"Being a founder usually means that you have to play bad cop often", said Tico Founder

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I’m Howie Young, Founder and Dreamer at Tico. I prefer to say that I got no “Background”, but I guess we are talking about education and experience here. So, I graduated with a BA degree and owned an entrepreneur hub, one of the oldest coworking spaces in Taiwan.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Tico. The vision is to create safer and more user-centered communications products. The core product is Wondercall, an embedded video call platform that helps enterprises bring p2p-secured video connections into any business in seconds

What is the origin story?

My colleagues and I founded Toetoe in 2013, a messaging platform that helps everyone save and exchange true words with whom they care about, which gained 50K users in one week and stored over 500K secrets before we shut it down due to some unresolvable technical issues. But we learned a lot from experience and realized that there’s a vast space to improve for all communication experiences and tools.

Then, I found Tico, a company focuses on creating better communication and conversation.

The name of the company was from two words, Time and Communication. It means we, Tico, will always bring the proper communication at the right time for everyone.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

I’m not quite sure if they love me as I love them. Being a founder usually means that you have to play bad cop often. But yeah, that makes us become the team dealing with the most strenuous situations when facing challenges.

I do hope they love me, really!

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

That’s not going to happen in any way, even if we prove that there are actual parallel times and spaces.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

We measure it from the engagement, usage of the product, and reviews from our users and clients. The core metric is a [secret] that can only be read after you pay and buy coffee to HackerNoon (jk).

Editor note: our core metric is time reading. Paying with eyeballs works for us.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

Users from over 150 countries have used at least one of our communication products and known what “Better communication“ is.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

Both answers are the Space technology for sure.

I can’t imagine if there will be anyone who doesn’t want to make a spacewalk once in a lifetime. Yet, I don’t see anyone who had known and figured out how human beings should treat Space well when we barely understood how to treat Earth well.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

Actually, it was HackerNoon found us. But, I do pretty much like the community of the platform. So, thank you, guys!

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

22 wouldn’t automatically become a certainly better version for you. It could be just a 21-beta if you don’t do anything for yourself.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

Covid-19 is just a force that forces you to change the way you think and take action. Even the virals know they have to learn and grow as quickly as possible to survive. So, think and act like the virus. You will find that's pretty helpful for you to become a badass.