Your Tech Story

Annasha

Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more

Echovme-logo

Sorav Jain : An Indian Entrepreneur Crusing Down the Bay of Digital Marketing

Leave a Comment / Founder, India, Inspiration, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

The traditional ways of marketing have been outweighed by digitalized promotions as soon as we stepped into the era of digitalization. But, since the last few years, online marketing space has been overcrowded by people with low experience and claimed professionals. The presence of such freelancers, who have a very minimal idea about digital marketing and social media, creates confusion among the customers which reduces trust in the long run. So, the effectiveness of a good digital marketing company gradually loses its demanding position while people with basically no knowledge-creating havoc in the digital world.

And, to clear the mind of people and help them chose the best, Sorav Jain, a young Indian entrepreneur created some offbeat strategies for his digital marketing company, echoVME. He built the company out of pure passion, as he was ever really into studying biotechnology, though he pursued it. But, later he made his mind to create something of his own, like his father and uncles and went abroad to study marketing management.

Family Background and Early Life

Sorav Jain belonged to a family where creating your own ship cruise was appreciated more than working on a royal one. His father and uncles were established businessmen, so going the unconventional way and turning down tempting jobs were absolutely supported by his family members.socialsamosa.com

Sorav Jain
Image Source: digitalscholar.in

Sorav went to Loyola College and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biotechnology in 2007. While being an undergraduate student, he already mastered the art of SEO, and hence, joined Contempo Technologies as an SEO and Content Executive in January 2006. By this time, Sorav already chalked out his plan to start off his venture and explore the entrepreneurial endeavours. He went to the University of Leeds to complete his master’s degree in International Marketing Management and joined CMO Axis as a Digital Marketing Specialist after graduating. Working for CMO Axis, a global digital marketing firm fascinated him even more about the world of advertising.

Setting up echoVME

Sorav Jain still continued working at CMO Axis, while he was building his own empire. Quite a business mind!

An entire plan was set up, and Sorav started assembling the building blocks of the company from December 2009. The company became operational from March of the next year, a couple of months after leaving CMO Axis. So, like any other young entrepreneur, Sorav dived into his business with the utmost passion and energy to bring a significant change in digital marketing.

The company started with a team of 10 members operating from Mumbai and Chennai.

At People’s Best Interest

echoVME wasn’t established with the regular idea of going around, convincing people, taking in clients and earning money. Sorav really wanted to put some effort to make young minds, especially college students, learn about digital marketing so that the quality of freelancers available in the marketplace improves and more students get exposed to the light of digital marketing.

Since its establishment, a lot of training sessions and workshops are conducted by echoVME. Apart from covering major cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, echoVME has also spread its wings to Sri Lanka. It was a really smart strategy from the owner to conduct such workshops, as they received humungous positive feedbacks, even from CEOs, CMOs, and Executive Officers of many famous brands.

Within few months of founding the company, it made deals worth $10 million through corporate blogging strategy.

Obstacles and Competitors

For Sorav Jain the hardest challenge was time management and implementing every theoretical statement from the heavy books of business administration in real life. He said that when you set up a business, it is more than just the bookish definition of the business terminologies, as you have to deal with real people and real crisis. But, that’s how one learns, isn’t it?

Sorav gives very vague answers, every time it comes down to mentioning echoVME’s competitors. In an interview, he said that every company that is trying to reach a standard position in digital marketing, especially blogging-centric marketing, are the competitors.

Success of echoVME

Presently, echoVME has trained more than 2000 professionals and brands through their training programs and workshops. More than 100 workshops have been conducted echoVME in major cities of India till date. The training sector of echoVME, SOCIALME has gained unexpected popularity from the very first day.

What after echoVME?

Sorav founded Digital Scholar, an agency-based learning institute in July 2019. Apart from this, Sorav has also been a guest lecturer at many famous educational institutes, like IIT Madras and Leeds Metropolitan University.

stack overflow

Stack Overflow : A Programming Hotspot Created for the Coding Enthusiasts

Leave a Comment / Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Some people might say that the job opportunities in the IT sectors are gradually reaching a saturation level, but is it really true? Today, while the world is getting consumed by the trove of technology, IT sectors play the most important role in functioning and developing of our world. Even, if you are launching a small product in the market, you need to create certain algorithms, a website, and definitely, a user interface, for which one needs to hire developers. In this 21st century, coders are on demand! Be it a pure competitive programmer or a developer, their contributions to the IT sector is certainly the need of the hour.

And, to help out the programmers out there be it an expert or a beginner, an online Q/A platform, Stack Overflow was created 11 years ago. Stack Overflow, the flagship site of the Stack Exchange Network was mainly created to answer the queries of the programmers based on any programming language, and the user can solve problems on the website as well.

The two finest minds who created this platform for every coding enthusiast out there are Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. They launched the site on 15th September 2008, eleven years from now, and today, the website witnesses over 50 million monthly visitors.

Stack Overflow Founders

About the Founders

Jeff Atwood is a software developer, who runs his own blogging site, Coding Horror, since 2004. Apart from co-founding Stack Overflow, he also launched his new company, Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., in 2013. He met Joel Spolsky after he started maintaining his programming blog.

Joel Spolsky is a software engineer and writer belonging to New Mexico. He maintains a blog called Joel on Software, and he is also the creator of Trello. Before founding Stack Overflow, he was a project manager of Microsoft Excel and also founded Fog Creek software.

Spolsky contacted Atwood on 2008 and together decided to set up a Q/A website related to coding.

The journey of Stack Overflow

Within months of the launch of Stack Overflow, it attracted a lot of coders from around the world, and even the beginners, who just wanted to learn something new. People helped each other by answering the doubts, learnt new things about any specific language, and even, if someone was showing off their coding skills, it worked out pretty well for the website.

Since both, the founders had their own personal blogs, they had enough number of subscribers. Atwood invited his subscribers to try the beta version of the newly released website, on 31st July 2008. And on 15 September 2008, the company announced the release of this beta version for public, where anyone could seek help and ask queries related to programming.

The website also incorporated a badge system for the users. For example, if you answered a question and your answer got upvoted you were given certain badges, that is, awards which upgraded your reputation. Thus, the more you answer, you are likely to gain certain incentives given that the quality didn’t drop.

But, it was noticed that a similar question was posted many times, giving rise to the same answers. Spolsky turned this drawback into a positive point, saying that if similar questions drove more traffic to the website, as it appeared on multiple search results, there is no harm in it after all.

The success of the website

In 2010, the company raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Union Square Ventures. In April 2009, the company added a feature called “timed suspension” which showed the user’s reputation at “1” because either they didn’t show enough interest to improve or engaged themselves in disruptive behaviour. After implementing this policy, 92% of the questions were answered within a few minutes.

In 2011, another $12 million was raised in Series B funding led by Index Ventures with the participation of Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Another $10 million was raised in Series C funding in 2013. Till now, the company has received around $70 million in funding.

Within five years of its launch, Stack Overflow answered 5 million questions related to coding, thus making the coding community even stronger. Around forty-four million visitors checked out the website every month by 2013.

Today, around 250 employees are working for Stack Overflow, with the majority working in head offices of New York, London and Munich. Around 14 million questions have been answered so far, and the site also partners with many big companies to help them recruit developers.

Majority of the queries that are posted on the website are regarding PHP, JavaScript, Java, Python, HTML, C#, jQuery and Android.

grammarly

Grammarly : The Founding Story of the Best Tool for Enhancing One’s Creative Writing

Leave a Comment / Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

With the increasing power of the internet to dominate mankind, digital contents have become quintessential parts of the online marketplace. We all know ‘a pen is mightier than the sword’ and in this era of modernization the true power of writing is revealed, given that it reaches out to more and more people worldwide.

So, when a person can influence the entire world through his writings, why not make it even better? A piece of writing can make significant changes if written in appropriate style and clarity with no grammatical errors. Moreover, the digital contents are supposed to be plagiarism free, a key rule that every writer must abide by. So, how about software that can provide all the essential tools for delivering a proper piece of writing?

With businesses flourishing through digital content writings, it is a pre-requisite for every blogger out there to have Grammarly. Grammarly is a software launched on 1st July 2009 to detect any kind of writing errors including grammatical flaws, spellings, punctuation, style mistakes, etc. Moreover, it not only detects the mistakes but corrects it by giving specific suggestions. The software is also a plagiarism checker. All you need is to drop the text, and then, it will do its job.

grammarly founders
Image Source: kamloopsmatters.com

The Birth of an Idea

The birth of the idea for Grammarly dates back to the time when Alex Shevchenko and Max Lytvyn went to International Christian University, Ukraine together. In 2000, when the internet just started getting popular, these two students noticed that almost everyone was downloading essays from the internet without anybody realizing it. Thus, the students were getting corrupted very easily, not harnessing the power of their own creativity.

Shevchenko started writing software to eradicate this tainted idea from the minds of students, and thus by 2004, he came up with a service called My Dropbox. He, along with Lytvyn and 15 other people, created a team and worked on this project. The prime utility of the software was to check plagiarism for essays. It was a charged service, and yet, 800 universities were using this product by 2007. My Dropbox was a huge success for the team because apart from this, there was only one company in the entire world doing business with the same technology. The very year, the product was sold to Blackboard, a renowned company for educational platforms.

Founding Grammarly

The conditions led by Blackboard while buying the company was that Lytvyn has to work for them for the next two years, and while working for the company, the other founder cannot work on a similar project. Lytvyn accepted the offer, but the very day the deal with Blackboard ended he fled to Toronto to work with Shevchenko. And, within a few days, they launched their new product, Grammarly.

Though at first, they decided to limit the use of Grammarly only for the educational institutions and students. But they did expand it and made it available to every the commoner as well. Today, anyone can buy the software and get access to all the tools and benefits of Grammarly.

To found Grammarly, Lytvyn and Shevchenko didn’t bring any investors in-house, rather they spent the money which was received from selling their first product.

Success of Grammarly

The best part of Grammarly is that it not only tracks the grammatical errors or punctuations but also points out an incorrectly formed sentence. It also suggests the user with some options to rectify their mistakes along with proper explanations where it went wrong.

One of the main problems with this kind of product is system imperfection. It’s the same reason for which Microsoft also oversees typos and some major errors. But, turning this into a strength Grammarly has set upvoting system for the changes it makes. So, the user defines which one is correct or more appropriate and not the system. Moreover, Grammarly uses machine learning and deep learning algorithms for its product to make it more efficient.

In 2012, the company made around $10 million, and by 2017, Grammarly had around 6.9 million active users. In 2017, the company also raised $110 million from General Catalyst, IVP and Spark Capital. This was the first-ever venture round of Grammarly, and the investors came around with utter interest. Everyone witnessed the profits of Grammarly, rising in geometric progression over the years.

Today, apart from browser extension Grammarly is also available as an application for both Android and iOS.

Superside

Fredrik Thomassen : The Founder of Superside, A Startup to Make Businesses Better and Time-efficient

Leave a Comment / Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

A proper presentation can work wonders when it comes to impressing your clients. One might have some strong strategies for the growth of the company, but presenting it accurately is also a very big deal. But, the employers of a company often spend way too much time making PowerPoint presentations, proofreading, etc. Now, hiring a freelancer for the creative furnishing of these tasks is always the priority, but what if you set a deadline?

Websites like Fiverr do offer services that are needed for business projects, but you cannot get things done every time, especially in the eleventh hour. So, Fredrik Thomassen created Superside, an online creative service which ensures both quality and delivery by time. For example, if one needs a project to be done within 24 hours, Superside makes a team according to the demand of projects and availability of the freelancers, so that the project is delivered on time, ensuring the excellence as well.

Fredrik Thomassen decided to create such a company, as he went through the troubles of spending hours on a project, designing, data entry, and much more when he worked at McKinsey & Company.

Education

Fredrik Thomassen
Image Source: forbes.com

Fredrik attended ESSEC Business School in 2009 and went to Norwegian School of Economics straight after that. He graduated from there in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in economics followed by graduating from London School of Economics and Political Science in 2011.

Career

After graduating with a master’s in Econometrics and Mathematical Engineering, Thomassen joined as a Journalist in Agderposten. He worked there for more than five years, and then, joined McKinsey & Company.

While working as an Associate in this company, Thomassen faced many problems related to the desk works, especially in creating project presentations in PowerPoint. According to him, it was time-consuming, and the “not-so-skilled-people” were trying their hands to give their projects a professional touch. So, instead of facing these troubles, why not hire a freelancer?

This was when the idea of creating Superside (formerly known as Konsus) started peeking in his mind. But, he already knew that platforms like Fiverr and Freelancer.com are already entertaining quite a robust number of both customers and freelancers. So, he needed to think outside the box to get his start-up running and successfully flourishing.

Founding Superside

According to the reports of Harvard Business Review, an average skilled office employee spends 40% of his time doing jobs like data entry and PowerPoint presentations. He can certainly put the efforts on core tasks, that is, for what he was actually hired, once these extra jobs get done by someone else.

Thus, to eliminate this problem for once and all, Fredrik Thomassen founded Superside in August 2015 in Oslo, Norway. Thomassen built Superside especially for the big firms whose workload gets doubled, as they needed to focus both on business and the creative presentations for clients. So, the company was built to ease the pressure for big corporations and also ensuring job security for the freelancers as well. After the company joined Y Combinator, the growth is increasing at 10% on a weekly basis.

Success of Superside

Superside has a very tough screening process to ensure the quality of work that is provided to the clients. Only a very handful of people, probably the experts at every field, are hired by Superside. So, there’s no need to worry about your project, once it has been assigned to a Superside team. Moreover, for the freelancers, it’s always a threat that they might be out of a job any time. Superside ensures a fixed number of jobs for certain freelancers who reach a given target, thus ensuring a constant source of income. Moreover, each freelancer gets paid around $15 to $20 for a single hour which is quite appealing for a freelancer.

By 2016, after joining Y Combinator, it really helped the company to reach its peak. Within a year of its launch, the company had clients from more than 500 companies coming from 60 different countries. There were over 200 vetted freelancers then, and most of them were from Eastern Europe. So, the biggest market for Superside was the U.S.

By early 2018, the company already raised $1.7 million from investors like Acequia Capital, Liquid2 Ventures and a few others.

Apart from Superside

Fredrik Thomassen has also served as the CEO and was the co-founder of Zalora Group, Zalora Indonesia. It is an e-commerce platform for fashion which is now a part of Global Fashion Group.

Kailasavadivoo Sivan

Kailasavadivoo Sivan : The Rocket Man of India

Leave a Comment / India, Inspiration, Tech Story / By

Amongst the innumerable number of successful entrepreneurs, and tech-savvies, there always emerges out a legendary person who creates history and breaks the records. Flourishing in the business world is not a big deal today given that we have developed so much in terms of technology, but how many of us dare launch spaceships and fly into the space to explore the galaxy?

All these sounds very astronomical, especially, for a developing country like India, isn’t it? Particularly, if the person behind the successful Indian space missions is a farmer’s son. A far-fetched dream, it seems like but turned into reality by none other than Kailasavadivoo Sivan, the chairperson of ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization). Today, because of this Indian scientist, India’s second mission to the moon was successfully launched. Outweighing other developed and superior nations of our world, Sivan is really creating a new era for India.

A Farmer’s Son

Born on 14th April 1957 in a small village called Tarakkanvillai in Kanyakumari district, Sivan belonged to a very poor household. Sivan’s father, Kailasavadivoonadar Sivan, was a farmer, so his family couldn’t afford a very good school for him.

Kailasavadivoo Sivan
Image Source: thehindu.com

He went to a government-sponsored school in his village, and later, went to ST Hindu College in Nagercoil for his graduation. Unable to afford any tuition or proper coaching, Sivan was a self-supported student and turns out, was the first graduate in his family.

After completing his undergraduate degree, he pursued aeronautical engineering from Madras Institute of Technology. After graduated from there in 1980, he received a master’s degree from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 1982. Sivan took one more step forward towards his bright future, and also our nation’s when he completed his PhD from IIT Bombay in 2006. Sivan also received an honorary doctorate in science from Sathyabama University.

Journey to ISRO

Sivan joined ISRO long before completing his PhD, that is, in 1982. Sivan was a part of ISRO’s many projects, but one of the significant projects he participated in was the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) project. This was his first project after joining ISRO. Another big project where he made a significant contribution is the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV), and, later, he became a project director of GSLV. He majorly worked with designing and development of space vehicles for ISRO’s missions.

Sivan is famous all over the nation as ‘Rocket Man’ because he is probably the best-known scientist in India and has a significant contribution in building cryogenic rocket engines. Sivan became the director of Vikram Sarabhai Space Center on 1st June 2015, and before that, he served as the director of ISRO’s Liquid Propulsion Systems Center.

On January 2018, Sivan was declared as the ninth chairperson of ISRO after A.S Kiran Kumar.

Sivan’s Contribution to India’s Space Missions

Sivan’s unparallel contribution and untamed determination for the space missions of India led him to launch 104 satellites in one single mission. Had it not been for this devoted scientist, India would be still struggling to launch a successful moon mission for the second time.

Kailasavadivoo Sivan has been working for ISRO for more than three decades now. But, before Sivan became the chairperson of ISRO, he served at many powerful positions like Secretary of Department of Space, Chair of the Space Commission, Deputy Director (ISRO), Project Director (ISRO), and many more.

Today, due to Sivan’s sheer dedication, India is known as the first country in the entire world that is preferred for a soft landing on the moon. ISRO’s biggest mission, after Sivan became the chairperson, Chandrayaan 2 was launched on 22nd July 2019. But this braveheart shattered into pieces when the Lander lost all communications, but still, the mission was 95% successful, only because of this man.

Awards and Achievements

Since 1999, Sivan has been the recipient of many prestigious awards starting with Shri Hari Om Ashram Prerit Dr Vikram Sarabhai Research Award. In 2007, he received ISRO merit award, followed by Dr Biren Roy Space Science Award in 2011. In 2019, he was awarded A.P.J Abdul Kalam Award from Tamil Nadu’s government.

Sivan is also a Fellow of Indian National Academy of Engineering and the Aeronautical Society of India.

Personal Life

Kailasavadivoo Sivan is married to Malathi Sivan, and he is the parent to two kids, Siddharth and Sushant Kailasavadivoo Sivan. The family lives in the Bengaluru City of India.

naukri.com

Sanjeev Bikhchandani : The Man who Gave Hope to New India with Naukri.com

Leave a Comment / Founder, India, Inspiration, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

India is pioneering in the business world not recently but from a long good time. Maybe the number of successful Indian start-ups has increased in recent times, but our country has many influential businessmen who have been changing the economic status of our country from time bygone. Employment is one of the key ways to improve the economic status of a nation and delving deeper into this mission, Sanjeev Bikhchandani founded Naukri.com in 1997. Naukri.com is an online job portal under Info Edge, which was also founded by this very person.

Bikhchandani came up from an economically “not-so-stable” family. So, because the circumstances of his upbringing, he had the vision to build something big for himself from a very young age.

No Business Background

sanjeev bikhchandani naukri.com
Image Source: forbesindia.com

It is a common perception in India that the People from Sindhi descent always belong to a lavish business background, but there are exceptions in every situation. Bikhchandani is also an exception when it comes to his family background, as he was raised by a government-employed father and a housewife mother. His father was a government doctor, but life was definitely not a bed of roses for Bikhchandani, as he grew up in a government colony with a middle-class lifestyle.

Born in 1963, he completed his schooling from St. Columbus’s School, Delhi in 1981 and pursued a bachelor’s degree in economics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. After he graduated in 1984, he went to IIM Ahmedabad to complete his MBA.

Bikhchandani was impressed and fascinated by the entrepreneurial side of the professional world, and hence, he decided to create his own business after getting a taste of corporate life.

Stepping into the Work-life

Before joining IIM Ahmedabad, he worked as an Account Executive at Lintas for three years. After post graduating with a Diploma in Management and Entrepreneurship, he started working for HMM Hindustan MilkFood Manufacturers), now known as GlaxoSmithKline. He worked there as a Product Executive and controlled the marketing of Horlicks.

While working at the company, Bikhchandani was paid Rs. 8000 per month, which was not at all an unsatisfactory amount in that period of time. But, he eventually got sick of the monotonous life given that he had bigger things on his mind from a very young age. Bikhchandani quit the job in 1990, and the next phase was definitely very difficult for him.

Starting the Entrepreneurial Journey

Since Bikhchandani was prepared for a long time to start his own business, he knew life was going to be rough. He is grateful to his wife for being supportive of him as after Bikhchandani left his job, the family completed relied on his wife. His wife, Surbhi, worked at Nestle, and this young couple was totally fine with the idea of being dependable, as they knew what it is going to take to become successful, and kudos they did it!

Bikhchandani founded two companies, Landmark and Info Edge in 1990, with another business partner. The former company dealt with the database of trademarks, while the latter dealt with salary surveys. After three years, with both the companies and a partner, they decided to split with each one getting to keep one company. So, in late 1993, Bikhchandani settled with Info Edge and started everything from scratch.

Founding Naukri.com

Since Bikhchandani needed to make a fresh start, he kept his expenses low for the next four years. The idea of Naukri.com burst in his mind after he attended an event of IT Asia Exhibition in Delhi. He planned to create a website and start executing what he had in his mind.

Since the internet just arrived in India then, all servers were US-based. It was not possible for him to create a website, and thus, he called up his brother, who was a professor in the US and hired a server. Bikhchandani also took capital from his brother to start the business, and that is how he founded Naukri.com. He provided his father with a 5% stake in the company.

The company was all about resumes, jobs and recruitment consultants, that lured both the unemployed and the employed in search of better jobs. Within a couple of years, Naukri.com made around INR 22 lakhs and gave 15% stake of the company to ICICI Ventures for INR 7.3 crores.The company was all about resumes, jobs and recruitment consultants, that lured both the unemployed and the employed in search of better jobs. Within a couple of years, Naukri.com made around INR 22 lakhs and gave 15% stake of the company to ICICI Ventures for INR 7.3 crores.

This was the turning point of the business, after which, the growth curve was never disappointing. In 2004, the company made Rs INR crores, and in 2006, it became country’s first Dot Com Company to make its place in the list of Bombay & National Stock Exchanges.

Apart from Naukri.com

The parent company of Naukri.com is Info Edge which also established Shiksha.com, Jeevansathi.com, 99acres.com, Quadrangle and many other websites as well. Bikhchandani’s Info Edge also holds stakes in Zomato, Meritnation, Policybazaar, Happilyunmarried, etc. Bikhchandani is also the recipient of the award Ernst and Young- Entrepreneur of the Year 2008.