Our portfolio company Shippo today announced that it is now providing all customers with access to the United States Postal Service ePostage program. Shippo is the first company to have received such a license from the USPS since 1999. But best of all, the benefits of this license go to Shippo’s customers without them having to do anything themselves! Such is the power of abstraction provided by API companies such as Twilio, Clarifai, Dwolla, Stripe and Shippo.
Wait, “power of abstraction” what does that even mean? When you are a Shippo customer, you integrate the Shippo API into your service, and Shippo connects on your behalf to the USPS and many other shipping carriers around the world. So: you as the customer have a single integration that is always the same and Shippo behind the scenes maps the many different integrations it has to this one format. Next time when your hear a programmer say “abstracting” you now know they mean hiding complexity and changes behind a well defined, easy-to-use “interface” (just like the graphical user interface on your computer hides all the complexity of the operating system underneath it).
Abstraction is powerful because it hides both complexity and changes over time. In the case of Shippo each carrier around the world works slightly differently, but Shippo’s API gives you a single interface. Shippo does all the hard work behind the scenes to hide the complexity. And change: Shippo just got a much better integration with the US Postal Service. It allows Shippo to respond to your queries faster and achieve much higher uptime (by cutting a dependency on USPS systems). Because this change happens “under the hood” the service to you as the customer gets better without you having to do anything!
This power is why going forward I believe all software will be created by composing APIs. Need communications? Use Twilio. Need payments? Use Dwolla and Stripe. Need deep learning? Use Clarifai. Need shipping? Use Shippo!