had always planned to come back to New Zealand. We actually decided that we probably want to seriously think about New Zealand with the birth of our first kid in 2020. And we started re looking. And so we initially did that by getting involved with a few of the early VC funds that were just starting in 2020 in New Zealand. And over that time we just really started getting increasing conviction that the startup ecosystem is real in New Zealand now. And there’s a real thing, a really amazing, fantastic thing happening here that’s really, really encouraging. And there are also some companies that are, I think, the best you’ll find anywhere in the world with a level of ambition that matches any company in Silicon Valley. I think we need more of them.

Bowen Pan:
But the fact that there are a few that meet at bar is really, really amazing. And we’ve had so much fun. What a great place it is to raise our kids. But not only that, it really did not feel like a trade off for us at all in that not only are we doing interesting work here, but we’re also hopefully helping companies to be successful to then plug back into the local community that we love.

Paul Spain:
In terms of those that are listening in sort of pondering working in New Zealand versus maybe other parts of the world, which is a topic that seems to be coming up a little bit at the moment. What would you say on that front within the tech side of things?

Bowen Pan:
I would just say that at least be aware of the opportunities that are available in the local tech companies here before and don’t just write them off because there’s really a luxury here that really did not exist when I was here 13 years ago and when I was deciding at that time. And there are really some amazing, amazing companies and talent. And I think more importantly, there are companies who can now absorb the really ambitious Kiwis who previously had to go overseas to satisfy that ambition. And increasingly there are a number of them and they are hungry for it. And there are other companies who are also aspirationally want to be there and want to grow into those kind of companies. And so I think it would be a shame for folks to just leave the country without even knowing the other options. And the options may very well be that it still makes sense for folks to go overseas and work there and study there for whatever period of time. And that’s still a great option.

Bowen Pan:
But the fact that we have a viable option in New Zealand now, and I think that the tech sector is the best it’s ever been. And the worst it’ll ever be is an amazing. It’s like an amazing thing to say. And I think that folks should seriously take a look at it and consider it. And even if you do leave to stay in touch with the tech sector here, because I think that whatever experience that is brought back will be really valuable for those companies, too.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I think there’s still that opportunity to I guess, you know, in some way replicate what you were doing and bring more of our best and brightest expats back to New Zealand.

Bowen Pan:
Right? 100%. 100%. So I think, you know, it’s not. I don’t think it’s a good buy for folks who do leave because I think tech does open up opportunities for both folks who comes back as well as folks who are just starting out their careers too. Both. Both are viable now, whereas before, I think it would have been a much harder sell.

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Bowen Pan:
Yeah.

Paul Spain:
All right, well, we’re out of time, so thank you very much, Bowen Pan, for joining us on the show.

Bowen Pan:
Thank you for having me. This was fun.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, appreciate it. Look forward to the next one.

Bowen Pan:
Thank you.

Paul Spain:
All right, cheers.

Paul Spain:
Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode with Bowen Pan. And of course, a big thank you to our NZ Tech podcast show partners, Workday, One NZ, Spark 2degrees and Gorilla Technology. As usual, this episode was recorded at Podcast NZ Studios in Auckland, where smart Kiwi business leaders lighten their stress and get help recording and producing high quality audio, video and webinars to take their products and services to new customers locally and globally every day. Be sure to follow NZ Tech Podcast across your favourite platforms such as YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and LinkedIn. I’m your host, Paul Spain, signing out. I’ll be back again with a new episode for you next week. See you then.