Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Jim Xiao, CEO of Mason (Part 1)

Jim is building an AWS or Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service company for rapid deployment of IOT products and use cases.

Startups can also leverage the platform to quickly build IoT products. Fascinating discussion. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Mason.

Jim Xiao: I’m the Founder and CEO of Mason. We started just over five years ago with the aim to build a smart device platform for innovators to take over industries. There have been a proliferation of these smart hardware companies. We want to make it easier for a founder with an idea to make that happen. We provide a hardware library of designs. We provide the software tooling.

We provide the integrated services so that all you have to do is build an application to go to market, and we help you through the rest of it. We’re the only fully-managed infrastructure to help someone take an idea of a smart hardware product and turn it into life faster than anyone else.

Sramana Mitra: Would you categorize yourself as a PaaS?

Jim Xiao: We think of ourselves as mobile IaaS. We think about AWS and pioneering IaaS by combining computes into the cloud. You see what Twilio has done by introducing mobile services to developers. We’re merging the two into mobile IaaS where a developer can establish hundreds and thousands of gigabytes of compute, all on the edge across 50 to 60 different countries without having to ship a box.

Sramana Mitra: How many developers are building applications on your infrastructure?

Jim Xiao: Right now, we have hundreds of developers building different projects. We have dozens of different customers in production, especially in healthcare and government. 

Sramana Mitra: What is your business model?

Jim Xiao: We charge license plus usage. Customers will pay a license for different designs within our hardware library. Then they use services like telecom or logistics that are attached to it. For example, some of the top pharma companies are using Mason to change over from pen and pencil to electronic data capture. They use Mason so that all they have to do is build an application to service their patients. We deploy it for them across 50 or 60 different countries now. 

Sramana Mitra: Are your customers mainly enterprise?

Jim Xiao: Yes, we’ve focused on mid-market. We’re just getting into enterprise. Our strategy has been really interesting in focusing on the software companies. That has allowed us to market really quickly.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about use cases. Let’s start with whatever is your highest revenue generator. What is that application? Who’s the customer? 

Jim Xiao: One of our larger customers is government agencies. We service about 1,400 government agencies from federal down to local. We’re helping them transform decades-old technology when it comes to ankle bracelets and helping the Department of Justice and Homeland Security turn ankle bracelets into smartwatches to provide additional services for our immigrant community.

You and I have experienced the iPhone or the Android device for quite some time now. How do we take that and use that so that communities can use that technology to, for instance, seek asylum, add mobile banking services, or to find jobs? 

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Jim Xiao, CEO of Mason
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