Who are you?

Hi Ken. My name's Sebastian.

What is your role?

I'm the head of business development here at FatSecret and I look after our platform API business.

Why do APIs matter?

Well, I think APIs are the backbone of modern, modern day IT infrastructure and to build scalable IT infrastructure and solutions, especially when you touch so many lives, like we do in the, in the health space and the nutrition space and weight loss space, I think you need to have robust APIs in order to power. You know, these solutions both on the web and for mobile apps for millions and millions of users every day.

What is your biggest challenge with APIs?

We operate in this niche, very niche market of nutrition data that, that most people are not familiar with. And, you know, our API is embedded in so many modern day health and fitness applications, medical applications that no one knows about. It's fully white labeled. So it's this niche market and it's really difficult to make, you know, a proper business out of it. And it took us. Probably 10 years really to be, to be Frank, um, to, to build a proper, um, API licensing business and at the same time doing it at scale globally. So we operate across 56 countries and we provide verified nutrition data. So scaling this business globally. Finding the right partners and the right customers is probably the biggest challenge.

What does it mean to operate an API in an AI-driven landscape?

It's a very good question. Potentially, you know, short term, this is a big threat. So we, we have been curating, verifying and publishing nutrition data for the past, you know, 17 years. We started back in 07. And back in 07, there was no nutrition API out there. You couldn't just tap into an open API and plug, plug it into your, your mobile app or your web app. And. And receive verified nutrition data. And then that led us to doing this ourselves. So we, we built, um, systems and tools and processes to, to curate nutrition data, and then publishing it on our, our website, which then had many, many companies, corporations come up to us and approach us and ask if we can make this data available to them. So we started very young with APIs and fast forwarding, as you said, to the modern day age of AI. Um, there is no potential threat to our API business, whereby You know, um, developers will not use us as a verified source for nutrition, but they will just ping OpenAI or any other LLM really. So short term, it might be, it might be a threat, but at the same time, we know that a lot of LLMs have, have their downfalls. They, they hallucinate. They often don't have good data when it comes to international markets. So for example, if you want to know how much sugar is in a Snickers bar, You know, you can probably ask JetGPT and it might have a decent result. But if you want to ask the same question for a product in Brazil, in Indonesia, in Japan, in Korea, in Germany, in Australia, the results are not that good. So there is still a need, we believe, for proprietary data, um, you know, to be providing you with verified nutrition information. At the same time, we know that AI needs training data. And I think that's the second part of the conversation, whereby. We know AI is already struggling to be provided with reliable, um, and, and really verified training data. And I think that's potentially another, um, another avenue that, that we might embark on in the coming years.

Is business development important when it comes to selling to AI applications?

Yeah, a hundred percent. And that's why we're trying to innovate and build on top of our existing API. Um, Substantially. So we've probably neglected that side of our business for maybe six, seven, eight years, and we focus possibly too much on our consumer side, um, of the business where we run a calorie counting app. It's called fat secret calorie counter by secret has about 130 million downloads. But now we're trying to, to leverage, for example, AI capabilities to build on top of our existing API platform. For example, we want to embed, or we will be embedding image recognition very soon, natural language processing. Um, and many other features that are sort of, they, they were kind of out there in the past, say five, six, 10 years ago, you could use like, yeah, large language models weren't really the thing back then. But machine learning obviously did exist 10 years ago already. So you could build somewhat very basic, um, natural language processing capabilities and very basic image recognition technology. But now. Obviously in the modern day and age and the modern AI world, it's much more easier to build really solid and robust, um, features that help people, you know, look up nutrition information to lock their foods way more easily to reduce friction. Um, and I think that's, that's where the future lies. So we really have to, you know, push ourselves every day and innovate harder and faster than, than what we've done in the past to stay relevant.

Is artificial intelligence more than training with APIs and access AI with APIs?

Yeah, a hundred percent. And then we tried to do it ourselves back in the day, say, um, In 2016, we started our own image recognition technology. So we hired our own team to build machine learning capabilities. Um, and that was sort of pre AI or what, what people now perceive as AI and call AI obviously was some extent that, but, um, one time to say all these things that people have built in say 2012, even 2020, it's largely, Irrelevant now, like the modern day LLMs, you know, they've become so good that most things that you build in house, whether you have two people, 10 people, or 20 people working on it, we know that the modern day big tech giants, they have a hundred people, 200 people sitting there doing this with, you know, much greater scale and much greater impact. So, There's so many really robust out of the box solutions now that you can tap into that will make things for the consumer. No, looking at the consumer, it'll make life for the consumers so much easier. And we try and always look back. What's the best possible solution for the use out there.

How do you operate your APIs?

Yeah, i'm not technically myself So i'm not a developer, but obviously I work with developers almost 24 7. Um, So we built a pretty standard rest api in 2010. It was a free and open api Um that people could tap into it obviously authenticates via all of 1. 0 and 2. 0 You And, you know, we hosted with AWS, so, you know, very, very low latency and it's got great coverage all over the world. We, we have a, as I said, a global business, so we have, we have clients, customers, API developers, almost in every country of the world, close to 40, 000 developers now using the API. So it has to be, you know, accessible from anywhere with minimal latency. Um, and then we have, in terms of the API calls, we have, you know, a food lookup, which we call food search, and we have barcode scanning, we have autocomplete search, similar to what, what Google does, where you can autocomplete a query, like when a user say an English speaking user types in B A N A, we know they're looking for a banana. Um, and then that will be made even, you know, even easier with natural language processing and image recognition. But yeah, high level, it's a very standard REST API, um, hosted with AWS. Um, That, that provides all sort of standard of authentication. And then we have what we call three legged OAuth as well. It's a protocol whereby a lot of health and fitness apps in particular use three legged OAuth to, to sync user data back and forth, like Apple, you know, Apple Health, Google Fit does it as well, whereby, um, A user might use a, a mobile application and they, they lock their foods or they keep track of their weight or keep track of their exercise and they can sync that data back into a public repository like Apple Health and Google Fit, or they sync it straight back into another third party app, which is something we, we provide in Power as well.

How did you learn about APIs as a business stakeholders?

Yeah, I think you have to. I think you simply have to over time. I know it takes time, especially when you don't have a developer background and you've never completed an IT degree. Um, and I'm very fortunate to have good colleagues who are very technical and who can explain things and can help me understand things. Like, for example, I think I saw that you've been active around Postman as well. Obviously, you're, you're, you're, um, very active on GitHub. And then, I think you have some sort of, um, no background with running Postman libraries as well, and, you know, I embarked on this Postman journey maybe two years ago when, when our CTO helped me set it up and yeah, it's been a, it's been a lifesaver. You know, I can, without being a developer, without being technical, I can use Postman, I can use our API and I use many other APIs for testing. And evaluation purposes are by a postman. So, um, that that's amazing.

What keeps you going each day?

That is a good question. Um, so the majority of our work that we do is in, in nutrition and weight loss. And when you look at the global landscape of what's happened in the last. Few years like, um, the global obesity rate has tripled since 1975 and 60 percent of Americans are now overweight or obese. The, you know, obesity pandemic is, is on the rise and the UN calls it a pandemic. Actually, it's been labeled as a pandemic. So the problem we're facing as a, as a society and as humanity as a whole is. It's unbelievable. And many people haven't even realized how much, um, impact food and nutrition, daily nutrition has on your overall health and wellbeing and the rise of chronic diseases, not just in the U S but globally is out of control. So we, we really try and build effective weight loss tools. That's, that's how we started. I mean, we started back in 07 as a, you know, a social network for dieting. That's what we called it back in 07 when, you know, there was. The days of Facebook when Facebook started and became big. So a long time ago, but we're still here and we try and build effective weight loss tools because we know it's a growing global problem. And again, the rise of obesity and the rise of chronic diseases, you know, largely nutrition related, unfortunately. Almost out of control. So we're really trying to, to have an impact and we're touching the lives of many users already with our, you know, API has just over 700 million API calls every month. And we have, as I mentioned, more than 130 million downloads for our own app. So there's a large global audience that we serve, that we try and help. And, um, at the end of the day, that's our, That's our motivation.