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Postmates : Success Story of a Company that is Modernizing the Way of Shopping Since 2011

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We have got individual mobile phone applications for online food delivery, grocery shopping, etc. But, how often do we hear about a single platform that serves all the purposes of delivering grocery to mouthwatering dishes from your favourite restaurants? Rarely. Right?

Postmates is one of those rare mobile applications that has a wide network of delivery partners that deliver products to the customers within a few hours of ordering. It is an on-demand service providing company which was launched on 1 May 2011 by three founding members, Bastian Lehmann, Sean Plaice and Sam Street. The company has its headquarters in San Francisco, California, and it serves the cities of the United States and Mexico with efficient food, grocery, and alcohol delivery services.

Before Postmates

Postmates Cofounders
Image Source: blogs.wsj.com

Before Postmates was launched, Lehmann went through many tough situations and faced failure in business. He dropped out of college to open a company of his own, and he opened his first e-commerce website in 1999. The downfall of the company was miserable, and the most significant reason for it was the launch of a product way prior to the rise in customer demand.

After the business was closed,Lehmann started living in Europe, where he met his future partners of Postmates. The team created a start-up called Curated.by, and the entire idea of what the company would do, or how will it progress, was very confusing. Lehmann realized it by himself, after returning to Silicon Valley, and in his own words it was a “stupid idea”. Curated.by was transformed to Postmates after they pitched Naval Ravikant, owner of AngelList, who told them honestly that the idea of Curated.by won’t work.

History of Postmates

Lehmann tried to create a business where the entire structure will connect the buyers, couriers and merchants. In the beginning, the road was bumpy because the network of couriers was very unstable (the courier partners backed out). After the matter was settled, the tech team delved deeper for creating the app, which initially, planned at selling furniture, electronic appliances, etc. But customers were using it for ordering food, but definitely not furniture.

Since the demand for food and grocery was observed, Postmates, eventually, shifted their idea to delivering products on the basis of daily need, and the business started rising.

The Growth

Though the company started as a part of AngelPad, the road to the first round of funding had many obstacles. AngelPad is an America-based start-up incubator that provides two 10 weeks mentorship and seed money while the companies need to present the ideas to investors at the end of the program. Finally, the company’s Series A funding was led by Founder’s Fundraising, and the company raised $5 million.

In December 2011, Postmates launched the same day delivery service, through a new iPhone app. This new scheme was for the local merchants, and the customers from San Francisco, Oakland as well as Berkley. The Global Positioning System (GPS) helped the customers to track their orders and get real-time updates.

In May 2012, Postmates released ‘Get It Now’, an application that allowed the users to order from any merchant of the city, even from the ones, who did not provide delivery services. Eight weeks before releasing the application, the company released the private beta version of the service which was tested by over 1,000 users. During this time, the network of couriers expanded making around 1,000 deliveries a day.

In March 2013, Postmates launched the ‘One Hour’ delivery service in Seattle. The service was first launched in San Francisco, and it turned out to be a huge success with the company having around 200 couriers in San Francisco, and 40 in Seattle. By this time, the company had raised over $2 million from angel investors, including Jeff Clavier, Paige Craig and Naval Ravikant.

In February 2014, Postmates raised $16 million from Series B funding led by Spark Capital. In the same year, the company announced that Nabeel Hyatt (Venture Partner at Spark Capital) and Scott Banister were joining the company’s Board of Directors. In the same year, the company completed its one-millionth deliveries and hired over 6,000 riders to ensure efficient and fast service.

In October 2015, the company announced an updated version of its API, and also, the new pricing (starting at $2.50 per pickup). Within the span of one year, the network of riders tripled from 6,000 to 18,000 and completed over 4.5 million deliveries.

In November 2017, Postmates expanded its service to Tucson, Honolulu and Mexico City (first international market). The company also came in partnership with Impossible Burgers and Shake Shack.

In January 2018, Postmates announced a partnership with Ford to conduct programs and tests on self-driving technology to take delivery to the next level. By 2018, Postmates provided services in 550 cities of United States.

In January 2019, the company raised $100 million, leading its total valuation to $1.85 billion.

The Success

From failed business to running a company with more than 800 employees, Postmates has unlocked access to every local merchant in the cities for the customers. The company has collaboration with 500,000 merchants carrying out 5 million orders a month throughout 3,500 cities.

grubhub

GrubHub : One of the Top Ten Online Food Delivery Services Of United States

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Be it a lazy Sunday or a tiring Tuesday, at times we don’t really wish to step out of our house for dinner. But who can stop the craving for good food? In those cases, the online food delivery services have become the real saviour.

GrubHub is one such online food delivery marketplace that has made the life of diners better and easier. Long before Zomato, Uber Eats or Foopanda stepped into the business of mobile food delivery; Grubhub was launched in the United States. It is one of the most famous and oldest online food delivery platforms that serve in the cities of the United States and London. The company was founded in 2004 by Matt Maloney and Mike Evans, with its headquarters based in Chicago, Illinois, United States.

Matt Maloney

Matt graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and did his MBA from the University of Chicago. He currently serves GrubHub as the CEO. Apart from his leadership in Grubhub, he is also an advisory board member in The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship. He is also a member of ChicagoNEXT, an organization established to nurture the young entrepreneurs of Chicago.

GrubHub founders
Image Source: businessinsider.com

Mike Evans

Mike graduated from MIT and wrote the first version of GrubHub in 2004. After the company followed a very tempting growth trajectory with his and Maloney’s contributions, Evans left it to try something new. He also wrote a science fiction novel and launched a new company, Fixer in 2017.

History

After the launch of GrubHub in 2004, the co-founders won the first place for the business plan of GrubHub at the Edward L. Kaplan New Venture Challenge in University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2006. This was the first victory of the company.

In 2007, the company raised a $1.1 million in the Series A funding led by Amicus Capital and Origin Ventures. This funding was used for expanding the business to San Francisco and New York markets. In 2009, another $2 million was raised in Series B funding which was led by Origin Ventures and Leo Capital. The funding received in Series C was five times the previous funding and was led by Benchmark Capital. In March 2011, the company raised $20 million in Series D funding hosted by DAG Ventures followed by raising another $50 million in Series E funding in the same year. The Series E funding was led by Lightspeed Ventures, and after this round of funding, the company acquired Dotmenu, the parent company of Campusfood and Allmenus. Both the funding and the acquisition made Grubhub’s position even stronger in the industry. In the same year, the company also acquired FanGo (a mobile ordering and payment solution provider).

In May 2013, Grubhub announced its merging with Seamless, its prime competitor in the market. The merged company planned to expand the business to more than 500 cities across the United States and take orders from more than 20,000 local restaurants. The signed agreement declared 58% of the share for Seamless and 42% for GrubHub. The agreement was finalized in August 2013.

In April 2014, the company went public for trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ‘GRUB’.

In 2015, the company acquired Delivered Dish followed by the acquisition of LAbite in May 2016. Both companies provided restaurant delivery services. In 2017, it took over Eat24, a food ordering platform from Yelp. A lot of acquisitions by Grubhub took place in the next few years, which includes LevelUp and Tapingo.

In February 2018, the company launched RestaurantHER, an initiative to support nationwide restaurants that are led by women and expanded its partnership with Foursquare. In April 2018, the company expanded its business further to 34 markets across the nation.

In May 2019, GrubHub came in partnership with Smoothie King, world’s leading smoothie brand.

Marketing Strategy

The biggest strength of Grubhub is collaboration. This helped GrubHub in expanding and escalating the growth. The company came in collaboration with the majority of the local restaurant outlets rather than in-house production of food, which cuts the labour cost and increases the profit. There are around 80,000 restaurants in alliance with GrubHub, which helps to maintain its stability in today’s market.

The increasing number of competitors is a potential threat that leads to market saturation irrespective of the growing number of customers. In order to eliminate its competitor from the market, GrubHub either came in partnership with these companies or acquired them.

The company also provided bonuses and special benefits to highly rated customers. This lures more users to order food through GrubHub.

The hassle-free delivery where the diner can track his or her valet and multiple payment options also attracts many users.

Statistics

Currently, there are 19.3 million active users who use GrubHub to make online food orders from 115,000 restaurants located in different cities of the United States and London. Around 521,000 orders are processed every day.

sinovation ventures

Kai-Fu Lee : The Indisputable Rockstar of China’s Technology Industry

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Technology is the field that is introducing people to new things almost every day. Whether it is the smartphone, self-driving cars or a mission to Mars, technology is taking us to new horizons. In fact, in the past few years, it has completely transformed the way people live their lives. Great minds are coming with greater ideas, and one such great mind is the Chinese technology enthusiast and the AI expert, Kai-Fu Lee.

Kai-Fu Lee is the founder of the venture capital fund, Sinovation Ventures, and the inventor of the world’s first speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system, which he developed as his PhD thesis subject.

Early Life

Lee was born on 3 December 1965, in Taipei, Taiwan to a legislator and historian, Li Tianmin. In 1973, when he was thirteen, he moved to the U.S. In the U.S., he attended the Oak Ridge High School. In 1983, he completed a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Columbia University followed by obtaining a PhD degree from the Carnegie Mellon University in 1988.

Kai Fu Lee Sinovation Ventures
Image Source: edge.org

During his PhD at the Carnegie Mellon, he got interested in machine learning and pattern recognition. He even participated in a few competitions, one of which was the US national tournament of computer players, where he represented a Bayesian learning-based system used to play the board game, Othello. He developed the system with his classmate Sanjoy Mahajan and even won the competition.

The topic of the thesis of his PhD was speech recognition, and he developed the world’s first large-vocabulary, speaker-independent, speech recognition, in 1988, as a Kluwer monograph, titled Automatic Speech Recognition: The Development of the Sphinx Recognition System.

Career

After completing his PhD, he joined the Carnegie Mellon University as the member of the faculty. In 1990, after working at the university for two years, Lee left the job and started working for Apple Computer as one of the leading research scientists. At Apple, he was appointed as the head of the research and development groups that worked on the major Apple projects, including Bandai Pippin, PlainTalk, Casper, Galatea, etc. Lee stayed with Apple for six years, and in 1996, left the company to join Silicon Graphics.

At Silicon Graphics, Lee worked as the vice president of the company’s Web Products division, and then was promoted to as the president of Cosmo Software.

After two years of his job at Silicon Graphics, Lee then joined Microsoft and was sent to Beijing, to set up the Microsoft Research (MSR) division there. In 2000, he shifted back to America, where he held the post of corporate vice president of interactive services division at Microsoft.

In 2005, Lee after leaving his job at Microsoft moved to join Google. This move of Lee led Microsoft to initiate a lawsuit against Google and Lee, as Lee had joined Google within one year of leaving Microsoft, which was against the company’s non-compete agreement. Google soon resolved the lawsuits, but Lee was restricted to work on Google’s projects similar to Microsoft’s. So Google sent Lee to China to handle its Asian subsidiary, as its President. Lee held the position till 2009. He became one of the key people for the establishment of Google.cn, and the achievements that the company had during this time in China.

Founding Sinovation Ventures

Despite a great career with Google, Lee left the company in 2009, to found a venture capital to provide support for Chinese talent and technology. On 7 September 2009, Lee formed Innovation Works, later renamed as Sinovation Ventures. The company funds the five most innovative technology ideas from the Chinese entrepreneur and startups every year. Sinovation Ventures involves some big names from the tech industry as the prime investors, including YouTube, Legend Holdings, WI Harper Group, etc.

Lee collaborated with Google to bring an OS for Android specifically built for the Chinese people. The collaboration also brought a desktop phone manager for Android for China.

By 2017, the company had raised over $1 billion funds, and in 2018, it raised over $500 million from its investors. Since its inception, Sinovation Ventures has helped over 300 Chinese startups with their business establishment.

Lee is an iconic personality that has been inspiring not only Chinese people, but people from around the world. In his career, he worked with big tech companies and even chaired some big-name organisations. He held the position of the chairman of the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Council. He was named under the Time 100 list in 2013 and was also featured as the Asia House Asian Business Leader in 2018.

Lee has also published a few books including Be Your Personal Best (2005), A Walk into The Future (2006), Making A World of Difference (2009), Seeing Life Through Death (2015), Artificial Intelligence (2017) and AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (2018).

Reynolds Johnson – The Man Who Created the First Ever External Hard Disk

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Data storage – It certainly does not carve a niche in one’s mind. However, Imagine being able to save only 5 MB data in a machine that weighed a ton and measured a whole room. That machine was the start of a journey that has resulted in accommodating the technology to create better and higher standards of living. It was the first external Hard Disk ever invented. Well, and it was in 1952.

Reynolds B. Johnson was the ninth child of John and Elizabeth Reynolds and was born in Minnesota on July 7th,1906. He was a simple school going boy who displayed a keen interest in technical and mechanical sciences. Johnson was interested in workings of the machines and exhibited his ability to the world by creating and demonstrating a working model of a submarine in a horse trough. He graduated from one of the best private schools- Minnehaha Academy and went on to pursue a BS in Educational Administration as a part of his higher education from the University of Minnesota.

A teacher by profession, Johnson decided to return to his original occupation and improve its status quo. In 1932, Johnson had an idea to create a device that could grade the standardized tests and dissipate horrors associated with it. He tasked two of his pupils to work under his directions to create such a device. He called it the “mark-sense technology”, and this was the official start to his career as an inventor. Technology-giant IBM hired him as an engineer and bought rights over his invention. The company sold his test scoring machine from 1937 onwards. Other companies such as Bell System used mark sense technology to record calls, and utility companies used it to record meter readings. The government organizations used it under the name “electrographic” technology.

Since then, his role at IBM was not limited to an engineer, but further expanded, when he led a research team at IBM’s research laboratory, with the objective of improving current data storage and retrieval solutions. His ideas are being worked on even today.

He created a machine that could store data using aluminium and magnetic drums, making the first imprint of a data external storage device on the world. His inspiring work in the field of data storage made him known as the “Father of Hard Disk Drive”.

Johnson was one of the most influential inventors of this century. His life is marked with almost hundreds of patents relating to storage and technology. He was an influential figure in the toy industry, too. He implanted technology by inventing “microphotography” in simple toys. Fischer Price also used Johnson’s technology in their “Talk to my books”. He is also famous for creating handy videocassette tapes bettering the original ones made by Sony.

Johnson’s visionary mind was recognized throughout the world. He was a recipient of several awards such as Franklin Institute’s Certificate of Merit, in 1996, and the National Medal of Technology, in 1986. Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers ( IEEE) established the “IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Systems Award” in 1991. The award is given to the inventors for their outstanding contributions.

Today, we dream of getting our desired things without making a splash in the water. It would be a disgrace if we do not remember a person who has provided the world with uncanny inventions, not only in the field of technology but also in the field of education. In 1966, Johnson made a bold prediction and a correct one, too, about the future of the education system: “The classroom of the future will be as different from today’s as the computer centre is different from the accounting room with its high stools of a few decades ago.” Such pioneering vision could only be compared to today’s Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musks.

Brian Dean : The Founder of Backlinko, ‘the Future of Modern Day’s SEO’

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Blogging is one trendy and the easiest business for earning some good cash. It has lured and helped a lot of young minds who can nurture their creativity through an online platform. But before one decides to open their own blogging site, there are certain rules and strategies one should get accustomed to. SEO, CRO, social media marketing, higher traffic, top ranking are some of the common terms that one usually comes across while blogging.

So, what if we tell you that you can get online training for becoming a good blogger, increase more traffic over your blogs, and even, get your site to the first page of Google? Backlinko, a site that maintains its own blogs and SEO expertise, is an awesome guide for all potential bloggers, digital marketers, and entrepreneurs out there.

Brian Dean, founder and CEO of Backlinko, formed the company back in 2013, to teach people more about practical blogging strategies. In no time, he became a very significant figure in the world of SEO and content marketing. But, success did not come to him overnight. He went through a number of failed businesses and tight financial circumstances before Backlinko happened. The flawless strategies of Backlinko seized the attention of the innumerous audience and brought immense success to the company in just a few years.

Early career of Brian Dean

Dean quit his job in 2010 to focus more on creating a niche in the world of SEO, but initially, there were a lot of failed attempts. The most fascinating thing about Dean is he always accepted failure as a path to success. He never thought of giving up even though he didn’t have sufficient money to invest in his business. Before his own startup, he worked as a freelance writer on Elance and Livestrong.com. After Demand Media (a company that owned Livestrong.com) went out of business, he was able to think of starting something of his own.

Backlinko

Starting from scratch, he started the business all by himself. His first successful website was live in 2012, achieving immense traffic. He started reading more SEO blogs to take this to the next level, but he was utterly disappointed. And, that is when he started to create his own blogs, and eventually, built Backlinko. The first blog of Backlinko was posted in 2013, and it attracted a lot of readers. With the overwhelming response, the company decided to take a step ahead and created its first flagship course, ‘SEO That Works’, in the same year.

Since he was the only member of Backlinko at the beginning, he did not have access to many amenities to shoot the videos for the courses. So, one of his friends helped him out by shooting the videos in Dean’s apartment. It took him around four months to deliver the first version of this course. But once it became popular, it started receiving around 200,000 unique visitors per day.

Business strategy

Dean, from the very beginning, focused more on the content, rather than the products of the platform. He was aware that most of the audience will gather around the unique blog titles and their content. So, he decided to focus on the quality of the content and posted one blog per month. These blogs comprised of unique content and effective strategies that, at the same time, were practical and achievable, too. Instead of writing several paragraphs, he crafted his articles in the form of tutorials and focused on making them easier to comprehend for the readers.

The first launch of Backlinko made around $80,000, and since then, it is only rising. The company also focused more on email marketing, and according to Dean, it is the key to the success of every business. The company also focused more on gathering customer stories and interviews. The process was time-consuming but quite fruitful. It helped the company grow and move ahead of its competitors.

Within a span of six years, and with only three team members, the company has become one of the top small online businesses. Currently, the site receives 25,000 visitors per month, and thousands of subscribers are regular over the Backlinko newsletter.

Dean targets on understanding his audience thoroughly, and according to him, once he figures out the type of audience he is dealing with and their demands, it becomes a lot easier for him to write the right content for them.

Yatra.com : How a Local Travel Agency Reached Millions of Indians

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Planning a trip, used to be a very hectic task before any of the online travel portals got launched. Now that, we have online travel agents, hotel and flight booking; checking availability of rooms, flights, and other accommodations, seems like a piece of cake.

One such online portal is Yatra.com, one of the most popular online Indian travel companies, that provide the finest travel services starting from booking hotels of your choice to create your own holiday packages. The company was founded on 1 August 2006 by Dhruv Shringi, Manish Amin and Sabina Chopra. It is a Haryana-based online travel agency with a wide spectrum of services and a large customer base.

Dhruv Shringi, CEO of Yatra.com

One of the founders of Yatra.com, Dhruv Shringi, as well as the current CEO of the company, holds an MBA degree from INSEAD. He is also a certified Chartered Accountant who gathered a lot of experience before launching Yatra.com. Before Yatra.com, he worked for Ebookers where he was responsible for sales of $850 million that occurred through multiple channels. The other two founding members also worked with Shringi at Ebookers from 2000-2005. And in the period of working together, these three came up with the idea of Yatra.com.

CEO Yatra.com Dhruv Shringi
Image Source: business-standard.com

Shringi had also worked for the London branch of Ford Motor Company and for 6 years he worked with Arthur Anderson in India. He provided business strategies as well as teamed up with the IT sector of the companies he worked for. A man with such calibre and occupational background is likely to bring some lucrative investors in house, and so he did for Yatra.com.

Growth, Acquisitions, and Strategies

The company started in 2006, with only three members, and crossed 1,000 employees by 2016. Yatra.com is a B2B type business providing flight tickets, hotel rooms, car rentals and holiday packages throughout the entire world. The company started growing rapidly in India from the very beginning and with some strategic acquisitions and investors, the company is now growing roots in international lands as well.

In June 2007, Yatra online was nominated for prestigious 14th Annual World Travel Awards. The company came in partnership with Sify.Com in November 2007. In 2010, Yatra.com became the first online travel company to launch India’s first online ticket cancellation service. The company established a contract with IRCTC on 4 January 2010, and the next month, it tied up with Himachal Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation.

On 17 February 2010, Yatra.com came in partnership with Tyroo, followed by a partnership with eBay India and Tripadvisor, the world’s largest travel community, in the month of April of the same year.

On 17 May the same year, the company was awarded the ‘Best Domestic Tour Operator’ award by the Ministry of Tourism. In November, Yatra.com came in a joint venture with American Express. This partnership and the acquisition of TSI, helped the company expand its business, especially for the international flight ticketing. At the end of 2010, Sabina Chopra got felicitated at the Second Annual Women Leaders in India Award 2010. A lot of exclusive holiday packages were launched in this year, which attracted different kinds of travellers.

In 2011, Yatra.com, for the first time, introduced holiday packages to Spain. And, to lure more Indian customers, it launched exclusively ‘Love, Breakups and Zindagi’ package. In April 2011, the company raised funding of $2 billion from blue-chip investors, including Valiant Capital Management, Norwest Venture Partners, and Intel Capital. In November 2011, the company was honoured with CNBC Awaaz Travel Awards for Best Online Travel Agency.

In 2012, Yatra.com won the award for ‘Best Travel Website’ in IAMAI’s 2nd Annual India Digital Awards. The company partnered with ZenithOptimedia Media in the month of March of 2012. It also launched a new credit card in association with SBI. By the time, it became the second largest online travel website in India and owned a 30 per cent share of the travel market related online transactions. The company also acquired a 100 per cent stake in Travelguru.com. In December 2012, Yatra.com, in association with Microsoft, released an app on Windows 8 for its customers.

In 2014, the company came in association with McDonald’s, and also, Rajasthan Royals (Official Travel Partner for IPL 2014). By August 2015, the company dominated the online travel market with booking in over 40,000 hotels. In 2016, Yatra.com incorporated Homestays in its mobile and website app. The statistics showed that in November 2016, 67 per cent of the total Indian travellers where booking holiday packages through Yatra.com. In the same year, Yatra merged with Terrapin 3 Acquisition Crop, which made the company worth $218 million.

The Success

In this journey of 19 years, the company has gained immense trust from its more than 31 million customers. Yatra.com books around 50,000 hotels in more than 500 destinations of India and over 430,000 hotels around the world. On an average rate, Yatra.com hosts more than 20,000 domestic flights and 5,000 hotels bookings per day, through online media and call centres.