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PTC Inc

PTC Inc – An American Technology Company Specializing In IoT And Augmented Reality.

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PTC Inc is a famous American software company that was founded in 1985. The main products and services of the company include the Internet of Things (IoT), Augmented Reality (AR), and collaboration software. The headquarters of the company is based in Boston, Massachusetts, US. A Russian immigrant and mathematician, Samuel P. Giesberg is the mastermind behind the foundation of PTC Inc. He worked as a software engineer at other companies before founding PTC. Today, this public multinational company has more than 6,000 employees spread across 30 countries.

The Initial Story Of PTC Inc

In May 1985, Samuel Giesberg officially launched PTC Inc and worked for developing a new CAD-CAM program. In the first few years, Samuel was looking for venture capitalists to market his new software. Initially, he was turned down by many venture capitalists but at last, he received a total fund of $4 million from Charles River Ventures and other firms. In 1988, the company launched its first product and by then half the funding money was invested. The first product of the company was the CAD-CAM program but PTC entered late in the market and was already surrounded by powerful rivals.

The CAD-CAM software technology entered the market in the 1960s and it was in the late 1980s that Samuel launched the new software. But, what he brought into the market has an added innovation in the already developed technology which left its rival surprised. For example, the CAD-CAM software in the market was able to make different changes in a 3D model but PTC’s software was able to predict the consequences of that change in the overall model. Thus, this new software became a breakthrough as it made the work of an engineer much easier. Within one year, PTC made a total sales of $11 million and a net income of more than $1.5 million.

PTC Inc
Image source: wikimedia.org

Business Growth

After the sales started escalating in the late 1980s, the company filed its first IPO and went public. Samuel also launched different versions of the mechanical software for various operating systems. Only after two years of launching the CAD-CAM software, PTC was controlling 10 percent of this software market. By the end of 1991, the total sales of the company reached $45 million. The CAD-CAM Pro/Engineer system was such a big hit that it attracted clients of big companies who were established in the industry. In 1992, this technology was named “Technology of the Year” by IndustryWeek. PTC also made into the list of Fortune 500 in 1995 and crossed $800 million in revenue.

In 1993 PTC’s market share increased to 20 percent and it landed big clients like Ford Motor and Caterpillar Inc. By this time the company also started increasing the number of employees and the annual revenue doubled within a year. In 1998, PTC acquired Comoutervision, where Samuel was a former employee, and Windchill Technology. In the early 2000s, PTC broadened the range of products as it developed lifecycle management software for products and services. PTC made both CAD-related and other acquisitions that include Polyplan Technologies, NetRegulus, Synapsis Technology, Mathsoft, CoCreate, NC Graphics, etc. Three years ago, the company landed a major investor, Rockwell Automation. It invested $1 billion in the company and acquired an 8.4 percent ownership stake.

About The Founder

Samuel Giesberg was a maths professor who fled to the US in 1974 with his 11-year old son. After he moved to a new country, he started working as a software engineer and soon he became a prodigy at Computervision (the company he worked for). Samuel’s brother Vladimir gave him the push to start his own company and also suggested landing some investors for financing the same. Samuel had ten years of experience in designing CAD-CAM software and thus decided to leap.

CrowdStrike

CrowdStrike – The Leading EndPoint protection Software Provider.

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With the first virus on the computer, the IT industry has seen multiple threats in the form of viruses, malicious activities, and cyber-attacks. Today, data is everything, and safeguarding the data has become the supreme task for the industry. There are several companies that are working towards providing a secure working environment and keeping the data safe from any sort of external threat. CrowdStrike is one of those companies bringing the most innovative products promoting cyber security and fighting such attacks. This 10-year-old company is best known for its endpoint security, threat intelligence, and cyberattack response services.

About The Company

CrowdStrike is a publically traded company founded in 2011. The company trades on Nasdaq with the ticker name CRWD. Its founders include George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston. The company headquarters is based in Sunnyvale, California, U.S., and it operates globally. CrowdStrike is home to about 4000 employees, and as of 2021, it made revenues worth US$874.438 million. A few of the major products by the company include Endpoint security, Security and IT operations, and Security cloud. CrowdStrike has helped companies tackle major high-profile cyberattacks like the Sony Pictures hack in 2014 and the Democratic National Committee cyber attacks in 2015-16, etc.

CrowdStrike
image source: www.crowdstrike.com

Founding CrowdStrike

George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston co-founded CrowdStrike in 2011. The next year, the founders started a subsidiary with the name CrowdStrike Services, Inc. The subsidiary provided proactive and incident response services. The company’s first product was the CrowdStrike Falcon, a threat intelligence software published in the year 2013. In the following years, CrowdStrike assisted major organizations like the United States Department of Justice, Sony Pictures, and the Democratic National Committee in tackling the biggest cyber-attacks. The company was also successful in uncovering malicious activities by many hacking groups, such as the activities of the Energetic Bear that worked for the Russian Federation.
In 2015, CrowdStrike received investments from Google through a Series C funding round. CrowdStrike launched a version of its antivirus software Falcon for mobile devices in 2017. During the same year, it became a unicorn and had annual revenues worth $100 million. By 2018, the company value reached more than $3 billion. The company went public on Nasdaq and had its first IPO in 2019. In the years 2020 and 2021, CrowdStrike acquired companies, including Preempt Security and Humio.
The company has won awards like AWS Global Public Sector Partner Award for best cybersecurity solution and Canada AWS Partner Award as the ISV Partner of the Year in 2021. It also got ranked at number one for Modern Endpoint Security 2020 Market Shares in IDC’s Worldwide Corporate Endpoint Security Market Shares, 2020 Report in the same year. Telstra, Google, Rackspace, March Capital Partners, Accel Partners, and Warburg Pincus are some of the major investors in CrowdStrike.

The CEO of CrowdStrike

George Kurtz is the President, CEO, and one of the co-founders of CrowdStrike. He was born in 1970 and grew up in Parsippany-Troy Hills, New Jersey. Kurtz went to the Parsippany High School, and according to sources, he started to program video games at an early age. When he was in high school, he built a bulletin board system too. He has got an accounting degree from Seton Hall University.
As soon Kurtz graduated from college, he started to work at Price Waterhouse. He then was shifted to the security group of the company in 1993. In 1999, he co-published a book on cybersecurity named Hacking Exposed, which later came in 30 different languages. In the same year, Kurtz founded his first company named Foundstone, which he sold to McAfee in 2004, becoming the senior vice president and general manager of risk management at McAfee.
In 2011, Kurtz, along with the former chief financial officer at Foundstone, Gregg Marston, and Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founded CrowdStrike in Irvine, California. Since then, he has been working as the President and the CEO of CrowdStrike.

LogMeIn

LogMeIn – World’s Largest SaaS Company Making Work-From-Home Easier for Companies.

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Today every company and firm has opted for the work from home scenario. And looking at the current circumstances, it may be a lasting trend for most of the companies. Though this is a new way of working, a company named LogMeIn has been the promoter of work-from-home even before the pandemic had hit the world. The company has been providing its remote work tools even before the Covid-19 pandemic. LogMeIn is an eighteen years old company providing software as a service and cloud-based remote-work tools for its clients worldwide. It offers its services to almost every size company, such as they can communicate and collaborate from anywhere to achieve their business goals, using any internet-connected devices.
LogMeIn deals in three major categories, i.e., Unified Communications & Collaboration services, Identity & Access Management services, and Customer engagement & support services.

About The Company

LogMeIn is a software company founded in 2003 in Budapest, Hungary. The company provides cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) remote work tools to its customers. The company headquarters is based in Boston, Massachusetts, and about 4000 people are working for the company globally. As of 2019, LogMeIn made revenues worth US$1.262 billion.
LogMeIn is a privately held company, and GoTo, LastPass, Rescue, Central are some of its popular products. The company promotes a remote-centric workplace through its variety of software, helping companies be more productive and enabling flexible hours.
GoToConnect, GoToMeeting, GoToRoom, GoToWebinar, GoToTraining, LogMeIn Central, LogMeIn Pro, GoToMyPC, and Grasshopper are some of the company’s most loved software helping its customers better connect and work remotely securely. Comcast, Dyson, Facebook, Johnson&Johnson, SalesForce and TheNorthFace are some of its major clients.

LogMeIn
image source: bizj.us

The Founding of LogMeIn

LogMeIn was founded as 3 am Labs in 2003 in Budapest. Later, in 2006, the name of the company was changed to LogMeIn. As soon as the company was founded, it started its growth through acquisitions. It first acquired Hamachi VPN product. In 2009 the company had its first IPO on NASDAQ. The company started to merge cloud computing with its products in 2011 and acquired Pachube. The merger resulted in the launch of IoT services under the brand name Xively.
In 2012, LogMeIn acquired Bold Software, and in 2014, it overtook the operations of Ionia Corp and Meldium. The company launched one of its revolutionary products, Rescue Lens, in 2015. The software provided video assistance to the customers on iOS and Android devices. The same year, LogMeIn also acquired the password management software LastPass for a sum of $110 Million. It also had a merger with Citrix that to acquire the rights of GoTo Family in 2016. In the following years, the company acquired names like Nanorep (2017) and Jive Communications (2018).
In August 2020, Francisco Partners and Elliott Management Corporation acquired LogMeIn. This also led to the delisting of the company from NASDAQ, and it became a private company.

The CEO At LogMeIn

William R (Bill) Wagner is the current CEO of LogMeIn. He has got a B.A. degree in History from Lafayette College, as well as an M.B.A. from The Wharton School of Business. In 1998, Wanger joined AT&T as the Marketing Director. He then started to work as the Chief Marketing Officer at Fiberlink Communications. In 2006 Wanger joined Vocus as the Chief Marketing Officer and later became the Chief Operating Officer of the same company. In April 2013, he became the President and Chief Operating Officer of LogMeIn and then was promoted to CEO in 2015. Wanger is also a member of the board of directors of companies like ChurnZero, Akamai Technologies, and BUILD Boston.

Arrow Electronics

Arrow Electronics – Story of a company from Radio Row to the Fortune 500 list.

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Arrow Electronics is a very famous Fortune 500 company established in the electronics industry. The company mainly focuses on distribution and other value-added services of various electronic components. Currently, Arrow Electronics is the largest US company in terms of total revenue. The journey of this multinational conglomerate began with a retail store in Manhattan opened by Maurice Goldberg in 1935. Today, the headquarters of the company is based in Centennial, Colorado. It is a publicly traded company with more than 19,000 employees. Michael J. Long is the present CEO and President of the company.

The Founding Story Of Arrow Electronics

In 1935, Maurice Goldberg opened a retail store called Arrow Radio on Cortlandt Street. This place was situated in lower Manhattan and it was very famous for Radio Row where the distribution of various electronic components began. Maurice established Arrow Radio to sell radios and various radio parts to retail customers. The sale for both radio and its parts peaked during the 1940s and the company decided to seek a franchise to sell new parts. Apart from selling radios from companies like Philco, GE, and RCA, two companies including RCA and Cornell Dubilier first franchised Arrow. Finally, the organization, Arrow Electronics was incorporated in 1946.

Arrow Electronics
Image source: bizj.us

Expansion Of Arrow Electronics

After Arrow Electronics was incorporated, the company received some additional franchises in the 1950s and started selling electronic components to industrial firms. Since the sales of the company were increasing it decided to open another office in Long Island in 1956. The company decided to file its first IPO in 1961 and thus it was able to list its share in the American Stock Exchange. During this time, the total sales of the company summed up to $4 million.

Gradually, the industrial division of the company started to dominate as industrial customers were more in number. The expansion continued as Arrow Electronics opened additional offices in New Jersey, Totowa, Norwalk, and Conneticut. In the 1960s, Company shifted its headquarters to Farmingdale, New York, and gain in 2011 shifted to Colorado.

In 1968, there was a change in the ownership of Arrow Electronics as three graduates from the Harvard Business School, Glenn, Green, and Waddell acquired the controlling interest of the company. These three investors led a private investor group and they acquired Arrow as they saw it as an opportunity to consolidate the fallen pieces of the electronics industry. In the early 1970s, Company ranked 12 in the list of US electronics distributors while Avnet topped the list.

This decade also witnessed the growth of Arrow’s electronics business as it won the semiconductor franchises led by Texas Instruments. During this time the company opened 20 new sales offices in the US. By the end of the decade, the electronics distribution business of Arrow was a big hit and the sales escalated to $177 million. From number 12, the company became the second-largest electronics distributor in the US.

Present Days

Through frequent public bond offerings, the company tried to fund its growth along with some acquisitions. Till the end of the 1960s, Arrow continued its retail operation and it ceased to operate in the 1970s. Arrow exclusively focused on the electronics business and established a real-time computer system to make the business more productive. In 1979, the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange and by the end of the year, it made a major acquisition that helped it gain customers from the Western US. The acquisition of the company continued as it acquired Kierulff Electronics to adopt a new growth strategy.

During this time, Stephen Kaufman, a former partner of McKinsey & Company joined Arrow as the President of the Electronics Distribution Division. And, it was under his leadership that the company expanded into Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. It also completed acquiring more than 50 companies and reached global sales of $9 billion at the beginning of the 21st century.

Michael J. Long – CEO

Michael Long joined Arrow Electronics in 1991 when the company merged with Schweber Electronics. In 1994, Long became the President of Capstone Electronics, a company under Arrow and in May 2009 became the CEO of Arrow Electronics. Long has a business degree from the University of Wisconsin.

Verisign

Verisign – The American Company Famous For Web Domain Name Registry.

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Verisign is a famous American company known for its authoritative domain registry business. While surfing the internet, we visit several web pages every day. If we notice the URL of these web pages, we can find .com, .net, etc at the end of the addresses. These are known as domain names and when an individual or a company wants to launch a website online, it needs to be registered under a certain domain name. Verisign is responsible domain name registry for two of the most extensively used domains, namely, .com and .net. It is the main business of the company apart from which it offers a variety of security services. 

About Verisign

James Bidzos established Verisign Inc in April 1995. The company’s headquarters is based in Reston, Virginia, US. It is responsible for operating a diverse array of network infrastructure with two top-level domains in the internet root nameservers. It is also responsible for country-code top-level domains like .cc and .tv and also back-end systems for top-level domains like .gov and .edu. This is the core business unit of Verisign and apart from that it offers distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), security services for cyber threats, etc. 

Verisign also had an authentication business unit that was sold to Symantec in 2010. The deal was closed at $1.28 billion and it included Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, Verisign Trust Seal, public key infrastructure, and Verisign Identity Protection Services. The ownership again changed in 2017 when Symantec sold it to DigiCert. Verisign also let go of its Security Service Customer Contracts to NeuStar Inc in 2018. 

Verisign
Image source: wikimedia.org

History Of The Company

Verisign was originally a part of the RSA Security certification services business unit. The parent company is an American-based business that specializes in network security using encryption. Verisign was formed as a spin-off in 1995 and this newly formed company received the RSA-held licenses for key cryptographic patents. These licenses were set to expire in 2000 and it was also a time-limited agreement. The new company that was formed operated as a certificate authority (CA) to ensure trust for the internet through digital authentication. 

From 1995 to 2010, Verisign operated on a large scale and in various sectors from military to retail applications. It had more than 3 million certificates that making it the largest CA in the world. But in 2010, it sold its authentication business unit to Symantec, and the same year the company announced that it would be moving from California to Northern Virginia. Verisign started acquiring different companies after a few years of the spin-off. In 2000, it acquired Network Solutions that was responsible for operating the domains .net, .com, and .org. The company operated these domains under an agreement with Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and the United States Department of Commerce. 

Business Growth And Expansion

The acquisition of Network Solutions formed the powerhouse of the core and the largest business unit of Verisign. After three years, Verisign decided to divest the Network Solutions retail but at the same time retained the business of domain registry. It was a very flourishing business and since it became the center of Verisign the company put its maximum focus on domain registry. By the end of 2010, the company reported annual revenue of $681 million which was 10 percent more than that of 2009. Verisign, over the years, has also faced many controversies regarding domain names, especially from the US government. 

James Bidzos – Founder And CEO

James Bidzos is the founder and CEO of the domain registry company, Verisign. Initially, he was not appointed the CEO of the company. But, after the resignation of Mark McLaughlin in 2011, James became the next CEO. He is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors at Verisign. In 1986, James joined RSA and according to him, the company was a big failure as there was no product and customers. It was under his leadership that RSA developed an encryption toolkit and landed contracts with Motorola and Novell. He also served as CEO of RSA before the spin-off in 1995. 

Angi Inc.

Angi Inc. – The Largest Marketplace And Review Service Of America.

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Before the internet era, one would only get to know about things through radio or TV. But the most reliable source of information used to be the word of mouth. But this type of information system, despite being the most accurate and reliable, did not have the reach. One could only provide information about a particular, topic like a sort of home decor service or the service of a hospital, etc., to people they knew. Though there used to be directories like Yellow pages and ads in the newspaper that would help to an extent, with limited reach and were the static approach. The arrival of the internet and the fact that it is accessible to all has helped companies like Angi. Angi is an online platform that facilitates review services on a broad spectrum of things to help people analyze what would suit their particular needs. Angi Inc. is as reliable a platform as mouth-to-mouth marketing has been, just with a broader reach. It is an internet content and information platform and one of the largest home service websites in America where people can put or read reviews on local businesses and contractors.

About The Company

Angi Inc. previously known as ANGI Homeservices Inc. is a publically traded home service website for putting and viewing reviews about nearby businesses and contractors. The company was founded in 1995 and trades on Nasdaq as ANGI. William S. Oesterle and Angie Hicks are the founders of Angi, and IAC is the current owner of the company. The platform provides an online marketplace for businesses and offers review services to people. Angi’s corporate headquarters is based in Denver, Colorado. As of 2019, 4500 people are working for Angi, and it made annual revenues worth US$1.132 billion in the same year. Angi and HomeAdvisor are its major subsidiaries.

Angi Inc.
Image source: townnews.com

Founding Angi Inc.

The idea behind Angi’s founding came up to Angie Hicks when he was looking for some reliable construction contractor for his boss William S. Oesterle in the suburban Columbus, Ohio in 1995. The search resulted in Hicks joining Oesterle to start a call-in service in Columbus for its natives, where they could rate a certain home or lawn care service. For that, Hicks went door-to-door and asked people to sign up for reviewing local contractors. In a year in Columbus, Hicks was able to recruit 1000 members and also raised money for the new business.
In 1996, the founder acquired Unified Neighbors a company providing similar review services. In 2012, the company name was changed to HomeAdvisor, and it made acquisitions like Werkspot (2013) and MyHammer (2016). In 2010, the company raised $25 million in capital to operate its other wing, Angie’s List. Angi went public on the NASDAQ exchange in 2011. In 2014, the company opened another branch of Werkspot.nl in Italy. The year 2015 noted the most growth for the company, as the recorded annual revenues for the year was $300 million.
The next year, Angi made its Angie’s List a freemium service having over 10 million reviews over it for free. The platform provided additional services on the paid subscription for the same. In October 2017, IAC acquired Angi and merged Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor into one. The new company was renamed ANGI Homeservices. Another name change for Angie’s List and ANGI Homeservices took place in 2021. The former was renamed Angi, and the latter now is known as Angi Inc.

The CEO At Angi Inc.

Oisin Hanrahan is the current Chief Executive Officer of Angi Inc. He went to the Harvard Business School and earned a Master of Business Administration. He has also got a master’s in Finance from the London School of Economics as well as a Business, Economics, and Social Sciences degree, which he received from Trinity College Dublin.
Hanrahan is a well-known entrepreneur, as he has founded companies like MiCandidate and Clearwater Group. He has also co-founded The Undergraduate Awards. He joined Angi in 2018 when one of his founded companies was acquired by Angi. Before becoming the CEO of Angi, he served the company as the CPO (Chief Product Officer). In February 2021, Hanrahan was named the CEO of Angi Inc.