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Barry Lam : Founder & Chairman of World’s Largest Maker of Laptop Computers

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Success is with those, who work hard towards their goals. The time, the personal computers were just introduced, the Taiwan based visionary entrepreneur, Berry Lam, saw the future scope of the notebook Pcs. He worked hard and used his more than 15 years of experience, in the manufacturing industry, to convert his vision into a successfully running business, and now, he is leading the number one laptop manufacturing company of Taiwan.

Early Life

Barry Lam was born in 1949 in Shanghai, China. His father worked as an accountant for the Hong Kong Club, so he spent his childhood in Hong Kong. He went to Taiwan, to pursue a degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University. He also received the master’s degree in the same field, from the same university.

barry-lam
Image Source: forbes

Career

Soon after Lam completed his master’s degree, along with his former classmates, in 1973, he founded a manufacturing business of the handheld calculators, naming the company Kinpo Electronics. Lam was appointed as the president of the company, and in his leadership, the company emerged as one of the largest contract manufacturers of calculators.

Founding Quanta Computer

In the early 80s, with the increasing popularity of personal computers, Lam founded scope in notebook computer manufacturing and became interested in the same field. In 1988, he left Kinpo to found Quanta Computer, along with one of his colleagues, C. C. Leung, with a capital of less than US$900,000.

In the beginning, it had two production lines that were handled by 60 employees at its office in Shilin Street, Hong Kong. Lam, the visionary entrepreneur wanted to become more than just a supplier. With Quanta, he offered combinations of features for its every product, which the client could choose from. Through Quanta he produced functional and powerful, yet lightweight products.

With the success of the company, Lam established its headquarter in Taiwan and also established the Quanta Research and Development Center there. The Center is focused on creating next-generation innovative products and works in collaboration with institutions such as MIT, National Taiwan University and Academia Sinica.

In 2001, Quanta Computer was recognised as the largest notebook manufacturer worldwide and had a 50% increase in the production. In 2002, the company established its plant in China. Under the One Child One Laptop project, in 2007, Quanta took orders for one million laptops and became the original design manufacturer for the OLPC XO-1.

In 2008, Quanta was named as Taiwan’s second largest private manufacturing enterprise, with an annual turnover of NT$777 billion reported in 2007. In the same year, the share of Quanta in the worldwide market was estimated to be 31%. The major clients of Quanta Computer include Apple Inc., Dell, HP, Amazon, Cisco, Lenovo, LG, BlackBerry, Sony, Sun Microsystems, Toshiba, and Verizon Wireless, etc.

Currently, there are 70,000 employees working for Quanta Computer worldwide, and it has expanded its businesses into network systems, mobile communication, automotive electronics, etc.

Personal Life

Currently, Barry Lam is serving as the chairman of the company. He was named the Entrepreneur of the Year 2005 by Ernst and Young. In 2006, he was awarded the Second Class Bright Star Medal’ by the Taiwan Government. He was listed as the 296th richest person in the world and 5th richest in Taiwan with a net worth of US$4.2 billion, in 2012. In the same year, he received an Honorary Doctorate, from the National Tsing Hua University.

Melanie Perkins : One of The Youngest Female CEOs of Tech World

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“Persistence is what makes an idea to happen,“ the answer given by the CEO and co-founder of Canva when asked about the secret of her success at such a young age. A teenager, who was disturbed with the complexity of the designing software including Photoshop and InDesign, had never thought that she would find a $1b opportunity in this complexity. One of the youngest female CEOs, and that too of two multi-million companies, Melanie Perkins’s hard work and struggle taught her a lot about leadership and running a business.

The Career Timeline & Founding Canva Inc.

Perkins was born and brought up in Perth, Australia and was a student of commerce and communications at the University of Western Australia. At the age of 19, she started teaching graphic designing to University students. With the time, she realised, that it was way too difficult to teach those students how to use those heavy software rather the designing itself. She was frustrated with the fact that it takes almost 22 clicks to export a high-quality PDF.

MelaniePerkins
Image Source: snappystreet.com

Those difficulties, that her students were facing, made her think of developing an easy to use platform for them. She decided to convert her idea into a functional website at a small level to test its potential at a smaller scale. She raised a sum of money, that she borrowed from her relatives, to pay the software designers to build the platform.

In 2007, she along with boyfriend Cliff Obrecht, founded Fusion Books, an online platform on which various schools could design their yearbooks. Only in a few years, Fusion Books became the largest Year Book publisher of Australia. Perkins even had to drop out from the University to completely focus on the website. The website soon became widespread in France and New Zealand, too.

Perkins knew that the scope of designing is unlimited, and it would be better for her if she focuses on using the same idea on a larger scale. In 2010, she decided to raise funding for her next big idea Canva and flew to California to pitch the idea in front of the major investors of Silicon Valley.

The very first investor whom she met was the San Francisco based investor and founder of MaiTai, Bill Tai. Although she wasn’t successful in getting funding from him, her idea was convincing enough to make Mr Tai help her meet other investors. But, it took three years for her to receive the first round of funding of $3 million for Canva and finally, in 2013, she launched it with the help of Cameron Adams, third co-founder of Canva and a hardcore Googler, who now serves as the Chief Product Officer of Canva. Cameron Adams is also among the first investors of Canva along with Lars Rasmussen and Matrix Partners.

The three years of her struggle taught her how to sell, how to recruit, and how to build a business. And her hard work turned out to be most fruitful for her. Just after one year of the launch of Canva, it had 750,000 users, and in April 2014, the company welcomed Social-media and technology expert Guy Kawasaki as its chief evangelist.

In 2015, Canva was launched for the businesses as Canva Work, a professional tool for designing. In 2017, the company reported its revenue to be four times, i.e. $AU 23.5m. Currently, over 200 people are working for Canva, and it has 10 million users across 179 countries. It has its headquarters in Sydney and Manila, and an office in San Francisco. In 2018, the company was valued at $1 billion, and Perkins became one of tech’s youngest female CEOs.

Currently, Perkins serves as the Chief Executive Officer and Director of Canva, Inc.

Martin Dougiamas : The Man Behind the Open-source LMS Moodle

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Martin Dougiamas is the Australia based educator and computer scientist, who founded one of the world’s biggest learning management system. Dougiamas has always been a keen learner, and despite lack of facilities, he was able to fulfil his desire for learning. A voracious reader and a lover of speculative fiction, he is a believer of sharing knowledge. Brent Simpson described him as “one of the rare instances in Open Source software development, where the right person with the right personality appears at exactly the right time; Martin Dougiamas is the Linus Torvalds of the LMS world and his software is the Linux of this software.”

Early Life

Dougiamas was born on 20 August 1969, in Perth, Australia. He spent most of his childhood in a deserted area in Western Australia, where, there was no facility for even basic education. He received his primary education at his home and studied from the material dropped from the aeroplane. He then joined the Kalgoorlie School of the Air, under distance education. As it was a distance learning school, he visited the school only a few times; sometimes for the school projects and a few times for the exams. He always missed being in a classroom with his classmates. At the age of ten, he became interested in wireless and internet technologies and studied books based on them.

Martin Dougiamas
Image Source: Flickr

After a few years, his family moved back to Perth, where Dougiamas joined West Balcatta Primary School and Balcatta Senior High School. He received a master’s degree and PhD from the Curtin University, Australia.

Career

At the age of 17, Dougiamas started working at Curtin University, where he taught the staff about the usage of various web applications. The internet and computers were the latest technologies that were emerging at that time, and he realized that it is not an easy task to teach people about those technologies and utilize them for teaching and learning.

The university installed the newly built learning management WebCT, one of the first learning management systems of that time, at its campus. Dougiamas was asked to improve its functionalities. But, his experience with the software was not a pleasant one, due to the restriction and software’s intellectual property rights.

Founding Moodle

Soon, Dougiamas joined the university as a student and started working on the development of a set of online tools for distance education, as the part of his PhD thesis, “The use of Open Source software to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry”. The tools he was developing for online education were soon adopted at a bigger level, and he had to eliminate them from his PhD thesis.

The first site developed on Moodle was of Peter Taylor from Curtin University, in 2001. By the end of the year, Moodle was available for downloads on CVS. In 2003, Moodle became a community-based software, with its first contributed module released on Moodle.org, a community arm for Moodle.com. People, across the world, were translating it in different languages and were developing themes for it.

In 2015, Moodle became the most used learning management system in the world, with 70,136 registered sites, in 222 territories worldwide, and in 2017, it had over 100 million registered users. Moodle Pty Ltd. HQ has over 45 employees, and it has its branches located in Australia, Spain, Canada, and the UK. The company is financed by a partners network that consists of over 80 certified companies around the world.

Personal Life

Currently, Dougiamas serves as the CEO of Moodle, Pty Ltd. He is the winner of Google-O’Reilly Open Source Award in the Education Enabler category (2008) and was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Vic – the Central University of Catalonia “for his contribution to open-source software through his leadership of the Moodle platform”, in 2016. He also received another honorary doctorate at the Université Catholique de Louvain, in 2018.

Herb Kelleher : The Founder & Former CEO of Southwest Airlines

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An aspiring journalist, who eventually became a lawyer and then a successful entrepreneur- Herb Kelleher, also wanted to live the lavish life that he had been seeing people living in his surrounding, and with the help of the right business plan and with the help of right people, he not only started one of the best airlines of America but also became one of the best CEOs of the country. Under his leadership, the airlines not only became the most preferred one by the consumers but was also voted Fortune magazine’s Best Place to Work in America

Early Life

Kelleher was born on 12 March 1931, to Harry Kelleher and Ruth Moore, in Camden, New Jersey. His father worked as the general manager at the Campbell’s Soup factory. He used to work at the same factory after school and also in the summer breaks, as a part-timer. He completed his high school education from Haddon Heights High School. He was a bright student and was also active in sports. He was in the Football team of the school and was a letterman in basketball and track. Later, he joined the Wesleyan University, to pursue a bachelor’s degree in English and Philosophy, in 1953. He was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity at the university. Influenced by a Wesleyan trustee, he then went to study law at New York University as a Root-Tilden Scholar and earned a graduate degree in the same.

herb
Image Source: experience.hsm.com

Career

In 1956, Kelleher started working as a clerk at the New Jersey Supreme Court. In 1959, he joined the Newark, New Jersey, firm of Lum, Biunno and Tompkins, where he practised law for two years. In 1961, he moved to Texas and became a partner in the law firm of Matthews, Nowlin, Macfarlane & Barrett.

Founding Southwest Airlines

While living in Texas, Kelleher got influenced by the lifestyle of the local people and started looking for something challenging that could help him be like one of them. He wanted to start his own law firm or any other business. In 1966, he joined the Texas businessman Rollin King as his outside counsel. One evening in a meeting with a client, an air charter service owner, in the St. Anthony’s Club in San Antonio, they sketched out a plan on a napkin.

King and his banker, John Parker wanted to launch an affordable airline between Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Kelleher joined hands with the two, and on 15 March 1967, with a seed money of $500,000, they launched the Southwest Airlines Co. Kelleher managed to buy a 1.8 per cent stake in the newly started airline company and was appointed as its first CEO. But due to some legalities, the airline kept from flying for a four-long year and had its first flight on 18 June 1971. The low prices of the flights, and other facilities like eliminating unnecessary services, made the airline an instant hit.

As the CEO of the company, Keheller brought a better working culture, making the employees work more passionately. In 1974, Southwest became the first airline to offer a profit-sharing plan, according to which employees owned 13 per cent of the company’s common stock. Southwest Airlines has constantly maintained its name in the top five Most Admired Corporations in America, in the Fortune magazine’s annual poll.

In 1982, Kelleher was assigned the post of the chairman and the president of the company, remaining on the position of the CEO. In 2003, the airlines had 33000 employees, and operated 2800 flights between 30 airports, with a total annual revenue of $6 billion and net profits of $442 million.

On 21 May 2008, Kelleher resigned as the chairman of Southwest Airlines.

Personal Life

Kelleher met his future wife, Joan Negley when he was in college and married her in 1955 when he was still studying law at the New York University. Fortune has also called him perhaps the best CEO in America. Kelleher was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 2004. He was named the CEO of the Year from Chief Executive magazine in 1999 and also from the Fortune magazine in 2001. In 1990, the Financial World named him as the CEO of the Decade in the Airline Industry and was also named as the CEO of the Century by Texas Monthly in the same year.

Scott Cook : One of the Most Groundbreaking Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley

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What can a bad boss lead its employees to? In the case of Scott Cook, his bad boss led him to think of starting his own business and establish a multi-billion empire for himself. Cook, an American billionaire businessman, is one of those people, who got their lives changed with a simple idea. The concept that people had never imagined of and thought as a non-profitable one, too. Not much people are aware of this nerd, who believed in his plan and gave a tough competition to multiple tech giants with his unusual product. But, who knows, are also aware of his management and leadership skills

Early Life

Cook was born and brought up in a suburb of L.A. He was a bright student at the school, and had programmed the school district’s one computer. After graduating from school, he got enrolled at the University of Southern California, to pursue a bachelor’s degree in economics and mathematics and later, joined the Harvard Business School, from where he received an MBA degree.

Career

After completing his education, Cook, took a job at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he earned much experience in product development and consumer marketing. He also met his future wife Signe Ostby while working at P&G. After leaving the job and marrying Ostby, he with Ostby moved to Menlo Park, California, where he started working at Bain & Company as a consultant in the strategic consulting department.

Founding Intuit

On a fine day, in the early 80s, Cook was sitting in the kitchen of their silicon valley house, with his wife. His wife had complaints about the management and payment of the bills. Cook was prompted by the matter and thought that there might be some more people who find managing the various household bills a bit difficult. He came with an idea to develop software that would help the people to manage and pay their bills. The idea was first of its kind as there were not many users of computers at that time, especially women who stayed at home. Hence, it became difficult for him to raise funding for this idea.

Cook’s interaction with the programming languages had happened last when he was in high school, so he contacted his friend from the Stanford University, Tom Proulx, to help him out with the development process of the software.

In 1983, the two founded Intuit Inc. and launched the first software of their company, the first version of Quicken, written in Microsoft’s BASIC programming language. The software was designed to work on the IBM PC and UCSD Pascal for the Apple II. The product was a success and soon found a competitor. Microsoft also produced a similar software named Microsoft Money, but Cook had its move and provided its customers a US$15 rebate coupon, redeemable on software purchased in their stores. At the same time, the company got engaged with John Doerr, to expand its product lineup.

In 1993, the company was made public for ICO, and it made a major acquisition, i.e., of Chipsoft (a tax-preparation software company based in San Diego). In 1994, the market capitalization of the company reached US$2 billion, and Microsoft made a buyout offer for the company. But, due to some legal issues, the buyout failed, and Microsoft continued its competition with Intuit. During this time, the company started producing web-based products and invested in some really good projects.

The annual revenue of the company estimated by May 2018, was US$5 billion and its market capitalization was about US$50 billion.

Cook remained the chairman of Intuit from February 1993 to July 1998 and served as the president and the CEO of the company, from April 1983 to April 1994.

Personal Life

Cook and his wife Ostby are the parents of three children and live in Woodside, California. In 2002, the couple established the Center for Brand and Product Management at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Business. In 2005, he was placed at number 320, in the Forbes 400, and his estimated worth was of $1.1 billion. Cook is one of the directors of eBay and Procter & Gamble and serves on the dean’s advisory board of the Harvard Business School. He is also one of the investors in eBay, Amazon, and Snapchat and has been a mentor to entrepreneurs like Larry Page.

Jaguar Cars : One of the Most Luxury Automobile Manufacturers in the World

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Jaguar Cars, the name speaks for itself. The brand is almost a hundred years old and has seen its own ups and downs. It has been the provider of most luxurious cars that are at the same time the best at performance and technology. Jaguar is known for its exclusive designs and exceptional comfort and as the producer of one of the fastest cars in the world.

History

Two motorcycle enthusiasts, William Lyons and William Walmsley, from the UK, came together with an idea to start a business of manufacturing motorcycle sidecars and founded Swallow Sidecar Company, in 1922. In 1934, the company was renamed as the S.S. Cars Limited, making the shares of the company public.

The next year, the company manufactured the first 2½-litre engine sports car, with the name SS Jaguar 2½-litre, followed by another sports model with a 3½-litre engine SS Jaguar 100. After the second world war, the shareholders of S.S. Cars Limited decided to rename the company to Jaguar Cars Limited, in a meeting held on 23 March 1945, so that to have a unique name for the company and to avoid any connection with acronym S.S.

jaguar
Image Source : motortradenews.com

In the late 40s, the company dealt with a huge issue of shortage of materials, particularly steel, becoming entirely dependent for their bodies on external suppliers. But, by the mid-50s, the company started achieving fame after manufacturing a series of powerful sports cars, including Jaguar XK120, Jaguar XK140, Jaguar XK150, and Jaguar E-Type. At the time, all of those sports cars were powered by the jaguar’s twin-cam straight-six engine, that provided the maximum efficiency. The manufacturing of the cars was based on the Lyons’ mantra of “value for money” and followed the slogan “Grace, Space, Pace.”

Winning the Le Mans 24 hours race, firstly in 1951, and again in 1953, were two major benchmarks for Jaguar, in the long history in motorsport. Lyons was always focused on manufacturing the world-class sporting saloons in larger numbers than the sports car market could support, and as a result, Jaguar was able to achieve a financial stability and a status for distinction with a range of elegantly styled luxury saloons manufactured under its name. The luxurious and stylish saloons cars included the 3-litre and 3½ litre cars, the Mark VII, VIII, and IX, the compact Mark I and 2, and the XJ6 and XJ12.

Pressed Steel Company Limited, manufactured all the major parts of the Jaguar cars, and in mid-1965, British Motor Corporation (BMC) and the Austin-Morris, together, acquired the Pressed Steel Company Ltd. Later, BMC also acquired Jaguar and started a joint venture British Motor Limited, in 1965, that was renamed to British Motor Holdings at the end of 1966.

In 1968, British Motor Holdings, under the government pressure got merged with Leyland Motor Corporation Ltd. and was formed as British Leyland. But, the poor decisions made by the company as well as the financial difficulties, could not make the deal last longer, and due to monetary success, the companies eluded. In 1984, Jaguar also emerged as a separate company and under the leadership of chairman, Sir John Egan, started to rise rapidly.

The Jaguar engines became famous due to its ubiquity and longevity, and the next powerful engine introduced by Jaguar was Twin OHC XK Engine, that was used in the XJ6 saloon from 1969 through 1992. It even empowered the British Army’s Combat Vehicle Reconnaissance (Tracked) family of vehicles, the Fox armoured reconnaissance vehicle, the Ferret Scout Car, as well as the Stonefield four-wheel-drive all-terrain lorry.

In November 1989, Ford offered the Jaguar’s US and UK shareholders to buy their shares, and in 1999, Jaguar became a part of Ford’s new Premier Automotive Group along with Aston Martin, Volvo Cars and, from 2000, Land Rover. At the same time, Jaguar shared a common sales and distribution network as well as some components with Land Rover. All these years, Jaguar made no profits under Ford’s leadership, and in 2007, Ford announced a sale of Jaguar as well as Land Rover, together. On 2 June 2008, Tata Motors of India, acquired both companies by paying £1.7 billion. The Tata Group further established Jaguar Land Rover Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary and renamed the parent company to Jaguar Land Rover Automotive PLC.

Currently, Jaguar is a manufacturer of the car models including the F-Type convertible, the Jaguar XF, the Jaguar XJ, the Jaguar XK, and the Jaguar R models. In the future, we can expect to see a C-X17 and a four-door compact saloon known as XE.

Since the beginning of the manufacturing of Jaguar Cars, all of the vehicles had the iconic chrome-plated Leaping Jaguar, known as the “The Leaper” on the cap of the radiator of those vehicles. The same leaper is also a part of the logo of the company. But, due to some safety reasons, the leaper has been dropped from the current Jaguar models.