Entrepreneur taps foreign experience to build innovation at Thai start-up Ex-Amazon manager and US A

Dan, 36, is co-founder and chief product officer of Glazziq, an e-commerce start-up for prescription eyewear and sunglasses. 
The company offers customers world-class quality eyeglasses, including prescription lenses, starting at Bt2,990. 
Glazziq works directly with frame and lens suppliers, and partners with optical retail stores for eyeglass prescription measurement and after-sales service. 
The products are available online at www.glazziq.com, and the company ships to all parts of Thailand.
“I decided to join the team after I understood the magnitude of the task we were going to undertake – as well as its potential to have a positive impact on millions of customers across Southeast Asia and the world. 
“I should also mention that probably the biggest reason I decided to co-found this start-up was our team. I really believe that the four founding members have the right mix of skills to make Glazziq a success,” he said. 
Prior to setting up business as a co-founder of Glazziq, Dan was an officer in the US Air Force, where he flew test missions to help develop aircraft technology, after which he worked at Amazon as a product manager in Amazon Video’s Content Metadata team.

Amazon Video is an online video-on-demand service, similar to Netflix. The Content Metadata team deals with all of the data about a particular movie or TV show.
For example, the metadata for “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” includes the director (JJ Abrams), cast (including Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher), as well as the genre (science fiction), themes (good vs evil), as well as other forms of categorisation (space opera).
“In my role as product manager, my job was to research, propose and supervise new projects in our area of responsibility. Most of our projects had to do with using this data to make better recommendations to customers. 
“These recommendations are presented to the customer on each movie or TV show’s web page, under the heading ‘Customers Who Watched This Item Also Watched’. We measured our performance based upon our ability to increase customer engagement, in the form of minutes watched and number of videos watched,” he explained.
Two of the biggest efforts he was involved in while at the US giant were the launch of the new Amazon Originals TV shows, and Amazon Video’s launch in Japan, the UK and Germany, he said.
Dan added that he had learned and gained experience from working at Amazon to help build and improve his existing businesses under three main themes: e-commerce, building business operations for systems, and engineering talent. 
For e-commerce, it is fundamentally about employing technology to gain an advantage, the entrepreneur said.
“Building an e-commerce business is more than just selling through a website or an app, as you need to create a business that can fundamentally provide better value to the customer, and the difference between a successful e-commerce company and a traditional one must be fundamental, not just a minor detail of day-to-day operations,” he stressed.
He said that at Glazziq, “we have done this by integrating the entire eyeglasses value chain, from the customer to the factory. This makes our company lightweight and fast, allowing us to offer our customers a better product at lower cost than the competition”.
As to building business operations for systems, and building systems for people – even on a relatively small scale – an operations workload can overwhelm a team and reduce the resources available for innovating, the co-founder said. 
Glazziq has therefore automated all non-customer-facing business functions as much as possible, in areas such as logistics, production and accounting, “which allows our operations team to focus solely on providing great customer service”, he added.
 
Developing engineering talent
Lastly, the engineering talent is developed, not born, he said, emphasising that talent must be continuously developed.
“Software is always changing, so developers’ skills get outdated very quickly if they do not have passion for learning. At Amazon, our technical leads were constantly exploring new technologies and figuring out how to use them to make our team more efficient. This is not to minimise the value of experience – experienced software developers usually have a better strategic intuition for what areas to prioritise and invest time and effort in. However, experience is nothing without the ability to execute,” Dan explained.
He said Glazziq tried to grow its engineering talent by exposing them to many areas. Nobody is only a “front-end developer” or “back-end developer”.
Although it is occasionally less productive or harder when staff are not specialised, Glazziq believes that when everyone understands the process – from the customer all the way back to the factory – it allows business to invent better products and systems.
“I try to apply what I have learned and my experience to provide better services and products to customers,” the co-founder said. 
Glazziq plans to expand into the international market next year.