After winning the grand prize at AngelHack Global Hackathon in 2018, Xiaozhou (William) Du joined Agora, a leading video, voice, and live-interactive streaming platform, to continue his great contribution to the industry. He specializes in technology innovation, real-time engagement adoption, and future user engagement re-envision with a professional business and technology background. Before Xiaozhou started his career at Agora, he honed his technical analysis and business consulting skills from competition and projects in supporting underrepresented communities. Xiaozhou was a participant of the AngelHack Global Hackathon in 2018, where he perfected his technical and marketing skills. He co-founded the OneArc team, an emergency information solution platform designed to assist survivors of natural disasters. To win the competition, Xiaozhou developed the competencies to understand and analyze the environment and have strong empathies towards users. Eventually, his efforts paid off. His team not only won the grand prize of 2018 AngelHack Global Hackathon in Seattle, along with Real-Time Communication Challenge and NHEA (National Environmental Health Association) Challenge, but also was enrolled in the HACKcelerator global accelerator program and established the initial partnership with the state governments.
“By having strong empathies towards, I have a great understanding of what the developers and founders are looking for and struggling with. I strive to eliminate the struggles and create smoother processes for the community,” he said.
While in college, he was a Business Consulting Group member where he offered consulting services to underrepresented communities and small to mid-size companies to address their operational problems. Not only did he optimize the operation efficiency of these companies, but also support the minority communities to thrive.
He brings his experiences to Agora in 2018 and has since strengthened them. As Agora’s former Developer Community Manager, he was tasked to learn their shared goals and create a robust and collaborative environment for the developer community. He led the entire team to manage Agora’s international developer initiatives and create the first developer education program and put together developer events, such as workshops, webinars, and hackathons, including RTE2020 Hackathon.
“I will say Developer Community Manager is involved in a triangle relationship, marketing, communication, and program management. The key to success in this role is to have both interdisciplinary knowledge and empathy to the community. Managing a developer community doesn’t mean to sell the product to them, but to enable developers to experience the great quality of your product.” he said.
Last year, Xiaozhou and his team created Tripanion, an all-in-one group trip booking app providing the best travel deals and Real-Time Engagement like video call, audio call, and messaging, during DeveloperWeek 2020 Hackathon. Using Amadeus’s Airline API and Agora’s RTC engine, Tripanion enables users to search flights while connecting with friends to discuss the schedule on the platform. Tripanion redefined the online group travel experience, which is estimated at over $400 billion in the market, and won Amadeus’s hackathon challenge.
Having these unique experiences and backgrounds, Xiaozhou now spends much of his time as a Startup Program Manager helping build a robust startup community and push the boundary of technology innovation in RTE. His work features Real-Time Engagement where users can share the same environment and experience, and are able to engage with each other on any devices. Xiaozhou has used his outstanding business communication skills to support and empower hundreds of startups and galvanize future technology innovation.
“Startup founders are usually the ones who need lots of support. They are bootstrapping the solution, figuring out the business model, drafting plans for scale, etc. By having the empathies to the startups in mind, we strive to eliminate some of the pain away while they are implementing user engagement elements within their solution.” Said Xiaozhou.
“We are dedicated to changing the way people communicate and engage with each other no matter where they are, who they are, and what they use. We are imagining the future user engagement and creating the best solution,” says Xiaozhou.
The Real-Time Engagement platform helps developers deliver rich in-app experiences such as embedded voice and video chat, real-time recording, interactive live streaming and real-time messaging. ​​Under his passion and commitment, Xiaozhou empowers numerous virtual classrooms, virtual workspaces, and metaverse startups to change the way people communicate and interact with each other, and help scale these companies from 0 to 1.
