Your Tech Story

Yashica Vashishtha

Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.

Todd McKinnon : The Founder of Okta, a Company that Specializes in Enterprise Security

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Taking risks, is what most of the people are afraid of, especially, when they are running in their late 30s. At the time when people are earning enough money by working under someone else, it was Todd McKinnon, who wanted to pursue his childhood dream of becoming an entrepreneur. Even he was heading a team of more than a hundred employees in his last company and was earning an adequate amount of money to survive in a place like Silicon Valley, he decided to leave the job and just work for his dream. Having years of experience and a great vision, today, he is the founder of a billion dollars company, Okta.

Early Life

McKinnon was born in Southern California and grew up in its bay area. His father was a VP of HR, who worked for various different companies, and his mother was a homemaker.

He completed his under graduation from Brigham Young University, and later, went to the California Polytechnic State University, where he completed a degree in computer science.

Career

McKinnon finds himself lucky, to be born and brought up in the capital of technology. Being a native of Silicon Valley, since his childhood, he was convinced that he would work for an IT company in Silicon Valley.

ToddMcKinnon
Image Source: sbnonline.com

During his graduation, he got recruited by PeopleSoft, in the campus placement, in 1995. At the time, he was building a database application for the recreation department on campus. Co-incidently, the recruiter from PeopleSoft was also working on a similar project and liked Mckinnon’s work and recruited him.

McKinnon was hired as an engineer in the company and received multiple promotions in the span of eight years.

After working for eight long years in PeopleSoft, in 2003, McKinnon left the job and started working at SalesForce. In 2009, he left SalesForce to start his own company, i.e. Okta.

Founding Okta

Besides the dream of working in a Silicon Valley company, McKinnon was also fascinated with the idea of starting his own business. The reason he gives for not starting a business earlier is that he always had good jobs in hand, and those were helpful in gaining good business experience.

In SalesForce, he was managing over hundreds of employees, and he had got a good reputation. He decided that it was the right time to start a business, as he was financially and mentally capable of doing that at the time.

At the same time, people got introduced to the cloud, and not many were sure how long it is going to last. But McKinnon saw an opportunity in the same. He started off developing with a macro product, and when he went out to talk and sell the product to people, he realized there was much more to the cloud, and finally, started working on identity management on the cloud.

McKinnon pitched the idea in over 75 meetings in a span of four to five months. He also asked a former SalesForce colleague, Freddy Kerrest, to join him for the startup, and finally, after seven months of hard, work was able to raise a million dollars seed funding to start the business and founded Okta in 2009. Okta provides cloud software that helps companies manage their employees’ passwords, by providing a “single sign-on” experience.

The company earned its first paying client, in December 2009. In 2015, the company was valued at $1.2 billion and raised $75 million in venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital.

In 2017, the company went public, and in its IPO it raised $187 million. Okta has its offices in Bellevue, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Sydney, San Jose and Washington D.C., and its headquarter is located in San Fransisco. In January 2019, the company reported a number of 100 million registered users on Okta and the company valued at over $7 billion.

Personal Life

McKinnon is married and has two children. He lives with his family in San Francisco. He is a fitness freak, and in 2017, he was named as the 14th fittest man on earth in the age group of 45-to-49, in the annual CrossFit Games, held in Madison, Wisconsin. Currently, he serves as the CEO of Okta.

Microsoft Expanding Xbox Live To Switch, iOS & Android

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According to a GDC listing, Microsoft is planning to expand the Xbox live support to cross platforms. The home video game console Xbox plays ones of the most popular games in the world, and Microsoft has decided to develop a Software Development Kit (SDK) that can be integrated to different platforms, like iOS, Android, Nintendo Switch beside Xbox and PC.

Xbox
Image Source: dailystar.co

The company is planning to announce the news and the details about the new SDK in the upcoming 2019 Game Developers Conference (GDC). The Game Developers Conference is the yearly convention for the game developers where they showcase their ideas and new gaming products. This year the event will be held in San Francisco in March.

“Xbox Live is expanding from 400 million gaming devices and a reach to over 68 million active players to over 2 billion devices with the release of our new cross-platform XDK,” says the GDC listing. At the event, Microsoft will be hosting a panel titled, “Xbox Live: Growing & Engaging Your Gaming Community Across Platforms.”

Microsoft has already made a few of its Xbox Live Achievements available on a few of the iOS and Android devices. But the new SDK will integrate Xbox Live achievements, friends, clubs and game history into non-Xbox and Windows PC platforms for the first time. The company will also be employing its PlayFab suite containing its backend tools as a part of this package.

“Xbox Live players are highly engaged and active on Xbox and PC, but now they can take their gaming achievement history, their friends list, their clubs, and more with them to almost every screen,” said Microsoft on its GDC conference schedule page.

This is an effort from Microsoft to break down longstanding barriers in the gaming industry, by building a cross-platform gaming service, that will enable the developers to get their users onto different platforms, such that they can be active on the Xbox games, without actually using the Xbox console.

Daniel Borel : Swiss Entrepreneur & Co-founder of Logitech

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In any business, you must keep an eye on the upcoming opportunities and grab it as soon as it shows up. In business, the success comes to those, who keep the courage of doing the same thing in a different way. One of such business personality from Switzerland is Daniel Borel, who always knew that he wanted to do something big and that big thing resulted in a multimillion tech company, i.e. Logitech.

It was Borel’s capability to see in the future such that he was sure that starting a business of mice manufacturing, that was just arrived in the market and could be a risky one, surely will lead him to success. Today, Logitech is not only world’s largest mice manufacturing company, but it also supplies other products including remote controls, security cameras, keyboards, webcams, speakers, B2B video conferencing equipment, computer accessories, gaming products, etc. at a global level.

Early Life

Born, on 14 February 1950, Daniel Borel is a native of Switzerland. In 1973, he completed his graduation in Physics from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. Even being a physicist, he wanted to do something else, so he switched to computing and in 1977, did his masters in computer science from Stanford University.

Early Career & Founding Logitech

After his post-graduation, Borel moved to the Silicon Valley. It was a huge culture shock for him, as people were working on innovative ideas and the technology was changing at a rapid rate. This inspired him a lot, and he along with, Pierluigi Zappacosta, one of his friends from Stanford University, started working on word processing.

Borel Logitech
Image Source: itreseller.ch

The two were doing quite well in both software and hardware, and at the same time, they started Logitech. They started the company in a farm of Borel’s father-in-law in Apples, Vaud, Switzerland in 1981, along with a former Olivetti engineer, Giacomo Marini.

At the time, around the early 80s, the computer mouse had just arrived in the market along with the personal computer. Borel found an opportunity in the same, and as he was already in contact with big companies like Apple and HP, he decided to manufacture mice for those companies.

Borel, as already had made plans on manufacturing computer mice and its software interface, visited Taiwan and China, to look for companies that could help him manufacture them. At the time, Microsoft also had started using the mouse for its word processor.

Logitech was successful in developing mice for the personal computers, along with a software interface, and approached Microsoft in order to sell those mice to it. Microsoft also showed an interest, but the deal never happened. At last, Borel had to adopt another marketing technique. He published coupons along with an ad in the Byte magazine, where he offered a price as low as $100 for the Logitech mouse when others were selling the same at $170.

The marketing technique went quite well, and Logitech was showered with orders. Since then, the company is growing at a rapid rate and has developed many other products under its name.

In the year 2008, Logitech reported the manufacturing of over one billion mice since 1985. In the same year, the company acquired Ultimate Ears, a supplier of Bluetooth speakers and custom in-ear monitors for professional musicians. In 2011, it also acquired the mobile visual communications provider, Mirial and in 2017, it acquired Astro Gaming.

As of 2018, the reported revenue for the year was US$2.57 billion, and a number of its worldwide employees have grown to 7000 people since its inception. The the two of its headquarters are established in Lausanne, Switzerland and Newark, California, USA.

Personal Life

Borel worked as the chairman of the company between 1982 to 2008, and as the CEO of the company from 1982 to 1988 and 1992 to 1998. Currently, he serves on the board of directors of Logitech and Nestlé. He has also founded Defitech, a foundation to make computer technology for handicapped people, where he also serves on the board of the company.

YouTube Seeking for Creator’s Suggestions for the Perfect Fix Against the ‘Dislike Mob’

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YouTube has given some simple options for its users, including liking and sharing the videos, and if they do not like one, they can just hit the dislike button. But from quite some time now, some of the users are misusing the dislike button, and YouTube is well informed of it.

youtube
Image Source: tubefilter.com

YouTube has been noticing that people are weaponizing the dislike button, and now have decided to act on the issue with the help of its development team. Currently, it is seeking ideas through its creator’s feedbacks and advice from its development team, on how to stop people from misusing the dislike button. Tom Leung, the director of project management at YouTube, in the recent issue of Creator Insider, talked on how the ‘dislike mob’ is harming the content on YouTube.

The ‘dislike mob’ is a group of people, who dislike the videos of a certain YouTube channel or creator, in order to attack their reputation, or just because they are upset with the creator, even without watching the videos.

YouTube has provided its users with the facility to make their videos private on their channel, or they can make the other matrices, including total likes and dislikes on the videos, invisible. Leung has suggested YouTube must make the hiding the likes and dislikes options as default, and the users who want to display the ratings can make the changes from the settings.

Leung has also advised adding a comment box, where the person who wants to dislike a video, has to give a reason behind disliking the video. The user also can opt for the ‘don’t want ratings’ option.

Since the ratings of the videos help in the channel growth, we cannot expect that all YouTubers will support the same. But many of the creators, after they got to know about hiding the ratings, have adviced that the dislike button should appear only after the video has played for at least half of its time.

Currently, YouTube is looking for more and better options to avoid the activities from the ‘dislike mob’, and has not decided on what it will be doing in the same matter, but soon we can see YouTube getting rid of this issue.

William Tanuwijaya : The Founder of First Indonesian Unicorn Startup Tokopedia

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There are many rags to rich stories that have been inspiring us. The story of this Indonesian entrepreneur, William Tanuwijaya, is kind of similar to those stories, expect it was not entirely based on good luck, but included lots and lots of hard work. Being born in a middle-class family, and having faced many struggles in life, Tanujania wanted to achieve something better in life, and he knew that without hard work, achieving his goals was impossible.

Early Life

Tanuwijaya was born on 11 November 1981, in Pematang Siantar, North Sumatra. He belonged to a middle-class family. He completed his school education from a local public school.

For his further education, he applied in the Universitas Bina Nusantara (Binus) Jakarta and later, got accepted for the degree course in Informatics. As he belonged to a family with an average income, he decided to work as a part-timer to support his education. He even did a 9 pm to 9 am job, at Warnet, to earn extra money. He graduated from the University as a software engineer in 2003.

Career

William
Image Source: tokyo.slush.org

Being a software engineer, like any other IT graduate, Tanuwijaya also wanted to work with big companies like Google. But since there was no Google branch in Jakarta, he started off his career as a software developer with a medium scale software company in Jakarta. He worked in the same profile with companies like TelkomSigma and Sqiva Sistem.

Gained much experience as a software developer, he shifted his interest in video games development and started working with Bolehnet. Later, in 2006, he joined Indocom Mediatama as the IT and Business Development Manager.

Founding Tokopedia

With an experience of over four years, Tanuwijaya gained enough confidence to start a new business for himself. In 2007, he started working on Tokopedia and called up his friend Leontinus Alpha Edison to work on the same, who later, became the co-founder of the company. The concept behind the startup was to create a platform, where Indonesian buyers and sellers could connect for free.

The basic plan to build this eCommerce platform was ready, but there were no investors who could help the startup to be launched immediately. At the time there were no IT-specific investors in Jakarta. So Tanuwijaya started pitching his plan in front of local investors. At the same time, his father was diagnosed with Cancer, so his plan of launching the platform in 2007, got delayed coming next two years, as the sole responsibility of his family had come on to his shoulders.

The first person Tanuwijaya approached for the funding was his boss from his previous company. His boss liked the idea and helped him to approach more people. Since Tanuwijaya did not belong to a business family, many of the people doubted his ability to handle such a big idea.

It took him two years to raise the required funding to start his business, and finally, on February 6, 2009, he launched Tokopedia. Tokopedia received its initial seed funding worth IDR 2.5 billion from PT Indonusa Dwitama. In the following three years, the company was able to get funding from global venture capitals like East Ventures, CyberAgent Ventures, NetPrice, and SoftBank Ventures Korea, etc.

In 2014, Tokopedia became the first technology company to receive a US$100 million investment from Sequoia Capital and SoftBank, in Southeast Asia.

Tokopedia is Indonesia’s first company that has grown too fast. In 2015, the company reported having more than 4.9 million active product listings, and in 2018, it recorded over 80 million monthly active users and over 4 million merchants registered on the platform.

The company also received a USD $1.1 Billion in funding from Alibaba Group in 2017. In the same year, the company became a Unicorn startup having a valuation above 1 billion US dollars.

Personal Life

William got married to Felicia H.W. on November 28, 2015. Currently, Tanuwijaya is heading the company as the CEO. Establishing Tokopedia as the biggest marketplace in Indonesia, he has become one of the richest people of Indonesia, having an estimated worth of 130 million US Dollars.

Nir Zuk : The Founder of Palo Alto Networks, the American Cybersecurity Company

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Another college drop-out and one of the most successful tech entrepreneur, Nir Zuk, always had a dream of starting his own business. It can be judged through his career graph that he likes to handle things on his own rather than following the order of some superior authority. This genius kid from Israel is a serial entrepreneur, who is really allergic to bureaucracy. The founder of Palo Alto Networks is happy in running a small business than working for a multimillion company.

Early Life

Zuk was born and brought up in Rehovot, Israel. He was in high school when he convinced his parents to buy him a Dragon 64 computer, as a few years ago, one of his friends has also got one. He started learning computer programming by reading books and was capable enough to write small codes, only in a year.

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Image Source: crn.com

When he was sixteen, he started writing commercial programs and earned enough money. At the same time, the first computer viruses very emerging, which caught Zuk’s attention immediately, and he became of the first persons who wrote one of the earliest virus programs.

According to the rule of the Israeli government, Zuk had to go through military training. But as he was a whiz kid, he got a job in the military’s IT department. Alongside his job in the military, he started going to college, where he took mathematics as his majors.

Career

Zuk spent a whole five years in the military, and before he could complete his degree, on the basis of his experience, he was recruited by Checkpoint, in 1994. Here he became the part of the team that was handling a major project and along with them, invented a technology called stateful inspection, which is the basis of network security technology today.

In 1997, Zuk moved to the US, to work at the U.S. head office of CheckPoint in Redwood City, California. After moving to the US, he worked with the same company for two more years and left the job.

Soon after leaving Checkpoint, Zuk went on to found his own startup company OneSecure, in 1999 and started working on the intrusion prevention system that sits behind the firewall, to make sure that the traffic passing the firewall is attack free. The system is the first of its kind.

In 2002, OneSecure was acquired by NetScreen. Even after the acquisition, Zuk retained his position of CTO in the company. Being in the company, Zuk had adviced NetScreen, to build their own firewall, such that it would be more profitable for them, but NetScreen was not ready to take the risk. Hence, after a year, Zuk left the company, to found his own company, and to build its own firewall.

Founding Palo Alto Networks

In 2005, Zuk, after teaming up with 25 of his colleagues from NetScreen, founded Palo Alto Networks. He had raised a total amount of $9.4 million for the startup. Within two years of the inception of the company, in 2007, it released its first firewall product, which was the world’s first “next-generation firewall”.

By 2011, Palo Alto Networks had become one of the most prominent cybersecurity firms and was listed as a leader on its enterprise firewall Magic Quadrant by Gartner. The company went public on the NYSE on July 20, 2012, having raised $260 million with its initial public offering.

In 2014, along with Fortinet, Mcafee, and Symantec, Palo Alto Networks founded the Cyber Threat Alliance, a not-for-profit organization for improving cybersecurity.

The revenue earned by the company in 2018, was estimated to be over US$2.27 billion. Currently, it is providing its service in the field of network security, cybersecurity, cloud computing. The company has got its headquarters situated in Santa Clara, California, U.S.