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Ronaldo Mouchawar : The Biggest Online Retailer in the Middle East

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Starting a business is itself a huge challenge and starting in a sector dominated by giants just makes the challenge double-fold. Amazon, undoubtedly, is one of the leading e-commerce company today. It has expanded to almost every part of the world and has become the top e-commerce company.

With a fierce competition already present in the market, a man decides to start his own e-commerce venture, in the middle-east, and just within a year, reaches maximum people in the country. The website was named Souq.com and co-founded by Ronaldo Mouchawar. How he became the most successful self-made businessman? Let’s get to know more about him.

Early Life

Ronaldo was born in Aleppo, Syria, to a merchant father. His father’s business became an inspiration for him to name his e-commerce site. Mouchawar went to Northwestern University in Boston to earn a Master’s degree in digital communications and a Bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Massachusetts in the United States. Initially, Mouchawar took a job at the Boston engineering firm. He also worked as a technical and systems consultant in the technology and business management sector at the Electronic Data System (EDS).

Entering into Start-Ups

After completing his education, Mouchawar joined Maktoob, the first successful web portal in the Middle East. He was not quite fluent in English and Maktoob was not looking for the fluent ones. As the web portal was gaining attention and becoming popular in the country, Mouchawar realized the potential of e-commerce business and wanted to create a separate commerce-only website.

Then, in 2006, he started a website called Souq.com. The word means ‘market’ in Arabic and Mouchawar’s hometown, i.e. Aleppo was famous for its souqs. The company was set up in Dubai as UAE had a larger population of young people and could prove a very profitable marketplace for an e-commerce website.

ronaldo mouchawar
Image Source: webit.org

Initially, Souq was launched as an auction website which later was diversified into an automobile and real estate. The business grew pretty quickly and was getting popular. Mouchawar expanded the business to Saudi Arabia and, by the end of 2009, Souq became independent of Maktoob. At that time the website was witnessing 3 million UAE dirhams worth of auctions i.e. the US $1 million.

There was also a time when smartphones were entering the market and more and more people were shifting from their laptop to smartphones. As Souq was available only for the desktops and there was no app developed for it, further growth of the business seemed to be limited. Mouchawar took a smart decision and quickly adapted to the changing technological era. And in 2012, Souq launched its first app. Today, more than 70% of purchases are done using smartphones.

Next big change was introduced in 2010. With Wisam Daoud joining as CTO, Mouchawar decided that Souq would no longer run auctions and classifieds. The company, at that time, had 80% business from the auction and 20% from fixed price. But in May 2010, they closed the auction site. Initially, the company lost most of their transaction but they made for it in around six months and also doubled its revenue each quarter.

Mouchawar, in 2014, launched ‘White Friday’ sales which coincide with the ‘Black Friday’ sale in the US. He explained that ‘Black Friday’ does not make cultural sense in Arab as Friday is the traditional day of prayer. The sale received a thunderous response and raised more than $275 million. At the time of its next White Friday Souq had doubled its sales and witnessed 13 million visitors and around 600,000 products sold during 25th-28th November.

In March 2017, Amazon acquired Souq by paying $580 million in cash.

Personal Life

Ronaldo Mouchawar has received a number of accolades including Gulf Business Industry Awards CEO of the year in 2013 and Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2015. He currently lives in Dubai, UAE.

Pierre Omidyar – The Founder of eBay

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Brilliant ideas are born out of the curious minds. The ideas or problems often roam around and everyone fail to notice them except some brilliant curious minds. These brilliant minds are the ones responsible for smartphones, computers, airplanes , tv, refrigerators; literally everything that has made our daily life so easy. One such extra-ordinary mind is Pierre Omidyar, a man who turned into a billionaire just at the age of 31. Omidyar, for the first time, brought the auction business on the online platform and connected hundreds of thousands of buyers and sellers through his website – eBay.

Pierre Omidyar is a French born Iranian American businessman and philanthropist. Born in 1967, Pierre’s interest in computers began from high school. He would skip the gym sessions to spend that time at the computer lab. This behavior got him his first job instead of teacher’s scolding. At the age of 14 he was put on the task to create a program that would generate catalogue cards for the library by the principal. Starting from a mere $6 per hour and earning almost 8 billion, Pierre has set a wonderful example for the whole world.

Pierre went on to Tufts University for his graduation in computer science and then joined a company to develop the Macintosh software. Before starting his software company Ink Development Corp in 1991, Pierre worked for Apple’s subsidiary Claris. His Ink Development Corp was purchased by Microsoft in 1996 and also changed its name to eShop. Just a year before that is in 1995 a multi-billion dollar idea had already taken birth in Pierre’s mind.

During the summer of 1995 Omidyar wrote a code for a portal called Auction Web on his own website. The purpose was to let people list the items for auction. Surprisingly, this idea grabbed stupendous attention that he had to set up a whole new website which was devoted just for online auctions. This site would later be known as eBay. With the launch of new website he also started charging a nominal fee for listing the items for auction. The charges would be anything from 25 cents to $2.

The pace at which eBay was growing made Omidyar to quit his job at General Magic, a company backed by Apple. Since then he started devoting his entire time to grow eBay. Omidyar was announced as the chairman of eBay in 1998 with Meg Whitman as the president and CEO of the company. Under Whitman’s leadership the company expanded its branches to Australia, Canada, Japan, UK, Germany, etc. At the end of 1998 the company had generated $750 million revenue and hosted 2.1 million buyers and sellers. The online auction strategy was then adopted by Amazon in 1999.

Omidyar is on the board of directors at ePeople, an online marketplace for technical support. He is married to Pamela Wesley and has three children. The couple also run a philanthropic firm Omidyar Network. This network is dedicated for journalism and launched the First Look Media along with Glenn Greenwald, the man who published government documents leaked by Edward Snowden. In 2014, the company published its first online copy The Intercept. Omidyar believes that journalism should have its own independent voice for the benefit of democratic society.

Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos- How A Bookish Kid Became World’s Richest Person

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Jeff Bezos is an entrepreneur, computer scientist, an e-commerce pioneer and has a passion for space exploration. He is the founder of Blue Origin, Amazon and is an investor in many other businesses. Jeff Bezos was born to a teenage mother, Jackie and Ted Jorgenson, a circus performer his biological father on January 12th 1964. He however grew up knowing that his father was Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant who married his mother when Jeff was still young. He only found out about his real father when he was 10. He cared less and his father has never really looked for him.

Jeff’s mechanical talent was seen from early in his life. When he was a toddle, he dismantled his crib with a screw driver so he could sleep in a regular bed. In his teen years, Jeff made an electric alarm with the aim of keeping his siblings from his room. His parents even had to let him use the garage for his science projects. Growing up, Jeff spent his summer vacations at his grandfather’s ranch. The maternal grandfather has been a role model to Jeff and taught his the farm work and piqued his interest in science even more.

Jeff Bezos schooled at the River Oaks Elementary School, Miami Palmetto Senior High School and finally at the Princeton University. He excelled throughout his school life and crowned it with two degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Princeton.

After school, Bezos joined the startup company named Fitel where he applied his skills in computer science. He later quit Fitel and later joined the D.E Shaw where he rose to the position of Vice President in four years. At this hedge fund he met the love of his life, MacKenzie Tuttle who was a research associate there. She is currently the wife to Jeff and a novelist. It was also while working as VP at the D.E Shaw that the idea of starting Amazon came to him. While he was looking for new ventures for the company he worked for then, he saw a statistic that made him interested in internet. It was shown that the World Wide Web was growing by 2300% a month. He immediately saw the potential prospects of selling online and quit his job.

Jeff Bezos began his first business while in school. It was an educational summer camp called the Dream Institute. He charged $600 per person and was able to enroll 6 people. Not bad for a school going child!

Amazon did not begin as what it is now. When it was born in 1994, Jeff wanted it to be an online book store. He thought of the details of the business and called up friend and family who would invest in the business while his wife was driving them to Seattle. He raised $1 million in capital and set up the business in his new home’s garage. The company was initially called Cadabra then it changed to MakeItSo.com, aard.com, awake.com, Bookmall.com, Relentless.com and Browse.com before finally settling for Amazon.com named after the largest river in the world.

Amazon was set up in July 1995 and within a month there were sales in all the 50 states and in 45 foreign countries. Within three years, the company grew to 3,000 employees making over $610 million in sales. However, the company was not making money yet. In 1997, they actually has a $30 million loss and $1,23 million loss in 1998. According to Jeff the company’s aim was to be customer centric company, not making profit. This strategy helped the company survive the dot com burst that killed many startups. In 1998 Jeff Bezos invested $250,000 in Google.

2001 was the first time the company recorded a profit of $5million on $1 billion revenues. Since then Amazon has grown more and more selling everything and with current revenues of $107 billion as of 2016. Jeff owns 18% of Amazon.  Amazon today owns Amazon cloud and web services. Amazon launched its cloud services years before Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. Jeff Bezos also founded aerospace company called the Blue Origin in 2014. This has been quite a success with many achievements including the launch of a reusable rocket recently. The company is working towards making space travel possible for the general public.

In 2013, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million. This has since grown surpassing the New York Times as the leader in daily unique visits. Jeff Bezos is currently the third richest man in the world with a value of $65.3 billion with only Bill Gates and Amanda Ortega worth more than him.