Your Tech Story

Harshal Pawar

Harshal Pawar is an avid reader, a TV show addict, and a writer. He has a personal blog brainwork.wordpress.com where he jots down his articles and poetry about love and life. He is currently pursuing film-making and wishes to bring the words written on a paper to the screen. More of all he is a scorpio.

Blake Ross – The Founder of Firefox

Founder, Story / By

Achieving great heights of success in a young age is not everyone’s cup of tea. A passion for work and dedication towards it is demanded rigorously. The technological evolution has made young minds sharp and enthusiastic to create more and more customer service based applications. For example, one of the most used and most preferred internet browser Mozilla Firefox is the application developed by one such genius youngster Blake Aaron Ross.

Early Life
Born on 12th June, 1985 in Miami, Florida, United States, Blake was raised by his highly qualified parents in the Key Biscayne area. His mother is a psychologist and father is a lawyer. Blake’s interest in software development arose at quite an early age. He completed his high school from Gulliver Preparatory School in Miami and graduated in 2003 from Stanford University. Blake’s first individual project was his first website named America Online which he developed at the mere age of 10. As his interest grew through the Sim City show Blake started creating small video games. And while he was graduating he simultaneously worked for Mozilla in California.

Blake’s interest in programming took a new leap when Netscape became open-source and he joined as an intern at the age of 15.

The Firefox Project
The name ‘Blake Ross’ is known as the name behind creating Mozilla Firefox web browser. Along with his two colleagues Dave Hyatt and Joe Hewitt, Ross conceived the idea of developing a user-friendly web browser. The idea was born when Ross and Hewitt were working on an open-source project. Soon, they put this idea into programming codes and developed the first version of Firefox and released it to the world on 9th November, 2004. Blake Ross was just 19 when the first version was released.

The first version of Firefox drew massive attention worldwide. Due to its user-friendly interface Firefox instantly became popular among the people and just within a month of its launch the application was downloaded 100 million times. The project saw it’s yet another success just within a year when Firefox became the most preferred web browser all over the world. He also published a book named ‘Firefox for Dummies’ on January 11, 2006.

A Parallel Venture
Along with the massive success of Firefox Ross kept working on his newer creative ideas to make internet more accessible and simple place. One such ideas Ross worked on was his startup named Parakey. Through this new user interface Ross aimed at bridging the gap between web and desktop. Parakey was developed by Ross along with Hewitt in 2006. Parakey was featured on the cover page of IEEE Spectrum Magazine in November, 2006 issue. Just a year later, i.e. in 2007, Facebook saw the potential in Parakey and purchased it for a muli-million price.

Driving Force Behind Firefox
From his early childhood interest in programming, which eventually led to the development of world’s most preferred web browser, Blake Ross has come a long way. The main driving factor behind the development of Firefox was his experiences during the internship at Netscape. He used to face lot of troubles in the browser he used to work on. And, other driving force was his mother’s frustrated experience with internet explorer. Ross then thought of developing something small yet powerful and simple to use. And, thus, was born Firefox.

Blake Ross’ Profile and Achievements
Blake’s constant working on newer ideas created a buzz among the companies. Soon after Parakey was purchased by Facebook, Blake Ross joined Facebook in 2007 and worked as Director of Product till 2013. He resigned from Facebook in 2013 to focus on his other interests. Ross has received multiple renowned awards and nominations for top magazines including the nomination for top Rave award of Wired magazine, Renegade of the year, etc. In 2005 Ross was listed on Rolling Stone magazines hot list.

Ross, from his experiences in the industry he works in, wrote a fan fiction original screenplay for HBO’s sitcom Silicon Valley. The TV series grabbed a lot of attention and went on to become popular among the audiences worldwide.

Personal Life
Ross, 30, found out back in 2016 that he has an extremely rare condition known as aphantasia. This condition takes away the ability to visualize anything. Ross wrote;

“I have never visualized anything in my entire life. I can’t “see” my father’s face or a bouncing blue ball, my childhood bedroom or the run I went on ten minutes ago. I thought ‘counting sheep’ was a metaphor. I’m 30 years old and I never knew a human could do any of this.”

Jonathan Ive – Chief Design Officer Of Apple

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A passion to do something and following your heart can take you places. Who would have thought that just being fond of designing would make Jonathan Ive the Chief Design Officer of the world’s most leading tech giant: Apple? he is serving the company for last 22 years and has designed some beautiful and innovative products.

Early Life
Ive was born in Chingford and raised in Staffordshire on 27th February 1967 under the guidance of his father Jonathan Jony Ive who was a lecturer and silversmith by profession. Ive got interested in drawing at very early and tender age of 14. Inheriting the skills from his father he started designing from jewelry to furniture and cars to boats.

Finally, after meeting few experts Ive decided to take a product designing course and joined industrial design at Newcastle Polytechnic. A hearing aid designed by Ive is kept on display in the London Museum of Design. Ive slowly started getting into technology and especially designing products using a Mac computer.

Beginning of Career
After the completion of his course Ive co-founded Tangerine – a London based design firm designing household products like kitchen and bathroom appliances. And Ive’s journey for Apple began from here. As Apple was one of the client’s at Tangerine they wanted him to join Apple after being impressed with his work. Robert Burner, the industrial design chief of Apple, hired Ive in 1992 and just in the next five years became the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design. Ive worked hard on the products such as the Newton MessagePad 110, which was one of the forgotten Apple products. Ive was on the verge to quit Apple but Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president of hardware engineering, gave him a raise and persuaded him to stay.

The Leap
Good that Ive took Rubinstein’s advice and stayed because in the coming years he would design some of the most famous Apple products like 1998’s iMac, 2001’s iPod, 2007’s iPhone, and 2010’s iPad. These were the groundbreaking designs by Ive which raised the bar of his reputation higher and higher. The uniqueness of the designs brought by Apple made them stand out in the market and a lot of other companies even copied the designs. Ive’s latest design is the Apple Watch.

Under Steve Jobs, Ive was given complete freedom to explore new ideas and designs. After the death of Jobs, some additional responsibility was put on Ive’s shoulders including the handling of software along with the hardware. He also has a personal design lab and is one of the most secret areas at Apple’s headquarters. And only a handful of people can actually enter this personal lab.

Ive holds more than 730 US design and utility patents as of 2014. Many more patents are yet to arrive in the future. He was awarded various awards recognizing his work in the design field. Ive lives with his wife Heather Pegg and twin sons in the Pacific Heights district of San Francisco, California.

Ive believes in charity and has developed products like the Leica Camera and Jaeger-LeCoultre sports watch which were sold at auction for charitable trusts. He considered Steve Jobs to be his closest friend and Jobs considered him to be his ‘spiritual partner’ at Apple.

Liu Chuanzhi Founder of Lenovo

Founder, start-up, Tech Story / By

Hardships are the rigorous tests in a determined person’s life. Hardships come in numerous faces and it is this time when a human being’s ability and patience to deal and overcome the difficult time is tested. Those who come strong out of this deadly storm are the one’s who create history and make a difference in the world. Liu Chuanzhi is one such person who despite of humongous political constraints, managed to build a company which now ranks number two in the production of computers in the whole world.

Born on April 29, 1944 in Shanghai, China, Liu Chuanzhi grew up during the worst of times. Liu’s father was an executive with the Bank of China in Shanghai. However, his connections with the Chinese Communists would create a problem in Liu’s future. Liu’s childhood was encompassed with the years of unstable politics and tension in the government. In 1961, he admitted himself in Xian Military Communication Engineering College. Due to his father’s political connections Liu was not allowed to study sensitive subjects and he completed his graduation in 1966 specializing in Radar Systems. This course, however, exposed him for the first time to the computing world.

Just two years after graduation, Liu’s past yet again haunted him and sent him down for labor work. This time it was due to his anti-revolutionary ideas which led the officials to send him to work on a state-owned rice farm as a laborer and learn by living among the peasants from 1968 to 1970. By this time, the Chinese Academy of Sciences was reopened which was closed due to Chinese Cultural Revolution. Liu returned to his job at Beijing and went on to work as an engineer and an administrator. Liu provided a lion’s share in developing the 757 mainframe computer. He resigned from his job in 1984 to join Chinese Academy of Sciences – the place where the computer producing giant Lenovo would be born.

Early Days

After joining Chinese Academy of Sciences Liu stumbled upon an idea to start a computer company. But, there were multiple barriers standing in front of him and his dream. First, the Chinese government did not encourage start-ups and ran a strictly planned economy. So the funding from government was out of question. Second, for a scientist to jump into business was considered below one’s dignity and, therefore, the company Liu would start won’t have a single market expert who knows how the business should work. Despite of this barriers, Liu received a 200,000 yuan ($24,000 USD) loan from his superior at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Liu’s computer company, initially named Legend, was compared to the early days of Apple. The company’s manufacturing unit began in a small 20 square yards room in Beijing. The company worked on the research of magnetic storage technology in its initial stage. In 1985, Legend did something which no other computer company had ever done, they built a Chinese character set for computers. Since, the Chinese language consisted of huge number of characters it was almost an impossible task to bring all those characters in digital form. But, the development of a character set put Legend multiple steps ahead of any other company. Due to the lack of business knowledge the company often faced opinion problems among the members. But, Liu’s leadership and his study of other big companies like HP and IBM helped him to sketch an influential business and marketing strategy.

Legend started selling computers six years after its foundation, i.e., in 1990. And by 1996, the company climbed on top of the computer manufacturing company’s list surpassing IBM. Liu believed in young people in their energy and talent which could pave a way to keep the company on cutting edge of innovation and technology. Most of the company’s higher staff included young people during the 90s. By developing Pentium II processor Legend once again proved that they are and will always be on the top of the market.

The company saw its massive success in 2004 when they were declared as the largest PC manufacturing company. In 2006, Legend was renamed as Lenovo Group to enter into the UK and Europian market where the name ‘Legend’ was already trademarked. Legend also became the first company to join the sponsorship for Olympic Games held in Turin, Italy in 2006.

In 1995, the Chinese government honored Liu as the Model of National Work Force and Man of Reform in China. In 2005, Liu has also been listed in Time’s one of the 25 most influential global executives.

Daniel Ek – Founder of Spotify

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Life is all about having a sense of purpose. No matter if you are a broke person with no money or a financially independent person doing well in life. Without a sense of purpose life begins to fill empty. Daniel Ek, a lover of music founded world’s top music streaming app to fulfill his own sense of purpose. After achieving great success at very early age and becoming financially independent, Daniel launched Spotify, a music streaming app which became impossibly famous in the whole world.

Born on 21 February, 1983, Daniel Ek grew up in Ragsved, Stockholm, Sweden. His father got out of their lives early on and most of his life, Daniel and his younger brother Felix, were raised by their mother Elisabet and stepfather Hasse. Daniel described their economical condition as “An average Swede. We didn’t have much money”.

Daniel and his Love for Music

Daniel’s love for music grew right from his childhood and the seed was sown from his family itself. His grandmother was an opera singer and grandfather was a Jazz pianist. He learnt to play the Swedish nursery rhyme “Lilla snigel” at the tender age of four. Daniel’s love and involvement for music heightened when in secondary school i.e. IT Gymnasiet in Sundbyberg, he was allowed to combine two of his favorite subjects – music and technology. Taking robust advantage of this opportunity he installed internet in the Oasen youth club and started his first business – building websites.

Daniel initially charged upto $100 for his first client and made his fees double for the next client. The website development business grew so much that he eventually started charging as high as $5000. Later on, due to increasing demand for his skills, Daniel hired the students from his own class. Soon, his team size grew up to 25 and his monthly earnings to a whopping $50000. On the other hand, Daniel’s devotion for music became the sole reason for him to attend the school. His music teacher Tony Kinberg said,

“Music really was Daniel’s thing. If music wasn’t on his timetable, he would come to the music room anyway, or if he had a free period. He’s really good singer and guitar player”.

Music and programming was what made his life worthwhile. Daniel Ek completed his graduation from Sundbyberg in 2002 in IT scoring top grades in eleven subjects. He later went on to join KTH Royal Institute of Technology. After realizing that the first year in his higher studies was all about theoretical mathematics and nothing about programming Daniel left the place by the eighth week.

Early Career

Leaving the KTH institute came as a turning point in Daniel’s life. Money had always been a luxury for Daniel. And a life he was longing for would soon provide him with this luxury. Daniel took a job at TradeDoubler – Europe’s biggest online advertisement company. His performance at the company brought him success and riches at the age of just 23, making him financially independent. The success poured in and soon brought another twist in Daniel’s life.

At the age of 29, Daniel started feeling a sense of emptiness into his life. Even after earning fat paychecks, owning a dream car, a three room apartment in central Stockholm Daniel felt lost in his life. This lead him into depression and soon he sold his apartment and car and moved to a secluded cabin long way from town. The isolation, music, and meditation which Daniel acquired while spending time in his wooden cabin led to the origin of his biggest business idea and he contacted Martin Lorentzon – an IT nerd. The idea was to create an app which allows the user to listen any music in the world at the cost of short advertisements in between.

Before, turning into a billionaire from Spotify, Daniel Ek has worked with several billionaire’s. He initially founded Advertigo which was acquired by TradeDoubler. He also served as a senior at Tradera – a Nordic auction company which was sold to eBay in 2006. Ek also served as a CEO of uTorrent along with its founder Ludvig Strigeus. uTorrent was also acquired by BitTorrent in December 7, 2006, which also ended Ek’s term as a CEO.

The idea of Spotify, originated in the wooden cabin, was in the development mode in 2006. Daniel used his old school trick to hire the young technology graduates from KTH to work on Spotify. The team would work in a small office in Riddargatann in Ostermalm, Stockholm. The company launched it’s official music streaming service ‘Spotify’ in October, 2008.

The service received huge positive response from all over Sweden and company targeted one country at a time. This pace helped them to focus on one particular region completely to provide better quality and huge playlist. Nearly 80% of Spotify’s works around the world to produce the best results for their users. Today, Spotify has more than 140 million users in more than 58 countries and has raised more than $2.5 billion from funding.

Personal Life

Daniel Ek is married to Sofia Levander, a TV actress and three years senior to Ek, in 2016. His net worth is calculated to be around SEK 4.5 billion. Daniel is also actively involved in charity and has donated 1 million Swedish Kronor for Charity Water – an organization dedicated to provide safe and clean water to 800 million people living without it. Daniel Ek lives with his wife and two children.

Richard Barton- Founder of Expedia

Founder, Story / By

A true businessman is someone who observes a problem that exists in the society, thinks for a possible solution and comes up with something to resolve that problem. Thus, making a difference in the society by providing the services which makes our life easy. Richard Barton is founder of multiple ventures all focused to make people’s life easy. Barton uses a slogan “power to the people”, the staunch philosophy behind his each start-up. Barton has created a space for the people where they can access information, data, and even share their views, thus making internet a place for people.

Image Credit: Twitter

Born on 2nd June, 1967 in New Canaan, Connecticut, United States, Richard Barton is a son of a teacher and mechanical engineer. His father, Jim Barton, once gifted a Commodore 64 to Richard when they lived in New Canaan. Barton has a strong family background with his forefather John Barton and his grandfather Horace Barton known as celebrated in the 1999 South Dakota Tennis Hall of Fame.

Richard Barton completed his degree in engineering in 1989 from Stanford University. Before joining Microsoft in 1991, he took a job at Alliance Consulting Group. After joining Microsoft, one day in a conversation with Bill Gates, Barton pitched the idea of his first business venture – Expedia, and asked Gates to back him. The idea behind Expedia was it would directly allow the consumers to view the prices and book online airline travel tickets, thus, removing the travel agents from the picture. He founded Expedia in 1994 and the idea took off a great leap becoming a massive success for Barton. Later, he left Microsoft as Expedia was declared as a separate company and went public in 1999. He remained as CEO of Expedia till 2003 after which the company was acquired by IAC Corp.

The acquisition of Expedia and considerable amount of free time gave Barton much needed space to think and work on his next ventures. He wanted to create something which had the same motto as Expedia had – to make common people’s life better. In one of the interview he said, “If we’re doing things for regular folks that make their lives better and save them money and give them transparency, we’re on the side of the angels”. His next project was to start a website called Glassdoor.

The idea behind Glassdoor was to provide job seekers transparent information about the company, employees, their salary and even rate the working based on the information. This would encourage the job seekers to find the right job for themselves and for the company to raise their bar so that their ratings are not affected. The site has a whopping 22 million members and has successfully raised $93 million. According to Mr.Hohman, Chief Executive Glassdoor, the company is willing to go public.

Barton’s another idea was to create a space to share transparent information about the local real estate markets. And thus was launched Zillow – a website to find any information needed about real estate. The aim of this website was to provide all that information which was previously hidden from the customer. Barton, as of today, owns shares worth $400 million in Zillow.

Although a genius business mind Barton avoids the hubbub of Silicon Valley and doesn’t wish to get himself mixed up in the flashy corporate world. He prefers to stay away and work from a place where he finds peace and can relax whenever he wishes. Currently, he is a board member at Netflix, a venture partner with Benchmark, and also an active investor in start-ups. Barton has managed to keep a low profile and lives in Seattle.

Marc Benioff, Founder and CEO of Salesforce

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Talented people have the urge to make a difference in this world and create a name for themselves from quite an early age. One such genius who jumped into the entrepreneurship race from the age when he was just in high school is Marc Benioff. Influenced by his father, a Hindu guru, and a former secretary of state Marc Benioff is best known as  founder of Salesforce – a cloud computing company.

Marc Benioff, son of Joelle and Russell Benioff, was born on September 25th 1964 in San Francisco and was raised in the Bay Area. Marc got his first exposure into the business world through his father’s local departmental store in San Francisco. In one of the interviews he went on to credit his father and said, “I learned my work ethic from him”. He studied high school from the Burlingame High School and during his time there he developed and sold his first software called “How To Juggle” for the TRS-80 Model 1 Computer. This trade gained him $75 from the buyer computer magazine.Marc BenioffThe next major successful turn came into Marc’s life when he was 15. This was the year when he founded his single-man company named Liberty Software dedicated to develop games for the Atari 800 computer. Under this company’s banner Benioff developed games such as “King Arthur’s Heir”, “The Nightmare”, “Crypt of the Undead”, and “Escape from the Vulcan’s Isle”. His venture of developing games became his primary source of income and by the next year Benioff was making $1500 per month which he would later use to pay for his higher studies. He graduated from High School in the year 1982 and enrolled himself into University of Southern California to pursue Bachelor of Science in Business Administration degree.

The USC days were of great opportunities for Benioff. He landed an internship as a programmer with the tech-genius and the greatest visionary ever lived Steve Jobs at Apple’s Macintosh division. It was here when he learned that revolutionary ideas were not just a dream but they can be pursued and achieved too. Benioff had made his mind to make his career in programming but one of his professor at USC had something else in mind. He suggested Benioff to take business. And, thus, was born an entrepreneur who would revolutionize the online world.

Marc started his career immediately after graduating from USC and joined the database giant Oracle as a customer support. Benioff had an exceptional oratory skills and this helped him to gain the “Rookie of the Year” title at the age of 23. Three years later he climbed up his career ladder so fast that he reached the Vice President position and became the youngest person to be on that post. This also gained him a fat salary of $300,000.

Benioff’s success caught an eye of the top-line people and the founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, himself called him in. Benioff and Ellison quickly became close friends and spent a good amount of time together attending parties, going on vacations, etc. After 13 years of job at Oracle, Benioff decided to work on something of his own project. And he started working on the idea of cloud computing and gave the company a name which today is known as “Salesforce”. Ellison supported Benioff’s idea by funding the project with $2 million and took a seat on board of directors.

As the time passed by, Benioff found out a potential competitor to Salesforce and it was none other than Oracle itself. This led to the start of downfall between Ellison and Benioff’s relations. While the business war’s continued Salesforce managed to survive the huge dot-com bust blow-off in early 2000s. The survival made the company even stronger and brought it in the list of biggest companies in modern cloud computing market. The company went public in 2004 and raised $110 million. Today, the company is valued at $40 billion and has also been awarded multiple awards including the “Best Place to Work at” for 8 consecutive years.

Starting from selling a software for $75 to making a billion dollars company Marc Benioff stands at number 16 in the Forbes 500 most influential CEOs list. Besides his business work, Benioff has also written a business book “Behind the Cloud”, a memoir on Salesforce in 2009. He is actively involved in philanthropical works and donates a huge sum to charitable trusts and organizations. Benioff currently lives in San Francisco, California with his wife Lynnie Benioff and two children.