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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.

PHP

Rasmus Lerdorf : An Insightful Programmer and the Creator of PHP

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The history of PHP programming language narrates the story of a programmer who prefers to be known as an engineer than a coder. Because according to this engineer, the end product is what matters the most and not the journey to it. Well, seems like his mind works more like a thermodynamic state function and less like a path-dependent parameter, isn’t it?

This remarkably excellent engineer is none other than world-famous programmer Rasmus Lerdorf. On one of his interviews, Lerdorf said that coding is quite boring and tedious, which is insignificant contrast to who he is and his occupation. So, let’s get to know more about this big guy and his ‘path’ to success.

Early Life

Rasmus Lerdorf
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Born into a family from Disko Island, Greenland, on 22nd November 1968, Rasmus Lerdorf moved to Denmark at an early age of three. At the age of fifteen, Lerdorf and his family moved to King City, Ontario. In 1988, Lerdorf graduated from King City Secondary School and pursued his higher studies from the University of Waterloo. He graduated from the university in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree of Applied Science in Systems Designing Engineering.

After he graduated, Lerdorf made significant contributions to the relational database management systems like Oracle Rdb.

Working With Programming Languages

When the programmers and the tech-savvies were working in the mid-90s with their main motive to make the internet more efficient and faster, he got hindered by languages like C and Perl. According to Rasmus Lerdorf, designing websites with these languages were too time consuming and needed to come up with a new one.

Lerdorf, along with some of the technical writers, assembled their ideas together and got them online as an HTML page. He wanted to take a step ahead, only when some companies asked for these documents or expand the idea and implement it in the practical world.

Creating PHP

He started working in CGI (common gateway interface), developed few libraries, wrote some programs in C, and finally, developed PHP, an entirely new language. Lerdorf created PHP (personal home page, now known as hypertext preprocessor) in 1994, and till now, many modified versions of the language has been released.

In a generalized way, PHP is a programming language that was designed for web development and can be used almost on every operating system. The most recent version of PHP is PHP 7.3 released on 6th December 2018.

After PHP became a very well known and useful language to big companies, Rasmus Lerdorf explained that he never intended to create a programming language, as he had no clue how to build one. He was making logical implementations to create something simpler than Perl, and one thing led to another. Finally, after forming a tech team to assist him with technical documentation, which followed beta testing, PHP/FI 2 was released in November 1997.

The Success

Today, PHP is a majorly used programming language, being used by websites like Etsy, Wikipedia, Tumblr, Yahoo, Flickr, Facebook, and many more.

Over the years, many features have been incorporated in PHP, but Lerdorf keeps telling one thing to every emerging engineer out there, that for a programmer, it is very important to understand C very well. Though he accepts that as compared to languages, like Python or C++, the user needs to put comparatively more effort using C, but it is the fundamental unit of learning for any programmer.

After releasing PHP, he worked with different big tech companies, and currently, he is working with Etsy.

Career of Lerdorf

In January 2000, Rasmus Lerdorf joined Linuxcare Inc. as a senior research engineer and continued for a year. In September 2002, he joined Yahoo! where he continued for seven years, as an Infrastructure Architecture Engineer. Lerdorf said that eventually, he became tired and kind of demoralized working in an ad centric web company, as it involves tricking your customers.

He joined Room 77 as an advisor in 2010, and then, it’s all about WePay and Etsy. It’s been eleven years, that he has been working in Etsy, first as an advisor, and then, as a distinguished engineer.

Lerdorf as every other enthusiastic programmer is very much interested in open source, and he attends the open-source conferences as a speaker throughout the world.