Mike Maney

Last night, I moderated a panel on the current state and future of the API market at APIdays San Francisco. It was the first time APIdays had come to the States, originating in Paris where the biggest event in its series of multi-city conferences is hosted. There’s a great round-up of photos and tweets here.

Our panel included TechCrunch’s enterprise reporter, Alex Williams; former ProgrammableWeb blogger and current head of SendGrid’s developer communications, Adam Duvander; and two top venture capitalists in this space: True Ventures’ Adam D’Augelli and Bessemer Venture Partners’ Ethan Kurzweil.

It was a lively discussion with great debate among the panelists. One topic I’m seeing a lot of the API discussion coming back to is infrastructure. I saw it at Gluecon in May, too. It’s something I’ve been saying for a while and one of the reasons I created maney:digital (well, that and the fact that the girls really love a guy with his own influencer consultancy). The sexy part of tech right now is the unsexy stuff. The tech world is no longer dominated by glossy apps. People and startups (the smart ones) know there’s real work to be done in shoring up the stuff that makes all the other stuff work. It’s not dissimilar to the rebuilding the American transportation infrastructure is going through (or should be going through). And among all of the digital ditch digging is an emergent class of startups banking not on the fixing, but on innovating among and on top of that new API-centric plumbing.

Sex may sell, but unsexy makes the sale possible.

(Image shot by @SOASoftwareInc)