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Liu Chuanzhi Founder of Lenovo

Founder, start-up, Tech Story / By

Hardships are the rigorous tests in a determined person’s life. Hardships come in numerous faces and it is this time when a human being’s ability and patience to deal and overcome the difficult time is tested. Those who come strong out of this deadly storm are the one’s who create history and make a difference in the world. Liu Chuanzhi is one such person who despite of humongous political constraints, managed to build a company which now ranks number two in the production of computers in the whole world.

Born on April 29, 1944 in Shanghai, China, Liu Chuanzhi grew up during the worst of times. Liu’s father was an executive with the Bank of China in Shanghai. However, his connections with the Chinese Communists would create a problem in Liu’s future. Liu’s childhood was encompassed with the years of unstable politics and tension in the government. In 1961, he admitted himself in Xian Military Communication Engineering College. Due to his father’s political connections Liu was not allowed to study sensitive subjects and he completed his graduation in 1966 specializing in Radar Systems. This course, however, exposed him for the first time to the computing world.

Just two years after graduation, Liu’s past yet again haunted him and sent him down for labor work. This time it was due to his anti-revolutionary ideas which led the officials to send him to work on a state-owned rice farm as a laborer and learn by living among the peasants from 1968 to 1970. By this time, the Chinese Academy of Sciences was reopened which was closed due to Chinese Cultural Revolution. Liu returned to his job at Beijing and went on to work as an engineer and an administrator. Liu provided a lion’s share in developing the 757 mainframe computer. He resigned from his job in 1984 to join Chinese Academy of Sciences – the place where the computer producing giant Lenovo would be born.

Early Days

After joining Chinese Academy of Sciences Liu stumbled upon an idea to start a computer company. But, there were multiple barriers standing in front of him and his dream. First, the Chinese government did not encourage start-ups and ran a strictly planned economy. So the funding from government was out of question. Second, for a scientist to jump into business was considered below one’s dignity and, therefore, the company Liu would start won’t have a single market expert who knows how the business should work. Despite of this barriers, Liu received a 200,000 yuan ($24,000 USD) loan from his superior at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Liu’s computer company, initially named Legend, was compared to the early days of Apple. The company’s manufacturing unit began in a small 20 square yards room in Beijing. The company worked on the research of magnetic storage technology in its initial stage. In 1985, Legend did something which no other computer company had ever done, they built a Chinese character set for computers. Since, the Chinese language consisted of huge number of characters it was almost an impossible task to bring all those characters in digital form. But, the development of a character set put Legend multiple steps ahead of any other company. Due to the lack of business knowledge the company often faced opinion problems among the members. But, Liu’s leadership and his study of other big companies like HP and IBM helped him to sketch an influential business and marketing strategy.

Legend started selling computers six years after its foundation, i.e., in 1990. And by 1996, the company climbed on top of the computer manufacturing company’s list surpassing IBM. Liu believed in young people in their energy and talent which could pave a way to keep the company on cutting edge of innovation and technology. Most of the company’s higher staff included young people during the 90s. By developing Pentium II processor Legend once again proved that they are and will always be on the top of the market.

The company saw its massive success in 2004 when they were declared as the largest PC manufacturing company. In 2006, Legend was renamed as Lenovo Group to enter into the UK and Europian market where the name ‘Legend’ was already trademarked. Legend also became the first company to join the sponsorship for Olympic Games held in Turin, Italy in 2006.

In 1995, the Chinese government honored Liu as the Model of National Work Force and Man of Reform in China. In 2005, Liu has also been listed in Time’s one of the 25 most influential global executives.

Daniel Ek – Founder of Spotify

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Life is all about having a sense of purpose. No matter if you are a broke person with no money or a financially independent person doing well in life. Without a sense of purpose life begins to fill empty. Daniel Ek, a lover of music founded world’s top music streaming app to fulfill his own sense of purpose. After achieving great success at very early age and becoming financially independent, Daniel launched Spotify, a music streaming app which became impossibly famous in the whole world.

Born on 21 February, 1983, Daniel Ek grew up in Ragsved, Stockholm, Sweden. His father got out of their lives early on and most of his life, Daniel and his younger brother Felix, were raised by their mother Elisabet and stepfather Hasse. Daniel described their economical condition as “An average Swede. We didn’t have much money”.

Daniel and his Love for Music

Daniel’s love for music grew right from his childhood and the seed was sown from his family itself. His grandmother was an opera singer and grandfather was a Jazz pianist. He learnt to play the Swedish nursery rhyme “Lilla snigel” at the tender age of four. Daniel’s love and involvement for music heightened when in secondary school i.e. IT Gymnasiet in Sundbyberg, he was allowed to combine two of his favorite subjects – music and technology. Taking robust advantage of this opportunity he installed internet in the Oasen youth club and started his first business – building websites.

Daniel initially charged upto $100 for his first client and made his fees double for the next client. The website development business grew so much that he eventually started charging as high as $5000. Later on, due to increasing demand for his skills, Daniel hired the students from his own class. Soon, his team size grew up to 25 and his monthly earnings to a whopping $50000. On the other hand, Daniel’s devotion for music became the sole reason for him to attend the school. His music teacher Tony Kinberg said,

“Music really was Daniel’s thing. If music wasn’t on his timetable, he would come to the music room anyway, or if he had a free period. He’s really good singer and guitar player”.

Music and programming was what made his life worthwhile. Daniel Ek completed his graduation from Sundbyberg in 2002 in IT scoring top grades in eleven subjects. He later went on to join KTH Royal Institute of Technology. After realizing that the first year in his higher studies was all about theoretical mathematics and nothing about programming Daniel left the place by the eighth week.

Early Career

Leaving the KTH institute came as a turning point in Daniel’s life. Money had always been a luxury for Daniel. And a life he was longing for would soon provide him with this luxury. Daniel took a job at TradeDoubler – Europe’s biggest online advertisement company. His performance at the company brought him success and riches at the age of just 23, making him financially independent. The success poured in and soon brought another twist in Daniel’s life.

At the age of 29, Daniel started feeling a sense of emptiness into his life. Even after earning fat paychecks, owning a dream car, a three room apartment in central Stockholm Daniel felt lost in his life. This lead him into depression and soon he sold his apartment and car and moved to a secluded cabin long way from town. The isolation, music, and meditation which Daniel acquired while spending time in his wooden cabin led to the origin of his biggest business idea and he contacted Martin Lorentzon – an IT nerd. The idea was to create an app which allows the user to listen any music in the world at the cost of short advertisements in between.

Before, turning into a billionaire from Spotify, Daniel Ek has worked with several billionaire’s. He initially founded Advertigo which was acquired by TradeDoubler. He also served as a senior at Tradera – a Nordic auction company which was sold to eBay in 2006. Ek also served as a CEO of uTorrent along with its founder Ludvig Strigeus. uTorrent was also acquired by BitTorrent in December 7, 2006, which also ended Ek’s term as a CEO.

The idea of Spotify, originated in the wooden cabin, was in the development mode in 2006. Daniel used his old school trick to hire the young technology graduates from KTH to work on Spotify. The team would work in a small office in Riddargatann in Ostermalm, Stockholm. The company launched it’s official music streaming service ‘Spotify’ in October, 2008.

The service received huge positive response from all over Sweden and company targeted one country at a time. This pace helped them to focus on one particular region completely to provide better quality and huge playlist. Nearly 80% of Spotify’s works around the world to produce the best results for their users. Today, Spotify has more than 140 million users in more than 58 countries and has raised more than $2.5 billion from funding.

Personal Life

Daniel Ek is married to Sofia Levander, a TV actress and three years senior to Ek, in 2016. His net worth is calculated to be around SEK 4.5 billion. Daniel is also actively involved in charity and has donated 1 million Swedish Kronor for Charity Water – an organization dedicated to provide safe and clean water to 800 million people living without it. Daniel Ek lives with his wife and two children.

Richard Barton- Founder of Expedia

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A true businessman is someone who observes a problem that exists in the society, thinks for a possible solution and comes up with something to resolve that problem. Thus, making a difference in the society by providing the services which makes our life easy. Richard Barton is founder of multiple ventures all focused to make people’s life easy. Barton uses a slogan “power to the people”, the staunch philosophy behind his each start-up. Barton has created a space for the people where they can access information, data, and even share their views, thus making internet a place for people.

Image Credit: Twitter

Born on 2nd June, 1967 in New Canaan, Connecticut, United States, Richard Barton is a son of a teacher and mechanical engineer. His father, Jim Barton, once gifted a Commodore 64 to Richard when they lived in New Canaan. Barton has a strong family background with his forefather John Barton and his grandfather Horace Barton known as celebrated in the 1999 South Dakota Tennis Hall of Fame.

Richard Barton completed his degree in engineering in 1989 from Stanford University. Before joining Microsoft in 1991, he took a job at Alliance Consulting Group. After joining Microsoft, one day in a conversation with Bill Gates, Barton pitched the idea of his first business venture – Expedia, and asked Gates to back him. The idea behind Expedia was it would directly allow the consumers to view the prices and book online airline travel tickets, thus, removing the travel agents from the picture. He founded Expedia in 1994 and the idea took off a great leap becoming a massive success for Barton. Later, he left Microsoft as Expedia was declared as a separate company and went public in 1999. He remained as CEO of Expedia till 2003 after which the company was acquired by IAC Corp.

The acquisition of Expedia and considerable amount of free time gave Barton much needed space to think and work on his next ventures. He wanted to create something which had the same motto as Expedia had – to make common people’s life better. In one of the interview he said, “If we’re doing things for regular folks that make their lives better and save them money and give them transparency, we’re on the side of the angels”. His next project was to start a website called Glassdoor.

The idea behind Glassdoor was to provide job seekers transparent information about the company, employees, their salary and even rate the working based on the information. This would encourage the job seekers to find the right job for themselves and for the company to raise their bar so that their ratings are not affected. The site has a whopping 22 million members and has successfully raised $93 million. According to Mr.Hohman, Chief Executive Glassdoor, the company is willing to go public.

Barton’s another idea was to create a space to share transparent information about the local real estate markets. And thus was launched Zillow – a website to find any information needed about real estate. The aim of this website was to provide all that information which was previously hidden from the customer. Barton, as of today, owns shares worth $400 million in Zillow.

Although a genius business mind Barton avoids the hubbub of Silicon Valley and doesn’t wish to get himself mixed up in the flashy corporate world. He prefers to stay away and work from a place where he finds peace and can relax whenever he wishes. Currently, he is a board member at Netflix, a venture partner with Benchmark, and also an active investor in start-ups. Barton has managed to keep a low profile and lives in Seattle.

Marc Benioff, Founder and CEO of Salesforce

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Talented people have the urge to make a difference in this world and create a name for themselves from quite an early age. One such genius who jumped into the entrepreneurship race from the age when he was just in high school is Marc Benioff. Influenced by his father, a Hindu guru, and a former secretary of state Marc Benioff is best known as  founder of Salesforce – a cloud computing company.

Marc Benioff, son of Joelle and Russell Benioff, was born on September 25th 1964 in San Francisco and was raised in the Bay Area. Marc got his first exposure into the business world through his father’s local departmental store in San Francisco. In one of the interviews he went on to credit his father and said, “I learned my work ethic from him”. He studied high school from the Burlingame High School and during his time there he developed and sold his first software called “How To Juggle” for the TRS-80 Model 1 Computer. This trade gained him $75 from the buyer computer magazine.Marc BenioffThe next major successful turn came into Marc’s life when he was 15. This was the year when he founded his single-man company named Liberty Software dedicated to develop games for the Atari 800 computer. Under this company’s banner Benioff developed games such as “King Arthur’s Heir”, “The Nightmare”, “Crypt of the Undead”, and “Escape from the Vulcan’s Isle”. His venture of developing games became his primary source of income and by the next year Benioff was making $1500 per month which he would later use to pay for his higher studies. He graduated from High School in the year 1982 and enrolled himself into University of Southern California to pursue Bachelor of Science in Business Administration degree.

The USC days were of great opportunities for Benioff. He landed an internship as a programmer with the tech-genius and the greatest visionary ever lived Steve Jobs at Apple’s Macintosh division. It was here when he learned that revolutionary ideas were not just a dream but they can be pursued and achieved too. Benioff had made his mind to make his career in programming but one of his professor at USC had something else in mind. He suggested Benioff to take business. And, thus, was born an entrepreneur who would revolutionize the online world.

Marc started his career immediately after graduating from USC and joined the database giant Oracle as a customer support. Benioff had an exceptional oratory skills and this helped him to gain the “Rookie of the Year” title at the age of 23. Three years later he climbed up his career ladder so fast that he reached the Vice President position and became the youngest person to be on that post. This also gained him a fat salary of $300,000.

Benioff’s success caught an eye of the top-line people and the founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, himself called him in. Benioff and Ellison quickly became close friends and spent a good amount of time together attending parties, going on vacations, etc. After 13 years of job at Oracle, Benioff decided to work on something of his own project. And he started working on the idea of cloud computing and gave the company a name which today is known as “Salesforce”. Ellison supported Benioff’s idea by funding the project with $2 million and took a seat on board of directors.

As the time passed by, Benioff found out a potential competitor to Salesforce and it was none other than Oracle itself. This led to the start of downfall between Ellison and Benioff’s relations. While the business war’s continued Salesforce managed to survive the huge dot-com bust blow-off in early 2000s. The survival made the company even stronger and brought it in the list of biggest companies in modern cloud computing market. The company went public in 2004 and raised $110 million. Today, the company is valued at $40 billion and has also been awarded multiple awards including the “Best Place to Work at” for 8 consecutive years.

Starting from selling a software for $75 to making a billion dollars company Marc Benioff stands at number 16 in the Forbes 500 most influential CEOs list. Besides his business work, Benioff has also written a business book “Behind the Cloud”, a memoir on Salesforce in 2009. He is actively involved in philanthropical works and donates a huge sum to charitable trusts and organizations. Benioff currently lives in San Francisco, California with his wife Lynnie Benioff and two children.

Rags to Riches Story: Stan Shih, Founder of Acer

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A great man once said, “If you are born poor it’s not your fault. But if you die poor it is your fault”. The one who stands up against all the odds and comes out successfully through the worst of times is bound to achieve the greatest feats of his lifetime. This is the story of Stan Shih, founder of Acer who has achieved the greatest success and is now a billionaire.

Born on 8 December, 1944 in the Republic of China – Taiwan, Stan Shih faced a struggling childhood. The already poor family was in a state of disaster when Stan, at a tender age of four, lost his father. At this small age he joined hands along with his mother in her business of selling eggs. The money they earned from this business helped Stan complete his preliminary education. But, his dream was much more than just completing preliminary. He worked even harder in their business and, with enough money accumulated, he went on to pursue the Bachelor’s and then Master’s program in Electronic Engineering from the National Chiao Tung University. He also successfully completed his honorary PhD in Electronics Engineering in the year 1992.

From an early age, Stan was dedicated towards his interests. He enjoyed every little process about his studies which immensely helped him to launch Acer in 1976. The launch of this company further saw such a tremendous growth that in 2006 it converted Taiwan into a PC-manufacturing powerhouse among the whole world. Today Acer stands as the second largest computer manufacturing company in the world.

Stan started the company along with his wife Carolyn Yeh and five other partners and it was initially named Multitech. Shih, accepted the chairmanship of Multitech in 1987 and it was this year when they decided to rename it to Acer. Beginning his career, in 1971, as a computer engineer at Unitron Industrial Corp. Shih made Taiwan’s first successful desktop calculator. His next major feat was the development of world’s first pen watch which he achieved during his time at Qualitron Industrial Corp., which he helped to establish too.

Stan Shih has shared a major part in establishing three largest PC companies Acer, BenQ and Wistron. He took retirement from the chairmanship of Acer in the year 2004 and has accepted the seat on the Board of Directors at Acer, BenQ and Wistron. Starting Acer with a mere $25,000 back in 1976, the company’s net worth has reached as high as US $22.2 billion. The company ranks at number 4 in terms of total PCs and at number 3 for the total notebooks across the whole world.

Social Responsibility
Shih, in one of his speeches, said, “You have to always look ahead, always be positive. It’s your choice, your destiny. You have to enjoy life but still have a personal social responsibility.” Despite being a billionaire Stan Shih is actively involved with social and public organizations. He was a chairman of the Asia Business Council, he sat on the board of directors of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd, and is also a chairman of the Brand International Promotion Association.

Awards and Honors
The year Acer was founded, i.e. 1976, also earned Shih a place on Taiwan’s “Ten Most Outstanding Young Persons” and just seven years later he was named one of the “Ten Most Outstanding Persons in the World” by International Jacees. Shih has been featured in noteworthy magazines like Asiaweek,  BusinessWeek, Fortune, and was featured in Time magazine’s “60 Years of Asian Heroes” for his achievements. The most precious day in Shih’s life was the day when he was awarded an honorary Doctor of International Law, the highest honor of the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Shih now lives with his lovely wife Carolyn Yeh and three children.

Story of Jimmy Wales: Co-founder of Wikipedia

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The world is making progress at a massive speed. So may it be in engineering, medical or creative prospects, the people are putting forward their best ideas to improve even further. And, no doubt, technology is playing a vital role in all this development. From cooking recipes to educational courses, everything is available on a single click. All this has become possible due to constant hard work of the people who had an ambitious vision. Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is one of such people who dreamt of building world’s largest encyclopedia, and that too, free for everyone’s use.

Early Life
Born on August 7, 1966 at Huntsville, Alabama Wales took his schooling at the Randolph School. He lived with his father, who ran a grocery store, and his mother, who ran a single room school. Jimmy wales, with his siblings, studied in this school before attending primary school. He graduated at the age of 16 and got his Bachelor’s degree in Finance from the Auburn University. While pursuing his postgraduate studies he went on to teach at the University of Alabama and the Indiana University.

Risks from Earlier Life
Wales was interested and quite good at computer coding. In 1994, while working with Chicago Options Associates, a trading firm, he spent his free time playing with the computer code wishing to build a knowledge sharing platform. Despite his bright career ahead in the firm, he decided to quit so that he could bring his dream into reality. As a result he started a company named ‘Bomis’ with his two partners. The website was designed for a purpose to gather humongous views and therefore contained some unethical material aimed to sustain male needs. Bomis worked quite well bringing in enough money which Wales used to finance his next big project.

The initial idea of starting a knowledge sharing platform was that people would contribute useful articles and expert editorial team would edit the content. The site was named ‘Nupedia’ which provided quality information and also challenged the professional encyclopedias already in the market. The idea was immensely apprehended and thousands of people all around the world started contributing quality informative articles to the website. Jimmy witnessed a major problem when the incoming articles were coming in a huge amount while the edited version were taking a lot of time to be uploaded. He had to find a way to balance both sides where the rate of uploading the edited articles would match the incoming articles.

Wikipedia’s birth and funding
This is when Jimmy Wales  and his colleagues came up with another ambitious idea. The idea put forward allowed maximum number of submissions on a single topic and, an added provision was that any user could be able to edit the article. Jimmy thought that finding faults and editing them in an article was easy but collecting the facts and information was the toughest part. The idea of crowd sourced editing worked and Wikipedia was born. Here, n number of people could edit and add the information to the already written article. Thus, making it more and more factual with every edit. January 15, 2001 was the official launch date of Wikipedia. Wikipedia was funded from the money earned from Bomis before it was made non profit organization.

The concept was receiving overwhelming response that Jimmy Wales and his teammates ever emancipated. Here, people from around the globe were providing quality and informative articles and simultaneously editing it constantly. Wales put few best editors to look over the uploaded articles and correct them regularly to maintain the quality of the information. In 2011, 10 years from launch, Wikipedia became the highest visited online encyclopedia platform. The website holds more than 30 million articles in more than 287 languages available freely for its visitors. Wales has avoided advertisements on his website to provide distraction free readings.

Wikipedia, on October 2013, was ranked as the 6th highest visited website across the globe. Jimmy Wales’ vision of providing quality education has revolutionized the way people could learn. From leaving his PhD dissertation thesis, his promising job mid-way to accomplishing the world’s largest information providing website Wales has come a long way and has definitely made this world a better place.