It’s common for an entrepreneur to compare his or her startup with an existing successful company to help create a better understanding of what the startup is all about, it’s often called a high-concept pitch. Two of my favorite examples: “Facebook for Dogs” (Dogster.com) and “Airbnb for Records” (Vnylyst.com). Venture Hacks, a startup blog, wrote about this a few years ago, “A high concept pitch distills a startup’s vision into a single sentence. It’s the perfect tool for fans and investors who are spreading the word about your company.”

Recently I spoke to Yash Kumar, a 2010 Georgia Tech graduate and CEO and Co-Founder of Runnable , a platform that lets users discover, run and reuse community-sourced code from their browser.

The high-concept pitch for Runnable?: “The YouTube of Code.”

“A new Industrial Revolution in software is going on,” Kumar told me. He said nowadays developers are spending more time reusing code than writing original code.  Kumar said workers during the industrial revolution would push buttons and pull levers on an assembly line to create products. “These assembled products would reuse existing parts and components to create new ones – this is exactly what we’re doing with Runnable, but instead of factory workers we’re empowering millions and millions of programmers.”

Kumar said the idea for Runnable began while he worked as a software developer at Amazon. He said not only is Amazon a big company, it also deploys a huge amount of internal API’s and software systems. He said it was impossible for him to easily find the right documentation for all of the software applications he had to manage.

But now with the launch of Runnable he believes, “it reduces the skill level needed to build complex software.” 

Here’s why Kumar compares his company to YouTube.  He says you’ll find on Runnable.com over a thousand pages of code and supports all major web programming languages. “Similar to the way YouTube took a world of disjointed internet video and enabled users to easily find specific videos, share and discover new ones, Runnable makes developing software easier by allowing users to find, edit, run, re-use and share code from their browser. Runnable is creating the first-ever marketplace for APIs and other reusable software.”

With Runnable, Kumar says anyone can:

•       Search for specific code, modules and APIs

•       Upload and share code and APIs that they have written

•       Choose between a wide array of languages like PHP, Node.js, Python, Javascript, ASP.NET and Ruby on Rails

•       Run and edit the code to see if it works with their project

•       Copy and paste that code directly into their project

Runnable is a venture-funded company with offices in Palo Alto, California. Kumar tells me that there are three other Georgia Tech graduates working with him at the company and that he’s keeping an active eye on the emerging startup tech community in Atlanta.

It may be a bit of a stretch to say “anyone” will be able to easily use Runnable, but I was able to get to work an example of code the Runnable folks sent me to try out using PHP/HTML. Try it yourself and let me know what you think.

This example would allow bloggers to get the latest YouTube videos for Tedx Talks -- and is something that anyone could copy and paste the code into their blog pretty easily.

•             http://runnable.com/Uj4SkdqCFq4tAACR/get-latest-ted-talks-videos-from-youtube-for-php

You could also change the variable to get all of Beyonce's latest videos instead. To do this, you would change:

$channel_name   =   'TEDxTalks';

to

$channel_name   =   'beyonceVEVO';