You might have noticed the shift in my focus over the summer, but I want to be explicit about my departure from Naftiko for anyone who was away doing summer things, or who missed the signal in all the noise. After a year at Naftiko, I am leaving behind the startup I helped found to focus exclusively on API discovery with APIs.io and API governance with API Evangelist. The company and the product were not aligned with my vision for the API space, and as with all of my recent work, my vision is what propels me forward, not the paycheck or the venture capital investment.
My vision for bringing discovery and governance to APIs at scale transcends any company I have been involved with over the last 16 years. I learned a lot about consumer power at Postman, about platform governance at Bloomberg, and about the importance of standards and interoperability while building Naftiko. I also walked away with a pragmatic understanding of the role artificial intelligence is playing in markets and in venture capital investment. I am rolling all of it back into APIs.io and API Evangelist, and more specifically into the Kin Score, following through on a vision that dates back to 2014 — one dedicated to making the ubiquitous and invisible API infrastructure around us discoverable, and governed.
The vision I have had in my head since 2014 is greater than any startup, enterprise, standards body, or government agency I have worked with since, and it is the antithesis of the venture capital, private equity, and market forces dominating the internet-powered economy today. I am fully aware how frustrating it must be to work with me when I hold such a deep commitment to that vision, and such an immovable belief in the competition, interoperability, and regulation needed to shape our online world. My views transcend the API ecosystem, community, and open source movements we all believe in across the world of APIs. I am obsessed with a societal level of political controls that can put the knobs and levers of the internet economy into the hands of the people who use it, who depend on it for their livelihoods, and who are also very often used by it.
The Kin Score is the codified, self-service, and automatable representation of that ongoing vision, combined with the open source profiling of companies, organizations, institutions, and government agencies on GitHub by API Evangelist, and the search and discovery of all that work across the data on APIs.io. I am not just looking to solve API discovery, as many have tried before. I am looking to use that perpetual discovery to understand which technical, business, and political knobs and levers need to be pulled and dialed in to regulate, standardize, and govern the API layer beneath the desktop, web, mobile, device, network, and AI applications powering the economy.
In my experience the answer to the role the internet plays in our lives — elevated dramatically by artificial intelligence — does not lie in enterprise governance, startup innovation, financial investment, government regulation, or market forces. It lies in D) All of the Above, driven by the competition, interoperability, and regulation of standardized APIs. I am biased, but I strongly believe it is true. I always have. Everything powering our economy flows through APIs. APIs are the inputs and outputs of artificial intelligence. Everything on our mobile phones is powered by APIs. I do not believe any single startup, enterprise, VC firm, standards body, or government agency can pull this off. I think it will take an ongoing series of open source and commercial standards, tooling, policies, and rules that leverage a modern API toolbox to get it done over time.
I keep trying to find a partner in crime on this vision, and honestly the only person who has stayed the course with me is Steve Willmott, former CEO of 3scale and current CEO at Safe Intelligence and Spec27 — a long-time investor in and believer in Kin Lane and API Evangelist, despite me being such a problematic collaborator. I share ownership of APIs.io, APIs.json, and API Commons with Steve, and they are all foundational cornerstones of my delusional world domination strategy. Steve regularly visits and talks with me — I had dinner with him last night in NYC — and he is the only person who will argue with me and then come back for more. Hats off to him. Talk to anyone who has worked with me. I am friendly and collaborative and open to sharing, but I am also very opinionated and immovable when it comes to my vision and my ethics for the space. Money does not persuade me. Large-scale problems and systems are the only things that will keep me quiet for any amount of time.
I feel like I am coming into the home stretch with this vision. It began earlier this century, took formation in 2010, and was solidified in my mind’s eye by 2015, but it was still very much out of reach for me financially and technically. I have to admit, AI has helped me bring it all together. It is kind of ironic. I know there is still a ton of work ahead of me to grow APIs.io into the volume of real-time data I need to get a handle on what is required, but my API Evangelist work has finally reached a major milestone with the delivery and versioning of the Kin Score. I just need to keep gathering data, making sense of each area of our economy, refining and dialing in the Kin Score, engaging with the providers I am applying the score to, and then rinsing and repeating. Maybe home stretch is not the right phrase. But I am closer than I have ever been, and I can see the playing field now. I just need to keep playing the game and telling stories about what matters.
