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Annasha

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

Udemy

The E-Learning Platform Of Udemy Serves Dual Purpose At Its Best

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By this time, we have already concluded that e-learning has become very demanding and important. Not only in India but also across the entire world students are benefited from these platforms. Many people have the idea that these platforms are only good for those preparing for competitive exams like JEE or NEET. But, this is just the wrong concept. Many websites have come up these days that provide online coaching for basics like Excel, PowerPoint, Java, etc. You can learn anything and everything with the help of these platforms. Udemy is one such online platform that allows us to learn, teach, and explore. The founders of Udemy are Eren Bali, Gagan Biyani, and Oktay Caglar. They founded the platform in 2010 intending to strengthen the educational culture around the globe.

About the Founders

Eren acquired a bachelor’s degree in two subjects from Middle East Technical University. He acquired a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering and a BS in Mathematics. After he graduated, he worked as a Front-end Developer at Gunlukbasin.com. In August 2005, he co-founded Eofer and became the CEO of the company.

Eren also worked at Lead Flex Developer at Dovetail.tv and as a Developer at BitGravity. In 2007, he co-founded Knowband and joined speedate.com as Director of Engineering. Currently, he serves as the Chairman of Udemy and CEO (also co-founder) of Carbon Health.

Gagan went to Mission San Jose High School and graduated in 2005. Later he went to the University of California for acquiring his bachelor’s degree in Economics. Apart from co-founding Udemy, he is also the co-founder of the Growth Hackers Conference. He has prior experience working at Microsoft, Accenture, and TechCrunch. He served as the CEO of Sprig for four years and as the President of Udemy for two years.

Oktay also graduated from the Middle East Technical University with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration. He is a very close friend to Eren since then. Currently, he serves as the CPO of Udemy.

The founding story

Gagan, co-founder of Udemy said that 9 to 5 job bored him very much. He worked at Accenture as a Strategy Consultant but he wasn’t satisfied with his job. He wanted to do something more challenging and was fascinated by the start-up culture. This is when he decided to co-found Udemy along with Erena and Oktay.

When they founded the company the other two co-founders apart from Gagan continued working in other companies as well. But, the three of them put their hundred percent in making this project successful.

The Business model

The most unique and best feature of Udemy is anyone and everyone can create a course. A student can be an instructor and vice versa. If you want to learn something new and already good in a different subject, you create a course and at the same time sign up for a new course. This feature attracted thousands of instructors within a few months. And, by the end of 2010, Udemy witnessed 10,000 registered users.

Growth, Success, and Investors

Though Udemy was publicly released in 2010, Eren started working in it from 2007. He built software for a virtual online classroom and later decided to make it free for everyone. To give his idea a perfect start, he fled to Silicon Valley and finally launched the website on 11th May 2010. Before launching Udemy, they approached many investors for funding. But, unfortunately, every single one turned them down. So, they provided the funding from their pocket and finally released it.

Once the platform went public, the response was unexpectedly high. So, they decided to conduct another funding round and they raised $1 million in August 2010. Next year, the company raised $3 million in Series A funding round lead by Groupon investors. In the Series B funding, Udemy raised $12 million and $32 million in Series C funding.

Some of the investors include Norwest Venture Partners, Insight Venture Partners, Learn Capital, etc. The Series D funding took place in June 2015 and Udemy raised $65 million from it. This was followed by another round of funding in 2016 where it raised $60 million from Naspers Ventures.

Udemy currently has more than 50 million students and 57,000 instructors. There is a variety of courses that are available in 65 languages. Udemy gives a chance to learn and educate others at the same time.

99designs

99designs – Hire The Best Designers For Your Business

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Designing is a very crucial part of any business. With digital marketing becoming the ruler of the empire, one needs to hire top-class designers for the company. It varies from company to company whether they want to hire a designing team or hire freelancers. But, with freelancers, things get easier and faster. You hire them, assign a job, set a deadline and the job is done. When it comes to freelancers, many websites provide the service of hiring freelancers. Websites like Fiverr, Freelancers.com are ruling the market for a very long time. But, they tend to cover most of the categories needed for business operation. For example, content writers, graphic designers, software developers, web designers, etc. 99designs is a platform that is solely created for connecting graphic designers to the clients. Matt Mickiewicz and Mark Harbottle founded the company in 2008. The company’s headquarters are based in Melbourne, Australia.

About the Founders

Born in Poland, Matt moved to Germany at a very young age. He was very much interested in developing websites and designing them as well. Matt created his first website, SitePoint at the age of fourteen and after a couple of years, he met Mark Harbottle. When he was in high school, he managed both attending classes and his advertising business.

Matt met his business partner only at the age of sixteen and established 99designs as an independent company in 2008. In 2011, Matt came in the list of 30 Under 30 Entrepreneur by Forbes and INC. He attends seminars and conferences around the world as an important speaker.

Mark Harbottle has plenty of experience in the entrepreneurial world. He co-founded 99designs in 2008 and presently invests in many companies. He has co-founded other companies as well which includes Flippa.com, Learnable.com, and SitePoint (parent company of 99designs and later spun off). He is the Founding Investor at Elto.com, Hired Inc., Influx Inc, and Assembly Payments.

How did it start?

Matt created SitePoint when he was in high school. But, then he didn’t know it would take a bigger shape in the future. Initially, the people at SitePoint competed with each other regarding who could create the best design. But, with a little entrepreneurial idea, the journey of 99designs started. They decided to design the logo and get a cash prize for the winner in return. And, finally, 99designs spun off from SitePoint.com.

Success and Growth

After Matt and Mark established the company in 2008, they found that most of their clients and designers are from the United States. So, they opened an office in San Francisco. Currently, the U.S. headquarters are situated in Oakland, California. The company grew fast and by the next four years, 99designs had more than 175,000 designers from 192 countries. In 2009, the company became one of Australia’s top innovations.

In 2011, 99designs raised $35 million from Accel Partners for carrying out global expansion. By this time, the company had around 100,000 designers and hosted more than 75,000 projects. In 2012, 99designs acquired a European company, 12designer which later became the European headquarters of the company. In 2013, the company acquired LogoChef, one of Brazil’s leading designing company. This year the company also expanded its business to Latin America and the Netherlands providing Dutch version of it.

In 2015, the company raised another $10 million. Though the company mainly conducted competitions and see whose logo wins, after a few years, they decided otherwise. From 2016, the company allowed the clients to directly choose and hire designers from the registered designers. At the end of 2018, the company’s annual revenue summed up to $60 million.

In 2018, the company also announced that the total earnings of the designers crossed $250 million by the end of the year.

Why in demand?

The platform has turned out to be advantageous for both the clients and the designers. In 99designs, the clients are provided with the best designer as they are given the liberty of choice. On the other hand, the designers also don’t need to interact with every other client asking for the project. If you are a designer you only design your project. 99designs does the rest of the job. Through the span of twelve years, it has become successful in establishing trust among the company and clients.

Fast company

Fast Company – Spreading Business News Around The Globe

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We have become so engrossed in our daily life that somehow we have to make time for everything. Our world is lucky enough that the era of digitalization has already made our life easier. In recent days, the habit of the newspaper is eventually changing to swiping news in our smartphones. Digital magazines are also available these days for enriching us with news and entertainment.

Speaking of magazines, many people have the habit of carrying one and reading whenever they get spare time. It is very important to follow up with current affairs especially technology and business. Fast Company is one such American business magazine that publishes both hard copies and available online for us. It is a monthly magazine that brings us the news from all over the world.

Bill Taylor and Alan Webber founded the company in 1995 and since then it has become more than just news provider. The domain of the content of Fast Company’s magazine is exclusively about the topics that we should be aware of. It includes technology, innovations, and people that are bringing a change to our world, nourishing creativity, etc.

About the Founders

Bill Taylor went to Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School to acquire his bachelor’s degree. He graduated in 1982 and in 1985 he went to MIT Sloan School of Management for acquiring his MBA. Bill’s career life started with Harvard Business Review. He joined it in 1987 as Associate Editor. In 1993, he started working on the project of Fast Company Magazine and officially released it in 1995. Currently, he is the author of Simply Brilliant which he joined in 2011.

Alan Webber completed his schooling from DeMun School at Clayton followed by St. Louis Country Day School. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English from Amherst College. After graduating, he went to Harvard Business School as an employee and later joined The Oregon Times. Alan also gained experience in the political career while he served as a policy advisor to the mayor of Portland.

Apart from his career in the political background, he is well-known as the co-founder of Fast Company. In 1999, he became Adweek’s Editor of the Year.

The Idea

Bill Taylor spotted the opportunity from the perspective of technology. When they decided to establish the company, the internet just started decentralizing the entire idea of computing. Gigantic developments were taking place in the world of telecommunication and networking. On the other hand, Webber looked at it to showcase in front of the population that how the world is changing. Connecting everything from politics to business, from the government to globalization, they co-founded Fast Company.

The Beginning

Economy, politics, and the internal affairs of the government are the foundation of a nation. While Bill Taylor excelled in the sphere of advocacy work and managing business, Webber was a busy curving niche in the political dimension. This made them the perfect duo as the founding member of the Fast Company. A magazine published by a politically and economically experienced team. They worked together for a long time and known each other well.

They started working for it in 1993. Initially, they were able to raise $550,000 from eleven investors. The fund was raised for investing in a prototype. This took almost a year but they took the risk.

Further Story

After a couple of years it started publishing, the company launched an online social network, “Company of Friends”. By 2003, it attracted more than 40,000 members from 120 different cities. In 2000, the company was sold for $550 million and after that, the dot com bubble affected it hugely. But, it eventually started recovering under the leadership of John A. Byrne.

In 2005, Mansueto Ventures bought both Fast Company and Inc magazine for $35 million. Since then the company continues its operations under Mansueto.

Future Aspects

When Fast Company started publishing it only had a handful of competitors. But, after the dot com bust, the recovery was questionable. Fast Company though known as one of the leading American magazines is not the best advertising platform. But, it has a reputation for publishing quality content valuable to the readers. So, the company is looking forward to engaging customers with its content.

Currently, Stephanie Mehta is the Editor of Fast Company and the magazine is published eight times a year.

coursera

Coursera Is Taking Massive Open Online Courses To New Heights

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Have you ever realized that after the advent of online education, millions of students have been benefited? Extra knowledge has become a pre-requisite for landing either a lucrative job or making it into one of the finest institutions around the globe. But, everyone can’t pay for extra courses when basic education seems far-fetched. Especially in a developing country like India, e-learning is the need of the hour. Because most of the population belongs to middle-class society and they need the privilege to acquire proper education. Learning the crucial need to educate the world, especially the young minds in an affordable way, MOOCs are needed. In 2012, two professors from Stanford University, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng founded Coursera. Coursera has become one of the largest and successful websites for MOOCs. And, this platform mainly focusses on making people learn about the emerging demanding topics like AI and ML.

About the Founders of Coursera

Daphne Koller’s research area is mainly based on the application of artificial intelligence in biomedical sciences. She is an Israeli-American professor in the department of computer science. In 1985, she graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at the age of seventeen and received her master’s degree at the age of eighteen. Daphne went to Stanford to acquire her Ph.D.

She received the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in 2008 which came with a cash prize of $150,000. In 2012, she along with another Standard professor, Andrew Ng, co-founded Coursera. She served as the co-CEO of the company and later as the President. Daphne left the company in 2016 and joined Calico as the Chief Computing Officer. Later, she left Calico to start her company, Insitro, a drug discovery start-up. Daphne is also the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.

Image Source: Google

Apart from being one of the most famous and successful computer scientists, Andrew is also an investor, writer, and businessman. His parents were immigrants from Hong Kong and thus he grew up in London. He went to Carnegie Mellon University and acquired his bachelor’s in three subjects in 1997. He majored in computer science, economics, and statistics. Later, he went to the Massachusetts Institute of technology and acquired his master’s degree in 1998.

Andrew joined Stanford University in 2002 and co-founded Coursera in 2012. He is also the co-founder of Google Brain and the former Vice President and Chief Scientist at Baidu. He was listed in Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2012. Andrew has also founded AI Fund that financially backs the AI-based start-ups.

The Beginning

Both Andrew and Daphne were inspired by the online courses of Stanford in the fall of 2011. They were driven by the idea of how an online learning platform is advantageous to millions of students out there who cannot afford to take coaching classes. Moreover, through this platform people can learn from the best professors in the world.

When they founded the website, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania joined their hands to contribute. It included many specialization courses as well. The content of Coursera eventually became very elaborate.

Growth, Funding, and Investors

The first funding that Coursera raised was an amount of $16 million. It was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Buyers and New Enterprise Associates. The series B funding took place in 2013 where Coursera raised $63 million from World Bank Group. The amount of funding raised shows how fast it was gaining popularity. In the next round of funding, the start-up raised around $60 million from EDB Investment. After a few more rounds of funding, Coursera’s valuation crossed $1 billion at the end of 2019.

To date, Coursera has established a relationship with 200 partners across twenty-nine countries. Apart from college and other educational institutions, Coursera has also come into partnership with many government agencies.

Strategies and Business Model

Within one year of its product going public, Coursera made an annual revenue of $1 million. Students from all over the world signed up for the courses especially because of the valid certificate provided after the completion. After a couple of years, Coursera decided to provide financial aid to the students who cannot pay the course fee.

After this, more students started enrolling and learning new skills. The students were highly benefited as the certificates were only given after passing the assignments with 80% gradation. This is one of the best features of Coursera that they are genuinely interested in educating people and not just making money.

Currently, Coursera has 47 million users around the world. The company has 450 employees and the headquarters is situated in California.

WebEngage

Marketing Is Getting More Realistic With Avlesh Singh’s WebEngage

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Most companies jump into establishing a business before having much idea about internal operations. There are start-ups founded by brilliant minds and excellent team efforts, achieving great success. But, those are the only companies we tend to know about. In the business world, many new start-ups are coming up every day but dissolving due to a lack of strategic moves.WebEngage is a very important sector for every business to expand and reach out to people. Most of the companies are indeed more interested in making a profit. But, a few understand that customers are the prime key to that. WebEngage is a marketing company that is focused mainly on personalized marketing experience for its customers. Alves Singh and Ankit Utreja founded the company in 2010. And, currently, it is one of the top 25 software companies in India.

About the Founders

Avlesh Singh went to the Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad. He graduated in 2005 with a bachelor’s degree in Mineral Engineering.

Avlesh started his career with burrp! where he worked as the Principal Engineer and Search Architect. He worked there for more than three years and joined InfoMedia18 Ltd. Avlesh left the company earlier in 2010 and co-founded WebEngage. Currently, he is the Chief Executive Officer of the company.

Before WebEngage, Ankit Utreja has fourteen years of experience in the field of tech stacks. He is extremely skilled at managing the database system. Currently, he is the Chief Technology Officer of WebEngage.

Early Days

When Avlesh and Ankit developed the company, its main focus was on making more engagement between companies and their customers. They emerged as a company providing an on-site survey and a feedback tool. But, once they started engaging customers, Ankit wanted to create more of a high-tech environment for the company. With the assistant of Ankit and the tech team, WebEngage became a full-stack mobile-first marketing automation platform.

Since then they believe in making marketing more personalized. The user should feel genuine engagement with the company and become more comfortable. WebEngage thus came up as an opportunity for digital companies to improve user engagement.

Growth and Success

WebEngage has been listed in the Winter 2020 Grid Report for Marketing Automation & Push Notification and the High Performer Category. The tool of WebEngage is also very easy to set up which attracts more customers around the globe. Due to this reason, WebEngage received an Implementation Index of 7.96 out of 10. This rate is higher than companies like Oracle and Adobe.

In 2018, the company helped more than 300 digital enterprises to make their user engagement better. Currently, the company is trying its best to help all the B2C companies make more annual revenue. Instead of landing new customers, WebEngage lets the companies reconnect with the existing customers and make a better relationship.

Investors

The major investors of the company are IndiaQuotient, Blume Ventures, Social Capital, Capital Group, and Indian Angel Fund. And, the recent investors are Social Capital and BlackSoil. The Angel round of WebEngage took place in October 2011 and the company raised $100,000. The next funding round took place in August 2012 where they raised $500,000 followed by $1.3 million in 2016. Till now, WebEngage has raised a total amount of $2.1 million from six funding rounds.

Application of AI and ML

Since WebEngage is an initiative to improve user engagement, the application of AI and ML is quite mandatory. The application of AI is needed here mainly to categorize the requirements of the customers based on business requirements, user action, demographic data, etc. It also checks the suitability of the content across different types of user groups.

Accusations

The company was making remarkable success. But, in 2017 one of the former female colleagues of the company accused Avlesh Singh of sexual assault. It spread all over social media like a wildfire. The investigation continued for a long time and they concluded about the relationship is consensual. But, after she came up with the same accusation once again, investigation presumed.

Later, all the charges were removed from him. But, the news affected the growth of the company to some point. Though, the action didn’t lead to something bigger like striking his name off the company. But, the company still suffered some loss.

Boost Media Logo

BOOST MEDIA- Providing High-Class Digital Marketing Services since 2011

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By now we have already become familiar with the term SaaS and the term SaaS stands for Software as a Service. In this kind of service, the company makes software whose license is given to other companies on a subscription basis. IT sector has various needs and in every company, smaller or bigger, an IT department is mandatory. It is important for the proper functioning of the business.

And, all these have eventually topped our priority list once the internet started becoming affordable by everyone. Speaking about SaaS, Boost Media is one of the largest and fastest-growing B2B SaaS companies that exist. Rob Lenderman and David Greenbaum founded the company in 2009 and since then it is excelling in the creative marketplace. Boost Media provides one of the best services in the sphere of digital marketing meeting every need of the clients.

Boost Media Logo

Boost Media Founders

Rob Lenderman went to North Carolina State University to acquire his bachelor’s degree in Nuclear Engineering. He completed his graduation in 1995. In 2000, Rob joined LendingTree as a Lead Developer and eventually, he received a promotion as SEO Architect. He left the company in 2007 and joined Interval International-IAC. He worked there as a product developer for three years.

In 2010, Rob joined Clearwire as the Director of eCare and left it for co-founding Boost Media. He was the Chief Product Officer of Boost Media until Adlabs Technology acquired the company in 2019. Currently, he is holding the same position at Adlabs Technology.

David Greenbaum went to the Yale School of Management for completing his MBA. His career started as an analyst in Goldman Sachs after which he started working for Plum Capital. In this company, he worked with many start-ups handling finance operation of them. It gave him a clear perspective of how he should start one.

David also worked at Interval Leisure Group as the Director of Strategy and M&A. After co-founding Boost Media, David also founded OnPlan.

Funding to Boost Media

Both the founders were well experienced when they founded Boost media. David, by then had already mastered the art of managing finance. The company received its first funding in the year 2011. In the seed funding, Boost Media raised $1.6 million. Some of the major investors included David Frankel, Jed Katz, etc. There was a total of eight investors that led this funding round.

The early Series A funding round took place in September 2011. Webb Investment Network led the funding round. There was another funding round in 2012 and the company raised $1.4 million. Javelin Ventures Partners led another funding round in 2013 and the company raised $2 million.

In 2013, the company raised $8 million in Series B funding from Western Technology Investment, Javelin Ventures Partners, and Battery Ventures. This year, the company also carried out its Series C funding round where it raised $19 million. Within a few years of founding the company, it landed many big investors.

Growth and Success

By this time, Boost Media has already become a well-acknowledged digital marketing service provider in the industry. From displaying advertising to social video, Boost Media released many platforms for better reach.

One such platform was released in 2016 and it was called Boost Media’s Express Platform. It was released in 2016 to help users have access to a marketplace with more than 1,000 professional copywriters.

Within 2016, Boost Media landed more than 200 customers including some big businesses like Jockey, Shutterfly, Liberty Mutual, etc. The team of Boost Media comprises of more than 1,000 experienced copywriters and designers. The company has its headquarters based in San Francisco.

Acquisition by Adlabs Technology

Adlabs Technology is a company working in the field of paid-search ad creations, optimization, and analysis which are powered by AI. The company announced the acquisition of Boost Media in 2019. The agreement included top to bottom of Boost Media’s assets including customer contracts, patents, trademark brands, software platforms, websites, etc.

The key employees of Boost Media were also accepted in the company including Rob. Currently, the company is performing all its operations under the name of Adlabs Technology. Before the acquisition, the company showed excellent results as an independent entity landed many lucrative clients.