A passion to do something and following your heart can take you places. Who would have thought that just being fond of designing would make Jonathan Ive the Chief Design Officer of the world’s most leading tech giant: Apple? he is serving the company for last 22 years and has designed some beautiful and innovative products.
Early Life
Ive was born in Chingford and raised in Staffordshire on 27th February 1967 under the guidance of his father Jonathan Jony Ive who was a lecturer and silversmith by profession. Ive got interested in drawing at very early and tender age of 14. Inheriting the skills from his father he started designing from jewelry to furniture and cars to boats.
Finally, after meeting few experts Ive decided to take a product designing course and joined industrial design at Newcastle Polytechnic. A hearing aid designed by Ive is kept on display in the London Museum of Design. Ive slowly started getting into technology and especially designing products using a Mac computer.
Beginning of Career
After the completion of his course Ive co-founded Tangerine – a London based design firm designing household products like kitchen and bathroom appliances. And Ive’s journey for Apple began from here. As Apple was one of the client’s at Tangerine they wanted him to join Apple after being impressed with his work. Robert Burner, the industrial design chief of Apple, hired Ive in 1992 and just in the next five years became the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design. Ive worked hard on the products such as the Newton MessagePad 110, which was one of the forgotten Apple products. Ive was on the verge to quit Apple but Jon Rubinstein, senior vice president of hardware engineering, gave him a raise and persuaded him to stay.
The Leap
Good that Ive took Rubinstein’s advice and stayed because in the coming years he would design some of the most famous Apple products like 1998’s iMac, 2001’s iPod, 2007’s iPhone, and 2010’s iPad. These were the groundbreaking designs by Ive which raised the bar of his reputation higher and higher. The uniqueness of the designs brought by Apple made them stand out in the market and a lot of other companies even copied the designs. Ive’s latest design is the Apple Watch.
Under Steve Jobs, Ive was given complete freedom to explore new ideas and designs. After the death of Jobs, some additional responsibility was put on Ive’s shoulders including the handling of software along with the hardware. He also has a personal design lab and is one of the most secret areas at Apple’s headquarters. And only a handful of people can actually enter this personal lab.
Ive holds more than 730 US design and utility patents as of 2014. Many more patents are yet to arrive in the future. He was awarded various awards recognizing his work in the design field. Ive lives with his wife Heather Pegg and twin sons in the Pacific Heights district of San Francisco, California.
Ive believes in charity and has developed products like the Leica Camera and Jaeger-LeCoultre sports watch which were sold at auction for charitable trusts. He considered Steve Jobs to be his closest friend and Jobs considered him to be his ‘spiritual partner’ at Apple.
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.
Can you imagine a dyslexic kid to be growing up and becoming a beast of the business world? Meet Richard Branson, the owner of Virgin group of companies. Richard Branson ventured into the business world at the tender age of 16. From dropping out of school and starting his own business to grow it into a billion dollar mountain, Richard has set an example before today’s youth to take risks and think bigger.
Richard Charles Nicholas Branson, son of Edward James Branson and Eve Branson, was born on 18th July, 1950, in Surrey, England. His father was a barrister and mother, a flight attendant. Richard’s poor performance in academics, at the age of 13, worried the teachers during his time at the all-boys Scaitcliffe School. He dropped out of school at the age of 16 due to continuous problems of dyslexia. This was the turning point in Richard’s life which would give birth to what would become a multi million dollar company – a youth-culture magazine, Student.
The magazine’s aim was to publish student written articles and various creative pieces. Richard sold first 50,000 copies of the magazine for free and covered the costs through advertising. He garnered $8000 worth of advertising money in the first edition itself. The next big idea Branson decided to transform into a business was the mail-order record company called Virgin. This would also help him in supporting his magazine. Branson soon expanded the mail-order business and started a record shop at the Oxford Street, London. In 1972 he successfully launched a recording studio in Oxfordshire, London. This school drop-out was on a greater mission and his next steps would significantly make him the smartest business man in the world.
The launch of Virgin Records also launched the careers of singers and musicians. The first artist, in 1973, on the label was Mike Oldfield who’s single ‘Tubular Bells’ was a record hit and stayed on the UK charts for 247 weeks. Branson, taking the advantage of Oldfield’s success, signed up numerous artists and then the world saw the rise of aspiring musical groups like Sex Pistols, The Rolling Stones, Genesis, etc. The back to back hits from these artists helped Virgin music to reach a position in top six record companies in the world.
The next big leap Richard Branson took was venturing into the airlines business. He expanded his businesses and started the Voyager Group in 1980 and Virgin Atlantic Airlines in 1984. Virgin was rapidly becoming a brand name in the world. Branson faced a major fall of his company in 1992 when the loss was immeasurable. This crushed Branson and he had to sell the company for $1 billion to Thorn EMI. When everything was lost Branson made up his mind to hold strong the music business. And in 1993, he launched Virgin Radio which was followed by V2, another record company in 1996 thus launching the careers of artists like Tom Jones.
Branson’s further major achievements were starting a train company, a mobile phone company, a luxury game preserve and finally a space tourism company named Virgin Galactic. The test launch of Spaceship Two was so massive a success that about 500 people have already booked tickets to ride on Virgin Galactic Spaceship. The company’s next venture is to launch luxury cruises and plans to sail its first cruise in 2020.
Richard’s massive success has set tremendous inspiration for entrepreneurs all over the world. He lives with his wife and two children, Holly and Sam, at Necker Island residence. Branson also gives motivational speeches and is an active supporter of charity organizations.
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.
Success and struggle are just like two sides of the same coin. A man who used to return Coke bottles to earn 5¢ to buy food, and walk 7 miles every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple created a legacy which is flourishing even after his death.
Steve Jobs the man behind MAC, iPad, iPOD and iPhone was abandoned by his biological parent, fired from his own company and suffered from cancer. Despite all these ups and downs he never lost focus and love for technology. Coming generations would hardly believe that it was one man who revolutionized music, smartphone and computer industry.
Steve always loved technology and even in college days he preferred practical knowledge over bookish knowledge. Jobs’ interest in electronics began to smoke up as he extended a helping hand to his father’s garage and began to befriend many engineers living in his neighborhood.
Love what you do
In his high school Steve Jobs approached Hewlett Packard and asked for some parts for his school project. The boy’s boldness impressed him and he not only agreed to provide the parts but also offered him an internship at his office. This was indeed a great opportunity for Jobs to formally step into the techno world. While interning for Hewlett Packard he met Steve Wozniak who worked as an engineer there. Wozniak was very passionate about technology like Jobs and they both became friends to change the face of technology in the coming future.
Jobs then got entangled with his higher studies and finally admitted himself in Reed College. But it seemed he could not find his place there and therefore dropped out from the college after first semester. His inclination towards spirituality tempted him to visit India, yet the love for electronics never faded away.
Beginning the journey with Apple
After he returned from India, Steve Jobs contacted Wozniak who then was busy in building a small computer. The idea caught up Jobs’ far sighted eyes and he proposed to take this computer into the business world with him. After convincing Wozniak they arranged to set up a shop at his father’s garage and named their business ‘Apple’. We therefore see how this topmost company sprouted from a garage. But as is the way of life, nothing goes smooth and easy and the task to collect seed money to start the business stood like a gigantic monster in front of them. Jobs sold his micro bus and Wozniak his calculator to make an investment of $1350. And this is how they introduced Apple I in 1975.
Although the computer could only get attention of hobbyists yet the sales collected decent amount of cash which gave them a way to redesign the computer into a better model. After 2 years, Apple II was launched in the market with coloured graphics and keyboard. The computer hit the market making huge success and made $3 million in its first year while the sales went up to $200 million in the next year. The success of Apple II marked a benchmark in the career of Steve Jobs.
Facing a downfall
Undoubtedly Apple II was a great success for Jobs but he failed to retain it for long. However, he did not put a pause to his efforts in introducing new designs and techniques to his computers but his efforts failed every time. The sales started decreasing with Apple III and LISA as new companies like IBM began to take over the market. But he never backed out and in 1984 Jobs brought another design in the market and named it as Apple Macintosh which came with a new user-friendly hardware, a mouse. But even this enhancement could not save him.
Jobs’ troubles didn’t seem to end here as the clash with his company’s board of directors in 1983 resulted in his losing of control over Apple in 1985. And eventually he had no other option than to sell his shares and resign. The irony of life could be exemplified best with this situation as Jobs was kicked out of the very company he founded.
NeXT
Stagnation was never meant for Steve Jobs and thus after resigning from Apple he launched another computer company named NeXT. But his aim to bring a revolution in the technical field did not come out as expected since the computers were highly expensive. Meanwhile, he also bought Pixar Animation Studios in 1986 which became the most important stepping stone in his career. With Pixar he made an animation film ‘Toy Story’ which was a smash hit. The great success of ‘Toy Story’ raised Pixar’s 80% shares to $1 billion.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish
Just after Pixar was made public, Apple bought NeXT for $400 million and gave Jobs a position as an advisor to the company’s CEO. But the company faced a failure in keeping up its old position and dealt with a quarterly loss of $708 million. As a result of this, the then CEO of Apple resigned from his position and Steve Jobs got back hold of the company by seating himself as the new CEO of Apple. He raised the company value by signing deal with Microsoft and also brought in new technology fronts in the computers. In no time the company’s sales revived and reached to $5.9 billion. Jobs then expanded the company with new products like iPod, iPhone and iPad. However, struggling with ill health Jobs resigned from his position as CEO in 2011.
Steve Jobs’ journey could be summed up in his own words uttered at Stanford University in 2005. His success could be traced by “connecting the dots” of the events that took place. Every turn of his life proved to be of immense importance at some point later. From taking the risk to drop out from the college to resigning from his own company, his decisions led him to better prospects. And his mantra of life, “keep looking, don’t settle” unless you are truly satisfied with what you are doing is worth adopting. It was his relentless efforts and uncompromising attitude that made him the pioneer of techno world. The legacy still continues with latest iPhone 7 and AirPods.
Jobs historic Standford address about life, love and loss
“If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”
A simple comment on Hacker News motivated an employee of Zoho Corp. to leave his cushy job and build a b2b company that recently got $31 million in funding at $250 valuation from Tiger Global. Company in case is Freshdesk and the person behind this hugely successful venture is Girish Mathrubootham.
Girish Mathrubootham, CEO of Fresdesk founded this cloud-based customer support platform in 2010. Girsih was VP of Product Management at the ManageEngine division of Zoho Corp when he read on Hacker News that Zendesk (now a competitor of Freshdesk) is increasing prices by 60% to 300%. In this comment of an unhappy customer of Zendesk, Girsih saw a potential business opportunity.
There was another personal experience where Girish never got a response to his 20+ emails from insurance company for his damaged TV. But when he posted his plight on a public forum he got immediate attention of the company. He realized that he had all that it takes to create a platform like Zendesk. He decided to hit the $37 billion customer relationship market with a SaaS based customer support platform along with his colleague Shan Krishnasamy.
They worked day & night with dedication for eight months to get the product out in market. In 2011, Freshdesk signed up its first client, Australia’s Atwell College. Freshdesk also emerged as winner at Microsoft BizSpark Startup Challenge winning $40,000. Girish and his co-founder maintained from the beginning that if within a year Freshdesk doesn’t get enough traction, they will shutdown and go back to job. However, that situation never arrived and soon they signed up 100 customer and became Zendesk’s biggest rival.
Smart Moves
Since inception Girish and his team planned everything from marketing to operations within budget. When they couldn’t integrate a US payment gateway to handle recurring payments which is essential part of any SaaS business and since their target customers were in US, Girish went ahead and registered a US company while sitting in India for just $1278. This paved the way to get a US bank account and integration of recurring payment gateway.
Girish always loved the work culture at Zoho Corp and felt the strong sense of ownership and pride of being part of the Zoho group. He brought the same culture to his company. Unlike other big startups, Freshdesk don’t prefer to hire people from IIT or IIMs. On the lines of Zoho, Freshdesk also prefer to hire top talent of tier II, tier III educational institutes. Girish is a kind of CEO whose happiness lies within the happiness of his employees. In an interview to ET, on being asked about wealth creation, he answered
“Wealth creation to me means creating wealth not only for founders and shareholders, but also for all the employees who are passionately building the company along with us.I think it is a great opportunity that I have as the founder to be able to create and share wealth. When I started the company I told my wife that I am not starting a company for me to buy a BMW, I am starting a company so that all my employees can buy BMWs.”
Once on a trip to San Francisco, Girish was proud to know from a taxi driver that he uses Freshdesk on his day job as support engineer. In 2012 Freshdesk launched a mobile SDK, Mobihelp, which lets its clients to engage their customers within their mobile app. In 2015, Freshdesk acquired a social recommendation platform Frilp and a live video chat company 1CLICK to strengthen its customer support platform. Today, Freshdesk is used worldwide and has a huge customer base with a plush office in Chennai along with branches in cities like London, Sydney and San Francisco.
Asia is now becoming a hub for innovative startups that dare to dream and innovate big time. One such startup is SoloInsight, a Pakistani startup that has built fastest 3D facial and iris recognition algorithms. SoloInsight is founded by Farhan Masood. Farhan is a well known entrepreneur and inventor.
Farhan the founder and CTO of biometrics security startup SoloInsight dropped out of college at the age of nineteen and is a self-taught technology inventor since then. He has received 34 international and 5 local awards. He started his journey from zero and today his company is operational in seven different countries and has a worth over 10 million dollars.
Hard work, commitment & perseverance
Masood was lucky enough to get his hands on gadgets and technology at a very early age. He got fascinated about computer software and engineering, but could not afford to buy the technology books. But he had a thirst for knowledge and curiosity about how things work. So, he made friends with a shopkeeper who would allow him to spend hours in his book store. He would bunk classes and read about computing at the bookstore all day long.
Thirty-five-year-old Pakistani national Farhan Masood got the attention of media and people when he developed Urdu graphics and the Persian language script for the Internet. He was just 19 then. This success gave him enough reasons to drop out of the college and pursue his dream.
His global recognition and interviews in national and international media landed him on an advisory position with Pakistan Govt. During his job, he helped government translate and digitize land records, which were previously only stored in old style, physical files. Later he moved to Dubai to start his own firm (an advertising technology startup called Quick Fix Solutions) and worked on several projects, including websites for the Dubai e-government, Enoc, Eppco and Dubai Internet City.
Birth of SoloInsight, a patented technology
After watching watching the Tom Cruise movie ‘Minority Report’ (based on future technology), Masood decided to work on iris recognition technology. In 2010 Masood moved back to Pakistan to work on SoloInsight.
SoloInsight is a global recognition software platform that helps companies accurately and efficiently manage ingress and egress to increase safety, ensure compliance, and save money. SoloInsight using its patented technology helps businesses increase productivity & profits.
For past 10 years, SoloInsight is tapping a billion dollar biometric devices market. SoloInsight has 119 clients and 114000 daily users. SoloInsight counts companies like US Apparel, Nestle, Pepsico, PEL, and the Pakistan Army as clients.
The journey
Masood wasn’t born with a silver spoon, he worked hard all his life to live his dream and make Pakistan proud. It was his father who encouraged and developed his interest in computing.
His continuous achievements and enthusiasm has made him an inspiration for many young entrepreneurs. His journey wasn’t that easy after all. For once he thought that his dream was shattered, when he needed money for his startup and his visa application was rejected due to political events. He has now moved his business to America and made a big name across the globe.
Farhan’s focus now is to transition into “Internet of People”, an unexplored idea. Other than being a recognized technologist and innovator, Farhan is well known for his philanthropic activities. The entrepreneur was awarded a Global Innovation through Science and Technology competition award by US Vice President Joe Biden in Turkey, for running the country’s largest blood donation network called Bloodline. Farhan Masood runs a movement called Pakistan Go-Green, which was the subject of a Digital Revolution case study at the Cambridge University.
The thinker + Doer = Rodinhood says his Quora profile; Alok Kejriwal is the man who changed the pace of India’s online gaming industry. Rodinhood is inspired from Rodin – who sculpted ‘The Thinker’ and Robin Hood who ‘got things done’.
Born on 25th December, 1968, the renowned CEO and co-founder of Games2win is known to the world as Rodinhood. Alok Kejriwal is an entrepreneur who knows how to utilize a problem as an opportunity to build business around it. He started his journey by joining his family business of socks manufacturing at the age of 18, while he was still in college. After 10 years, he moved out of the family business and started something of his own which was not into manufacturing. He went on to venture in mobile and then online games.
Making of the Rodinhood
As they say, leader is one who knows the way, shows the way and goes the way. Alok Kejriwal is a true leader and has proved his leadership, honesty and truthfulness in every walk of life. He started his socks business around 1989. Once when his socks factory was preparing Argyle socks order for a leading retailer he noticed an issue with packaging. He picked up one bundle of socks and opened it like a consumer for final inspection. As he ripped the adhesive sticker from the socks, he was thunderstruck as the thread of the small ‘criss cross’ lines that make the Argyle pattern so famous began ripping out of the socks. The shipment was ready to be shipped in 3 hours and the socks had PASSED inspection from Europe and India. Without worrying about extra cost of building top pair of socks and losing credibility or business he decided to be truthful and informed the buyer. This critical decision earned him a lot of respect in the eyes of buyer. The buyer was so delighted and grateful that he not only paid for extra cost but also gave many more orders in future.
In 1998, Kejriwal founded an online contests portal company named Contests2win.com (C2W) with a borrowed laptop and only Rs 5,000. He realized the power of internet while working in the family business. During this time, he used the internet for information on spare parts on company websites. “I got fascinated with the power of Internet to distribute knowledge and thought of building business around it.”, Alok once said.
Later, he launched a venture entitled “Mobile2win” in china in 2001. Mobile2Win organized mobile competitions and promotions on mobile interactive platforms. In 2003 mobile2win operations were also started in India. He got the VAS Business of Sony Channels’ singing show Indian Idol. Alok was one of the pioneers of ringtone business. He did create a lot of value and money before mobile companies and tv channels themselves started doing this business to maximize their profits.
Mobile2win was doing fantastic but due to funding, scale and other issues, Alok was asked to leave mobile2win. However, this sad exit turned out to be good for him in long turn. He got million dollars on exit from mobile2win which he invested in conetst2win. Later the Indian arm of mobile2win went to Chandigarh (India) based company for no cash deal while Chinese mobile2win got acquired by Disney.
Taking the legacy forward, he came up with a new venture Games2win in the year 2007. Today, Games2win is ranked among top gaming site across the world. The most popular game at Games2win is Parking Frenzy and has about 20-25 million downloads. Besides Parking Frenzy, another 15 of their games have 1 million downloads now.
As the popularity increased, Games2win discovered that thousands of other websites and blogs were embedding Games2win games on their sites. Instead of blocking games on other websites or sending them copyright infringement notices, Alok and his team used an innovative idea. They started displaying Ads within the game whenever it was played on a website other than Games2win. Suddenly their success metric changed to the number of websites illegally embedding their games. More the embeds, more display ads, more revenue.
Although not being a great supporter of mobile only approach, he moved Games2win from a top game company to a mobile games company while struggling with static traffic in 2010. Games2win started focusing on mobile games and stopped making web games in 2014. New games are only available for smartphones. However, you can still play old games on their website.
Tough calls and work life balance
Entrepreneurship is bed of thorns. Being a successful entrepreneur and a successful father, husband at the same time is not that easy. You are always occupied with business deals, meetings, and dinner with clients and what not. Alok Kejriwal is married to Chhavi Kejriwal and has two daughters. In his blog “would you marry an entrepreneur? “, he jotted the pros and cons of marrying an entrepreneur. Topping it with his own story, he recalled a real life incident.
Can you imagine where was he when his second daughter was born? Hospital? No, you got it wrong! Well he wrote,” I skipped visiting the hospital and escorting my wife and my newborn daughter (my second child) home, because that evening I was signing some term sheets of my first venture contests2win.com in the lobby of The Oberoi in Mumbai.”
Startup mentor, critic and attention grabber
Alok never shies from going public with his views on different startups and their business ideas and many times he has been proved right. Alok criticized the app only approach of Myntra and Flipkart which turned out to be true after these companies rolled back their decision.
The the blue eyed gaming champ also criticized then Housing.com CEO Rahul Yadav for two Housing.com hoardings that were barely visible behind trees which attracted a sharp reaction form Rahul Yadav.
Amidst all the criticism, chaos and challenges, Alok kept pushing himself and continued to grow as an entrepreneur. He knows the art of being in news and use the right opportunity at right point of time.
Alok belongs to that rare breed of successful entrepreneurs who go extra mile to help budding entrepreneurs achieve success. This “Crazy Internet Entrepreneur” of India is playing the role of a startup mentor and motivator. Alok runs Rodinhood.com where he and fellow Rodinhoods share their experiences related to startups, products, teams, marketing & business. Nothing can beat such startup stories and experiences in helping budding entrepreneurs run their show successfully. He and his team of volunteers organize The Rodinhoods Open House(TRH) in different cities of the country for free. TRH helps startups meet industry leaders, pitch their product to investors and network with fellow entrepreneurs.
A TRH workshop in progress
His favorite advice to entrepreneurs is
“To go where no man has gone before…” (from Star Trek).
