A major Republican donor and the owner of the elite thoroughbred horse farm in Versailles, Kenny Trout is one of the richest persons in the world. The life of the American billionaire was never this easy. As a kid, he went through the financial struggle and worked hard to get at the position where he stands right now. In school, when his teacher questioned him that what he wanted to become in future, he did not know what career he would choose, but he surely knew that he wanted to become rich.
Early Life
Troutt was born in 1948 in Mount Vernon, Illinois, United States. His father worked as a bartender. He was the eldest of his three siblings. Troutt did his schooling from the Mt. Vernon Township High School, and later, graduated from the Southern Illinois University, in 1971. Belonging to a poor family, he always intended to overcome his family’s financial conditions and become rich. Due to the shortage of money, he started working at a very young age, to support his family and earn extra bucks. He even sold insurance to subsidise his studies while he was in college.
Image source: dmagazine.com
Career
After completing his graduation, with continues hard work, he co-founded Excel, a long distance phone service, along with his business partner Steve Smith, in 1988. Smith’s interest in the network marketing business, helped the two to start the company, as he had found much more scope in the same. Just in nine years, the company had earned revenue in billion dollars. Excel became the fastest growing company in the U.S., even faster than Microsoft. In 1996, it went public in the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ECI, becoming the youngest company ever to join the NYSE.
In the month of June, the very next year, Excel acquired the Telco Communications Group, followed by a merger with Teleglobe, in November 1998. The merger between the two companies brought lots of fortune to the two co-founders of Excel. Troutt and Smith became billionaires overnight.
Troutt retired as CEO on September 20, 1999, and was replaced by Christina Gold. Currently, Troutt serves as the chairman of Mt. Vernon Investments.
Personal Life
Troutt is married to Lisa E. Copeland and has three children with her. The family lives in their 13000 square foot grand estate in Dallas Texas. At present, he owns a 2,400-acre thoroughbred horse breeding and racing farm in Versailles, Kentucky, named WinStar Farm. In 2014, his net worth was estimated to be approx. US$1.5 billion.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.
These days, we all are on social media sites, chatting our whole day away. Yes! And when it comes to expressing what we feel, words come after the emojis. Emojis is the integrated way of telling how you feel, and who knows better about Emojis than ‘BA’.
Confused about who is BA? BA is none other than Jacob Blackstock, the man behind “Bitmojis.” If you are an active social media user, you probably know what Bitmojis are. Bitmojis is an advanced version of emojis. it’s nothing else but ‘you’. Yes, Bitmojis is what you would see yourself as in an animated fantasy world. And the man behind this beautiful fantasy world, Jacob Blackstock or as he prefers himself to be called, ‘BA’ has a story which stands a must listen one.
Image Source: businessinsider.com
The Toronto born boy had an exquisite interest in movies and drawings. Jacob was deeply influenced by some of the movies like Mary Poppins and Poltergeist. He believed in himself and saw his future in them. The day he got to know that only the humans create those movies, he decided to do something in the same field. His mother gave him tips about his speech and told him he must not forget about mentioning her when he would receive an Oscar. His passion for his dream to do something in movies led him to write a short story, “ Mr Beaver in Space”, at the mere age of four. While in school, he not only wrote but also, produced and acted in a play.
He also had quite an interest in drawing. It was almost like that he started drawing the day he learnt how to hold a pencil. He was too much into cartoons and comics and who knew that he would do something so extraordinary out of something so simple.
The ‘movies’ interest was not over yet. He got a job in a film studio and made an 11 minutes movie, which was animated using stop motion. It took him three long years to create the 11 minutes movie. It was Outrageous, but at the same time, he was also exhausted by this. He wanted to do something else, something different.
Keeping this in mind, he started working on a new idea. The project got the funding of the Canadian government, and all BA did was that he would sit every day on his desk, take a drawing sheet, and draw a 10×8 inches panel. He drew, drew and drew. Not thinking about what is going wrong, or without detailing, beautifying all the stuff he made, he drew and drew. Although he was not completely sure about what he was doing, he went on for a few months, and considering the work he was doing, he decided that something has to come out of it, and it cannot belong to the garbage.
Soon, he realised that it was too much work for him. He became tired of drawing, and that’s when he created an online comic builder. It was an easy-to-use tool and created comics faster than ever. The real strike for him was when he discovered that this comic builder designed people. The comic builder turned out to be wilder than his own imagination.
That’s when he came up with Bitstrips with the help of his high school friend Jesse Brown, in 2007. Based on his thinking that the comics take a lot of time, Bitstrips allowed people to make comics even with little artistic skills. Jesse referred it to as “YouTube for comics”. At first, it was meant for the educational purpose, i.e. was used in schools, but soon they noticed that it was also being used outside the class. In 2012, a Facebook version for Bitstrips was launched, and within months, it gained heavy user amount, i.e., more than 10 million users. An app was launched, and just in the time of few months, it became a hit. It was among the most downloaded apps across the globe. Upon which, BA and Brown received funding from Horizons Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
In October 2014, BA came with Bitmoji, which gave users the independence to create stickers which featured comic characters of Bitstrips.
“Texting is making the conversation more convenient than ever, but it’s also stripped away a lot of the things that make communication human, we think one of the most important things that are still missing is identity. If you think about history, 99 per cent of human communication has been face-to-face,” said BA upon the purpose of Bitmoji (Source- Business Insider).
He further said that Bitmoji expresses what’s inside you. “Your avatar doesn’t have a bad hair day,” he said. Bitmoji really stood as the perfect animated avatar of the person who used it. It relevantly shows the best you!
In the year 2016, speculation started rising that Snapchat wanted to buy Bitstrips, which it did around for $100 Million. Bitstrips now only focused on ‘Bitmoji’, and soon after, a Snapchat update with integration with Bitmoji was released. Bitmoji became the most downloaded app on the iOS app store in countries like Australia, Canada, France, United Kingdom and the United States.
According to BA, Bitmoji is the “next level” or “beyond” emojis. Bitmoji releases new updates very quickly and sometimes even within 24 hours. Bitmoji currently, is a part of emoji and is gaining its spice by getting involved to Tinder to create something that shows the love side of ours.
BA predicted the needs of the communication of the future, and he presented it to the world which got famous just in a jiffy. Such is the power of imagination. And so is the story of BA or we may say, the CEO and Co-Founder of Bitstrips.
Raghav is a student and a content writer. He loves to write about emerging as well as the existing technologies around and about the ones who bring them to you. Music is the other passion that Raghav processes. It is like the fuel to his body. He is also in writing songs and poems. He believes that life is short, so live the best out of what you have got. Raghav considers himself a sci-fi guy, having stories and tech all around in his head, all the time.
A believer of persistence and continuous hard work, Ben Silbermann, is an American billionaire Internet entrepreneur and one of the three co-founders of Pinterest. Silbermann would have never thought that his childhood habit of collecting things, like bugs, postal stamps and baseball cards, will make him a billionaire one day. The photo sharing and pinning them onto a pinning board, on Pinterest, isn’t different from his old hobby of collecting things. And now, Pinterest has become one of the most used social media platforms that boast over 20 million users worldwide.
Early Life
Silbermann was born on 14 July 1982. He was a native of Des Moines, living with his parents Jane Wang and Neil Silbermann, both of whom were ophthalmologists. He did his schooling from Des Moines Central Academy and attended the Research Science Institute at MIT. When he was in school, he also went through a heart transplant surgery. In 2003, he received a graduate degree in political science from the Yale University.
Image Source: Flickr
Career
After graduating, Silbermann got a chance to work with Google, as a member of the online advertising group. At the time, he became more interested in programming and conceived an idea of a startup. He discussed the matter with his friend and the future co-founder of Pinterest, Paul Sciarra, and quit his job. Sciarra started teaching Silbermann the basic programming, and both started working on an iOS app, Tote. Tote was a fail, and the two started thinking of a new idea that could help them with their startup.
Founding Pinterest
The two thought of creating an app that could help the people for keeping the necessary records in the phone, and see the things they wanted to see. The idea was great for the people who wanted to avoid filling up of their email accounts, with unnecessary catalogues. But, the timing of the idea was not that good, as at the same time the financial crisis had occurred, and nobody was ready to invest in technology startups.
Ben and Paul had meetings with many of the capitalists, but everybody was happy investing their money in gold. At last, Silbermann found out about a competition happening in NYU, which had a huge cash prize for the winners. Though the two won the second prize with no money, they were able to meet a few investors., one of whom was convinced to fund the half of the round, only if they could get the other half of the round.
Finally, they managed to arrange the money and started working on their startup project. Silbermann had met his third partner Evan Sharp, through a common friend, when Sharp was studying at the NYU. Evan and Silbermann shared a common interest of collecting things and wanted to create something related to it for their themselves.
In the startup project, Evan also joined hands with Silbermann, and in 2009, they started developing Pinterest. In March 2010, they launched the site as a closed beta, soon followed by the launch of an invitation-only open beta. Just within nine months of its launch, Pinterest had 10000 users, and in March 2011, the company launched an iPhone app. Silbermann contacted 5000 of Pinterest users, through letters, and even met a few of them in person, to receive feedback from them. Until the summer of 2011, the three founders of the company were operating the company from a small apartment.
In late October 2013, the website was valued at $3.8 billion. By October 2016, it had 150 million monthly active users, and in June 2017, Pinterest raised $150 million of funding from its investors.
Personal Life
Silbermann lives in San Francisco, California, with his wife Divya Bhaskaran and two children. Forbes estimated his net worth at $1.6 billion as of 2018. He was listed 12 among America’s Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40 (2016) and also got featured with Mark Zuckerberg on Fortune’s 40 Under 40 (2014).
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.
Drew Houston is an American Internet billionaire entrepreneur, who co-founded the multi-billion company Dropbox at the mere age of 24. Once just an idea, now has more than 500 worldwide users subscribed to it. Houston a computer enthusiast, gives the credit of his success to his partner and co-founder of Dropbox, Arash Ferdowsi, and the education he received at MIT. In one of his speeches at MIT, he said that people should surround themselves with inspiring people. He said, “Surrounding yourself with inspiring people is now just as important as being talented or working hard.”
Image Source: nytimes.com
Early Life
Houston was born on 4 March 1983, in Acton, Massachusetts. His father was an electrical engineer. Houston was a student at the Acton-Boxborough Regional High School. Initially, he was influenced by video games and had decided that he would become a video game tester. But as soon his father introduced him with programming, his focus diverted towards the computers. At the age of 14, while playing a video game, on his father’s Pcjr computer, he found a bug in the game and reported to the video game company, upon which he was offered a job at the same company. In 1990, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from where he earned a graduate degree in Computer Science.
Career & Founding Dropbox
Along with an offer for a job at the early age of 14, he had also been a part of many startups including Bit9, Accolade and Hubspot. Houston was still in college when he thought of developing Dropbox. He wrote the first line of code for Dropbox, while he was travelling on a bus, as he had forgotten his USB drive. At the time he was frustrated with his habit of forgetting and losing those USB flash drives all the time. So he conceived the idea of creating a cloud-based system for keeping the files in it. At first, he started working on the project for his personal use, but then he realised that the product could benefit other people too.
Houston released a video regarding the idea, his college mate Arash Ferdowsi being one of the viewers of it. Ferdowsi was really impressed by the idea and contacted Houston for partnership. From here the two started working on the project together.
In May 2007, Houston founded the parent company to Dropbox, Evenflow, Inc. In the same year, the company was able to get a seed funding from venture capitalists like Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Y Combinator. In 2008, the company launched Dropbox at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. Within one year, Dropbox had more than 3 million registered users. By 2011, the number of users reached 50 million, and in March 2016, it had 500 million users.
During the evolution of the company, it also went through some successful acquisitions including TapEngage, Audiogalaxy, Snapjoy in 2012, Bubbli in 2014, CloudOn in 2015, etc. In 2011, the total revenue earned by the company was over $240 million. Dropbox is considered as one of the twenty best startups of Silicon Valley.
In February 2018, Dropbox filed an IPO to be listed on the Nasdaq.
Personal Life
Houston is a huge video game lover. He also likes to sing, and during the college, he was a part of ’90s cover band. Business Week named Houston as one of the most promising players aged 30 and under. He was also named among the top 30 under-30 entrepreneurs by inc.com.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.
The ousted co-founder of Cisco Systems, who is known for pioneering the widespread commercialization of local area network (LAN) technology, is an American computer scientist, who linked 5,000 computers across a 16-square-mile (41 km2) campus area, at the time when it even connecting the computers of two different buildings was an unheard thing.
Early Life
Bosack was born in 1952, in Pennsylvania. He completed his school education from La Salle College High School in 1969 and joined the Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania to get a bachelor’s degree. After graduating, Bosack joined DEC as a hardware engineer. But, as he had applied in the Stanford University for higher education, he left his job, to join the university to pursue computer science, as soon he got accepted in the university.
Image Source: therichestimages.com
In 1981, while studying at the Standford University, he was appointed as the support engineer for a project to connect all of Stanford’s mainframes, minis, LISP machines and Altos. At the university, he met his future wife and partner, Sandy Lerner. Lerner was working as the director of computer facilities for the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. The two started dating, and the couple got married in 1980.
Founding Cisco
While working as the support engineer for Standford University, Bosack, along with his wife, started experimenting on the same, secretly at his home using Stanford’s network. The two worked as partners and invented an Advanced Gateway Server; the revised version of the Stanford router built by William Yeager and Andy Bechtolsheim. To commercialise the router, they founded Cisco Systems and received the license for selling the router. The company was named on after the city San Francisco.
The router was able to effectively connect different hardware, like an Apple Macintosh, Unix workstation as well as an IBM mainframe, supporting multiple protocols. According to the legends, the Bosack and Lerner had invented the first such router to connect the computers of two different buildings of Stanford University, that used different networks, so that they could share emails through it.
For the first two years of the company, Bosack operated it from the garage of his house, and the medium of marketing was word of mouth. Despite, he was able to get contracts worth $200,000, only in the first month of starting the company. As the company was growing, Bosack appointed Greg Satz and Richard Troiano, for programming and for sales for the company, respectively.
In the year 1988, venture capitalist Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital invested $2 million in the start-up, and the company focused on the bigger commercial market. In 1990, the company went public, generating $70 million annual revenue. Sequoia Capital, having a share in the company, appointed John Morgridge as the new CEO of the company. The step was taken to increase the company growth. The joining of the new CEO also made Bosack and Lerner quit the company. At the time they left the company, they had two-thirds of the stakes in Cisco, which they sold for about $170 million dollars.
Personal Life
Bosack and Lerner got divorced in 1990. Currently, Bosack is retired and living in his home state of Pennsylvania. For his contribution to the field of computer science, he won the Computer Entrepreneur Award in 2009. For a long period of time, he held a significant position in the companies like AT&T Bell Labs and Digital Equipment Corporation. He also played a key role in the development of emerging network technology driven by the U.S. Department of Defense. He also gets the credits for creating new in-line fibre optic amplification systems, capable of obtaining unprecedented data transmission latency speeds of 6.071 milliseconds over 1231 kilometres of fibre.
Bosack along with his ex-wife Lerner, founded a charitable organisation, with the 70% of the money they received after selling their Cisco stocks. The foundation works towards animal welfare and finances various science projects.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.
Publishing is what Winer was always interested in. An MS in Computer Science, he detested computers and the engineering culture at the school level and became familiar with computers only when he went to the college. Winer is a New York-based American software developer and entrepreneur, who is best known for his writing and his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web services. For his writing, he has earned titles like “protoblogger” and is counted among “most influential web voices” of Silicon Valley.
Early Life
Dave Winer was born on 2 May 1955, in Brooklyn, New York City. His father Eve Winer was a PhD and a school psychologist. His mother Leon Winer was also a Ph.D., and a former professor of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. In 1972, he completed his high school from the Bronx High School of Science. In high school, he started an underground newspaper. Later, he joined the Tulane University in New Orleans and graduated in Mathematics in the year 1976. He then completed an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in 1978.
Early Career
After completing his education, Winer started working in the computer time-sharing business, in the Empire State Building on the thirty-ninth floor. Later, he moved to Silicon Valley and joined a leading software company at the time, Personal Software, Inc., as the lead developer. The company worked on a software product VisiCalc, and he began to work on his own product idea named VisiText. While in the company, he came to the conclusion that the company did not ship what it produced. At the same time, the company started working on a commercial product around an “expand and collapse” outline display, an outliner software product.
Image Source: Wikipedia
In 1981, he left Personal Software and founded his own company named Living Videotext, where he further worked on the outliner. In 1983, he released ThinkTank for Apple II, which was based on VisiText, followed by the release of ThinkTank for IBM PC and Macintosh, etc.
In 1987, Winer sold Living Videotext to Symantec. The deal paid him a fortune, and he worked with the newly formed Symantec’s Living Videotext division for the next six months.
UserLand
The next year, in1988, Winer founded another company named UserLand Software and was appointed the CEO of the company. Under the name of the company, he released a system-level, outliner-based scripting language, Frontier, for Mac. In the mid-90s, Winer became interested in online publishing while helping automate the production process of the strikers’ online newspaper. He started working towards online publishing and developed a website for himself the ‘Scripting News’, in February 1997. Scripting News is described as “one of the web’s oldest blogs.”
In the same year, he started Frontier’s NewsPage, supporting Scripting News. Later, he, along with Microsoft, developed the XML-RPC protocol, resulting in the formation of SOAP, that he co-authored jointly with Microsoft’s Don Box, Bob Atkinson, and Mohsen Al-Ghosein. In the same year, he developed an XML syndication format for his Scripting News weblog in order to provide his readers with much more timely information.
During the same time, RSS was created for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal, preceded by several trials at web syndication that did not obtain much popularity. In July 1999, Dan Libby produced a new version of RSS, RSS 0.91 incorporating elements from Dave Winer’s news syndication format. In April 2001, Netscape dropped RSS support from My.Netscape.Com and Winer, along with RSS-DEV Working Group, published a modified version of the RSS 0.91 specification on the UserLand website. With a set of changes, Winer also released RSS 0.92 in December 2000 and RSS 2.0 in September 2002.
By 1999, Winer had become the leader in blogging tools and a leading evangelist of weblogs. The InfoWorld named him one of the “Top Ten Technology Innovators” in February 2000.
DaveNet
In November 1994, Winer originated DaveNet, to replace the standard news channels of the software business. DaveNet distributed newsletters over email and stored the goofy and informational web archives on it. Few of his newsletters included complaints against Apple’s management. The HotWired also published his censored columns from DaveNet, between June 1995 and May 1996. DaveNet won the Cool Site of the Day award in March 1995 but was discontinued in 2004.
Podcasting
Winer was receiving more requests for audio blogging features in the RSS from his readers and other bloggers, upon which he decided to include a new functionality in RSS 0.92, named the enclosure, that would transfer the address of a media file to the RSS aggregator. On January 2001, he first demonstrated this new feature in his Scripting News weblog, by enclosing the song Grateful Dead in it. With a built-in aggregator for both “send” and “receive” components in Userland’s weblogging product, Radio Userland, many of its users started doing audio blogging on it. In February 2004, Ben Hammersley suggested the word ‘Podcasting’ for ‘Audioblogging’.
Along with UserLand, Scripting News and Podcast, Winer also shares the credits for BloggerCon and Weblogs.com followed by some web authoring tools, including OPML Editor, River2 aggregator, Fargo, Dropbox-based outliner, etc.
Personal Life
Currently, Winer is living in New York. In June 2002, Winer underwent life-saving bypass surgery and had to step down as CEO of UserLand. He has been working as a successful writer in Silicon Valley and is referred to as one of the most prolific content generators in the web history. In 2003, he worked as a fellow at Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School and was the visiting scholar at NYU School of Journalism between 2010-12.
In 2002, he was named among the ‘InfoWorld Top Ten Technology Innovator’. In 2001, he was awarded the ‘Chosen Tech Renegade’ by Wired for work on SOAP with Microsoft.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.
