success story

Jack Wong : CEO & Founder of Meizu; A company Making ‘The’ Futuristic Phones

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

The race about whom beats who, in the Smartphone industry is on since over a decade now, and there seem to be mixed answers about who, actually, is the best. As of now, there stands a number of companies that are delivering their best services, to increase their consumer base. Though Google, Apple and One Plus are some of the companies which are at the focus of the limelight, there are some other companies which are equally good and deliver the newest of the technologies remaining underground. There is no doubt that these companies provide cost-effective services and are efficient in their work. Meizu is one such company, that is beyond this era and is delivering future based phones. The founder and the CEO of the company, Jack Wong, shares a story that glorifies the fact that success doesn’t need a degree.

Jack was born on February 13, 1976, in Meixian, Meizhou, Guangdong Province in China. Since his childhood, Jack was very much into electronics and electronic devices. He was 16 when he got expelled from high school. So, due to this reason, he could not attend college and doesn’t have a degree.

Jack started working as a pier porter but was not satisfied with his job, because he wanted to work in the electronics industry. With this mindset, Jack moved to Shenzhen, the hub to electronics at that time. Starting from there, he, joined as the General Manager at ‘Argean’. The company focused on manufacturing speakers and MP3 players. Jack looked forward to innovative products and induced the systems with high battery and more storages.

It was mid-2002 when he decided to leave Argean, because of the divergences within the company, which made the environment unhealthy. He, at that time, had gained plenty of experiences in making music devices. At the end of 2002, Jack decided to invest 100,000 RMB to start a new company, naming it ‘Meizu’.

The first product of the company was the MP3 players. The company focused on the quality of work, rather than on the design. The M6 player series had immense quality but had a poor design. But they soon realized the importance of design and started working on it, to raise their level for the competition.

Jack, being the CEO, wanted to bring more success to the company. The experience that he had, he applied it all in the company’s working, that gained him notable sales in 2006, which was recorded to be more than 10 billion Yuan. Meizu stepped up in the game when they launched their first smartphone, Meizu M8. The phone had a touch screen of 3.4”, Windows CE 6.0 OS, and a RAM of 256 MB.

It was not until three years when they launched their next device, and this time, the device was based on Android OS, i.e. Android 2.3, with a 3.5” screen and QHD resolution.

Since then, the Meizu phones have become very popular based on their quality. It has rivalled many of the top-notch devices having lost and won the races. In recent times, the company has launched Meizu ‘Zero’ which has become the first ever smartphone device with no physical buttons. These phones are pressure sensitive and come with a wireless charger, having no volume and power buttons. The device hails no sim tray, which also, makes ‘Meizu’ the first company to introduce the concept of ‘E-sim’. The international availability of those phones, though is not confirmed yet.

“Jack prefers to be less sociable. He hasn’t given a single interview since entering the industry,” one of his co-workers said. However, Jack runs a Meizu forum, as the company is a user feedback based company and involve all the requirements that users wish to see in their devices.

Jack Wong, also known as Huang Zhang, like other successful drop-out entrepreneurs, has demonstrated another example to us that we don’t need any kind of professional qualification to put ourselves forth and prove ourselves. Knowledge comes from experience, and acquiring it can only be possible if you show the true passion towards it. Jack, gives this world the media and the ability to feel what the future may look like, by putting it in your own hands.

Raghav

Raghav is a student and a content writer. He loves to write about emerging as well as the existing technologies around and about the ones who bring them to you. Music is the other passion that Raghav processes. It is like the fuel to his body. He is also in writing songs and poems. He believes that life is short, so live the best out of what you have got. Raghav considers himself a sci-fi guy, having stories and tech all around in his head, all the time.

William Tanuwijaya : The Founder of First Indonesian Unicorn Startup Tokopedia

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

There are many rags to rich stories that have been inspiring us. The story of this Indonesian entrepreneur, William Tanuwijaya, is kind of similar to those stories, expect it was not entirely based on good luck, but included lots and lots of hard work. Being born in a middle-class family, and having faced many struggles in life, Tanujania wanted to achieve something better in life, and he knew that without hard work, achieving his goals was impossible.

Early Life

Tanuwijaya was born on 11 November 1981, in Pematang Siantar, North Sumatra. He belonged to a middle-class family. He completed his school education from a local public school.

For his further education, he applied in the Universitas Bina Nusantara (Binus) Jakarta and later, got accepted for the degree course in Informatics. As he belonged to a family with an average income, he decided to work as a part-timer to support his education. He even did a 9 pm to 9 am job, at Warnet, to earn extra money. He graduated from the University as a software engineer in 2003.

Career

Being a software engineer, like any other IT graduate, Tanuwijaya also wanted to work with big companies like Google. But since there was no Google branch in Jakarta, he started off his career as a software developer with a medium scale software company in Jakarta. He worked in the same profile with companies like TelkomSigma and Sqiva Sistem.

Gained much experience as a software developer, he shifted his interest in video games development and started working with Bolehnet. Later, in 2006, he joined Indocom Mediatama as the IT and Business Development Manager.

Founding Tokopedia

With an experience of over four years, Tanuwijaya gained enough confidence to start a new business for himself. In 2007, he started working on Tokopedia and called up his friend Leontinus Alpha Edison to work on the same, who later, became the co-founder of the company. The concept behind the startup was to create a platform, where Indonesian buyers and sellers could connect for free.

The basic plan to build this eCommerce platform was ready, but there were no investors who could help the startup to be launched immediately. At the time there were no IT-specific investors in Jakarta. So Tanuwijaya started pitching his plan in front of local investors. At the same time, his father was diagnosed with Cancer, so his plan of launching the platform in 2007, got delayed coming next two years, as the sole responsibility of his family had come on to his shoulders.

The first person Tanuwijaya approached for the funding was his boss from his previous company. His boss liked the idea and helped him to approach more people. Since Tanuwijaya did not belong to a business family, many of the people doubted his ability to handle such a big idea.

It took him two years to raise the required funding to start his business, and finally, on February 6, 2009, he launched Tokopedia. Tokopedia received its initial seed funding worth IDR 2.5 billion from PT Indonusa Dwitama. In the following three years, the company was able to get funding from global venture capitals like East Ventures, CyberAgent Ventures, NetPrice, and SoftBank Ventures Korea, etc.

In 2014, Tokopedia became the first technology company to receive a US$100 million investment from Sequoia Capital and SoftBank, in Southeast Asia.

Tokopedia is Indonesia’s first company that has grown too fast. In 2015, the company reported having more than 4.9 million active product listings, and in 2018, it recorded over 80 million monthly active users and over 4 million merchants registered on the platform.

The company also received a USD $1.1 Billion in funding from Alibaba Group in 2017. In the same year, the company became a Unicorn startup having a valuation above 1 billion US dollars.

Personal Life

William got married to Felicia H.W. on November 28, 2015. Currently, Tanuwijaya is heading the company as the CEO. Establishing Tokopedia as the biggest marketplace in Indonesia, he has become one of the richest people of Indonesia, having an estimated worth of 130 million US Dollars.

Yashica Vashishtha

Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.

www.xornor.co

Nir Zuk : The Founder of Palo Alto Networks, the American Cybersecurity Company

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

Another college drop-out and one of the most successful tech entrepreneur, Nir Zuk, always had a dream of starting his own business. It can be judged through his career graph that he likes to handle things on his own rather than following the order of some superior authority. This genius kid from Israel is a serial entrepreneur, who is really allergic to bureaucracy. The founder of Palo Alto Networks is happy in running a small business than working for a multimillion company.

Early Life

Zuk was born and brought up in Rehovot, Israel. He was in high school when he convinced his parents to buy him a Dragon 64 computer, as a few years ago, one of his friends has also got one. He started learning computer programming by reading books and was capable enough to write small codes, only in a year.

When he was sixteen, he started writing commercial programs and earned enough money. At the same time, the first computer viruses very emerging, which caught Zuk’s attention immediately, and he became of the first persons who wrote one of the earliest virus programs.

According to the rule of the Israeli government, Zuk had to go through military training. But as he was a whiz kid, he got a job in the military’s IT department. Alongside his job in the military, he started going to college, where he took mathematics as his majors.

Career

Zuk spent a whole five years in the military, and before he could complete his degree, on the basis of his experience, he was recruited by Checkpoint, in 1994. Here he became the part of the team that was handling a major project and along with them, invented a technology called stateful inspection, which is the basis of network security technology today.

In 1997, Zuk moved to the US, to work at the U.S. head office of CheckPoint in Redwood City, California. After moving to the US, he worked with the same company for two more years and left the job.

Soon after leaving Checkpoint, Zuk went on to found his own startup company OneSecure, in 1999 and started working on the intrusion prevention system that sits behind the firewall, to make sure that the traffic passing the firewall is attack free. The system is the first of its kind.

In 2002, OneSecure was acquired by NetScreen. Even after the acquisition, Zuk retained his position of CTO in the company. Being in the company, Zuk had adviced NetScreen, to build their own firewall, such that it would be more profitable for them, but NetScreen was not ready to take the risk. Hence, after a year, Zuk left the company, to found his own company, and to build its own firewall.

Founding Palo Alto Networks

In 2005, Zuk, after teaming up with 25 of his colleagues from NetScreen, founded Palo Alto Networks. He had raised a total amount of $9.4 million for the startup. Within two years of the inception of the company, in 2007, it released its first firewall product, which was the world’s first “next-generation firewall”.

By 2011, Palo Alto Networks had become one of the most prominent cybersecurity firms and was listed as a leader on its enterprise firewall Magic Quadrant by Gartner. The company went public on the NYSE on July 20, 2012, having raised $260 million with its initial public offering.

In 2014, along with Fortinet, Mcafee, and Symantec, Palo Alto Networks founded the Cyber Threat Alliance, a not-for-profit organization for improving cybersecurity.

The revenue earned by the company in 2018, was estimated to be over US$2.27 billion. Currently, it is providing its service in the field of network security, cybersecurity, cloud computing. The company has got its headquarters situated in Santa Clara, California, U.S.

Yashica Vashishtha

www.xornor.co

Tim Norton : The Kiwi Serial Entrepreneur & Founder of 90 Seconds

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

Startups these days have certainly become a trend. Several good ideas are revolving around the investors to get their initial fundings. Many of which are successful in receiving the same, but happens to the ones who are not able to get one and end up with failure? Surely owner of those idea gets disheartened and drop their plan of startup.

But when you are really talented and have helped many other companies with their businesses, you get the confidence to start your own a hundred times even if you have failed multiple times.

The New Zealander self-made entrepreneur, Tim Norton, is one such personality, who kept on working on his ideas and built multiple startups until he founded 90 Seconds.

Early Career

Tim Norton, the serial entrepreneur, is a native of New Zealand, often described as the Steve Jobs of New Zealand. He was born and brought up in Matamata, a town in New Zealand’s North Island. He completed his graduate degree in commerce from the University of Canterbury, in 1999.

Soon after he graduated, Tim started working at Energy Intellect Ltd. as the Product & Growth Manager and led many projects there. With his leadership quality, Norton was able to raise $1 million revenue within first 12 months of his entry in the company. Later in the same company, he also handled the post of IT systems administrator and managed the development team. He also successfully raised capital funding for the company.

Beginning of Entrepreneurship

After working for three long years in Energy Intellect, Norton left the job in May 2003. Having gained much experience as a leader, he thought of starting his own business. In the same year, in the month of July, he started his consultant firm Little Ones, where he managed projects for web application development companies.

Although the company was doing really well, he wanted to try out other businesses too. After Little Ones, he started another venture, EvolutionOne, that hosted many open source business apps on the cloud, to provide the various organisations with a single platform, where they could manage their business online.

After these two startups, Norton went to found a few other startups, too, including Decisive Flow, StartupMedia, Airspace and Love to Ride.

Although, not all of his startups succeded, and he ended up borrowing up to a million dollars of debt.

Founding 90 Seconds

In 2010, Norton founded his most successful startup, 90 Seconds Limited, the Cloud Video Production Service. At the time, he was still under a huge debt. In the beginning, Norton shot small videos for free and posted on the platform. He knew that people do not like to watch ads in between the videos and also avoided watching longer videos, so he selected a 90 seconds’ time frame for the videos to be uploaded on the platform, and from here only he discovered the name for his startup.

At the same time, Norton started travelling to various other countries to shoot videos on different topics and to promote his startup in other countries too. In the early stage of the inception of the company, 90 Seconds opened an office in London.

The startup was a huge success, and within one year of its launch, Norton was able to pull off all his debt.

In 2015, the company reported the production of over 10,000 videos for more than 1,000 brands, in 80 countries. The recorded growth rate of the company had reached to 10% month on month, in the same year.

In 2016, 90 Seconds raised a $7.5million funding from Sequoia Capital. At the same time, it also got investment from 40 other investment firms. By Feb 2016, 90Seconds had established offices in five countries and seven cities.

The life story of this Kiwi entrepreneur is really inspiring in terms of the failure he faced in some of his startups, and even then he kept on experimenting to find the one business that would transform his career entirely.

Yashica Vashishtha

www.xornor.co

Brian Armstrong : The Nerd Who Co-founded Coinbase; the Future “Google” of Crypto

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

It is rare to find a single person with a technical background who also has a great sense of business. Such a person is capable of building a robust business model that will pay off really well and sustain in the changing technology and business needs. Brian Armstrong, a nerd from San Jose, who had been experimenting with various businesses, since his teens, and also had an immense interest in programming languages, ended up in building the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange; Coinbase.

Early Life

Armstrong was born on 25 January 1983 and was brought up in the San Jose, in California. He was still in school when he developed an interest in computer programming. He started learning Java and CSS, that led him to get work from local firms from San Jose when he was still in school and created websites for them. His neighbour’s garage was his first office.

Brian Armstrong — Image Source: techcrunch.com

In 2001, after completing his school, he went to Rice University, where he completed a graduate degree in Computer Science along with another graduate degree in Economics. He also received a master’s in Computer Science from the same university.

Early Career

During his bachelor’s in Computer Science, Armstrong had done a four months’ internship as the Team Lead at IBM San Jose. There he developed tools for Network Attached Storage devices based on Java. Later, when he completed his graduate degree in Computer Science, he started working as an Enterprise Risk Management Consultant at Deloitte and Touche.

In 2003, he co-founded UniversityTutor.com. The website helped people find personal tutors in their area. On 16 May 2011, Brian joined Airbnb as the software engineer and worked there for a year.

Founding Coinbase

Armstrong was always interested in starting some business and actively thought of many ideas for that. By the end of 2010, he came across to the concept of Bitcoin. Being a technical product, it was quite amusing for him. At the same time, he got familiar to the fact that there were not many marketplaces for the exchange of bitcoin.

Being a computer programmer and an economist, he was capable of conceiving a plan to create an exchange marketplace for Bitcoin. In July 2011, Brian came together with Fred Ehrsam, who worked at Goldman Sachs, to co-found Coinbase.

It was the time when a single Bitcoin priced at $10 and buying Bitcoins required serious tech chops. Coinbase was the alternative for such transactional platforms, where people could use the traditional bank accounts to purchase cryptocurrency, similar to using PayPal. The two founders got Coinbase to enter into Y Combinator startup incubator, in 2012, to raise funding for the company.

In October 2012, the two launched the company and started operations of buying and selling the cryptocurrency through bank transfers. In 2013, the company received funding worth US$5 million from the venture capital firm Union Square Ventures.

Due to the ease of use, by the year 2014, the company had a million users using its services. In the same year, the company acquired Kippt, the blockchain explorer service. It also launched the vault service for secure storage of bitcoin as well as added a feature to process Bitcoins to payment apps like Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal.

In 2015, the company launched the Coinbase Exchange, through which the professional traders could exchange the cryptocurrency. By 2016, the company had added Ethereum to its platform and also rebranded the exchange name to Global Digital Asset Exchange (GDAX). Currently, the exchange process the transaction of multiple cryptocurrencies, but has stopped the same for Ethereum, due to suspicion of the attack on the network.

The company is currently processing its wallet in 32 different companies.

Personal Life

In 2017, Armstrong was listed as Fortune 40 under 40, and later, recode under the 100 list. By the end of 2018, he was among the list of billionaires, and his net worth was estimated between $900 million and $1 billion. Currently, he serves as the CEO of Coinbase, the company having over 200 employees.

Yashica Vashishtha

www.xornor.co

Adobe : The Software Giant Transforming the Way You Look at the World

start-up, Story, Tech Story / By Raghav

Technology, today, has grown to such level that it has changed the way you look at the world. Not only the world, but it has changed the way you look at yourself! Shocking, isn’t it? There are many powerful tools available in the software market that people can use to make you believe in the things that can’t even exist. The creativity, the risks, the hard work, the growing power of multimedia, the inspirations and the motivations, when all were put together, the greatest software of all time, ‘Adobe’, became a reality. Great as it might seem, the story of the success of Adobe was not an easy one, but is the best one you can get inspiration from.

Adobe is an American Multinational computer software company. The headquarter of the company is located in San Jose, California, United States. The foundation of the company is purely based on creating software that enhances the creation of median and intensifies creativity.

Adobe was founded by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, in December 1982. The company’s first office was the Warnock’s garage. It all started when both of the computer geniuses developed a programming language that was specially designed to describe position, shape and size of objects on a computer-generated page. The software was known as ‘Postscript’. But the company, Xerox, they were working in, refused to take the product to the market. Both John and Charles resigned and started working on their own on the same project.

‘Adobe’ name was inspired by Adobe Creek, Los Altos, California, a location near to their homes. The logo (A creative and stylized “A”) was designed by John’s wife, Marva Warnock.

The first product that Adobe launched in the market was a ‘PostScript’ software. It was a powerful computer language, the same that they had designed while working in Xerox. It described to a printer the whole layout of an electronic page. The product surprisingly made a breakthrough, and by 1985, Adobe had $1.9 million in sales. By 1986, the revenue that the company was generating was around $16 million, out of which, $4 million were income based.
Steve Jobs wanted to buy the company, but both of the creators refused. However, after giving second thoughts to the idea, and having words with their investors, John and Charles agreed to sell 19% of the company’s shares to him. For that, Jobs paid at least five times of their company’s value at that time. This deal made it the first company to gain such a profit in its first year only.

This was just a start for the company. Next, it launched a second product which was a type-1 interface. The interface provided digital type fonts that could be printed in any resolution. Subsequently, the company launched the marvellous ‘Adobe Illustrator’, which produced high-quality drawings that can be printed and published very easily. The product stood out brilliantly and generated approximately $85 million as revenues. This was a clear sign that with each product, Adobe was growing and that too on a rapid pace. The company, soon, became one of the best software manufacturers over the world. The quality of the work was very high which made the two founders of the company sit and relax, on the ‘top’.

Their next release, ‘Adobe Photoshop’, still stands best in the market. The software is a photo editor, which became the best seller in the market in no time. In the year 1990, the company had more than $170 million in revenue, including the $40 million total income. Within a period of 4 years, the revenue reached $670 million.

Every story has a point of downfall, and in 1998, such point arrived for Adobe, too. In 1998, Hewlett Packard (HP) made a similar PostScript software. Due to which, Adobe saw a reduction in sales by a massive 40 per cent. The company experienced a setback but was quick to react. Soon, it started rebuilding strategies, restructuring plans and started cutting down on employees.

In 1999, for a comeback, Adobe decided to launch a publishing tool, ‘InDesign’, with a risk of a similar tool already running in the market, sold by Quark. So, Adobe was not expecting much from it. However, when released, InDesign did the impossible. The product became a huge success, gaining Adobe more than $ 1 billion as revenues, over the time, reshaping and reviving the company.

Since then, Adobe has not looked back. Some of the software that they have in the market right now, are Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Flash player, Adobe Dreamweaver, Page maker, Adobe Scan, Adobe Premiere Clip, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Capture CC, Adobe creative cloud, Adobe connect and the ever-lasting Adobe Photoshop, which carries many more versions of it further.

Adobe has also been involved in social welfare activities. The company works to make its employees’ life more and more convenient by creating a healthy work environment. It has given cash grants and many contributions like volunteer support, software training, donated software to a non-profit organization. The company also supports the environmental stewardship.

As of now, Adobe is ranked number 10 by Forbes on the list of ‘Top 100 Digital Companies’. The company has more than $ 7.7 Billion sales in the market and a market cap of $ 119.1 Billion.

Adobe’s story gives us a glimpse of how something unique can create a spark among consumers. Also, that when you are walking on a path, where nothing goes right, it just requires a proper plan to get back on the track. One should never leave the creative ideas in their head, and the story of Adobe shows that and helps us get them out with the versatility of the software they offer.

Raghav

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