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Jack Ma: A self made billionaire

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E-commerce is one of the fastest growing segments in the industry. Many young entrepreneurs have tried their hands in this field but very few were able to taste success. One such hugely successful eCommerce business is Alibaba.

The man behind this extremely successful ecommerce business is Jack Ma. Today Ma the founder and executive chairman of Alibaba Group has an estimated net worth of $25 billion. Who would have imagined that a 5 feet tall Chinese man will lead Alibaba to a record breaking $25 billion IPO and become 18th richest person in the world? Alibaba’s IPO was bigger than Google, Facebook and Twitter combined.

Determination & persistence paves the way
Ma was born in Hangzhou, China. Lack of resources was never a excuse for him to learn or do something. In Childhood Ma developed a desire to learn English, so he started to converse with foreigners. For nine years he used to guide foreigners around the city for free to learn English. This opened the door to many entrepreneurial skills; from interacting with people to knowing their thought process; this somewhere pushed him to develop his own views on capitalism and entrepreneurship. During this course he became pen pals with one of these foreigners, and she nicknamed him “Jack”, because his real Chinese name Ma Yun was too difficult to pronounce.

But before he became the richest person in China, Ma went through a lot of rejections. Can you imagine the man behind Alibaba’s success was rejected by three universities?Quote JackMa2

Today world’s top universities and business schools like Harvard take pride in inviting Jack Ma for guest lectures whom once they were not ready to give admission. He was rejected by Harvard 10 times as a student. Jack Ma learnt from failures than through the formal channels of education.

He applied for 30 jobs and got rejected. Jack Ma once said, “When KFC came to China, 24 people went for the job…23 people were accepted. I was the only guy who wasn’t.” His journey from a failed man to a successful tech leader & entrepreneur is exemplary .

Ma’s first date with internet and rise of Alibaba
“Beer” was the first word that Jack Ma searched for on the internet- Really? Beer? Well, during his trip to US, he searched for “Beer” and then “China”, when no results came up, he decided to set up a Chinese website. He saw the web as the future of business and even tried to register the name Internet!
In 1995 he along with his wife and a friend founded an internet company called China Yellow Pages. This company made 5,000K Chinese Yuan (US$800K).

In 1999 he started Alibaba, a B2B marketplace along with his 17 friends. He chose the name Alibaba since it was unique and easy to spell and people were able connect with this name very easily. Alibaba.com allows merchants and companies to trade products online. Within a short period of time Alibaba became one of the largest websites online.

Ma is a larger-than-life figure. Even after reaching the great heights, Jack Ma is the exceptionally optimistic and determined. His journey to success is definitely one which will inspire you even in your darkest days. Jack Ma believes that “If you are still poor at 35, you deserve it!” His journey is a perfect example of a rag-to-riches story. The most important lesson is- when the dream is big enough, the facts don’t count.

Most of us indulge so much in making excuses about things that we even forget to make the best of every situation. We all give countless excuses everyday like lack of money, lack of good education and people around us always discourage us. The same was the case with Jack Ma, he had nothing to push him forward but his strong desire to excel made him the man he is today.

“We are never in lack of money. We lack people with dreams, who can die for those dreams” – Jack Ma

Elon Musk- A tech founder on a mission to save and change the world

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This is the age of Tech Entrepreneurship and startups. From Steve Jobs to Bill Gates there are many tech founders who have made it big into technology that has changed the world and impacted our lives drastically. Today entrepreneurs are thinking beyond online ecommerce and taking huge risks to make world a better place. For many tech founders money is not the only thing that matters. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook and his wife pledged to give away most of their wealth for social causes. Bill Gates is a well known philanthropist. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is running so many campaigns in the world to improve education, health and lives of people.

Elon Reeve Musk is one such great tech entrepreneur and new age philanthropist. Unlike others his philanthropy is driven by technology that aims to make world a better place to live. The real-life inspiration for Iron Man’s main lead character Tony Stark, Musk has interests in industries like automotive, aerospace, solar energy, energy conservation, satellite and high-speed surface transportation. Working more than 100 hours a week and drawing just $1 as salary, Elon is on a mission to save and change the world by investing and nurturing companies like Tesla, SpaceX, and Solarcity.

ELON MUSK
ELON MUSK

Have you heard about Blaster? Blaster is a game that was made by a bored 12 year old in 1984. This 12 year old was none other than Elon Musk. Elon Musk one of the founders of PayPal became a self-made millionaire at the age of 27, when he sold his first company, Zip2. By age 41, his estimated net worth had surpassed $1 billion, and today, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO has an estimated net worth of $10.5 billion. Most of his innovations seem straight out of a sci-fi movie.

Tesla Motors
Musk co-founded Tesla Motors, a company that designs and manufactures premium electric vehicles. Tesla was able to succeed in the electric car market where other large manufacturers failed due to lack of innovative ideas.
Elon recently launched the Tesla Model 3 at the Tesla Design Studio in Hawthorne which will hit the market in 2017. The new model starts at $35000 and accelerates to 60mph in 6 sec. This is a next level car with exciting features. It’s Musk’s vision and innovative ideas that has led to the making of this different league model. More than 1,80,000 pre-orders were received by Tesla in a day for Model 3. Tesla is also planning to enter India in 2016.

Success of Tesla has paved way for vehicles that are stylish, feature rich and cause less harm to environment.

SpaceX
Before the closing of PayPal, he had already started dreaming about a greenhouse, “Mars oasis” which he wanted to land on mars.

Musk decided to start a company that would build affordable rockets, using vertical integration and the modular approach of software engineering. Those ideas resulted in his launch of SpaceX in 2002. His long-term goal is to help humanity through SpaceX by creating a true spacefaring civilization.

Creating a reliable rocket that successfully gets into space was not an easy job. No one wanted to invest in SpaceX because everyone believed it to be over ambitious and a venture with pretty less hope of being successful . Musk invested his own personal funds worth $100M in SpaceX. However, SpaceX was on the verge of closing due to lack of funds when three attempts to launch a rocket failed. In 2008 SpaceX did a launch of Falcon 1 launch vehicle which failed. Elon took the stage and motivated employees for the next attempt saying that rocket science is not an easy thing and failures are bound to happen. Motivated team investigated the issue and was ready with next rocket in 7 weeks which otherwise would have taken a year for any other company. On sept 28th SpaceX successfully launched the rocket and became world’s first private venture to launch rocket in earth’s orbit. An achievement that was limited to only 6 mightiest nations of the world. After this SpaceX got an offer for $1.6 billion to carry out 12 launches for NASA.

Another feather was added to Musk’s cap last week after the launch of futuristic pop-up room and landing of the unmanned Falcon rocket at Atlantic sea. SpaceX resumed station deliveries for NASA on Friday and landed its booster rocket on an ocean platform for the first time.The innovations at SpaceX has resulted in cheapest cost of launching rockets in the history.

SpaceX is currently working on a new spacecraft, which will allow humans to travel in space and take ride from earth to moon. SpaceX is making a much larger rocket that will be able to bring 100 people to Mars at once. Google and Fidelity has now invested in SpaceX.

Success of SpaceX is the result of Musk’s quest of a fantastic future. His vision is worth appreciating. Take a bow!

Solarcity
The company was co-founded by Elon Musk in 2006. Solarcity produces the world’s most efficient rooftop solar panels with a market cap of just under $6 billion and has become the largest installer of solar panels in the US. Solarcity is now building the country’s largest solar panel-manufacturing factory in Buffalo.

Tesla and SolarCity companies are making a pollution free, environment friendly renewable energy future a reality.

Man at the helm for an innovative future

Musk “the world’s most remarkable living entrepreneur” is undoubtedly an epitome of an entrepreneur, inventor and a business magnate. He is truly the real life Iron Man. In case you don’t know, parts of Iron Man 2 were actually filmed inside and outside of SpaceX and musk even had a cameo in the film.

His ideas are the most ambitious ideas so far. He is a true leader who can envision and lead people to a better world and better future.

You can read more about ELON Musk and his future plans in the book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

Weekend projects that became million dollar products

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As they say, ideas come to many but there are few who go ahead and give them a try. Similarly most people never pay a heed to their hobbies. Hobbies always take back seat given the time and money constraints. But those who fulfill their hobbies, live a life full of energy and satisfaction.

Hobbies if executed with passion, can be rewarding too. Like Walt Disney whose hobby of doodling and sketching turned into a multi-billion dollar business or for that matter Bill Gates whose hobby of programming turned into what we know today is Microsoft.

Here we are talking about two side-projects that were created and executed over a weekend which later turned into million dollar businesses. Joe Gebbia, Brian Chesky & Noah Kagan, If you don’t know them and what did they do, read on. All these turned their side projects in great startups  worth millions of dollars.

AppSumo: Noah Kagan
AppSumo is a daily deals website that promotes great digital products (application software, eBooks) and online services (online training courses). Founded in 2010 by Noah Kagan, AppSumo today has more than 700,000 users and revenue in millions.

Noah Kagan once a top performer in Facebook held 20,000 shares (0.1% of the company) which would have made him millionaire. However, as the fate would have it, he was fired in less than a year. Noah always wanted to do something of his own. For the same reason he left Mint forfeiting his shares worth $1.7 million. Noah Kagan started a gaming company KichFlip (Gambit) which probably got shut down due to Facebook’s policies.  Gambit was created over a weekend by Noah and his friends which grew to $1,000,000 plus business by end of year.

During his stint with Gambit Noah realized that it’s pretty difficult to get customers and he decided to do something for apps to get customers. He realized that people were discussing different products on forums like Reddit and would love to get those for a discount. This led to creation of AppSumo. AppSumo the core product was built over a weekend by hiring freelancers from Pakistan for $50.  Noah

AppSumo started listing products for some commission which  would help startups that needed such platform to market their product. He struck his first deal for selling ‘imgur Pro’ and made his first dollar. He validated the idea with 200 sales and thereafter never looked back. Today, AppSumo lists tons of apps and online training courses.

Story of AppSumo and Noah Kagan is not ordinary. After forfeiting lucrative plush jobs and millions of dollars, starting a new business over a weekend and to take that to million dollars revenue is just amazing.

 Image courtesy: http://okdork.com/

Airbnb: Brian & Joe
Two designers unable to pay rent decided to rent out 3 air mattresses along with breakfast to earn some money, that’s how Airbnb was born. In the year 2007 Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia didn’t have enough money to pay rent. Seeing an upcoming design conference in San Francisco as an opportunity to make some quick bucks, they created a website, airbedandbreakfast.com.

After few days, they got their first three customers paying them $80 each. At this moment they realized the potential of this business and decided to take it forward. However, these two entrepreneurs instead of creating another renting website decided to do something different. They decided to enable local people list their rooms for travelers visiting the city for conferences, trade fairs or festivals.

Airbnb

In the initial years, they had no office and they mainly worked from the flat they had. A year later when their team grew to 15 people they set up their first office in San Francisco, California.

In 2008 it was election time in US and Barack Obama was going to address 80,000 people in  Denver at the Democratic National Convention. There was a shortage of hotel rooms in that area. They got a major boost from this room scarcity. They played smartly by offering special cereals in the name of Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain’s for $40 which generated more than $30,000 which paved the way for expansion.

They expanded rapidly from then on by including properties between market and CouchSurfing. In 2009 they raised an initial funding of $20,000 funding which led to another $600,000 from venture capitalists.

Several mergers and acquisitions of Accoleo, CrashPadder, Localmind paved the way for their international expansions. Airbnb now deals in properties ranging from hotels to islands to bungalows. Today Airbnb have their offices internationally from London to Delhi to Cuba to Singapore and many more.


Video credit: fundersandfounders

There are problems around us needed to be solved. There are solved problems which needed to be optimized. Don’t put that compelling idea which comes to your mind to hibernation. Go ahead and give it a shot. You never know you would end up creating something like Airbnb or AppSumo.

InMobi, a company that ran out of money to $2bn acquisition speculations

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Every startup goes through ups and downs. It’s the critical business decisions, tough calls, hard work, persistence that makes startups survive and successful in long run.  InMobi was started  in 2006 as SMS based search platform, mKhoj, that later pivoted to become a mobile advertising platform. Founded by  Naveen Tiwari, Abhay Singhal, Mohit Saxena, and Amit Gupta, InMobi which today clocks  138 Billion monthly ad impressions and has 17 offices worldwide once barely had enough money to survive and was on the verge of possible shutdown.

Since than InMobi has come a long way. Today, company competes with Google’s AdMob, Apples’ iAd and there are speculations that Microsoft is going to acquire InMobi for $2 billion.

How team that built InMobi hopped in together
Four friends came together to build next-gen mobile ad platform. They built the first version mKhoj working out from a rented apartment in Mumbai.  In 2007 when company ran out of money, management ran the company for two months on 14 credit cards without paying bills before they hit a funding of $7 million.

Big leap & the funding
In initial days Mohit and Abhay were themselves doing cold calls to get the business. In 2007 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures invested $7M in InMobi. In 2008 company took a call to go global but decided not to go in a crowded market like US but  in markets like southeast Asia & Africa.

Company growth and culture
From the initials days itself company believed in long term strategy to invest in technology and people. InMobi has built a great culture. Most people in the company has stock options since the founders believe that when company tastes the success, employees too should get rewarded enough for the risk, passion and commitment to stand together in every thick and thin of the company. Unlike conventional HR standards, the company has no standard performance monitoring system, no raking and ratings and believes in employee growth and empowerment.

InMobi’s is a story of passion, a story of commitment, a story of  an Indian company that dared to go global.

Video credit: InMobi YouTube, Nasscom