Your Tech Story

startup

rapido

Rapido : India’s Biggest Bike Taxi Pooling Service

Leave a Comment / Founder, India, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Though taxis were always there, the ride-hailing services have got even more popular after the companies like Uber and Lyft has come onboard. These apps provide the most convenient method to hire cabs and travel independently. But for a daily basis, these are not the affordable choice for people. In countries like India, there is also a problem of traffic in big cities, which also affect the efficiency of a rental car. But with the motorbikes, there is still hope for affordability as well as escaping the traffic. This very fact has inspired many people to build a bike ride-hailing service, and companies like Uber and Ola are not any exception. Even though these big companies could manage to host the very service, it is Rapido that has successfully established its motorbike ride-hailing service in India.

Rapido was founded by three engineer friends, Aravind Sanka, Pavan Guntupalli, and S.R. Rishikesh, in 2015, in Bengaluru India. Sanka and Guntupalli are childhood friends, and Rishikesh was the flatmates with Guntupalli. Three of them were working as engineers in Bengaluru, earning good bucks, but none of them could not escape from the startup fever.

After the app-based ride-hailing services came to India, all three loved the concept and used those apps to commute to their offices and back. But it was not an affordable option. One fine day, all three decided to overcome this problem and look for some better and affordable option for daily travelling.

Rapido founders
Image Source: Forbes

Motorcycles are quite popular in India and are also the most affordable mean of travelling. All the three decided to quit their job and start working on a business model that will help people hire bikes to commute from one place to the other at cheap prices. At the beginning of their business, they named the company ‘theKarrier’. They started theKarrier in November 2014 and rebranded it as Rapido in 2015.

The basic idea behind the startup was to hire people who owned two-wheelers. The idea was different from Uber and Ola, as these company invested heavily on the vehicles. But in the case of Rapido, the bike owners just needed to register on the Rapido-captain app and verify their details with the company. And, they were good to go. Another thing that helped Rapido to rise above its rivals was that it did not bother that the driver wanted to be full or part-timer.

The driver in terms of Rapido is called the Captain, and the company provides its every captain with insurance. For the safety of the rider, it has included a few features on the app. The user gets the assistance just in a single tap on the app. Rapido has also set up a customer care service for the users and also offers perks on the rides.

Almost over 5000 drivers use the app every day, and an average of 15,000 drivers log in to the app every month. These drivers also complete over 30,000 rides per month on an average, and the company aims to make it one million rides per day by the end of 2019. The women drivers have also registered to the app and are successfully earning good money over it. According to the stats, the app usually registers drivers of the age between 18 to 50 years.

In April 2017, Rapido raised an undisclosed amount in its pre-Series A funding, backed by Hero MotoCorp Ltd chairman Pawan Munjal and Google India managing director Rajan Anandan. By 2018, the company has raised $6 million in two rounds and was earning a $1.5 million revenue every month. It hosted the latest round of funding in August 2019 and raised over $58 million in funding led by Westbridge Capital. Rapido wants to spend this money on technical innovation and intends to reach 100 major cities in India soon.

Rapido began its service from Bengaluru and is now expanded to 40 cities across the country, including Hyderabad, Mysore, Vishakhapatnam, Vijayawada, Tiruchirappalli, Madurai, Coimbatore, Indore, Guwahati, Surat, Patna, and the NCR region.

The Rapido founders got their names listed in Forbe ‘30 Under 30 Asia – Consumer Technology 2019’.

voicemail

Gordon Matthews : The American Inventor Who Invented the Voicemail

Leave a Comment / Founder, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Some inventions have become such an integral part of our lives that we cannot imagine our lives otherwise. One can even go to the extent and say that we have almost taken such services for granted. The biggest such example is a subtle yet impactful invention- the Voicemail. This telephone service has been a part of our life for a very long time. It is almost impossible for us to imagine our mundane lives complete without this. But the voicemail is the result of sheer hard work and novelty. Gordon Mathews, the inventor of Voicemail, teaches us some of the most important lessons of life as we unfold the story of how a normal man went on to become the visionary who changed the way people communicate.

The Beginning

Gordon completed his graduation in engineering science from the University of Tulsa in the year 1959. Soon after his graduation, Gordon joined the U.S Marine Corps, and this life decision laid the first foundation stone for Voicemail. We can all agree on the fact that there comes a day in everyone’s life when they have the make it or the break it moment. For Gordon Mathews, this time was when he witnessed the accident of his fellow pilot.

A part of him believed that he had a role to play in it. Soon after he was discharged from the U.S Marine, Gordon went on to join IBM and contributed hugely in developing voice-activated cockpit controls that would play a major role in decreasing air catastrophes such as his friend’s. The incident managed to influence and affected him in such a way that the man decided to dedicate the rest of his career trying to find a solution for such problems in transmitting information between people.

Gordon Matthews
Image Source: ithistory.org

There are a lot of stories that revolve around how Mr Mathews invented Voicemail. The most famous and widely accepted one among them is of his travel to his office in Dallas on a rainy day. On his way to the office, Gordon noticed a trash-filled with pink slips full of while-you-were-out messages and other important information. This sparked an idea in him, and later, led to the invention of the Voicemail.

Gordon once said that if he sees anything that irritates him, he tries to fix it. This was exactly what happened with Voicemail. At the time of his invention, there was already the existence of a simple home answering machine that could only store messages. It uses an ordinary typewriter to do its function. The system found by Gordon did so much more than just record and save messages, i.e., send, forward, receive, store and even erase messages.

VMX

With the rocketing success of voicemail, Gordon started his very own company called ECS Telecommunications, which later on went on to be known as VMX. Soon enough, he received a patent for his invention of Voicemail and sold his first system to 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company). It is believed that his wife Monica was the one to send the first commercial voice message over it.

Later on, Mr Mathews went on to sell major shares of his company to huge firms such as 3M, Intel, Hoffman La Roche and Zenith Data Systems. But later in the year 1988, VMX went into the verge of a major bankruptcy and was soon acquired by a firm named Opcom. This firm was in turn obtained by Octel communications which were then, the largest provider of voicemail services and equipment across the world.

The Legacy

The legacy that Gordon Mathews left behind is huge. He is someone who believed that he could make the world a better place and actually went on to do the same. Even though he did not have much of a success story to tell as a businessman, everyone has a lot to learn from Gordo, as an inventor. The world is always in dire need of new inventions and people like Gordon Mathews, who indeed makes a huge difference in how we perceive the world.

sql

The Story of two Genius Scientists Behind SQL

Leave a Comment / Founder, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce are the original developers of the SQL Server, a product for storing and managing data. Both of them started working on it in the 1970s, and the first version of the software was released in 1974. SQL (Structured Query Language) was built as a domain-specific language to be used for accessing and manipulating data, data query and much more.

Apart from SQL, Chamberlin and Boyce are well known for their contribution in XQuery and Boyce-Codd normal form respectively.

Donald D. Chamberlin

Born in 1944 in San Jose, California, Chamberlin attended Campbell High School. He pursued electrical engineering in Harvey Mud College and later, completed his master’s as well as a PhD degree from the Stanford University. While he was in his college, he managed to land an internship in IBM Research in New York, and it is the same place where he started working after his PhD.

donald d chamberlin sql
Image Source: computerhistory.org

In the 1960s, at the time Chamberlin was in college, Computers were merely reachable by commoners. In fact, at that time, Harvey Mud College also had only a single computer, an IBM 1620. Chamberlin got lucky to have access to the computer and managed to write a program for tic-tac-toe for a human player on a keyboard.

During this time, two significant figures, Charlie Bachman and Ted Codd, were making exceptional contributions to the database management system. When Chamberlin joined IBM, one of IBM’s main concerns was to launch an efficient optimizing compiler for Codd’s Relational Model of data. Chamberlin was a part of the group working for the prototype, and hence, he was sent to CA, where he met Raymond F. Boyce.

Raymond F. Boyce

Boyce was born in 1947 and grew up in New York. He graduated from Providence College in 1968 and received his PhD from Purdue University in 1972. After receiving his doctorate, he also joined IBM and worked on database projects. Shortly, he came up with Boyce-Codd normal form in collaboration with Todd and was later sent to CA to work on the optimizing compiler.

And, when he met Chamberlin in CA, both of them set their course to develop SQL.

The Idea of SEQUEL

Raymond F Boyce Sql
Image Source: alchetron.com

SEQUEL stands for Structured English Query English which is one of IBM’s original database management systems.

While they were working on Codd’s relational ideas, they found one major drawback that made this relational model look very complicated. Since Codd was a mathematician, he explained everything with reference to the Cartesian plane and used many complex mathematical symbols and relations to elaborate his models. Since they were working to improve the data management system, both Chamberlin and Boyce thought of coming up with a language that would simplify the complexity of his models because Codd’s ideas were undoubtedly too strong. So, both of them started working on writing a language and named it SEQUEL for everyone (non-mathematicians) to use it using simple terminologies.

When they came up with SEQUEL, IBM didn’t have any product plan based on this language, so the company suggested them to produce the paper at a technical conference in Ann Arbor. Boyce went to the conference and realized that the relational database system (RDBMS) is truly the future of database management in every field. Soon after Ray returned from the conference, he died of a brain aneurysm.

Success of SEQUEL

IBM lost one of its greatest computer scientists, and Chamberlin, unfortunately, lost his partner. But, this didn’t hinder the growth and exposure of SEQUEL. Once the paper was released, IBM started working on testing the usefulness of the language in the practical world. They started building prototypes of the product (system R prototypes) based on this language. A team of 12 IBM programmers was made to work on this system R.

Products like System/38, SQL/DS and DB2 were commercially available during the late 1970s and early 1980s. After SEQUEL started launching commercial products, the shorter version of the commercial name became SQL.

During the early 1980s, the prices of computers fall unexpectedly, thus, allowing every organization to shift their paper records to a computer database. This led to the growth of database management systems, having a grip on the market and opening a vast source of profit for SQL.

Oracle also started making SQL database systems for the U.S government and sold them successfully. The language becomes so easy and efficient to command that the government launched FIPS 127, a federal database system that used SQL.

By 1986, both ANSI and ISO accepted SQL as the database language, and since then, new versions of it have been popping up into our systems.

caviar

Jason Wang : The ‘$10 to $90M’ Journey of a Passionate Entrepreneur

Leave a Comment / Founder, Product, Story, Tech Story / By

Entrepreneurship has always been a term that possibly the three-fourth of the world population look forward to. There are rarely any people who are happy with the idea of the 9 to 5 job. Every person must have thought about starting up their own business and being their own boss at least once in their lifetime. And it is fair too, as working for oneself and doing the work out of passion is what makes everyone successful. One such person, who was always in the favour of becoming his own boss is Jason Wang, an American serial-entrepreneur, who founded the food delivery service Caviar.

Jason Wang belongs to the Japanese descendent and graduated from Berkely University. He was still in school when he started his first business, i.e., an anime website, which served a total of 30,000 unique visitors every month. He received $1 for every ten visitors through ads, and hence, was earning $30 a day. But soon, the creators of Cardcaptor seized the domain name of his website, and his first business came to an end.

After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, (Haas School of Business), he worked with big-name companies, including Google and Microsoft. Though he had a good salary package and had a stable job, he was still dreaming of building his business. So finally, after leaving his corporate job, he founded a mobile app development company, 815 Productions, in 2010. With his company, he developed an app that extracted data from Craigslist. Though the app was quite useful, the venture also got shut in a few months. But still, he remained to be encouraged to do something big and on his own. He kept on thinking of new ideas that would be a kick-starter for his entrepreneurship.

Jason Wang Caviar
Image Source: bizjournals.com

During the same time, Groupon was taking over the world with its amazing deals. He was impressed by how the company was establishing itself in no time. Seeing the growth of the company, Jason was forced to look at the business model of Groupon, upon which he found out that most of the people were going for the food deals on the platform. This led him to think of a similar coupon business that only would provide deals in food items.

Jason concluded that it would be better to target the university students to get more customers in one place without investing in ads. So he launched MunchOnMe for the Berkeley University students first. At the same time, Paul Graham from Y Combinator came to the university for his keynote and asked the students to apply for the accelerator program at Y Combinator.

Jason Wang had already registered 3000 users to MunchOnMe and applied to Y Combinator with the same idea. He made it to Y Combinator for its summer batch. It was a life-changing experience for him, as he got to listen to the big tech entrepreneurs and learn more about the business. He also received an $18000 seed funding for MunchOnMe.

After launching MunchOnMe officially for the general public, Jason realised that the business was good, but could not sustain for a longer time. So after operating it for a few months, he decided to sell the company. While selling the company, he made it clear to the buyers that he won’t be a part of the company and will lose every right over it.

The money he earned from the company’s acquisition helped him and his teammates to survive for a year and a half. But after that, he ran out of money. According to an interview with Jason Wang, there was a time when he had only $10 in his business account. But fortunately, the place he was renting had enough space to make room for new tenants, and he rented half of the place for $600.

While working in his office in San Francisco, he and his teammates felt the craving for Ike Place’s sandwiches, but the restaurant was on a distance of 45 minutes. So it would take them to go and come back from the restaurant a total of one and a half hours plus one hour of standing in the long queue at the restaurant. They called the restaurant for delivery, but they did not have the service available at that time. This was the year 2012, even before Uber. So there were no resources that could help Jason and his teammates to get the sandwich in time.

This incident made Jason think of a delivery service that would help people to get the desired food at their doorsteps. This led to the launch of Caviar.

Jason started working on the idea and partnered with three restaurants, i.e., Ikes Place, HRD and Nick’s Cripsy Tacos. The idea was to get people what they wanted to eat, delivered at their doorsteps. And, initially, Jason and his team would deliver the food by themselves. It was easier for him to get new customers as he talked about the idea with his friends from the University, Office, and also from Y Combinator. In the beginning, they would deliver on the lunchtimes and only on the weekdays. But soon, the company started gaining more customers and partnered with more restaurants. This way, Caviar gained most of its users within the six months of its launch and became popular among the masses.

The company had a kickstart, and in two years, it raised more than a $13 million from the investors. Jason did not have a long journey with Caviar, but it was the most successful business of his life. He sold the company to Square in 2014 for a rumoured $90 million.

Though Jason Wang sold his company, he is still active as a growing entrepreneur and has made a few investments in different ventures. Alongside Caviar, he also launched a few restaurants and also co-owns a hospitality group called Umai. He is also the founding partner of Beluga Capital, the venture that helps the tech startups with funding. He is a big food lover and also founded a food blog named Cityfoodsters. Jason also got his name listed under the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2015.

Marshall Amplification

Jim Marshall : The Guitar Amp Pioneer and the ‘Father of Loud’

Leave a Comment / Founder, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

From a drummer to one of the most successful entrepreneurs and the inventer of the amplification system, the life journey of Jim aka James Charles Marshall has been quite an interesting one. Jim Marshall is the founder of the famous Marshall Amplification, a company that designs and manufactures music amplifiers and the other music-related products, including speakers cabinets, headphones, and earphones, etc. The company is also known for manufacturing customised products for its customers and is one of the biggest brands in the music industry.

Early Life & Career

Jim Marshal was born in a family of musicians and boxers settled in Acton, London, United Kingdom, on 29 July 1923. Being a part of a musical family, he got naturally inclined towards music. When he was a little kid, he got diagnosed with tubercular bones. So he had to spend most of his childhood in the hospital. At the time he grew a little older, the second world war took place. He also tried his luck in the army but was rejected due to his poor health condition.

Despite missing his school education, Marshall was able to get a day-time job as an electrical engineer at a small firm. He also worked part-time in the evening as a singer as well as a drummer. As an electrical engineer, he got to gain a lot of experience and designed and built a portable amplification system that he brought to his workplace in the evening. This was the first time when he built an amplification system by himself.

Jim Marshall
Image Source: allaboutbluesmusic.com

Soon in 1942, he joined a band as the lead drummer. At the same time, he started teaching music to people. Those people include some of the famous names of the music industry, including Mitch Mitchell and Micky Waller.

Career as an Entrepreneur

Through working with the band and the music classes, he was able to save enough money to start a music store in Hanwell, west London. Initially, he sold drums in the store and soon, on the request of many guitarists, he stocked guitars and their amplification system in the store. While selling those guitars and their amps, he often got to hear that these guitars were not producing the desired sound for them, not even with the amps. The customer wanted something bigger and louder. The customers had to buy different amps for different sounds. So on the suggestion of Ken Bran, the amp repairer, Marshall thought of building a single amplification system for all.

The Turning Point

Marshall started working on a new amplification system, along with his team, that included Ken Bran and the other worker at the store, Dudley Craven. Within a total of six attempts, using a Fender Bassman, Jim Marshall developed the first prototype of the Marshall Amplification in 1962. He named the system as JTM45. JTM is the acronym for Jim and Terry Marshall (Jim’s son).

The new Marshall Amplification became an instant hit and offered people with the sound they were seeking for. Soon the sales, as well as the products in the range of amplification, increased.

One of the most significant product from Marshall Amplification is the Marshall stack. The Marshall stack was designed specifically on the request of Pete Townshend, who wanted a 100 Watt head and an 8×12 cabinet amp. But instead of an 8×12 cabinet, Jim Marshall suggested him a 4×12. But Pete directed him to build what he wanted initially. At last, he had to come back to Marshall so that he could cut the cabinet into half and make it a 4×12. And eventually, the famous 100 Watt Marshall stack was developed.

In 1981, Marshall came up with the Master Volume Marshall amps and the classic Marshall JCM800 split-channel amps. The Marshall store also started including speakers and other music equipment for sale.

The Life After Success

In 1984, Jim Marshall became the recipient of the “Queen’s Award for Export” by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom for the extraordinary achievement of the Marshall Amplification.

Upon completing the 25 years of the company in 1987, it introduced a new Silver Jubilee series of amps, that included the 2555 (100-watt head) and the 2550 (50-watt head) models. The new models rendered the “semi-split channel” design, such that the user could set two different input gain levels through the same tone stack and master volume control.

In 1985, Marshall got his hands printed to the Rock and Roll Walk of Fame. Marshall also received an OBE honour from Buckingham Palace for his “services to the music industry and charity” in 2003.

Marshal participated in many charity works. When Marshall suffered from tuberculosis as a child, he was treated at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in Stanmore, London. So after earning enough money, he donated a few million dollars to the same hospital.

Marshall had become the biggest name in the field of music through his invention. Today, Marshall Amplification is the first choice of every musician. In fact, in the 60s and 70s, the big-sized Marshall stack had become a status symbol for the musicians. Marshall died at the age of 88 on 5 April 2012. Today he is remembered as one of the four forefathers of rock music equipment and is often cited as the father of Loud.

keka

Vijay Yalamanchili : The Founder of the Best Payroll and HR Software in India, ‘Keka’

Leave a Comment / Founder, India, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

We are often ambushed by many software companies in the market while searching for the best. Be it a tool for project management, your digital assistance, or an HR software, we often find ourselves in a huge dilemma. So, to reduce one of your conundrums, YourTechStory brings to you the flabbergasting story of Keka, the best HR software in India till date.

Vijay Yalamanchili, the founder of Keka, solely founded the company out of sheer disappointment and frustration from working with HR software not up to the mark. He found that the HR software available in the market have a very poor user interface, which leads to a substandard experience for both the HR and the employees. So, to contribute to the HR community of India, Yalamanchili built the software, Keka HR in 2015. Apart from HR software, Keka also has payroll software, applicant tracking software and much more.

Early Life and Career of Yalamanchili

Yalamanchili is mainly a product designer and architect by profession. He pursued his B.Tech in Electronics and Communication Engineering from JNTUH College of Engineering, followed by an MS from the University of Delaware.

Vijay Yalamanchili keka
Image Source: iamwire.com

After completing his MS, Yalamanchili started working with Microsoft in 2003 as a Software Development Engineer. He worked there only for three months.

In August 2006, he co-founded Fotolink Media, a visual image search platform used for product marketing by brands using mobile devices like mediums. It was one of the first mobile start-ups in India. He left the company after 4.5 years and founded Ramp India in 2006. The company was developed to provide solutions and build products for start-ups in India. After working in Ramp with a strong architectural team and delivering over 30+ products, Yalamanchili founded Technovert in July 2012. The zeal for excelling in the world of technology made Yalamanchili establish software solution companies one after the other. He co-founded Technovert with Sashi Pagadala. The company provides services in India, USA and Dallas.

By this time, Yalamanchili suffered enough with the HR software and founded Keka HR in 2015. It’s a Hyderabad based start-up which put a significant impact on the market when it got released, as it provided a better user experience to people.

Strategies to Outdo the Competitors

By the time Yalamanchili founded Keka, he was experienced enough to understand the major flaws in the other HR software. So, his main focus was on improving quality.

Yalamanchili’s first target was to make the user experience better because if the user experience degrades, after a point of time, it would ultimately ruin the brand name, which had already happened to all the other HR software out there.

Another major fault that Yalamanchili noticed in other HR software was the tracking of attendance. No existing software before Keka directly synced biometric devices to attendance log. Hence, it was very tiresome for the HRs to update it manually in the web browser. Keka got a very big bonus point by adding this feature. Though it took almost 1.5 years to build a software like this, it paid off well.

Keka also implemented well-designed security and privacy features that allowed the customer to get notified even if a Keka Customer representative is accessing their account. So, Keka itself also cannot sign in to customer’s account without their consent.

Instead of running behind more customers, Keka invested more time with its existing customers to improve their products until and unless it gave a smooth performance. It is very important to make the customers feel worthy and important because if they feel so, the scale will rise up automatically.

Success of Keka

It is nearly unbelievable that a company which acquired around 450 clients in less than a year is self-funded, given that Keka includes reputed clients like Godrej, Honda, Saavn and ClearTax. Keka is the recipient of the Hottest Start-up of Hyderabad Award and is in Top 3 in terms of bagging new customers with a comparatively smaller team with respect to its competitors.

Keka wanted to go old school, and hence, it tried becoming self-independent which turned out to be surprisingly successful. The company wanted to develop software with a touch of Indian style, and hence, they named it ‘Keka’ which means awesome in a native South Indian dialect. And, guess what? It just proved to be worthy of the name since the very first day.