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CEO who once struggled to speak English now commands $3 Billion Company

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Being not able to speak or being fluent in English, a global business language that binds billions of people will certainly lower your confidence and may become a source of  humiliation at the work place and business meetings. You might consider this shortcoming as your biggest weakness to professional growth.

However, some dare to defy the set standards of society & business world. Those who have the dream to do something bigger in life, keep their head down, face the challenges with courage and keep working towards the bigger dream.

One such person is Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the founder of PayTM, a $3 billion e-commerce and payments company from India.

Winners do things differently
Vijay Shekhar Sharma was born in the city of Aligarh (UP), India to a humble family. With no bigger life goal than to complete his engineering degree and land up in a job and serve his family, he left Aligarh after completing his schooling to pursue an engineering degree at Delhi College of Engineering.

Vijay entered the Delhi College of Engineering with great enthusiasm and zeal at the age of 15. Vijay who had studied all his life in Hindi medium wasn’t able to understand a word in classroom where lectures were delivered only in English. Even his classmates preferred English to converse. Vijay shifted to back benches to avoid attention and even started to bunk lectures.  This was testing time for him but then Vijay decided to take this thing head on and win the battle. He started to read English magazines & dictionaries borrowed from others.

He read lot of English business magazines during his college time. This arouse his curiosity about internet and software.

Entrepreneurship is bed of thorns
Inspired from Yahoo and Sabeer Bhatia, Vijay launched a company named Xs while in college. He along with his batch mates built a website that had web directories, web-guided services and a search engine. Vijay also got seed money from a Angel Investor, a New Mexico-based venture capital fund. Vijay sold the company in 1999 to Living Media India (India Today Group) for half a million dollars. Vijay bought his first color TV with the money and also paid of his father’s loan.

From One97 to PayTM
Vijay co-founded One97 with Rajiv Shukla, a mobile VAS company in 2000. But in 2001 company got hit by post 9/11 market crises. His partner left and Vijay was left with no money. He was forced to travel in buses and even on foot to save money for dinner & tea. He had to take a job amid family pressure to get settled in life. After few months Vijay left the job to get back to entrepreneurship.

Vijay continued with One97 and lunched services like mobile astronomy, music messaging, ringtones etc. and got series A and series B funding.

In 2010, Vijay launched PayTM, an online mobile recharge platform. Vijay in 2011 coined the idea of mobile payments to company board but board wasn’t convinced. But, a confident Vijay offered to put in $2 million of his own equity to launch PayTM. RBI’s  approval of semi closed wallet in 2012-13 paved the way for the launch PayTM payment wallet and marketplace. In 2014-15 PayTM secured a funding to the tune $100 million in series A from Alibaba, Alipay and SAIF.

PayTM is now doing an average transactions worth Rupees 30 million on daily basis and is backed by industry legends like Ratan Tata. It has a network of 16,000 online and 10,000 offline registered merchants and is projected to increase to 100,000 merchants. Currently, PayTM is valued at $ 3 billion after the latest funding round of $680 million from Ant Financial of Alibaba. Recently PayTM has launched in-store payments from wallet as well.

With the personal experience of hard achieved success, Vijay refrains to call the staff at his office as employees, he prefers to call them as colleagues or teammates understanding their contribution also towards growth of the company. He also distributed 4% of his equity worth $120 million to his team.

The meteoric success came to Vijay with all his own hard work and sheer determination. Rise of a man with humble background against all odds and hurdles like language, early debacle of business and a reluctant board at One97,  he stands as an inspiration and attestation behind the saying “A man makes his own destiny”.

 “To the winners, who won because they didn’t give up.”- Vijay Shekhar Sharma

Multi-million dollar start up that just works 4 days a week without any managers

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Today when most startups tend to burn the mid night oil and work even on weekends, this organization works typically for 4 days a week (Mon-Thu), more specifically 32 hours a week and has grown exponentially from a start up to become a leading global multi million dollar Ed-tech company offering online professional training & courses. The organization is Treehouse, headquartered in Portland, Ontario. Employing 110 employees, Treehouse operates just 32 hours in a week.

The secret recipe to rousing success

How come a company working less than 32 hours a week with around 100 employees is so successful. The reason for this is amazing work culture of Treehouse.

No Managers

Treehouse is a flat organization with no manager controlling employees or their work. Each employee is responsible for their own work. Earlier Treehouse was also like any other company having typical org structure. Internal politics, grapevine and rumors were hampering its growth cycle. It’s then company decided to do away with org structure and have a flat hierarchy. Going flat has increased the productivity of the Treehouse staff and enabled them focus on the activities they are hired for. The flat organization enabled the employees to implement their own ideas in the work they were assigned instead of depending on the typical managerial hierarchy to work on it.

The career growth of the individual employee in the company in absence of the managers is set up on the basis of how proficiently a employee delivers the work assigned. Breaks are encouraged during the working hours to have personal communication between colleagues. The employees work from Monday to Thursday and the offices are kept closed on Fridays and weekends, thus enabling them to spend more time with their families.

This work culture has helped create a complete work life balance and almost 100% retention of the workforce.

Less emails more productivity

Employees are discouraged from using emails. Ryan Carson, the founder of Treehouse says that emails distract employee and instead they use HipChat which keeps them focused on their work schedule.

For the discussion on the ongoing projects Convoy, an internal discussion forum is used. These tools have increased employee productivity since they don’t have to go through each and every email. Treehouse discourages any sort of official communication on off days that is on Fridays and weekends.

Less meetings, less interrupts

Treehouse team believes in less face to face meetings. Most of the communication is written either on Convoy or HipChat which reduces unplanned meetings or interrupts. Employees can plan their work and also choose to respond to written communication as per their schedule and availability.

All these things have resulted in increased productivity, less attrition, high employee morale. Treehouse in the year 2012 received initial funding of 4.75 USD and one year later in 2013 received 7 million USD funding from Social+Capital and Kaplan Ventures. It has been able to garner a monthly revenue of $1.7 Million with a subscriber base of more than 1,00,000 and recurring monthly sales of $1,42,000. The number of its paid subscribers is increasing by an average of 46%.

Today, Treehouse provides technical, skill enhancement, app development and other learning tools via  iOS and android apps at affordable rates both to the individuals as well as organizations and learning institutes like schools at affordable rates. It offers choice of the subject from its extensive library and has a point based system within the apps that measure the progress of the skills learned by its subscribers.

Farhan Masood- A college dropout to multi-billion dollar bio-metrics startup

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Asia is now becoming a hub for innovative startups that dare to dream and innovate big time. One such startup is SoloInsight, a Pakistani startup that has built fastest 3D facial and iris recognition algorithms. SoloInsight is  founded by Farhan Masood. Farhan is a well known entrepreneur and inventor.

Farhan the founder and CTO of biometrics security startup SoloInsight dropped out of college at the age of nineteen and is a self-taught technology inventor since then. He has received 34 international and 5 local awards. He started his journey from zero and today his company is operational in seven different countries and has a worth over 10 million dollars.

Hard work, commitment & perseverance
Masood was lucky enough to get his hands on gadgets and technology at a very early age. He got fascinated  about computer software and engineering, but could not afford to buy the technology books. But he had a thirst for knowledge and curiosity about how things work. So, he made friends with a shopkeeper who would allow him to spend hours in his book store. He would bunk classes and read about computing at the bookstore all day long.

Thirty-five-year-old Pakistani national Farhan Masood got the attention of media and people when he developed Urdu graphics and the Persian language script for the Internet. He was just 19 then. This success gave him enough reasons to drop out of  the college and pursue his dream.Farhan Masood

His global recognition and interviews in national and international media landed him on an advisory position with Pakistan Govt.  During his job, he helped government translate and digitize land records, which were previously only stored in old style, physical files. Later he moved to Dubai to start his own firm (an advertising technology startup called Quick Fix Solutions) and worked on several projects, including websites for the Dubai e-government, Enoc, Eppco and Dubai Internet City.

Birth of SoloInsight, a patented technology
After watching watching the Tom Cruise movie ‘Minority Report’ (based on future technology), Masood decided to  work on iris recognition technology. In 2010 Masood moved back to Pakistan to work on SoloInsight.

SoloInsight is a global recognition software platform that helps companies accurately and efficiently manage ingress and egress to increase safety, ensure compliance, and save money. SoloInsight using its patented technology helps businesses increase productivity & profits.

For past 10 years, SoloInsight is tapping a billion dollar biometric devices market. SoloInsight has 119 clients and 114000 daily users. SoloInsight counts companies like US Apparel, Nestle, Pepsico, PEL, and the Pakistan Army as clients.

The journey
Masood wasn’t born with a silver spoon, he worked hard all his life to live his dream and make Pakistan proud. It was his father who encouraged and developed his interest in computing.

His continuous achievements and enthusiasm has made him an inspiration for many young entrepreneurs. His journey wasn’t that easy after all. For once he thought that his dream was shattered, when he needed money for his startup and his visa application was rejected due to political events. He has now moved his business to America and made a big name across the globe.

Farhan’s focus now is to transition into “Internet of People”, an unexplored idea. Other than being a recognized technologist and innovator, Farhan is well known for his philanthropic activities. The entrepreneur was awarded a Global Innovation through Science and Technology competition award by US Vice President Joe Biden in Turkey, for running the country’s largest blood donation network called Bloodline. Farhan Masood runs a movement called Pakistan Go-Green, which was the subject of a Digital Revolution case study at the Cambridge University.

 

Alok Kejriwal- From making socks to leading online game company

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The thinker + Doer = Rodinhood says his Quora profile; Alok Kejriwal is the man who changed the pace of India’s online gaming industry. Rodinhood is inspired from Rodin – who sculpted ‘The Thinker’ and Robin Hood who ‘got things done’.Alok Kejriwal

Born on 25th December, 1968, the renowned CEO and co-founder of Games2win is known to the world as Rodinhood. Alok Kejriwal is an entrepreneur who knows how to utilize a problem as an opportunity to build business around it. He started his journey by joining his family business of socks manufacturing at the age of 18, while he was still in college. After 10 years, he moved out of the family business and started something of his own which was not into manufacturing. He went on to venture in mobile and then online games.

Making of the Rodinhood

As they say, leader is  one who knows the way, shows the way and goes the way. Alok Kejriwal is a true leader and has proved his leadership, honesty and truthfulness in every walk of life. He started his socks business around 1989. Once when his socks factory was preparing Argyle socks order for a leading retailer he noticed an issue with packaging. He picked up one bundle of socks and opened it like a consumer for final inspection. As he ripped the adhesive sticker from the socks, he was thunderstruck as the thread of the small ‘criss cross’ lines that make the Argyle pattern so famous began ripping out of the socks. The shipment was ready to be shipped in 3 hours and the socks had PASSED inspection from Europe and India. Without worrying about extra cost of building top pair of socks and losing credibility or business he decided to be truthful and informed the buyer. This critical decision earned him a lot of respect in the eyes of buyer. The buyer was so delighted and grateful that he not only paid for extra cost but also gave many more orders in future.

In 1998, Kejriwal founded an online contests portal company named Contests2win.com (C2W) with a borrowed laptop and only Rs 5,000. He realized the power of internet while working in the family business. During this time, he used the internet for information on spare parts on company websites. “I got fascinated with the power of Internet to distribute knowledge and thought of building business around it.”, Alok once said.

Later, he launched a venture entitled “Mobile2win” in china in 2001. Mobile2Win organized mobile competitions and promotions on mobile interactive platforms. In 2003 mobile2win operations were also started in India. He got the VAS Business of Sony Channels’ singing show Indian Idol. Alok was one of the pioneers of ringtone business. He did create a lot of value and money before mobile companies and tv channels themselves started doing this business to maximize their profits.

Mobile2win was doing fantastic but due to funding, scale and other issues, Alok was  asked to leave mobile2win. However, this sad exit turned out to be good for him in long turn. He got million dollars on exit from mobile2win which he invested in conetst2win. Later the Indian arm of mobile2win went to Chandigarh (India) based company for no cash deal while Chinese mobile2win got acquired by Disney.

Taking the legacy forward, he came up with a new venture Games2win in the year 2007. Today, Games2win is ranked among top gaming site across the world. The most popular game at Games2win is Parking Frenzy and has about 20-25 million downloads. Besides Parking Frenzy, another 15 of their games have 1 million downloads now.

As the popularity increased, Games2win discovered that thousands of other websites and blogs were embedding Games2win games on their sites. Instead of blocking games on other websites or sending them copyright infringement notices, Alok and his team used an innovative idea. They started displaying Ads within the game whenever it was played on a website other than Games2win. Suddenly their success metric changed to the number of websites illegally embedding their games. More the embeds, more display ads, more revenue.

Although not being a great supporter of mobile only approach, he moved Games2win from a top game company to a mobile games company while struggling with static traffic in 2010. Games2win started focusing on mobile games and stopped making web games in 2014. New games are only available for smartphones. However, you can still play old games on their website.

Tough calls and work life balance

Entrepreneurship is bed of thorns. Being a successful entrepreneur and a successful father, husband at the same time is not that easy. You are always occupied with business deals, meetings, and dinner with clients and what not. Alok Kejriwal is married to Chhavi Kejriwal and has two daughters. In his blog “would you marry an entrepreneur? “, he jotted the pros and cons of marrying an entrepreneur. Topping it with his own story, he recalled a real life incident.

Can you imagine where was he when his second daughter was born? Hospital? No, you got it wrong! Well he wrote,” I skipped visiting the hospital and escorting my wife and my newborn daughter (my second child) home, because that evening I was signing some term sheets of my first venture contests2win.com in the lobby of The Oberoi in Mumbai.”

Startup mentor, critic and attention grabber

Alok never shies from going public with his views on different startups and their business ideas and many times he has been proved right. Alok criticized the app only approach of Myntra and Flipkart which turned out to be true after these companies rolled back their decision.

The the blue eyed gaming champ also criticized then Housing.com CEO Rahul Yadav for two Housing.com hoardings that were barely visible behind trees which attracted a sharp reaction form Rahul Yadav.

Alok kejriwal

Alok kejriwal rahul yadav

Amidst all the criticism, chaos and challenges, Alok kept pushing himself and continued to grow as an entrepreneur. He knows the art of being in news and use the right opportunity at right point of time.

Alok belongs to that rare breed of successful entrepreneurs who go extra mile to help budding entrepreneurs achieve success. This “Crazy Internet Entrepreneur” of India is playing the role of a startup mentor and motivator. Alok runs Rodinhood.com where he and fellow Rodinhoods share their experiences related to startups, products, teams, marketing & business. Nothing can beat such startup stories and experiences in helping budding entrepreneurs run their show successfully. He and his team of volunteers organize The Rodinhoods Open House(TRH) in different cities of the country for free. TRH helps startups meet industry leaders, pitch their product to investors and network with fellow entrepreneurs.

A TRH workshop in progress

His favorite advice to entrepreneurs is

“To go where no man has gone before…” (from Star Trek).

Jack Ma: A self made billionaire

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E-commerce is one of the fastest growing segments in the industry. Many young entrepreneurs have tried their hands in this field but very few were able to taste success. One such hugely successful eCommerce business is Alibaba.

The man behind this extremely successful ecommerce business is Jack Ma. Today Ma the founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group has an estimated net worth of $25 billion. Who would have imagined that a 5 feet tall Chinese man will lead Alibaba to a record breaking $25 billion IPO and become 18th richest person in the world? Alibaba’s IPO was bigger than Google, Facebook and Twitter combined.

Determination & persistence paves the way
Ma was born in Hangzhou, China. Lack of resources was never a excuse for him to learn or do something. In Childhood Ma developed a desire to learn English, so he started to converse with foreigners. For nine years he used to guide foreigners around the city for free to learn English. This opened the door to many entrepreneurial skills; from interacting with people to knowing their thought process; this somewhere pushed him to develop his own views on capitalism and entrepreneurship. During this course he became pen pals with one of these foreigners, and she nicknamed him “Jack”, because his real Chinese name Ma Yun was too difficult to pronounce.

But before he became the richest person in China, Ma went through a lot of rejections. Can you imagine the man behind Alibaba’s success was rejected by three universities?Quote JackMa2

Today world’s top universities and business schools like Harvard take pride in inviting Jack Ma for guest lectures whom once they were not ready to give admission. He was rejected by Harvard 10 times as a student. Jack Ma learnt from failures than through the formal channels of education.

He applied for 30 jobs and got rejected. Jack Ma once said, “When KFC came to China, 24 people went for the job…23 people were accepted. I was the only guy who wasn’t.” His journey from a failed man to a successful tech leader & entrepreneur is exemplary .

Ma’s first date with internet and rise of Alibaba
“Beer” was the first word that Jack Ma searched for on the internet- Really? Beer? Well, during his trip to US, he searched for “Beer” and then “China”, when no results came up, he decided to set up a Chinese website. He saw the web as the future of business and even tried to register the name Internet!
In 1995 he along with his wife and a friend founded an internet company called China Yellow Pages. This company made 5,000K Chinese Yuan (US$800K).

In 1999 he started Alibaba, a B2B marketplace along with his 17 friends. He chose the name Alibaba since it was unique and easy to spell and people were able connect with this name very easily. Alibaba.com allows merchants and companies to trade products online. Within a short period of time Alibaba became one of the largest websites online.

Ma is a larger-than-life figure. Even after reaching the great heights, Jack Ma is the exceptionally optimistic and determined. His journey to success is definitely one which will inspire you even in your darkest days. Jack Ma believes that “If you are still poor at 35, you deserve it!” His journey is a perfect example of a rag-to-riches story. The most important lesson is- when the dream is big enough, the facts don’t count.

Most of us indulge so much in making excuses about things that we even forget to make the best of every situation. We all give countless excuses everyday like lack of money, lack of good education and people around us always discourage us. The same was the case with Jack Ma, he had nothing to push him forward but his strong desire to excel made him the man he is today.

“We are never in lack of money. We lack people with dreams, who can die for those dreams” – Jack Ma

Elon Musk- A tech founder on a mission to save and change the world

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This is the age of Tech Entrepreneurship and startups. From Steve Jobs to Bill Gates there are many tech founders who have made it big into technology that has changed the world and impacted our lives drastically. Today entrepreneurs are thinking beyond online ecommerce and taking huge risks to make world a better place. For many tech founders money is not the only thing that matters. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and his wife pledged to give away most of their wealth for social causes. Bill Gates is a well known philanthropist. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is running so many campaigns in the world to improve education, health and lives of people.

Elon Reeve Musk is one such great tech entrepreneur and new age philanthropist. Unlike others his philanthropy is driven by technology that aims to make world a better place to live. The real-life inspiration for Iron Man’s main lead character Tony Stark, Musk has interests in industries like automotive, aerospace, solar energy, energy conservation, satellite and high-speed surface transportation. Working more than 100 hours a week and drawing just $1 as salary, Elon is on a mission to save and change the world by investing and nurturing companies like Tesla, SpaceX, and Solarcity.

ELON MUSK
ELON MUSK

Have you heard about Blaster? Blaster is a game that was made by a bored 12 year old in 1984. This 12 year old was none other than Elon Musk. Elon Musk one of the founders of PayPal became a self-made millionaire at the age of 27, when he sold his first company, Zip2. By age 41, his estimated net worth had surpassed $1 billion, and today, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO has an estimated net worth of $10.5 billion. Most of his innovations seem straight out of a sci-fi movie.

Tesla Motors
Musk co-founded Tesla Motors, a company that designs and manufactures premium electric vehicles. Tesla was able to succeed in the electric car market where other large manufacturers failed due to lack of innovative ideas.
Elon recently launched the Tesla Model 3 at the Tesla Design Studio in Hawthorne which will hit the market in 2017. The new model starts at $35000 and accelerates to 60mph in 6 sec. This is a next level car with exciting features. It’s Musk’s vision and innovative ideas that has led to the making of this different league model. More than 1,80,000 pre-orders were received by Tesla in a day for Model 3. Tesla is also planning to enter India in 2016.

Success of Tesla has paved way for vehicles that are stylish, feature rich and cause less harm to environment.

SpaceX
Before the closing of PayPal, he had already started dreaming about a greenhouse, “Mars oasis” which he wanted to land on mars.

Musk decided to start a company that would build affordable rockets, using vertical integration and the modular approach of software engineering. Those ideas resulted in his launch of SpaceX in 2002. His long-term goal is to help humanity through SpaceX by creating a true spacefaring civilization.

Creating a reliable rocket that successfully gets into space was not an easy job. No one wanted to invest in SpaceX because everyone believed it to be over ambitious and a venture with pretty less hope of being successful . Musk invested his own personal funds worth $100M in SpaceX. However, SpaceX was on the verge of closing due to lack of funds when three attempts to launch a rocket failed. In 2008 SpaceX did a launch of Falcon 1 launch vehicle which failed. Elon took the stage and motivated employees for the next attempt saying that rocket science is not an easy thing and failures are bound to happen. Motivated team investigated the issue and was ready with next rocket in 7 weeks which otherwise would have taken a year for any other company. On sept 28th SpaceX successfully launched the rocket and became world’s first private venture to launch rocket in earth’s orbit. An achievement that was limited to only 6 mightiest nations of the world. After this SpaceX got an offer for $1.6 billion to carry out 12 launches for NASA.

Another feather was added to Musk’s cap last week after the launch of futuristic pop-up room and landing of the unmanned Falcon rocket at Atlantic sea. SpaceX resumed station deliveries for NASA on Friday and landed its booster rocket on an ocean platform for the first time.The innovations at SpaceX has resulted in cheapest cost of launching rockets in the history.

SpaceX is currently working on a new spacecraft, which will allow humans to travel in space and take ride from earth to moon. SpaceX is making a much larger rocket that will be able to bring 100 people to Mars at once. Google and Fidelity has now invested in SpaceX.

Success of SpaceX is the result of Musk’s quest of a fantastic future. His vision is worth appreciating. Take a bow!

Solarcity
The company was co-founded by Elon Musk in 2006. Solarcity produces the world’s most efficient rooftop solar panels with a market cap of just under $6 billion and has become the largest installer of solar panels in the US. Solarcity is now building the country’s largest solar panel-manufacturing factory in Buffalo.

Tesla and SolarCity companies are making a pollution free, environment friendly renewable energy future a reality.

Man at the helm for an innovative future

Musk “the world’s most remarkable living entrepreneur” is undoubtedly an epitome of an entrepreneur, inventor and a business magnate. He is truly the real life Iron Man. In case you don’t know, parts of Iron Man 2 were actually filmed inside and outside of SpaceX and musk even had a cameo in the film.

His ideas are the most ambitious ideas so far. He is a true leader who can envision and lead people to a better world and better future.

You can read more about ELON Musk and his future plans in the book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.