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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.

Rags to Riches Story: Stan Shih, Founder of Acer

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A great man once said, “If you are born poor it’s not your fault. But if you die poor it is your fault”. The one who stands up against all the odds and comes out successfully through the worst of times is bound to achieve the greatest feats of his lifetime. This is the story of Stan Shih, founder of Acer who has achieved the greatest success and is now a billionaire.

Born on 8 December, 1944 in the Republic of China – Taiwan, Stan Shih faced a struggling childhood. The already poor family was in a state of disaster when Stan, at a tender age of four, lost his father. At this small age he joined hands along with his mother in her business of selling eggs. The money they earned from this business helped Stan complete his preliminary education. But, his dream was much more than just completing preliminary. He worked even harder in their business and, with enough money accumulated, he went on to pursue the Bachelor’s and then Master’s program in Electronic Engineering from the National Chiao Tung University. He also successfully completed his honorary PhD in Electronics Engineering in the year 1992.

From an early age, Stan was dedicated towards his interests. He enjoyed every little process about his studies which immensely helped him to launch Acer in 1976. The launch of this company further saw such a tremendous growth that in 2006 it converted Taiwan into a PC-manufacturing powerhouse among the whole world. Today Acer stands as the second largest computer manufacturing company in the world.

Stan started the company along with his wife Carolyn Yeh and five other partners and it was initially named Multitech. Shih, accepted the chairmanship of Multitech in 1987 and it was this year when they decided to rename it to Acer. Beginning his career, in 1971, as a computer engineer at Unitron Industrial Corp. Shih made Taiwan’s first successful desktop calculator. His next major feat was the development of world’s first pen watch which he achieved during his time at Qualitron Industrial Corp., which he helped to establish too.

Stan Shih has shared a major part in establishing three largest PC companies Acer, BenQ and Wistron. He took retirement from the chairmanship of Acer in the year 2004 and has accepted the seat on the Board of Directors at Acer, BenQ and Wistron. Starting Acer with a mere $25,000 back in 1976, the company’s net worth has reached as high as US $22.2 billion. The company ranks at number 4 in terms of total PCs and at number 3 for the total notebooks across the whole world.

Social Responsibility
Shih, in one of his speeches, said, “You have to always look ahead, always be positive. It’s your choice, your destiny. You have to enjoy life but still have a personal social responsibility.” Despite being a billionaire Stan Shih is actively involved with social and public organizations. He was a chairman of the Asia Business Council, he sat on the board of directors of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd, and is also a chairman of the Brand International Promotion Association.

Awards and Honors
The year Acer was founded, i.e. 1976, also earned Shih a place on Taiwan’s “Ten Most Outstanding Young Persons” and just seven years later he was named one of the “Ten Most Outstanding Persons in the World” by International Jacees. Shih has been featured in noteworthy magazines like Asiaweek,  BusinessWeek, Fortune, and was featured in Time magazine’s “60 Years of Asian Heroes” for his achievements. The most precious day in Shih’s life was the day when he was awarded an honorary Doctor of International Law, the highest honor of the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Shih now lives with his lovely wife Carolyn Yeh and three children.

Story of Jimmy Wales: Co-founder of Wikipedia

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The world is making progress at a massive speed. So may it be in engineering, medical or creative prospects, the people are putting forward their best ideas to improve even further. And, no doubt, technology is playing a vital role in all this development. From cooking recipes to educational courses, everything is available on a single click. All this has become possible due to constant hard work of the people who had an ambitious vision. Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is one of such people who dreamt of building world’s largest encyclopedia, and that too, free for everyone’s use.

Early Life
Born on August 7, 1966 at Huntsville, Alabama Wales took his schooling at the Randolph School. He lived with his father, who ran a grocery store, and his mother, who ran a single room school. Jimmy wales, with his siblings, studied in this school before attending primary school. He graduated at the age of 16 and got his Bachelor’s degree in Finance from the Auburn University. While pursuing his postgraduate studies he went on to teach at the University of Alabama and the Indiana University.

Risks from Earlier Life
Wales was interested and quite good at computer coding. In 1994, while working with Chicago Options Associates, a trading firm, he spent his free time playing with the computer code wishing to build a knowledge sharing platform. Despite his bright career ahead in the firm, he decided to quit so that he could bring his dream into reality. As a result he started a company named ‘Bomis’ with his two partners. The website was designed for a purpose to gather humongous views and therefore contained some unethical material aimed to sustain male needs. Bomis worked quite well bringing in enough money which Wales used to finance his next big project.

The initial idea of starting a knowledge sharing platform was that people would contribute useful articles and expert editorial team would edit the content. The site was named ‘Nupedia’ which provided quality information and also challenged the professional encyclopedias already in the market. The idea was immensely apprehended and thousands of people all around the world started contributing quality informative articles to the website. Jimmy witnessed a major problem when the incoming articles were coming in a huge amount while the edited version were taking a lot of time to be uploaded. He had to find a way to balance both sides where the rate of uploading the edited articles would match the incoming articles.

Wikipedia’s birth and funding
This is when Jimmy Wales  and his colleagues came up with another ambitious idea. The idea put forward allowed maximum number of submissions on a single topic and, an added provision was that any user could be able to edit the article. Jimmy thought that finding faults and editing them in an article was easy but collecting the facts and information was the toughest part. The idea of crowd sourced editing worked and Wikipedia was born. Here, n number of people could edit and add the information to the already written article. Thus, making it more and more factual with every edit. January 15, 2001 was the official launch date of Wikipedia. Wikipedia was funded from the money earned from Bomis before it was made non profit organization.

The concept was receiving overwhelming response that Jimmy Wales and his teammates ever emancipated. Here, people from around the globe were providing quality and informative articles and simultaneously editing it constantly. Wales put few best editors to look over the uploaded articles and correct them regularly to maintain the quality of the information. In 2011, 10 years from launch, Wikipedia became the highest visited online encyclopedia platform. The website holds more than 30 million articles in more than 287 languages available freely for its visitors. Wales has avoided advertisements on his website to provide distraction free readings.

Wikipedia, on October 2013, was ranked as the 6th highest visited website across the globe. Jimmy Wales’ vision of providing quality education has revolutionized the way people could learn. From leaving his PhD dissertation thesis, his promising job mid-way to accomplishing the world’s largest information providing website Wales has come a long way and has definitely made this world a better place.

Neil Patel Co-founder of Hello bar, Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics

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Internet is a world of organized chaos. One can reach immeasurable heights if the path through this chaos is figured out. And once figured out it can make you millionaire or a billionaire. One such bright mind to carve a path through this chaotic world is that of Neil Patel. He managed to find a solution on which numerous multi-billion dollar companies would rely in the future. Patel, at an early stage in his career, realized the potential of digital marketing and dedicated his whole time in finding the best way that would increase the traffic on a website.

Born on 24th April, 1985 in London Neil grew up in a family with a strong entrepreneur background. While studying at the John F. Kennedy High School, Neil saw his cousin making money out of selling burned CDs. He too tried to follow his cousin but avoided selling the pirated versions due to legal constraints. However, the burned CDs gave considerably low returns and Neil thought of a new idea to increase his income. Now, he would sell the black boxes and by buying cable black boxes from eBay he would capitalize his money. Again, the legal constraints made him jump to yet another idea of reselling automotive parts. This time he acquired legal permission from the State Board of Equalization to avoid any further disturbances in his business.

Patel, at an early age of 15, landed his first job which involved cleaning restrooms, picking up and emptying trash cans, sweeping the vomit, etc. He would earn comparatively extra cents than other places. His next and better job was in the sales just 3 months later working in Quality Systems selling vacuums worth $1600. But Patel’s aim was not just to earn money but to get rich and the sales job wasn’t going to make him a rich man.

A Step Forward
Neil’s sister introduced him to the boss at Oracle consultant. He studied the business model of Monster.com he started his own venture called Advice Monkey which failed terribly. But every failure brings with it new opportunities and lessons to learn. Neil learnt the magnificent potential of Internet Marketing.

With the knowledge of potential business model and the tool to achieve it already acquired Neil only needed proper education of the same. Therefore, he joined Cypress Community College to learn Digital Marketing. And along with his partner, and her sister’s then boyfriend, setup a venture called Crazy Egg which took the internet marketing field by storm.

The reputation Crazy Egg gained made Neil work harder on his business model and further setup numerous software and internet marketing firms. He has also founded KISSmetrics , Hello Bar, etc. His digital marketing strategies attracted several MNCs like HP, e-commerce giant Amazon, Viacom, GM and NBC. Patel’s model helped to increase the revenue growth of these companies multiple folds.

Patel is the owner of $10 million fortune and is now eyeing to help several non-profit organizations. He is known as the SEO Tycoon in the digital marketing field as his strategies increased the traffic on TechCrunch by a whopping 30% in just two months. Growing in a family full of business men and his mother who owns a home daycare business, Neil grew up to follow the footsteps and has made a name for himself in the entrepreneur world.

Richard M. Schulze: From School Drop Out To $50 Bn. Company

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Life is just a monotonous symphony without any risks. Success follows only the risk takers who believe in their vision. Today’s billionaires were once just common people struggling to survive. This is the story of one such significant man who changed the way of selling and shopping, the founder of Best Buy – Richard M. Schulze.

Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Schulze spent his earlier days in the Central High School. Due to some problems he soon had to drop out of the school. Richard later earned an honorary degree from the University of St. Thomas. He then joined U.S. Air Force at the Minnesota Air National Guard. He further changed his line of work and started working as an electronics salesman.

First Risk
Schulze, while working as electronic salesman, thought of starting something of his own in the electronics industry. He decided to start an audio equipment store called Sound of Music in Saint Paul. Schulze opened this store in 1966 with the money he acquired by mortgaging his home. The business witnessed a massive growth in a small time and was soon expanded to nine stores.

The company launched its first massive sale after one of its store was hit by a tornado. The sale’s instant success brought one another major change in the business. The name Sound of Music was changed to Best Buy and the company shifted to superstore model immediately on an 18,000 sq. ft. area. The superstore offered products at everyday low prices, special discounts which attracted massive attention of people. The introduction of VCR technology profited Best Buy and the company started forty new stores across the whole U.S. in 1989.

From the very first year the company saw huge financial success with $160,000 worth sales. Schulze’s long term vision helped him take crucial decisions which would take the company to greater heights. This decisions included expanding the sales from just stereo equipment, changing the business model, etc. Although they had very less experience selling appliances the company’s business model helped them achieve the massive $9.5 million sales in 1982, the same year when the company acquired the name Best Buy.

Bumpy Rides
The company was in huge success as they touched $240 million sales in 1987 and had become the number one rival of other stores like Highland Superstores. Schulze’s first major loss hit the company hard. The company witnessed 60% decrease in their profits despite of massive revenue being generated. The loss was huge and made the company think of some solution to recover it. This is when creativity worked its magic as the company came up with an idea called “Concept II” which also was considered to be the most innovative idea ever used.

The ‘Concept II’ idea became a massive hit among the customers too and garnered the company a whopping $1.5 billion revenue mark. This huge success of Best Buy came as a hurricane for the other competitors like Highland superstores. The increased sales of Best Buy and drastic losses of Highland superstores led the latter one to shut down their business due to lack of sales. Schulze’s company was in limelight from then and they went on to expand their stores in every city of the US. The company successfully started 95 new stores across the whole US during the period 1996-97. And at the end of 1997 the company had secured $7 billion in revenue.

The company gained so much popularity by 2003 that every store’s every shelf was equipped with almost every electronic device. This included smartphones, washing machines, music players, etc. of every brand.

Richard’s journey so far, has made him a billionaire. Starting from a small town in US to spreading his business worldwide Best Buy has become the largest electronics supermarket in the world. In the current time the company owns more than 1,150 stores all across the world and has crossed more than $50 billion revenue. Success has followed Richard every time he took a daring and risky decision. Their expansion strategy has made them a top superstore company in the world.

Steve Jobs of China: Lei Jun Founder of Xiaomi

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Recognized as the ‘Steve Jobs’ of China, Lei Jun  the Founder of Xiaomi has amassed a net worth of $8.4 billion. Xiaomi Inc. is the world’s fastest growing mobile phone company, who climbed to fourth position in a short span of time.

Lei Jun is not just an entrepreneur but much more than that. He is the mastermind behind the quick and astounding growth of Xiaomi Inc. Since the incubation of this company ten years back, today the company’s net worth is a whopping $45 billion. The company’s motive is to provide quality smartphones with high-end features in affordable price range. And they have stood to their point delivering the smartphones loved by the whole world.

Success only comes after a huge struggle and Lei Jun has faced all those hard times to become the most influential personality today. He was born on 16th December, 1969 in Hubei, China. Jun’s childhood was spent in an under developed industrial area of Wuhan, Central China. He graduated from Mianyang Middle School in 1987 and further went to Wuhan University to take a degree in Computer Science. And in 1991, he came out as a Bachelor’s student of Computer Science.

The most common ‘next step’ after gaining a degree is to find a suitable job. Lei Jun was also in the race to find one. His graduation days were spent in reading about the tech revolutionary Steve Jobs and dreaming to become like him one day. After wandering for a job Lei landed a job offer from Kingsoft, a software giant in China. Just within seven years Lei Jun was announced as the CEO and President of the company. During his time as a CEO Jun started an online bookstore. Joyo.com, in 2000 which went on to become so famous that it became number one fan base for the book lovers till 2004. The rising popularity of Joyo grabbed Amazon’s attention and they acquired it for a mind-blowing price of $75 million.

Lei Jun has made a unique image by not just being a CEO of Kingsoft. He is an active investor who has invested in numerous startups like Vancl.com, YY, UCWeb, etc. Jun has successfully funded more than 70 startups. In the year 2007, Lei Jun faced health complications leading him to resign from the CEO post and settle on Vice Chairman instead. This was when he seriously started thinking upon founding his own dream company, Xiaomi Inc. The company was started and garnered success Jun never even thought of.

Jun was featured in the Top 10 IT figures in 1999, 2000, and 2002. In 2012 the China Central Television chose him as one of the top 10 business leaders in China. Fortune has named Jun as the most powerful business personality in the whole Asia. Jun lives with his wife and two children in China.

Qualcomm: How 7 MIT Graduate Came Together to Create a Company With 23.55 billion USD Revenue

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A simple idea can set a revolution in an era. The mid 1980s witnessed the planting such a seed of an idea which would eventually take over the technological world. Seven brilliant and visionary minds set up to meet and discuss about setting up Quality Communications. The seven minds Irwin Jacobs, Andrew Viterbi, Harvey White, Adelia Coffman, Andrew Cohen, Klein Gilhousen and Franklin Antonio invented wireless communication system now used in almost every electronic device.

The story began in 1985 when these MIT graduates gathered at Irwin Jacobs’ house to discuss the idea of developing a wireless and quality communication system. The company successfully signed its first contract to work on the unique digital wireless technology – CDMA. The technology is used by the US military to have secure communications. The company, in 1988, launched products like OmniTRACS satellite locating and messaging service which tracks the vehicles along their route.

The initial days of developing CDMA were challenging for the founders. With only six months on working on the technology they had to demonstrate their product before potential investors. Irwin Jacobs, however, confidently walked on the stage and demonstrated the product which would set history in the wireless industry. The first CDMA technology was then known as IS-95. Since then, Qualcomm has successfully established CDMA2000, WCDMA and LTE technologies which are widely used in mobile phones.

Qualcomm, in 1999, took a big step and sold their base station to Ericson which was then followed by selling phone manufacturing to Kyocera. The decision came with a mutual consent to completely focus on developing and selling ASICs which implemented the others. This helped the company to become the largest semiconductor company in the world. A common person can find their chipsets even in their home in devices like TV and smartphone.

The Big Leap
No other company has acquired as many companies as Qualcomm has from 1997 to 2014. Qualcomm has acquired nearly fifty technological companies that are directly or indirectly related to their sole products. In 2012, the company invented yet another path-breaking chips called Snapdragon chips. This chips are mostly used in smartphones by giants like Xiaomi and Samsung. Apple uses modems developed by Qualcomm and not the Snapdragon chips.

Game of Strategies
The founders have played a strategic game by developing something which every device must have and the companies developing those devices have to license it before using. For example, the 3G and 4G interface standards are the product of Qualcomm’s CDMA. The company aims to develop CDMA at much more advanced level. The upcoming upgrades would add to the efficiency of the already available chipsets by multiple times.

Qualcomm today has estimated revenue of 23.55 billion USD. Qualcomm’s contribution to the world of wireless technology is beyond appreciation. We might just think for a moment what if there was no wireless technology? There would be no WiFi, Bluetooth, etc. The world would be a messy place with all those wires around. Qualcomm lives on the motto ‘Enabling the wireless industry’ and it has stood to its slogan since its inception and will continue to do so in future too.