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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.

Reid Hoffman : The Mind Behind the Largest Corporate Social Network

Founder, Inspiration, Social media, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Sometimes, it takes a long process for a person to understand and choose the right way that leads to his goals. Only a few can dream to help others achieve their dreams and bring out a positive change in the world. But if one truly wants to accomplish his dreams, he will find out a way. Same is the story of the infamous American internet entrepreneur and the venture capitalist- Reid Hoffman, who had initially dreamt about changing the world through his motivational speeches and eventually, reached out to a bigger platform and definitely have brought out his share of change.

Early Life

Reid Hoffman was born to William Parker Hoffman Jr. and Deanna Ruth, on 5 August 1967. He was born in Palo Alto, California and spent most of his childhood in Berkeley. He did his high school from The Putney School and earned his Bachelor Science degree in Symbolic Systems & Cognitive Science, from Stanford University. He was awarded a Marshall Scholarship and hence went to the Wolfson College, Oxford University to pursue a Master in Studies in Philosophy in 1993. He had also received a Dinkelspiel Award in his graduation from Stanford University.

Career

As a child, he always loved playing the tabletop roleplaying games. So in 1982, when he was just 12, he got his first job as an editor at a game developing company named as Chaosium. His work at the company was quite impressive, and in 1984, with the release of Chaosium’s ‘Borderlands’, a role-playing game, he got his name featured on its box, at the time he was just 14. He always wanted to become an influential person so that he can bring a change in the world. He had thought of becoming a professor. But soon he realised that writing books and reaching people can be a long way. So he diverted his mind towards entrepreneurship.

Reid Hoffman
Image Source: twimg.com

After graduating, he went to do an internship at Inglenook, a winery, followed by a job at Apple Computer. In Apple, he worked on a social network named as eWorld. After working for some time in Apple, he took a job at Fujitsu and in 1997, found his first company named as SocialNet.com. Soon after, setting up SocialNet.com, he joined PayPal as the COO, in 2000. His boss at PayPal, Peter Thiel says about Hoffman that he was a firefighter-in-chief at PayPal. At Paypal, he was responsible for most of the high-level jobs like payment infrastructure, government, legal issues, etc., that he handled efficiently under a great pressure.

Founding of LinkedIn

After eBay acquired Paypal, in 2002, Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, a professional social media network, with his old colleagues from SocialNet.com and Fujitsu. He also received some investment from his colleagues from Paypal, Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois. LinkedIn became a huge success and Hoffman became its founding CEO. Today, Hoffman holds a share worth $2.34 billion in Linked in and he serves as the Executive Chairman of the company. By 2014, LinkedIn had spread in more than 200 countries, with over 332 million members. In June 2016, Microsoft offered him an amount of $26.2 billion in cash for the acquisition of LinkedIn.

Investment, Writing & Motivational Speeches

LinkedIn was a huge success, after which, Hoffman found his interest in investment. He is one of the Angel investors, who are happily ready to invest in potential startups. It is said that Hoffman was the one who arranged the $500,000 angel investment meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel. Along with Peter, he had also invested in Facebook initially.

Reid Hoffman always wanted to become a positive influence the for its betterment. His desire of becoming a motivational speaker and writing books was always alive. He started writing from local blogs, followed by his ‘LinkedIn’s Series B Pitch to Greylock: Pitch Advice for Entrepreneurs’ and ‘LinkedinInfluencr’ blogs on LinkedIn. In February 2012, he released his first book ‘The Start-Up of You’ with co-author Ben Casnocha, that became the bestseller in New York and was critically acclaimed. In July 2014, he came with another release, ‘The Alliance’ with Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh.

Hoffman also started a podcast named as ‘Masters of Scale’ on 5 May 2017, where he discusses various counterintuitive business theories with successful entrepreneurs.

Personal Life

Hoffman got married to Michelle Yee, in 2004, and the two live in Palo Alto, California. Hoffman is also in Philanthropy and is a member of many NGOs. In 2016, he donated $20 million to a charity Biohub.

Matt Mullenweg : The Founder and CEO of WordPress

Founder, start-up, Tech Story / By

Breaking the stereotype, many common people coming from nowhere, have become the most important and influential leaders of the tech industry. Few names like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc., pop up in each person’s mind as their innovations are playing an so important role in our lives. These innovations have also introduced new trends. One such trend is blogging. And when we hear the word ‘blog’ how can anyone forget the name of WordPress?

WordPress is an open source platform for creating websites, preferably used by most of the bloggers, small businesses, etc. It is one of the best CMS available, which does not require much knowledge of coding language to set up one’s own website. Introduction of WordPress revolutionized the whole internet and today 30% of the internet sites work on the WordPress. That’s a huge achievement. And all the credit goes to the man behind the idea – Matt Mullenweg.

Early Life

Born on 11th January 1984, in Houston, Texas, US, Matt went to High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. He studied jazz saxophone in his school. Further, he went to the University of Houston to pursue the degree in Political Science. But, soon he dropped out in 2004 and accepted a job at CNET Networks. He worked at CNET for two years then quit to start his own venture Automattic.

Matt was never into computer programming. When he was just 18, he used to post blogs on b2/cafelog, an open-source blogging platform. But, after some time, he came to know that the lead developer of this platform had quit and the company had stopped developing it any further. This is when Matt decided to develop the b2 codebase blogging platform according to the web standards of that time. He posted this information on his own blog and soon was joined by his fellow coder Mike Little. They made some key improvements and added some more features to the platform, and this is how the revolutionary WordPress was born, in January 2003.

Rise of Career

Soon after, Matt and Mike were joined by the original b2 developer Michel Valdrighi in the development of WordPress. Matt was just a newbie in his college at that time, and he had already co-founded his another venture Global Multimedia Protocols Group, in March 2004. Next, Matt launched a hub, where one could get notifications about blog updates called Ping-O-Matic.

Matt Mullenweg
Image Souce: wikimedia.org

WordPress was still seeking a huge audience to get on the global level. In May 2004, a strong competitor of WordPress, called Movable Type, made some changes in their prices, which led thousands of people looking out for an alternate platform. Fortunately, WordPress was available and caught everyone’s attention.

Now that WordPress was receiving a good response, CNET offered to recruit Matt to work on WordPress for them. He grabbed the opportunity and dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco. A couple of months later, came the big announcement of bbPress. And, in February 2005, Matt along with the WordPress team released WordPress 1.5 ‘Strayhorn’. It introduced several top features like themes, moderation features, and redesign of front and back end.

Matt left CNET, in October of the same year to focus completely on WordPress. Just within a few days, he announced Akismet – an effort to stop comment and trackback spam. Later, in December, there came another venture called Automattic, the original company behind all his other ventures. Matt under Automattic, recruited all the people who had contributed to the development of WordPress.

In January 2006, Toni Schneider was appointed as the new CEO of Automattic. Exactly two years later, the company raised about $29.5 million from Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and New York Times Company. This was due to the increasing popularity of WordPress among the bloggers and various other funding offers from investors. By that time WordPress had a team of 18 people working.

In early 2009, WordPress was growing faster than anyone had ever imagined and was witnessing 10% growth each month. The platform was hosting around 15,000 new blogs daily. The growth kept increasing each year, tremendously. In April 2012, it was reported that WordPress empowered more than 70 million sites and made a revenue of $45 million that year.

Matt took the CEO position in Automattic, in 2014, and raised $160 million to take the company’s value to a billion dollars.

Personal Life

Matt has won several awards due to his achievements. Business Insider named him among the top 10 most influential people for changing the face of the internet. In February 2011 he was listed in the Forbes 30 Under 30 for the impact, he has made on the blogging world.

Matt supports a number of non-profit organizations and philanthropic organizations like Archive.org, Innocence Project, Charity: Water foundation, and many more. He is currently living in San Francisco.

Qantas Airlines : The Flying Kangaroo of Australia

start-up, Story / By

Airlines are one of the biggest business and a symbol of pride for every country. For some countries, its aviation industry plays a pivotal role in its development. One such country is Australia which has the third oldest airline in the world named Qantas Airways. It is the flag carrier of Australia, and, also is the largest airline in terms of fleet size and international flights. Qantas is the abbreviated name for the airline’s it stands for Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services. The airline is also popularly known by its nickname ‘The Flying Kangaroo’.

Early Years

In the early 1920s, three people came together to set up Qantas, that would become one of the most influential airlines in the future. These people were Hudson Fysh, Paul McGinnes, and Fergus McMaster. On 16th November 1920, Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Limited was founded in Winton, Queensland.

The airline set up their headquarters in Winton, Queensland and owned their first aircraft named Avro 504K. The next year they shifted to Longreach, Queensland and after nine years later, i.e. in 1930, they shifted the headquarters to Brisbane, Queensland. Initially, the tickets booking was available in their office set up in a small building in Longreach.

The year 1934 brought a prosperous offer for Qantas Airways. The company, along with British Imperial Airways, formed a new company and called it Qantas Empire Airways, also known as QEA. The air service started between Brisbane and Darwin the same year. The company began international flight service next year in 1935 when it extended airline to Singapore.

But with the World War II, Qantas Airways suffered a huge loss as five of its total ten aircraft were destroyed in the enemy attacks. The rest five were taken by the Australian government for the war services. It was way after, in 1943, that the services resumed again. The logo of Qantas airways consists of a kangaroo, which was first used on the “Kangaroo Route” in 1944 between Sydney and Karachi.

Qantas
Image Source: cloudfront.net

Nationalization & Expansion

The Australian government shortly nationalized Qantas Airways in 1947. It was the decision of the then Labor Prime Minister Ben Chiefly. This led to a complete nationalization of the airways which transferred the domestic flights to Trans Australia Airlines. Qantas now operated within just international networks. This gave the airlines more opportunities to expand its services and the company flew its aircraft to Tokyo, then Hong Kong. Later the headquarters was formed in Sydney and in June 1959, entered into the jet age, with its first Boeing 707-138 aircraft.

Qantas, in 1992, merged with the Trans Australian Airlines and was semi-privatised between 1993 and 1996, with 51% of stakes owned by Australian shareholders. In 2001, Qantas founded a budget airline service, called Jetstar Airways, to compete with the newly entered Virgin Blue Airways in the Australian airline industry. It successfully acquired about 65% of the market share with Virgin Blue acquiring 30%. Qantas is also one of the founding members of Oneworld Airline Alliance.

The company slowly launched its services to other parts of the world including the Asian market. In 2004, it launched Jetstar Asian Airways covering major Asian countries. And it is expanding and increasing its services to other parts of the world too.

Qantas Airways headquarters is situated at Qantas Centre in the Bayside suburb of Mascot, Sydney, New South Wales. The airline has played a major role in the development of Australian aviation industry. The airways carry about 47 million passengers every year and have provided employment to more than 30,000 people. It operates about staggering 7300 flights each week which fly to more than 1000 destinations around the world.