Imagine a 12 and a 14 year old brother-pair standing before the crowd, numbering approximately 5,500 – talking about business. Sounds a bit fictional, doesn’t it? Well, it’s a true story of two youngsters from India. The age when majority of kids are busy playing video games, or preparing school projects, these youngsters from Chennai are achieving what thousands of start-ups are still dreaming of. They started their own app development unit back in 2011 and have reached milestones during the span of six years.
The founders of GoDimensions, an app development unit, Shravan Kumaran, now 16, is the President and his younger brother Sanjay Kumaran, now 15, is the CEO of the company. The app development idea sprouted out of their passion in coding and an encouraging attitude of their father, Kumaran Surendran who is the director of Symantec, an American security software company. The Kumaran brothers launched their first app Catch Me Cop after developing a whopping 150 test apps. Their dedication is definitely praise worthy.
Catch Me Cop grabbed attention of multiple internet giants including cnet.com and the result was their app displayed on world’s leading tech company Apple’s App Store, a grand success for the young entrepreneurs. Catch Me Cop is a mobile game in which a convict escapes the prison and runs through various difficult terrains like a desert, maze, forest, etc. and the citizens are in search of this convict. The game became a sensation among the young as well as the adults who enjoyed catching the convict.
GoDimensions has launched 7 applications available for iOS and 3 for Android platform. The company has recently launched an app for the Windows phone platform. Shravan, currently a class 12th student and Sanjay, studying in class 10 in HUS, Chennai work from their bedroom occupied with Apple Macs, Galaxy Notes and every high-end digital platform.
The long list of apps developed under GoDimensions hood include Alphabet Board – with a 5 star rating on app store, Prayer Planet – an app for praying to the God, ETC, CarRacingHD, Emergencybooth, E15, ColourPallete, and goDonate – a platform to share excess food, clothes, etc. to the needy. These apps, in total, have already crossed the 70,000+ download mark in over 60 countries with an average rating of 4.5 stars.
The brothers’ interest is not limited to coding and app development. Sanjay, the youngest of two, loves to play football and is the goalkeeper for his school’s football team whereas Shravan loves to play cricket and keyboard. Their mother and former journalist, Jyothi Lakshmi, recalls that she got suggestions that her children would be more productive from home rather than in school. But they both aim to complete their formal education and grow the company parallelly.
The young brother-duo were spotted during a TEDx talk and at a SAP event in Bangalore where they talked about sketching a business plan. Sanjay Kumaran quotes, “I believe that great UI is key for a great Business.” The company’s recent turnover entered the Crore club and their increasing user base will see a massive growth in income too.
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.
Jeff Bezos is an entrepreneur, computer scientist, an e-commerce pioneer and has a passion for space exploration. He is the founder of Blue Origin, Amazon and is an investor in many other businesses. Jeff Bezos was born to a teenage mother, Jackie and Ted Jorgenson, a circus performer his biological father on January 12th 1964. He however grew up knowing that his father was Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant who married his mother when Jeff was still young. He only found out about his real father when he was 10. He cared less and his father has never really looked for him.
Jeff’s mechanical talent was seen from early in his life. When he was a toddle, he dismantled his crib with a screw driver so he could sleep in a regular bed. In his teen years, Jeff made an electric alarm with the aim of keeping his siblings from his room. His parents even had to let him use the garage for his science projects. Growing up, Jeff spent his summer vacations at his grandfather’s ranch. The maternal grandfather has been a role model to Jeff and taught his the farm work and piqued his interest in science even more.
Jeff Bezos schooled at the River Oaks Elementary School, Miami Palmetto Senior High School and finally at the Princeton University. He excelled throughout his school life and crowned it with two degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Princeton.
After school, Bezos joined the startup company named Fitel where he applied his skills in computer science. He later quit Fitel and later joined the D.E Shaw where he rose to the position of Vice President in four years. At this hedge fund he met the love of his life, MacKenzie Tuttle who was a research associate there. She is currently the wife to Jeff and a novelist. It was also while working as VP at the D.E Shaw that the idea of starting Amazon came to him. While he was looking for new ventures for the company he worked for then, he saw a statistic that made him interested in internet. It was shown that the World Wide Web was growing by 2300% a month. He immediately saw the potential prospects of selling online and quit his job.
Jeff Bezos began his first business while in school. It was an educational summer camp called the Dream Institute. He charged $600 per person and was able to enroll 6 people. Not bad for a school going child!
Amazon did not begin as what it is now. When it was born in 1994, Jeff wanted it to be an online book store. He thought of the details of the business and called up friend and family who would invest in the business while his wife was driving them to Seattle. He raised $1 million in capital and set up the business in his new home’s garage. The company was initially called Cadabra then it changed to MakeItSo.com, aard.com, awake.com, Bookmall.com, Relentless.com and Browse.com before finally settling for Amazon.com named after the largest river in the world.
Amazon was set up in July 1995 and within a month there were sales in all the 50 states and in 45 foreign countries. Within three years, the company grew to 3,000 employees making over $610 million in sales. However, the company was not making money yet. In 1997, they actually has a $30 million loss and $1,23 million loss in 1998. According to Jeff the company’s aim was to be customer centric company, not making profit. This strategy helped the company survive the dot com burst that killed many startups. In 1998 Jeff Bezos invested $250,000 in Google.
2001 was the first time the company recorded a profit of $5million on $1 billion revenues. Since then Amazon has grown more and more selling everything and with current revenues of $107 billion as of 2016. Jeff owns 18% of Amazon. Amazon today owns Amazon cloud and web services. Amazon launched its cloud services years before Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. Jeff Bezos also founded aerospace company called the Blue Origin in 2014. This has been quite a success with many achievements including the launch of a reusable rocket recently. The company is working towards making space travel possible for the general public.
In 2013, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million. This has since grown surpassing the New York Times as the leader in daily unique visits. Jeff Bezos is currently the third richest man in the world with a value of $65.3 billion with only Bill Gates and Amanda Ortega worth more than him.
Travis Kalanick, the man who today owns a $66 billion company, was once broke and faced a lawsuit of $250 billion which could have even landed him behind bars. It was his sheer determination and self-belief which gave him the power to rise up and shine on. He is the man behind the immensely successful company Uber. Uber, the taxi hailing app is a household name around the globe and has taken the transport industry by storm.
Travis Kalanick faced a lot of ups and downs in his life but despite the odds, with his skills and talent, he was able to start a worldwide ever-growing firm whose popularity stunned the world.
Image Credit: Wikipedia
Kalanick was born on August 6, 1976 in Los Angeles. He lived with his family, father, a Civil Engineer and his mother, a newspaper ad saleswoman, in Northridge, California. He did his graduation from Granada Hills High School Los Angeles, California. He had good interest in programming at a young age and started programming around seventh grade. From his childhood, he had skills necessary for being an entrepreneur which he used to hone by selling small items door to door.
After completing high school, he got admission in University of California, Los Angeles where he decided to pursue computer engineering to get a good job later but for a person, with high enough natural caliber of an entrepreneur like him, it was not supposed to last.
Dropping out of college and first startup failure
In University, he realized his true talent and the opportunities through College were insufficient for him to exercise his capabilities to their potential. In 1998, he made a risky yet bold decision to drop out of college with his friends. Travis Kalanick along with his friends Vince Busam and Michael Todd founded Scour Inc. and Scour Exchange which was a multimedia search engine and peer-to-peer file exchange service respectively. This was Kalanick’s debut into the corporate world.
The road to success is never easy and straightforward, so it was for Kalanick. He had to go through a lot of hardships and tough decisions to get to the point where he is today. Emerging in the corporate world with stunning pace it took him no time to get noticed by the big players of the industry.
Scour, the media search engine got very popular as it allowed people search and download videos, movies for free. This rising success of Travis Kalanick and his company was also seen as a threat to business by many other company owners of same niche. Soon Motion Picture Association of America and National Music Publisher Association along with more than 30 companies brought a copyright infringement lawsuit against Scour and sued Scour for a gigantic amount of $250 billion pushing Kalanick and his team to a corner.
With this lawsuit, his company was set to shut down. But, along with it, it could have also landed Kalanick and his team behind bars. But Travis Kalanick with his great presence of mind after considering various possibilities for future decided to save something than nothing and filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and avoided the fine as well as going to jail along with his team. However, as a result he had to shut down the company.
Sun rises but to set Again
This shutdown came as a shock to Kalanick but his persistence didn’t allow him to stop thinking new ideas. In 2001, considering previous incidents carefully along with the Scour’s engineering team he founded a new company called Red Swoosh which was also a peer-to-peer file sharing company that allowed users to exchange large multimedia files.
The idea of Kalanick with this company was to take on all the 33 companies who had sued Scour and turn them into Red Swoosh’s customers which he eventually did.
But things never go the way we want them to be. Soon the bandwidth prices declined and company lost its investments and they had to fire all their employees. But fate had more of it coming against Kalanick. IRS(Internal Revenue Service) ran a check on Red Swoosh and found that taxes were not being paid to the government completely, hence Kalanick’s company was asked to pay a fine of $110,000 or a jail term. Kalanick somehow managed to get the money as funding from Mark Cuban.
But this incident led to an internal dispute between Kalanick and Todd which eventually resulted in a falling out between the two and Travis took over the company. Thus, there was more pressure of work on him than he could handle, thinking about work all the time, he slowly lost all his friends and was left all alone in the end.
Later in 2007, things got completely out of hand and Travis had to sell the company to an American Corporation, Akamai Technologies, which bought Red Swoosh for $19 million.
“If someone can do it, then I can do it too”
With 2 such huge unsuccessful business startups at the age of 30, his life was in chaos, such circumstances could have broken down any human being but not Travis Kalanick. While trying his best to see through the current situation, he happened to see Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which is the work of a 70-year-old director. It instilled in him a thought process:
“If some old person can do something like that then I can still do much more than I have done yet”.
As a result, the diminished flame of perseverance to achieve the goal in his heart lit again and made him take another step in the corporate world. With his creativity and visionary thinking combined, he came up with a revolutionary idea of combining technology with everyday life.
Masterpiece: The Star-Lit Sky
In 2009, Travis regained the confidence of investors and managed to get a seed funding of $1.25 million and started Uber, which is a mobile application for hiring and ride-sharing vehicles. It works by connecting passengers and drivers of such available vehicles, and created a milestone in the history of both technology and corporate world by merging mobile technology with daily life in a creative yet very handy manner for common people.
Today, Uber is a well-known platform for hiring rides across the globe with just a tap. Just like many other products Uber has become a brand name for hiring rides. Being a convenient and easy to use application for mobile platform Uber was greeted by people with open hands. Since its launch in 2009, it has been able to increase its user base to more than 66 countries with the company’s net valuation to $66 billion, making Kalanick a Star Shining proudly in the Corporate World.
“The Lone Wolf”
Today being acknowledged as one of the world’s most renowned entrepreneurs, Kalanick is often invited to speak at various business events and conferences like LeWeb and Tech Cocktail to share his views on the present business matters being discussed worldwide.
It is Kalanick’s sheer determination and will power to reach greater heights with which he has gone against the tide from time to time to reach his goals. No matter how difficult a situation is, he always makes sure to work his way through it and see it to the end the way he wants.
Chasing his dreams with all he’s got did place him in Forbes’s List Of World Billionaires, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg compared to his achievements in life.
As Kalanick states:
“The entrepreneur community, there’s a certain kind of founder, they call them a ‘lone wolf.’ I probably fit in that category.”
Ikrant Kumar Bhatia is a Digital Marketing Enthusiast and is passionate about becoming an Entrepreneur. He is currently working as an Internet Marketer and planning to come up with his own Startup.
