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Logan Green & John Zimmer; The Nice Guys of Ride-sharing

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“Follow your instinct,” you might have heard it several times from the mouths of the most successful entrepreneur across the world, but how many times it happened that you really did? Logan Green and John Zimmer, two young tech professionals, are among the ones, who went along with their gut feeling of starting an unusual business of sharing a car with strangers for the money. In the beginning, they were warned by many, that the business has higher chances of failing. But after almost ten years, the two are operating the same business, backed by biggest venture capitalists and making revenue in billions every coming year.

Logan Green was a native of California, where he attended the New Roads High School in Santa Monica. He received a bachelor’s degree in Business Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. At the college, he founded The Green Initiative Fund and was the youngest director for the Santa Barbara Metropolitan Transit District.

As a child, Green used to ride with his parents in their car, and whenever he saw outside the car, he found more cars, with most of the times, only a single person riding it. The time he had to join the college, he left his car back at home, to try the other conventional means of transportation. At the same time, his girlfriend Eva was also transferred to a college in Los Angeles.

lyftfounders
Image source: riverfronttimes.com

In the time of three years of her college, Green continued to visit Eva on every weekend riding different transportations. He even asked Zipcar, a car-sharing program, to implant their cars at UCSB, but could not convince them. Finally, he himself bought four cars and started the car-sharing program at the campus. Under the program, the users could unlock cars with radio-frequency identification.

On the other hand, Greenwich, Connecticut brought up John Zimmer, was also interested in the car-sharing concept. Zimmer, a graduate from Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, was influenced with the fact that he could fill the empty seats of his car while going back to home in the college breaks but had no idea from where to begin. After graduating from college, Zimmer started working as an analyst in real estate finance at Lehman Brothers in New York City, keeping a journal about carpooling ideas, side-by-side.

After completing the college education, Green went on a trip to Zimbabwe, where he was introduced to the crowdsourced carpool networks. The idea led him to build a platform named Zimride, using the Facebook API, upon which users could find and plan carpools.

Eventually, at the same time, he was introduced to Zimmer on Facebook via a common friend. Zimmer came to know about Zimride, and both coincided on the same idea of the development of a carsharing platform. As the two shared the similar interest, it took no time for Green to fly to New York and meet Zimmer.

In late 2006, together Green and Zimmer launched the first version of Zimride in the Cornell University and later, in 2007, in the UCSB campuses. Over 20 per cent of students registered for the service, but still, they used it only a few times in a year. During the very time, Uber was also providing its car-renting service, but the service included the rental of brand new luxury cars. The idea of Zimmer and Green was way too different from that.

Green and Zimmer moved to Silicon Valley, to work on the growth of the company and shared an apartment that served as both apartment and office. After working hard on Zimride for five years, they expanded the company to thousands of users and over 50 universities.

The main mission, the two were working towards, was to provide an alternative to car ownership. In 2013, they sold Zimride to Enterprise Holdings and turned there focus towards Lyft, their newly founded company, providing carpooling in local areas.

The next thing they figured out was that having an app for the smartphones can get them more users as well as more frequent rides for localities. So, they hired two engineers to develop an app for Lyft, and within three weeks the app was ready.

In 2017, Green and Zimmer raised $4.1 billion dollars for Lyft, valuing the company at $11.5 billion. Currently, Lyft is providing its services in 50 United States and has grown to 1,000 employees.

In 2009, Zimmer and Logan Green were named finalists in Business Week’s list of America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs and in 2014, the two were named “35 Under 35 list of Inc. Magazine.

Patrick Collison : Co-founder of Stripe & the Youngest Self-made Billionaire

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Learning has nothing to do with the age, whether you are 8 or 80, if you are learning some good stuff, it is going to pay you off in some unusual way. Like Patrick Collision’s interest in computer programming, that he grew at a tender age, led him to become the youngest self-made billionaire. He established one of the leading software companies, at an age when most of the people are still in high school or attending the college.

Early Life

Patrick Collison was born on 9 September 1988, to Lily and Denis Collison, in Dromineer, County Tipperary. He is the eldest of his two brothers John Collison and Tommy Collison. He was just eight when he started learning computers at the University of Limerick. His interest in computers, later, led him to study programming languages at the age of ten.

pattrick collison
Image Source: businessinsider.com

At the age of fifteen, Collison took part in the 40th Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, where he won the runner-up’s trophy for his project on artificial intelligence named after his idol Issac Newton. The very next year, on 14 January 2005, he again participated in the same competition and won the first prize, for a project on a LISP-type programming language. He was awarded a €3,000 cheque and a trophy of Waterford Crystal presented by President Mary McAleese.

Collison completed his high school education from Gaelscoil Aonach Urmhumhan, Tipperary, Ireland. Later, he joined the Castletroy College in Castletroy, County Limerick.

Career

After graduating from Castletroy College, Collison entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from where he soon dropped out to co-found a software company named ‘Shuppa’, with his younger brother John. As they could not raise funding for the company in Ireland, the two approached a few investors from the Silicon Valley and moved to California after Y Combinator showed interest in the start-up.

The two joined hands with other two Oxford graduates, Harjeet and Kulveer Taggar, and merged the company into Automatic.

In March 2008, at the age of 19, Collison sold the company to a Canadian company named Live Current Media, and both the brothers became millionaires overnight. In the month of May, in the same year, Collison accepted the position of director of engineering in the company’s Vancouver branch.

Founding Stripe

While in high school, Collison and his brother started building iOS apps. During this time Collision discovered that it is much easier to earn money through those apps, rather charge for things online and get the payment. This brought an idea of the development of a payment app into Collison’s mind, and after getting inspired by the working model of virtual hosting provider Slicehost, he built a prototype of his payment app.

In 2010, the Collison brothers built and released the first version of the app named as dev/payments, which later was renamed to Stripe. Initially, they tested the app with their friends and collected the feedback from them. Soon, people started talking about the app and Collison had a long waiting list for the app users. In the same year, the Stripe managed to receive a seed funding from Y Combinator. In the following year, it also received funding from venture capitalists Peter Thiel, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz, worth $2 million. Again in 2012, Stripe was funded with an $18 million Series A investment led by Sequoia Capital at a $100 million valuation.

Till September 2011, Stripe was running on an extensive beta. At the time the company became public and received a $20 million Series B investment.

Personal Life

Currently, Collison is working as the CEO of Stripe and lives in San Francisco, California. In November 2016, the Collison brothers became the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. The two were also featured on a young Irish person’s rich list aired on an RTÉ television in the Christmass edition 2008.

Barry Lam : Founder & Chairman of World’s Largest Maker of Laptop Computers

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Success is with those, who work hard towards their goals. The time, the personal computers were just introduced, the Taiwan based visionary entrepreneur, Berry Lam, saw the future scope of the notebook Pcs. He worked hard and used his more than 15 years of experience, in the manufacturing industry, to convert his vision into a successfully running business, and now, he is leading the number one laptop manufacturing company of Taiwan.

Early Life

Barry Lam was born in 1949 in Shanghai, China. His father worked as an accountant for the Hong Kong Club, so he spent his childhood in Hong Kong. He went to Taiwan, to pursue a degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University. He also received the master’s degree in the same field, from the same university.

barry-lam
Image Source: forbes

Career

Soon after Lam completed his master’s degree, along with his former classmates, in 1973, he founded a manufacturing business of the handheld calculators, naming the company Kinpo Electronics. Lam was appointed as the president of the company, and in his leadership, the company emerged as one of the largest contract manufacturers of calculators.

Founding Quanta Computer

In the early 80s, with the increasing popularity of personal computers, Lam founded scope in notebook computer manufacturing and became interested in the same field. In 1988, he left Kinpo to found Quanta Computer, along with one of his colleagues, C. C. Leung, with a capital of less than US$900,000.

In the beginning, it had two production lines that were handled by 60 employees at its office in Shilin Street, Hong Kong. Lam, the visionary entrepreneur wanted to become more than just a supplier. With Quanta, he offered combinations of features for its every product, which the client could choose from. Through Quanta he produced functional and powerful, yet lightweight products.

With the success of the company, Lam established its headquarter in Taiwan and also established the Quanta Research and Development Center there. The Center is focused on creating next-generation innovative products and works in collaboration with institutions such as MIT, National Taiwan University and Academia Sinica.

In 2001, Quanta Computer was recognised as the largest notebook manufacturer worldwide and had a 50% increase in the production. In 2002, the company established its plant in China. Under the One Child One Laptop project, in 2007, Quanta took orders for one million laptops and became the original design manufacturer for the OLPC XO-1.

In 2008, Quanta was named as Taiwan’s second largest private manufacturing enterprise, with an annual turnover of NT$777 billion reported in 2007. In the same year, the share of Quanta in the worldwide market was estimated to be 31%. The major clients of Quanta Computer include Apple Inc., Dell, HP, Amazon, Cisco, Lenovo, LG, BlackBerry, Sony, Sun Microsystems, Toshiba, and Verizon Wireless, etc.

Currently, there are 70,000 employees working for Quanta Computer worldwide, and it has expanded its businesses into network systems, mobile communication, automotive electronics, etc.

Personal Life

Currently, Barry Lam is serving as the chairman of the company. He was named the Entrepreneur of the Year 2005 by Ernst and Young. In 2006, he was awarded the Second Class Bright Star Medal’ by the Taiwan Government. He was listed as the 296th richest person in the world and 5th richest in Taiwan with a net worth of US$4.2 billion, in 2012. In the same year, he received an Honorary Doctorate, from the National Tsing Hua University.

Melanie Perkins : One of The Youngest Female CEOs of Tech World

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“Persistence is what makes an idea to happen,“ the answer given by the CEO and co-founder of Canva when asked about the secret of her success at such a young age. A teenager, who was disturbed with the complexity of the designing software including Photoshop and InDesign, had never thought that she would find a $1b opportunity in this complexity. One of the youngest female CEOs, and that too of two multi-million companies, Melanie Perkins’s hard work and struggle taught her a lot about leadership and running a business.

The Career Timeline & Founding Canva Inc.

Perkins was born and brought up in Perth, Australia and was a student of commerce and communications at the University of Western Australia. At the age of 19, she started teaching graphic designing to University students. With the time, she realised, that it was way too difficult to teach those students how to use those heavy software rather the designing itself. She was frustrated with the fact that it takes almost 22 clicks to export a high-quality PDF.

MelaniePerkins
Image Source: snappystreet.com

Those difficulties, that her students were facing, made her think of developing an easy to use platform for them. She decided to convert her idea into a functional website at a small level to test its potential at a smaller scale. She raised a sum of money, that she borrowed from her relatives, to pay the software designers to build the platform.

In 2007, she along with boyfriend Cliff Obrecht, founded Fusion Books, an online platform on which various schools could design their yearbooks. Only in a few years, Fusion Books became the largest Year Book publisher of Australia. Perkins even had to drop out from the University to completely focus on the website. The website soon became widespread in France and New Zealand, too.

Perkins knew that the scope of designing is unlimited, and it would be better for her if she focuses on using the same idea on a larger scale. In 2010, she decided to raise funding for her next big idea Canva and flew to California to pitch the idea in front of the major investors of Silicon Valley.

The very first investor whom she met was the San Francisco based investor and founder of MaiTai, Bill Tai. Although she wasn’t successful in getting funding from him, her idea was convincing enough to make Mr Tai help her meet other investors. But, it took three years for her to receive the first round of funding of $3 million for Canva and finally, in 2013, she launched it with the help of Cameron Adams, third co-founder of Canva and a hardcore Googler, who now serves as the Chief Product Officer of Canva. Cameron Adams is also among the first investors of Canva along with Lars Rasmussen and Matrix Partners.

The three years of her struggle taught her how to sell, how to recruit, and how to build a business. And her hard work turned out to be most fruitful for her. Just after one year of the launch of Canva, it had 750,000 users, and in April 2014, the company welcomed Social-media and technology expert Guy Kawasaki as its chief evangelist.

In 2015, Canva was launched for the businesses as Canva Work, a professional tool for designing. In 2017, the company reported its revenue to be four times, i.e. $AU 23.5m. Currently, over 200 people are working for Canva, and it has 10 million users across 179 countries. It has its headquarters in Sydney and Manila, and an office in San Francisco. In 2018, the company was valued at $1 billion, and Perkins became one of tech’s youngest female CEOs.

Currently, Perkins serves as the Chief Executive Officer and Director of Canva, Inc.

Martin Dougiamas : The Man Behind the Open-source LMS Moodle

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Martin Dougiamas is the Australia based educator and computer scientist, who founded one of the world’s biggest learning management system. Dougiamas has always been a keen learner, and despite lack of facilities, he was able to fulfil his desire for learning. A voracious reader and a lover of speculative fiction, he is a believer of sharing knowledge. Brent Simpson described him as “one of the rare instances in Open Source software development, where the right person with the right personality appears at exactly the right time; Martin Dougiamas is the Linus Torvalds of the LMS world and his software is the Linux of this software.”

Early Life

Dougiamas was born on 20 August 1969, in Perth, Australia. He spent most of his childhood in a deserted area in Western Australia, where, there was no facility for even basic education. He received his primary education at his home and studied from the material dropped from the aeroplane. He then joined the Kalgoorlie School of the Air, under distance education. As it was a distance learning school, he visited the school only a few times; sometimes for the school projects and a few times for the exams. He always missed being in a classroom with his classmates. At the age of ten, he became interested in wireless and internet technologies and studied books based on them.

Martin Dougiamas
Image Source: Flickr

After a few years, his family moved back to Perth, where Dougiamas joined West Balcatta Primary School and Balcatta Senior High School. He received a master’s degree and PhD from the Curtin University, Australia.

Career

At the age of 17, Dougiamas started working at Curtin University, where he taught the staff about the usage of various web applications. The internet and computers were the latest technologies that were emerging at that time, and he realized that it is not an easy task to teach people about those technologies and utilize them for teaching and learning.

The university installed the newly built learning management WebCT, one of the first learning management systems of that time, at its campus. Dougiamas was asked to improve its functionalities. But, his experience with the software was not a pleasant one, due to the restriction and software’s intellectual property rights.

Founding Moodle

Soon, Dougiamas joined the university as a student and started working on the development of a set of online tools for distance education, as the part of his PhD thesis, “The use of Open Source software to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry”. The tools he was developing for online education were soon adopted at a bigger level, and he had to eliminate them from his PhD thesis.

The first site developed on Moodle was of Peter Taylor from Curtin University, in 2001. By the end of the year, Moodle was available for downloads on CVS. In 2003, Moodle became a community-based software, with its first contributed module released on Moodle.org, a community arm for Moodle.com. People, across the world, were translating it in different languages and were developing themes for it.

In 2015, Moodle became the most used learning management system in the world, with 70,136 registered sites, in 222 territories worldwide, and in 2017, it had over 100 million registered users. Moodle Pty Ltd. HQ has over 45 employees, and it has its branches located in Australia, Spain, Canada, and the UK. The company is financed by a partners network that consists of over 80 certified companies around the world.

Personal Life

Currently, Dougiamas serves as the CEO of Moodle, Pty Ltd. He is the winner of Google-O’Reilly Open Source Award in the Education Enabler category (2008) and was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Vic – the Central University of Catalonia “for his contribution to open-source software through his leadership of the Moodle platform”, in 2016. He also received another honorary doctorate at the Université Catholique de Louvain, in 2018.

Herb Kelleher : The Founder & Former CEO of Southwest Airlines

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An aspiring journalist, who eventually became a lawyer and then a successful entrepreneur- Herb Kelleher, also wanted to live the lavish life that he had been seeing people living in his surrounding, and with the help of the right business plan and with the help of right people, he not only started one of the best airlines of America but also became one of the best CEOs of the country. Under his leadership, the airlines not only became the most preferred one by the consumers but was also voted Fortune magazine’s Best Place to Work in America

Early Life

Kelleher was born on 12 March 1931, to Harry Kelleher and Ruth Moore, in Camden, New Jersey. His father worked as the general manager at the Campbell’s Soup factory. He used to work at the same factory after school and also in the summer breaks, as a part-timer. He completed his high school education from Haddon Heights High School. He was a bright student and was also active in sports. He was in the Football team of the school and was a letterman in basketball and track. Later, he joined the Wesleyan University, to pursue a bachelor’s degree in English and Philosophy, in 1953. He was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity at the university. Influenced by a Wesleyan trustee, he then went to study law at New York University as a Root-Tilden Scholar and earned a graduate degree in the same.

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Image Source: experience.hsm.com

Career

In 1956, Kelleher started working as a clerk at the New Jersey Supreme Court. In 1959, he joined the Newark, New Jersey, firm of Lum, Biunno and Tompkins, where he practised law for two years. In 1961, he moved to Texas and became a partner in the law firm of Matthews, Nowlin, Macfarlane & Barrett.

Founding Southwest Airlines

While living in Texas, Kelleher got influenced by the lifestyle of the local people and started looking for something challenging that could help him be like one of them. He wanted to start his own law firm or any other business. In 1966, he joined the Texas businessman Rollin King as his outside counsel. One evening in a meeting with a client, an air charter service owner, in the St. Anthony’s Club in San Antonio, they sketched out a plan on a napkin.

King and his banker, John Parker wanted to launch an affordable airline between Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Kelleher joined hands with the two, and on 15 March 1967, with a seed money of $500,000, they launched the Southwest Airlines Co. Kelleher managed to buy a 1.8 per cent stake in the newly started airline company and was appointed as its first CEO. But due to some legalities, the airline kept from flying for a four-long year and had its first flight on 18 June 1971. The low prices of the flights, and other facilities like eliminating unnecessary services, made the airline an instant hit.

As the CEO of the company, Keheller brought a better working culture, making the employees work more passionately. In 1974, Southwest became the first airline to offer a profit-sharing plan, according to which employees owned 13 per cent of the company’s common stock. Southwest Airlines has constantly maintained its name in the top five Most Admired Corporations in America, in the Fortune magazine’s annual poll.

In 1982, Kelleher was assigned the post of the chairman and the president of the company, remaining on the position of the CEO. In 2003, the airlines had 33000 employees, and operated 2800 flights between 30 airports, with a total annual revenue of $6 billion and net profits of $442 million.

On 21 May 2008, Kelleher resigned as the chairman of Southwest Airlines.

Personal Life

Kelleher met his future wife, Joan Negley when he was in college and married her in 1955 when he was still studying law at the New York University. Fortune has also called him perhaps the best CEO in America. Kelleher was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 2004. He was named the CEO of the Year from Chief Executive magazine in 1999 and also from the Fortune magazine in 2001. In 1990, the Financial World named him as the CEO of the Decade in the Airline Industry and was also named as the CEO of the Century by Texas Monthly in the same year.