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Annasha Dey is an NIT student, who apart from studying engineering is also a content writer. She has a great interest in photography, writing, reading novels, and travelling as well. She is a foodie who loves socializing and hanging out with her friends. She is also a trained Kathak dancer and a big fashion enthusiast. Dey also loves watching TV series, which includes F.R.I.E.N.D.S. and Big Bang Theory. To be a better writer she prefers to read more

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. 

J2 Global

J2 Global – A Renowned Digital Media And Cloud Computing Company In The US.

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Digital media has shown unbound opportunities in the 21st century especially now that every nation wants to go digital. And, in recent years, the potential of cloud platforms and their demand has increased rapidly. J2 Global is a company that has established itself in the digital media and cloud computing industry. The company has over 4,000 employees and its total assets sum up to nearly $3.5 billion. J2 Global is based in Los Angeles, California and it mainly provides internet services through Business Cloud Services and Digital Media.

About J2 Global

J2 Global is a publicly traded tech company that was founded in December 1995. Jaye Muller and Jack Reiley co-founded J2 Globals. The company has two business divisions, namely, Business Cloud Services and Digital Media Division (Ziff Davis). There are several firms under the business cloud division of the company. Some of them are eVoice, UnityFax, Excel Micro, VIPRE, etc. And, the digital media division of the company includes brands like PC Magazine, Everyday Health, IGN.com, and Mashable. J2 Global has also been the recipient of many prestigious awards. In 2012, the company was recognized in the InformationWeek 500 list of technology companies. Next year, J2 Global was featured in the Forbes list (rank 40) of America’s Best Small Companies.

J2 Global
Image source: media.bizj.us

The Idea Behind J2 Global

The idea of founding J2 Global came from Jaye Muller who was an established musician hailing from East Berlin. He also studied electronics which was another interest of his apart from music. As a musician, Muller traveled a lot and he needed to change hotels almost every day. This created an inconvenience for Muller as he received the fax and voice mails one or two days late and his privacy was compromised as the hotel staff read or listened to his confidential messages. So, when he started researching for any commercial service or product that would help him receive his day-to-day voice mails and faxes on a personal device, he found none. This is when he along with Reiley decided to open a business and fill the void.

Initially, Muller started creating a rough plan for an email-based retrieval system for receiving and sending voice mail and faxes. He was working with a telecommunication company based in Australia to develop the prototype. In 1995 Jaye Muller and Jack Reiley founded the company J2 Global which back then was known as JFax.com. In 2000, the company’s name was changed to J2 Global Communications and again in December 2011, it was changed to J2 Global.

Major Events Of The Company

With the advent of the 21st century, J2 decided to expand the company through some acquisitions. So, in 2000, J2 acquired SureTalk.com, a California-based company that offered online messaging services. It also acquired common stocks for TimeShift which is a web-based technology company. The same year, J2 acquired one of its biggest market rivals, eFax, a company that provided free internet faxing service. Initially, when the company was launched it operated only with the business cloud division and in 2012 the digital media division was launched. This new division was created after the acquisition of a digital publisher called Zeff Davis Inc. Recently, it has acquired many companies that include IGN Entertainment, MetroFax, Backup Connect BV, Business Critical Software, SaferVPN, etc. J2 currently has a global network across more than 50 countries.

About The Founders

Jaye Muller is a famous German musician and a successful entrepreneur who co-founded J2 Global with Jack Reiley. In 1995, he established J2 Global to eradicate the problem of receiving delayed faxes and voice mails. He remained an active part of the company till 2004 and a shareholder till 2016. Before coming into the internet business, he released two solo albums but put his music career on hold for some time as he exclusively focused on J2.

Jack Reiley also comes from a musical background as he was a songwriter, record producer, and disc jockey. Apart from co-writing songs, Reiley also released a solo album called Western Justice. He passed away in April 2015.

Sina Corporation

Sina Corporation – A Chinese Tech Company Providing A Microblogging Platform Similar To Twitter.

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Sina Corporation is a famous multinational conglomerate based in China. It has three headquarters in Shanghai, Beijing, and the Cayman Islands. In November 1998, Wang Zhidong, Wang Yan, Ben Tsiang, and Hurst Lin founded Sina Corporation. The company had mainly four lines of business which are Sina Weibo, Sina Mobile, Sina Online, and Sinanet. Currently, Charles Chao is the CEO of the company has more than 60,000 employees. There are more than 100 million people worldwide who use the products and services of Sina Corporation. In 2003, the company was named “China’s Media of the Year” by Southern Weekend.

About Sina Corporation

The four founders founded Sina Corporation in Beijing in 1998 and after a couple of years established its financial headquarters in Shanghai. The company mainly focuses on offering its platform and services to Chinese users globally. It has 100 million registered users of which 10 million engages in free-based services. Apart from the users of China, the company also has Chinese users from North America.

Sina provides different types of services worldwide and has thirteen access points within Greater China and also tailored pages for overseas nations. International markets include Japan, Korea, the US, Australia, Europe, and Germany. The microblogging platform of Sina is also very famous such that more than 5,000 companies and across 2,500 media organizations in China use it.

Sina Corporation
Image source: g.foolcdn.com

Major Sina Businesses

Though the company has four business lines, Sina Weibo is the most famous and revenue-generating of all. Sina Weibo is a microblog social network, a platform similar to Twitter, and the largest social networking service in the Chinese language. Based on the number of active users, Sina Weibo dominates 56.5% of the microblogging market in China. In the Sina Weibo platform, the company has more than 500 million active users and the browsing time is also comparatively more than any other competitors of Sina.

The cloud computing market of Sina Corporation also dominates the Chinese market. This is because Sina App Engine (SAE) is the earliest and the largest such platform in the country. Sina launched this platform in 2009 and this product is dedicated to web deployment, and hosting services for various corporations as well as independent developers. Currently, more than 300,000 developers in China are using the SAE platform.

History Of The Company

Sina Corporation was founded as a result of the merger between the two largest Chinese websites. In 1996, the most traffic generated internet portal of China SRSNet was established which later merged with Sinanet, a website that was developed in 1995 for the American Chinese community. After the merger of these two websites, Sina Corporation was founded and the services were extended to North America and Hong Kong. The merger lead Sina Corporation to outrun its rivals like Sohu and NetEase in terms of the most visited portal site. Sina Corporation started expanding very quickly in terms of launching new services and that way it attracted new customers.

In April 2000, Sina Corporation became the first company to get approved for listing in the Nasdaq National market through a variable interest entity (VIE) in the Cayman Islands. Sina was closely followed by its rivals in the following months of the same year to get listed in the same. In 2000, the official website of the company was selected for online coverage for the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney. In 2015, the online portal of Sina was attacked as there were certain allegations that it contained distorted facts and violated morality. Recently, Blizzard Entertainment sued Sina Games related to a game called Glorius Saga.

Charles Chao – CEO of Sina Corporation

Charles Chao is the current president and CEO of Sina Corporation. He joined the company back in 1999 when Sina faced various obstacles to get listed in NASDAQ. Charles made great efforts to establish Sina as a VIE which cleared the path for the company. Charles, before becoming the CEO of the company, also served as the CFO and COO. He is also the Chairman of the Board of Sina Corporation.

Bloomberg L.P.

Bloomberg L.P. – One Of The Most Famous Companies In The Mass Media Industry.

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Founded in 1981, Bloomberg L.P. is one of the most renowned media companies based in Manhattan, New York City. The company is famous for offering financial software tools, enterprise applications, and news to various financial organizations. Bloomberg L.P. offers these services to various companies through the Bloomberg Terminal which is the core revenue-generating platform of the company. Currently, the company has established offices in 167 different locations and has nearly 20,000 employees. BloombergL.P. is a private company and there is a limited partnership.

About the Company

In 1981, Michael Bloomberg with help from Thomas Secunda, Duncan MacMillan, and Charles Zegar founded Bloomberg L.P. Apart from these four founders, Merrill Lynch invested in the company (12% ownership investment). Bloomberg has multiple services and products that include Bloomberg Terminal, Bloomberg News (wire service), Bloomberg Television (a global television network), Bloomberg Radio, magazines, and newsletters. The revenue generated by Bloomberg has crossed the $10 billion mark (in 2019). The company is currently under the leadership of Michael Bloomberg (co-founder and CEO).

Bloomberg L.P.
Image source: prnewswire.com

History of Bloomberg L.P.

The major contribution behind establishing Company as an independent company goes to Michael Bloomberg. Back in 1981, when Salomon Brothers, a huge American international bank was acquired, Michael Bloomberg received settlement money of $10 million. Before the acquisition of Salomon Brothers, the bank used Bloomberg as the computerized financial system. The company was designed in-house and when Michael received $10 million he used that money to start Innovative Market Systems (IMS).

Michael decided to develop his own computerized system that will provide real-time market data and various financial analytics to the Wall Street firms. In 1982, Michael released the Market Master Terminal (later known as the Bloomberg Terminal) into the market and Merrill Lynch became its first customer. Merrill Lynch made a deal with the company that on behalf of buying 20 terminals and a 30% equity stake for $30 million Bloomberg won’t be able to market the terminal to any of Merrill Lynch’s competitors for the next five years.

In 1986, the name of the company was changed to Bloomberg L.P. (Limited Partnership) and in the upcoming years launched other products like Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Terminal Subscription. In 1993, Bloomberg.com was first launched to provide information on markets, currency conversion, the latest news, and events in the financial sector. In 1996, the company decided to acquire ⅓ of the stake owned by Merrill Lynch for $200 million. This acquisition valued the company at $2 billion. During the financial crisis, Merrill Lynch decided to sell the remaining stake back to the company and it valued Bloomberg at $22.5 billion approximately.

Since 1981, the company has made several acquisitions ranging from magazines to software companies. In 1992, the company purchased New York Radio Station WNEW for $13.5 million. It was later renamed Bloomberg Radio. In 2009, a weekly business magazine from McGraw-Hill called BusinessWeek. This magazine was relaunched as Bloomberg Businessweek and this acquisition was done to bring general business to the media audiences.

Major Acquisitions

The same year, the company also purchased New Energy Finance, a data company based in the UK. This acquisition was done so that company becomes an industry source with abundant information to support low-carbon energy development. Some of the other companies acquired by Bloomberg are Arlington (Bureau of National Affairs based in Virginia), Dublin-based software company PolarLake, Barclays indices business, and CityLab.

Michael Bloomberg – CEO and Co-Founder

Michael Bloomberg, mostly famous as Mike Bloomberg, is a famous American businessman and politician. He is the co-founder and also the majority owner of the company. Michael went to John Hopkins University as graduated as an electrical engineer in 1964. Later he went to Harvard Business School and acquired his MBA degree. Michael was a general partner at the Salomon Brothers upon acquisition of which led Michael to establish his company. Currently, Mike Bloomberg is among the top 20 billionaires in the Forbes billionaires list.

DocuSign

DocuSign – An US-based Software Company Famous For Its e-Signature Service.

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DocuSign is a famous American company that is based in San Francisco, California. The company provides DocuSign Agreement Cloud that allows various organizations to manage electronic agreements. And, as a part of its cloud service, DocuSign also offers e-Signature so that the users can sign electronically on different devices. The company was founded in 2003 by three founders, Court Lorenzini, Tom Gonser, and Eric Ranft.

About DocuSign

DocuSign provides worldwide services and its products are used in more than 180 countries by 1 million customers approximately. US ESIGN Act and the European Union’s eIDAS regulation both approves the digital signature produced by DocuSign. The CEO of the company is Daniel Springer. DocuSign became a public traded company in 2018 when it filed its first IPO. Former CEO Keith Krach was the largest individual shareholder of the company at the time of IPO. Other major shareholders are Sigma Partners, Ignition Partners, and Frazier Technology Ventures.

Founding Story

In 2003, Tom Gonser came up with the idea of DocuSign when he was working for NetUpdate. Tom founded NetUpdate in 1998 and he served as the CEO of the company back then. Throughout the journey of NetUpdate, the company has acquired several companies and among these companies, DocuTouch was a start-up. This company was a Seattle-based start-up that provided e-Signature services.

DocuTouch received $4 million in funds from Timberline Venture Partners, Bill Kallman, and Jeff Tung. When NetUpdate acquired DocuTouch, Timberline invested another $1 million in the company. The company also held various patents for web-based digital signatures and collaboration. Tom Gonser wanted to establish the e-Signature start-up as a different company and hence with the support of Court Lorenzini, they purchased the assets of DocuTouch from NetUpdate and started DocuSign. After establishing the company, Gonser left NetUpdate to focus full-time on his new start-up.

DocuSign
Image source: cloudinary.com

History of Company

After buying out DocuSign from NetUpdate, the company began its sale in 2005. zipLogix was one of the first customers of the company as it integrated the DocuSign e-Signature to its real estate virtual forms. The e-Signature of DocuSign became a very convenient service especially for court-based events like mock trials and encrypted audit logs. When the company was founded, Court Lorenzini became the CEO of the company but he stepped down in 2007 both as CEO and Chairman of the Board. He took his role as Executive Vice President of Business Development.

Matthew Schiltz replaced Lorenzini in early 2007 and he served as the CEO of the company until 2010. Till this time, the headquarters of the company was based in Seattle but when Steven King became the new CEO of the company it was shifted to San Francisco. In June 2010, DocuSign expanded its services to phone-based authentication including for both iPhone and iPad. It named the e-Signature service as e-Signature Transaction Management. The growth of the company truly escalated during this period as DocuSign alone was responsible for 73 percent of the total SaaS-based e-Signature market.

Recent Years

The massive growth of the company attracted many new investors including Scale Venture Partners that led a funding round and raised $27 million. In 2011, the company opened a new office in San Francisco that today has become the headquarters of the company. It also opened a new office in London in the same year. In 2012, DocuSign signed a deal with PayPal to carry out transactions with DocuSign Payment. After this joint partnership with PayPal, the company also entered into joint ventures with Google Drive and Salesforce.com.

In mid-2012, a report in Business Insider showed that the majority of the Fortune 500 companies have signed up for using DocuSign. In the last couple of years, DocuSign has acquired two companies, Spring CM and Seal Software. In 2016, the company ranked 3 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list. The company hired a new CEO in 2017, Daniel Springer.

Daniel Springer – CEO of DocuSign

Daniel Springer has 30 years of experience in leadership and innovation across the SaaS industry. Before joining DocuSign, Daniel served as the Chairman and CEO of Responsys and prior to that, he worked at several other companies including Modem Media, Telleo, NextCard, and McKinsey & Company.