API Economist: How did you become the API Evangelist?

Kin Lane: I was the VP of Technology at an events management company, WebEvents Global, leading their technology and architecture. I ran all SAP events, including Sapphire for two years. I was also involved with TechEd and a lot of the North American events. I was brought on to move them out of the data center and be more elastic in the cloud, and meet the demands of the global events. I moved it into the Amazon Cloud and re-architected the whole system using APIs and Amazon APIs. I loved APIs. But I wanted to do something else. I started studying the API space. I quickly realized that there are a lot of technical pundits in this space. But no one was keeping eye on the business of APIs, the myriad of tools it takes to be successful, nor approaches to evangelism and marketing to developers and the whole politics of APIs. So I launched API Evangelist and just started studying this space. Three years later I'm still doing it.