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Hugh Herr: The Leader of the Bionic Age

Founder, Health, Inspiration, Product, Story, Tech Story / By

There have been many scientists whom inventions by mixing the technology and biology has helped the humankind to achieve the things that were unimaginable at some time. The technology has become a helping hand for those who have born with disabilities or have got one due to some mishappening. Hugh Herr is one extraordinary person, who was born like any other fit person, but misfortune hit him bad. Even though the doctors had given up on him, he overcame his disability by inventing the perfect aid for himself, which now is also helping others as well.

Early Life

Herr was born and brought up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in a Christian family. In the beginning, he was not much into studies and found his love for rock climbing at an early age. At the tender age of 8, he climbed the face of Mount Temple (11,627-foot high) and became the best climbers in the United States, when he was just 17.

The Climb

In January 1982, with a fellow climber Jeff Batzer, Hugh caught into a blizzard, while climbing the Mount Washington, in New Hampshire. Due to the snowstorm, the two lost their ways and spent three nights into the Great Gulf, at a temperature of ?29 °C. On the fourth day, the rescue team found and saved them. Spending three days at such a lower temperature caused them major injuries. Due to the frostbite, Hugh was amputated below both of his legs and Jeff got his left leg, fingers of his right hand and the toe on his right foot, amputated.

Hugh Herr
Image Source: bostonmagazine.com

Hugh went through a number of surgeries. The doctors could do everything but give him another pair of legs. Hugh could not climb the mountains anymore and had to be dependent on others. He could not accept that and, his love for mountaineering, made him create a specialized prostheses feet for himself. The prostheses feet helped him not only walk but, were also capable of ascending steep ice walls efficiently.

With time, Hugh managed to create a pair of feet that had toes with a high stiffness that could stand on a small rock of the size of a coin. He even scaled many, difficult to reach, mountains with the help of those titanium feet. Soon, he regained the title of the best climber of the US once again.

Career

Along with making improvements in his prostheses feet, Herr joined college and received a graduate degree in Physics. He then attended MIT, to pursue a degree in Mechanical Engineering and received a PhD in biophysics from Harvard University.

After obtaining his Doctorate degree, he started working on advanced leg prostheses and orthoses, at MIT. He headed the Biomechatronics research group at the MIT Media Lab. The group focusses on creating more functional and comfortable wearable robotic emulating devices for the disabled people.

Hugh founded BionX Medical Technologies, Inc. also known as iWalk, Inc. In 2006, that create devices that emulate and serve to supplement the human functionality. His company manufactures the computer-controlled assistive devices to aid the disabled persons.

Hugh Herr is a true achiever, and his story is an inspiration for many. He has received numerous awards for his contribution to Science and Technology, including the 13th Annual Heinz Award in 2007, and the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Leadership Award, in 2005.

Personal Life

Hugh is married to Patricia Ellis Herr, who is an author by profession. The couple has two daughters together. At present, Herr is working as the associate professor in MIT’s Program in Media Arts and Sciences. In 1991, Osius, Alison wrote his biography with title Second Ascent: The Story of Hugh Herr.

Will Shu : The Co-Founder of the Multi-Million Delivery Empire

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Spotting a delivery boy, with his company’s branding food box, has become quite a common thing these days. But, a few years ago, these delivery services were limited to a few restaurants only. The saying ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ can’t be denied, if your late night craving leads you to launch a food delivery service very next day. Same happened with the founder of Deliveroo, Will Shu, who was working as an investment banker in London, and an idea to start a food delivery service clicked his mind, during one of his late night shifts.

Early Life

Will Shu aka William Shu, is a 38 years old American entrepreneur, who was born in 1979 in a Taiwanese household, in Connecticut, United States. He attended the Northwestern University, where he received a bachelor’s degree. After graduating in 2001, he started working at Morgan Stanley in New York as an investment banking analyst. After working for a few years, in 2010, he decided to return back to the US and completed a master’s degree in Business Administration from Wharton Business School.

After his MBA, he joined S.A.C. Capital Advisors as an analyst. In 2012, he started working as an investment banker at the London branch of Morgan Stanley.

Founding Deliveroo

While working for Morgan Stanley in London, Will Shu faced difficulty with arranging food at mid-nights at his office. An idea of starting a delivery service hit his mind and discussed the same with his childhood friend and software engineer, Greg Orlowski. The idea looked fine, and Will contacted his landlord who also owned a cafe. His landlord became his first client and ultimately, Shu became the company’s first delivery boy.

Will Shu
Image Source: whartonmagazine.com

The restaurants like Pizza Hut were already delivering food to their clients, but, Deliveroo became a delivery service that helped all size’s restaurants to deliver food to their customers through a single delivery service.

In the beginning, partnering with his landlord’s cafe, Will delivered food in the surrounding area, to understand the business on both the sides; the restaurant and the customer. Slowly, he reached more restaurant owners and managed to sign a contract with them. According to the contract, he would deliver the food to the customers that will cost a small amount to the restaurant. He worked, as a delivery boy, alone for 9 months and his delivery service became famous, receiving really good feedback from the customers. After nine months, he started hiring more employees for the company. By 2014, the service expanded to other cities of London and in 2015, Deliveroo reached Paris, Berlin and Dublin.

In 2017, the company’s worth was estimated to be around £1.5 billion, and it had expanded to 12 countries and was working in more than 150 cities. Deliveroo helped many independent restaurants to reach more customers, in the neighbouring localities. These small, independent restaurants, have always been the main focus of the business plan of Deliveroo. Will intends to build a separate kitchen for the delivery operations for those independent restaurants.

Personal Life

Will holds the American nationality and lives in Notting Hill, London. He still continues to deliver food once in two weeks for Deliveroo.

The Founders Behind the Worldwide e-Commerce Marketplace : Groupon

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In the industry, where most of the businesses want to earn more profit by avoiding bargaining and discounts on their services, Groupon.com brought a new way of earning profits with their different business model. The company is solely based covering the idea of selling discount deals on the services of local as well as multinational companies. The idea was unusual which gained huge popularity and benefits in a short interval of time.

It was Andrew Mason, who came up with the idea of creating such a business model for his first start-up company. Andrew Mason, who was first appointed as the CEO of the company, convinced Eric Lefkofsky, to invest $1 million in the idea, making the latter the co-founder of Groupon.

Early Life

Andrew was born in Pennsylvania and did his schooling from Mt. Lebanon High School, in 1999. In 2003, he received a bachelor’s degree in music from Northwestern University. After graduating from college, he joined a web designing company InnerWorkings, as a web developer. The company owner, Eric Lefkofsky, became his future partner and co-founder of Groupon.com. Andrew left the job to join the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy to pursue a master’s degree. However, he dropped out from the course after a few months of joining and again started working at Lefkofsky’s.

Founding Groupon.com

In 2006, the time, Andrew was working as a web developer, he was also dealing with the cancellation of a cell phone contract. He became frustrated with the client service and was looking for a solution. Soon, an idea lit Andrew’s mind and he started working on ThePoint, his first entrepreneurial venture. Lefkofsky also became interested in the project and offered a $1 million amount for the start-up. The two along with another business partner of Lefkofsky, Brad Kwywell, became the co-founders of ThePoint.

ThePoint was a platform developed for the purpose of getting people together to accomplish a certain goal, using the social media. Eventually, the main objective of ThePoint became saving money through various discounts from local vendors. In 2008, ThePoint was renamed to Groupon and was launched as the platform that focussed entirely on group buying.

The idea of Groupon was new in the market, and, in just one and a half year, the company valued at over $1 billion. The company became the first one, to join the $1 billion club in such a small time. In November 2011, Groupon was public, having the biggest IPO by an Internet company, since Google (2004). The concept behind Groupon was to provide deals to the consumers and sell the services of the companies, taking 50 per cent of every deal. Till 2014, it was noted that the company revenue hiked by 25% every passing year.

To avoid any kind of competition, Andrew and Lefkofsky started acquiring the local deal-of-the-day companies. Starting with the Europe-based MyCityDeal in 2010, Groupon also acquired other companies like ClanDescuento, the Japanese service Qpod.jp, Russian Darberry.ru, the Singaporean Beeconomic.com and the Indian deal-of-the-day website SoSasta.com. By March 2015, Groupon expanded in 500 cities worldwide, has 48.1 million registered users.

On February 28, 2013, Mason was dismissed from his post of CEO. Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell remain as the major investors of the company, and the former is serving as the chairman of the company.

Marc Andreessen : The Computer Scientist Who Founded Netscape

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Inventor, entrepreneur and a super angel investor; Marc Andreessen is a complete package. The former had explored the world of computers and taught himself the basic of the programming language when he was in school. He became bored with computers even before he finished the high school, and when the interest in computers sparked again, he conquered the world of technology. He is the one who introduced the world to the first consumer-based web browser, Netscape Navigator.

Early Life

Marc was born in Cedar Falls, Iowa, on 9 July 1971, to Lowell Andreessen and Patricia Andreessen. Both his parents worked in a seed company, in New Lisbon, Wisconsin. He became familiar with computers at the age of nine. When he was in the last year of his school he was influenced by the fact that how the scientists at his school, used to send their piece of work to other Universities over the internet.

Marc became more interested in computers and went to pursue a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. After graduating the college, in 1993, he started an internship at IBM in Austin, Texas and later, took a job with the AIX graphics software development group. At the time Tim Berners-Lee’s had recently launched the World Wide Web.

Invention of Netscape

Marc, living in California started working at Enterprise Integration Technologies. There, he constituted a team including Eric Bina, to create a web browser. After constantly working for almost two months, Marc developed a graphical and user-friendly browser that was compatible with a wide range of computers. He named it Mosaic Web browser. In the beginning, he gave away the browser for free and it earned over 2million users, within a few months.

Marc Andreessen
Image Source: forbesimg.com

A former employee of the same company, Jim Clark, suggested Marc start his own software company. Following the suggestion, Marc started Mosaic Communications Corporation, that was later renamed to Netscape Communications. Also, the Mosaic web browser was renamed to Netscape Navigator.

Soon after the launch, the browser became quite popular. The browser was easy to use and pointed through information using mouse clicks and pictures. Many bigger companies bought the web server software and the related tools for their websites raising $56 million in the year of its initial release.

In 1999, AOL acquired Netscape for $4.2 billion, and Marc became the Chief Technology Officer of the company.

Other Ventures

In 1998, Andreessen along with Ben Horowitz, Tim Howes, and In Sik Rhee, founded another software company, named Loudcloud. The company was renamed as Opsware in 2003. In 2007, Hewlett-Packard acquired the company for $1.6 billion. Marc also co-founded another IT firm, Ning, that was acquired by Mode Media for $150 million, in September 2011.

In July 2007, Andreessen, with his partner Horowitz, started a capital venture, Andreessen Horowitz. Before this venture, they had already funded many start-ups. They together financed the major startups including Facebook, GitHub, Pinterest, Skype Twitter, and Honor, etc.

Andreessen serves as the advisor to Asana and director of CollabNet. He also sits on the board of directors of Facebook, eBay, Anki, Kno, Stanford Hospital, TinyCo, Bump Technologies, Dialpad, Oculus VR, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Personal Life

In 2006, Marc married Laura Arrillaga, the daughter of Silicon Valley real estate billionaire John Arrillaga. She is also an entrepreneur and a philanthropist. The two have a son together.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin : The Intellectual Friendship Behind Google

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

It is a bit difficult to imagine that a college research project can land you to own one of the biggest companies in the world. But, why not? If you are applying your knowledge and efforts in the right direction, unusual things can happen to you. Same goes for the success story of two college mates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who joined their hands for a college project and are now leading the most powerful company in the world together.

Early Life

Larry Page was born on March 26, 1973, to Carl Victor Page Sr., a computer science professor, and Gloria Page, a computer programming instructor. He lived with his parents and elder brother in East Lansing, Michigan. He grew among the people, who loved computers, and eventually, developed an interest in the same, at an early age. After graduating from East Lansing High School in 1991, he joined the University of Michigan, and did a degree in Computer Science, followed by a master’s degree in the same from Stanford University.

On the other hand, Sergey Brin was just 6 years old when his parents brought him to the US, from the Soviet Union, in 1978. At that time his family has faced a tough time. He joined the Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland for some time, but left the school to continued his education at home. Later, in 1993, Brin attended the University of Maryland and received a Bachelor’s degree in Science. In 1994, he went to the Stanford University to study Computer Science.

The BackRub Project

After his post-graduation, Larry enrolled in the PhD program, at the Stanford University. At the time he became interested in exploring the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web. Larry met Brin during the orientation program for the new students and became close friends.

page_brin
Image Source: vox-cdn.com

Brin was looking for a topic for his PhD thesis project and found Larry’s project the most convincing. He joined Larry for the research and both published a research paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”. Ultimately they developed BackRub a web crawler to crawl the backlinks on the web, along with the PageRank algorithm.

In the beginning, both turned their hostel rooms into their lab and office, to create a search engine, based on the PageRank algorithm. The search engine became very popular among the internet users at the university. In 1996, they released the initial version of Google for the users at the Stanford University.

Founding Google

Page admits that he understood the importance of the project only in mid-1998. The popularity of the search engine made him buy more servers to handle the searches. Brin and Larry received their first investment from Andy Bechtolsheim, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who wrote them a cheque in the name of Google, Inc., worth $100,000. At the time, they did not have a registered company with that name.

In 1998, they finally officially registered Google, Inc. as their company, Larry becoming the CEO of the company and Brin the President of the company. By June 2000, Google became the most comprehensive search engine, indexing one billion Internet URLs. It grabbed the attention of many angel capitalists and raised funding in millions.

New Ventures & Acquisition

In 2005, Google acquired Android for $50 million. This acquisition mainly aimed at the convenience for the user to use Google at any place at any time. In 2008, Larry and Brin with T-Mobile launched the first phone embedded with Android OS, named G1. By 2010, Android became the most popular OS for smartphones beating Apple’s iOS.

Following the lead of Facebook, the team launched a social media platform Google+. The most important products of Google includes the AdWords, YouTube and Gmail. It also owns the Google Chrome web browser and unveiled a Chromebook laptop in 2012. Google as a company has also launched a series of smartphones that are as popular as its rival companies Apple and Samsung.

Personal Life

Both Page and Brin, live in Palo Alto, California, U.S. Page is married to Lucinda Southworth since the year 2007 and have two children with her. Brin was married to Anne Wojcicki for 8 years (from 2007 to 2015). They also have two children together.

Currently, Page is serving as the chief executive officer and Brin is the President in the Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc, that they co-founded in 2015.

Terry Gou : The Founder & Chairman of Foxconn

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Terry is also called the Trump of Taiwan for his resemblance to the former in the matter of wealth, influential business empires and the number of marriages. Always avoiding the media attention this business tycoon knows how to handle the competition as well as the market pressure. Even being a part of many controversies, he never failed to amaze people with his tactics. By never compromising the quality, Terry’s Foxconn has become one of the biggest electronics contract manufacturing companies.

Early Life

Gou was born on 8 October 1950, in Banqiao, Taipei County, Taiwan. His father was in the police. His parents moved from China to Taiwan in 1949, when the civil war occurred in China. Terry is the elder son among the three children of his parents. Later, his brothers Tai-Chiang Guo and Tony Guo also became successful businessmen of Taiwan.

Terry Gou
Image Source: forbes.com

Gou received a proper high school education followed by a college graduation. Until the age of 24, he tried his luck in every kind of jobs, from working in a rubber factory and at a grinding wheel, to working in a medicine plant.

Founding of Foxconn

After working at the various places, in 1974, Gou started a company named Hon Hai, in his hometown in Taiwan. He investing $7500, rented a shed and employed ten elderly persons as his first workers. His company produced the parts of television sets. In 1980, he received his first big order of making console joysticks, from Atari. After completing a big order, an encouraged Gou thought of expanding his business and approaching many other big companies. So he flew for an eleven months long business trip to the USA.

Despite being uninvited at many places, Terry’s stubbornness helped him to break into companies and receive many orders from them. He was even kicked out of many places several times. His determination made him grab other greatest opportunities and hence, he managed to establish his largest factory in mainland China, in Shenzhen, in 1988.

Terry was hardworking and was always aware of his goals. His hard work paid off and he soon bagged many big deals with multinational companies like IBM, Blackberry, Intel, Playstation, HP, Apple, etc. Today, he is one of the biggest tech giants and in 2016, Forbes listed his net worth at US$10.6 billion. Along with Foxconn, he also owns the HMD Global, that sells Nokia branded phones.

Personal Life

Terry has lived a controversial professional as well as private life. He has been in the spotlight for his sharp comments and also for his affairs. One of his affairs also led him to a blackmail situation. Even the police were involved which later got control of the situation, but, the case ruined his reputation.

Terry was married to Serena Lin. In the year 2000, he started an educational charity with Lin and donated one-third of his wealth to charity. Lin died in 2005 from breast cancer. He has a son and a daughter with her.
Later, he married Delia Tseng, on 26 July 2008. Tseng is a choreographer by profession. The two have three children together. Terry and Delia have decided to donate 90% of their wealth to charity.