Your Tech Story

start-up

Zapier

Chronicling Zapier’s Growth from a Three-Man Team to A Global Remote Working Phenomenon

Leave a Comment / start-up, Tech Story / By

With almost all services going digital, remote working has become a big part of our lives. Even in India, we are seeing a lot of new tech companies giving their employees the option to work from home on a regular basis. However, it is difficult to integrate all these employees and build a cohesive team. Well, that is where companies like Zapier come into the picture. This global remote company allows users to integrate all the applications they need from the comfort of their homes. Therefore, large companies get to bring all the web applications they need under one umbrella for easy and comfortable use. Here’s the story of how Zapier grew from being a small side hustle to a multi-million-dollar company employing over 250 employees from more than 23 countries around the world.

Founding Zapier

Zapier began in Missouri as a collaboration between friends Wade Foster, Bryan Helmig, and Mike Knoop. The idea for such a platform came while the trio was participating in the first Startup Weekend Columbia, way back in 2011. After their initial submission for the Winter funding cycle got rejected, they built a prototype which brought together 25 apps. This prototype was then accepted by Y Combinator, which is a startup accelerator. Follow this, the company shifted its base to California and in October of 2012, they received funding worth $1.3 million from investors such as Bessemer Venture. The company then grew at a rapid pace and became profitable by 2014.

Setting Up the Ground Rules

Right after winning Startup Weekend, the trio decided to pursue Zapier as a side hustle, opting to work on it only during their free time, such as nights and weekends. However, when they got picked up by Combinator, they decided to see it as a full-time project. The biggest challenge they faced while expanding was establishing its ground rules. Since they were a remote working company, the employees rarely met, and hence communication was key. When the CEOs sleep, most of their employees who are on the other side of the world, are waking up to start their day. Hence, the company had to implement some ground rules so that everyone stayed on the same page. The company utilizes Slack to maintain communication channels with their employees. They also have policies wherein every week pairs are matched for a video chat to build better employee relationships. By saving money in the form of rent, they host semi-annual retreats to get everyone under the same roof.

Growth and Success

Zapier’s success didn’t start in Silicon Valley, but in a college, hackathon based out of Missouri. Since then it has grown to become one of the world’s largest SaaS service providers, with over 1.5 million users. The trio grew from being full-time students and employees to co-founders of one of the US’s biggest companies. The main lesson here, as per Brian is to allow yourself to commit to your passion project, the way those three did. Furthermore, the co-founder states that the company never wanted to be a remote working one, but became one by pure coincidence. After winning Combinator, Mike was traveling back and forth to be with his girlfriend. This enabled him to see just how useful remote working is. So, when the time arose for them to scale their operations, the founders decided to try out remote working employees. Their success wasn’t easy, and they faced a lot of competition and struggles along the way.

Furthermore, Zapier is one of the few companies that have gotten by with just one round of funding. This is of course without counting their bootstrapping, which helped them raise $1.2 million in 2012. Eight years later, they have no office space but employ over 200 employees from all around the world. The company saves a lot from doing so, with their CFO estimating that they save $2 million a year thanks to this innovative approach. In under five years, starting from 2012, the team had surely yet slowly grown into a team of over 100 professionals. The company’s policy is to hire when they feel they are running short on people. The weekly one-on-one culture helps the higher-ups understand if anyone is feeling overworked and burnt out. Since hiring is restricted to mission objectives, their main priority is a skill, and this helps them access some of the best people out there.

All these policies have helped them grow exponentially, with the Zapier suite now containing over 800 apps. All of this has been without the help of even a basic sales team. Rather than invest money acquiring customers, the company believes in spending money serving their customers better. The company turned profitable for the first time in 2014, and have now had 6 profitable years. They have since gone on to make over $35 Million dollars in annual revenue.

Byju's Logo

Brush Up Your Skills With The Learning App Of Byju’s

Leave a Comment / start-up, Tech Story / By

The start-up culture of India has developed in the last two decades. Previously, it was America who hyped about the start-up community while India was being orthodox. But, the time has brought before us some of the most successful start-ups rising from the Indian community. These days the young minds create the start-ups who want to bring a diverse change in our society. But, for transforming our society and eradicating all the delusional thoughts holding it back from developing education is the priority. And, speaking of education, we have already heard of Unacademy, Udemy, etc. They are trying to reach even the most rural students and enlighten them. The idea of a start-up for providing online education is truly a need especially for a developing country like India. Byju Raveendran founded Byju’s Learning App in 2011 to provide online education and online live classes. Currently, the headquarters of the company is based in Bangalore, India. With only five employees in the team, Byju serves students across the world.

About the Founder Byju Raveendran

Born in the 1980s, Byju Raveendran belonged to a small village in Kerala. Both of his parents were from teaching background but he was never pushed for excelling in his academics. His father wanted him to be more interested in sports. He completed his schooling from a local school and went to Government Engineering College in Kannur, Kerala.

Raveendran acquired his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. He chose to study engineering over medical because he won’t be able to make time for playing sports as a medical student. After his graduation, he joined a company as a Service Engineer. Raveendran cleared the CAT exam with 100 percentile but declined to take admission for MBA.

This is when his entrepreneurial journey started and he co-founded Byju.

The Idea

After making it to the finest IIM of India, Raveendran still decided to not go for an MBA. This was the turning point of his career and he aced it. While his friends took admission in the top IIMs, Raveendran decided to teach the MBA aspirants. So, he started providing offline tutorials to the students. And, he used to take classes on the terrace of his friend’s house.

Origin of Byju’s Learning App

While Raveendran started taking coaching classes, he initially didn’t charge any money. But, the students were free to sign up for the paid advanced classes if they liked the preliminary ones. The number of students grew eventually. And, one fine day he found himself conducting mathematics workshop comprising of 20,000 students around major Indian cities.

From Offline to Online

Since the number of students grew exponentially, Raveendran decided to record his lectures. By 2009, he started making video lectures for students across 45 different cities. Raveendran’s tutorial videos pushed him to open a company, Think and Learn. He established it with a passion to create learning videos for school students. The idea expanded to provide competitive support as well.

The Success of Byju’s 

After Raveendran founded the company in 2011, he finally launched the Byju’s app in 2015. The launch of Byju’s app was very successful witnessing more than 2 million downloads in the first three months. Next year, Byju’s app became the Best Self-Improvement app under Google Play India. In 2017, the company released two more apps, Byju’s Math App for kids and Byju’s Parent Connect App respectively. The later helped the parents to track their child’s progress. The company received its initial funding from Aarin Capital back in 2013.

By the end of 2018, the app had 15 million users and over 900,000 paid users. Byju’s also acquired a couple of companies in its journey. It acquired TutorVista in 2017 and Osmo in 2019. Within 2018, the company raised around $250 million from its global investors. Recently, it raised another round of $50 million from Mark Zuckerberg, Sequoia Capital, Sofina, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, etc. In 2018, Byju also took an entry into the unicorn club valued at $1 billion. This year, Byju’s also received the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award for start-ups.

Byju’s is the only start-up in Asia that is backed by Mark Zuckerberg. By the end of 2019, the company’s total funding summed up to $971 million and its total valuation to $8 billion. The app had more than 10 million downloads by 2019.

authorize.net

How Jeff Knowles Created Payment Gateway History by Founding Authorize.Net

Leave a Comment / start-up, Tech Story / By

Almost everyone agrees that the future is digital. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that most organizations want to move their sales online, to maximize sales. In the field of e-commerce, one of the most crucial parts of going digital is creating a secure payment portal. Having a robust, credible and easy to use payment portal ensures efficient sales and revenue generation. Therefore, for an e-commerce company to sustain itself, it must employ an efficient payment gateway. We would not have been able to enjoy the choice and freedom we have now, concerning online shopping, if not were such technologies. Being able to secure such a gateway ensures that companies can enable financial transactions peacefully. This time around, we will be taking a look at one of the most successful payment gateway companies in world-Authorize.net founded by Jeff Knowles.

Early Payment Gateway Prior To Authorize.Net

While we see several options in front of us now, things weren’t always this easy. Before 1996, there were hardly any reliable options in the market. Then came Jeff Knowles, with his idea for a payment gateway that forever changed the way payment gateways function. Jeff has a degree in computer science and business from Brigham Young University and the University of Phoenix respectively. Jeff began his career as an engineer at WordPerfect. In 1995, he left this job to begin working as a sales agent for a particular ISO, while attending business school. While working here, he met several non-retail customers who were looking for a desktop-based solution. Prior to this, most people relied on Trans330 or Zon-Jr for this function. The only solution he saw was either selling clients PC-Authorize, ICVerify or CyberCash, all of which were difficult to use and lacked flexibility. Since he had a background in software engineering, Jeff decided to handle the problem his way. So, he began to explore new ways by which to process financial transactions. This would not only help his clients save money, but also improve the company’s overall efficiency. Meanwhile, around the world, the internet era was coming to life. Around the same time, Netscape grew to become an important browser, while ISPs cropped up all over the US. Hence, this essentially became the dawn of e-commerce around the world.

Process of Developing Authorize.Net

Jeff began by contacting First Data to understand how they work and gather data regarding financial transactions. He researched POS systems and then analyzed how various channels work, in order to gain an insight into how these systems function. Using these specifications, Jeff started to beta-test sending messages using this line. The initial development phase led to the formation of Authorize.Net, and then followed the hiring of other software engineers.

The idea then grew into and became a rudimentary plan to create a gateway service for enabling transactions between merchants. However, the initial plan took several hours to process and respond too, and wasn’t very successful. However, the idea proved to become extremely successful, with many clients wanting to try this idea out. Within a few weeks, the team built a system that could send transactions safely. They then designed an interface and API for the same and then encrypted it to provide security. A year later, in 1997, Authorize.net, allowed merchants to connect via https protocol and SSL encryption. Over the next two years, the team kept releasing timely updates to create a more well-rounded system.

The initial investment of $100,000.00 came from the friends and family of the team members themselves.

Success and Further Development

Authorize.Net grew exponentially, and the system quickly spread to various merchants, agents and sales agents across the country. All these individuals were anted such a product as they made it easier to make transactions online. The system later grew to include ACH payments, and within two years Go2Net bought Authorize.Net. Twenty years later, the payment gateway industry has undergone a tremendous overhaul, and yet Auhtorize.Net stays relevant. By 1999, Authorize.Net was making over 90 million dollars and its shareholders couldn’t be happier. Go2Net was bought by InfoSpace, three years later for US$4 billion, while Authorize.Net went to Lightbridge for US$82 million and later to CyberSource by 2007. Visa then acquired CyberSource three years later for US$2 billion. As of 2014, this payment gateway was serving over 450,000 customers, making it one of the world’s most popular gateways.

NASA and SpaceX

NASA and SpaceX to Take to the Skies in Mid-May

Leave a Comment / start-up, Tech News / By

Ever since we began colonizing the Earth, we have been fantasized by the skies. Throughout our history as a race, we have been attempting to make sense of our skies and understand why the world is the way it is. This culminated with the Space Race that saw the USSR and US fight for supremacy when it came to interstellar travel and exploration. With science and technology progressing even further, the race to identify the secrets of our universe has only gotten more competitive. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is one of the largest private players in the field of space exploration, and they have recently released some exciting news. Here’s a look at what NASA and SpaceX had to say and what impact it will have on the space industry.

Taking to the Skies

NASA and SpaceX have released a statement which states that they are planning to launch their first manned flight somewhere between mid and late May. This comes as a surprise as most experts had felt that the COVID-19 would push dates further back. However, both NASA and SpaceX have issued a media invite on Wednesday regarding their Demo-2 launch. This will be the world’s first commercial manned crew launch into space. The invite has also specified a time frame that says that the mission will be completed by no later than mid-May, much to the excitement of fans from all over the world.

While reports which came out in January had stated that the launch would occur sometime in May or late April, people had expected the Coronavirus to have changed this date. With production facilities having been hit due to the virus, most experts were expecting a shift in dates. While SpaceX started early, readying their Crew Dragon spacecraft for the mission, NASA had to make a few changes in the mission parameters. These changes include a longer stay for the crew at the International Space Station. The crew consists of experienced astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley.

Universal Collaboration

SpaceX will be the world’s first private company to launch a manned space mission, and NASA is helping the company ready their team and machinery. The conveyance of astronauts from and to the International Space Station occurs successfully thanks to a partnership with the Roscosmos agency. This Russian initiative makes use of the Soyuz spacecraft to fly astronauts for ISS. While people were expecting a change in dates, this confirmation from NASA has proven that the mission is still very much on. Furthermore, NASA has moved facilities into Stage 3, meaning that their employees will be on telework unless specifically required at their facilities physically for any mission-related work. Meanwhile, their Ames facility has been taken up to Stage 4, due to California county implementing a shelter-in-place order. This essentially means that the facility is temporarily closed with all personnel working from their homes via telework.

In the new invite which came out yesterday, NASA has stated that they will continue to monitor the COVID-19 situation and will keep communicating updates as and when required. Reports also state that the organization is doing everything it can protect Hurley and Behnken by following standard isolation procedures so that they don’t get sick before the flight.

Brighter Future

This will be the first crewed launch from US soil to the International Space Station ever since 2011. SpaceX will reportedly be using the Falcon 9 rocket to transport astronauts Behnken and Hurley as it tries its level best to cut unnecessary costs. In March, the Crew Dragon had circumnavigated the ISS, almost 400 kilometers above the Earth. However, the capsule contained only a mannequin inside and returned to the Atlantic after spending six days in space. Ever since, 2011 Americans have not launched any manned missions, with Russians handling most of the manned flights. This will be changed by this joint venture between SpaceX and NASA. SpaceX has made over 15 trips to the ISS for refueling the station ever since 2012. However, SpaceX is not the only private company that is helping NASA with space exploration, because even Boeing is developing their Starliner capsule, after having won a contract. The Falcon 9 rocket will launch from Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with Dragon spacecraft onboard. If the Demo-2 launch proves to be successful, SpaceX will become officially certified to launch people into space.

Myspace

How Tom Anderson Grew to Become the World’s Most Popular Man By Finding Myspace

Leave a Comment / start-up, Tech Story / By

Social media took the world by a storm when it hit the markets in the early part of this decade, and the spark has grown to become a raging fire. With millions of people using social media on a daily basis, it has grown to become a billion-dollar industry. Here today, we will be taking a look at one of the most popular networking sites of the past-MySpace. This company became insanely popular, and then grew exponentially, before getting eclipsed by Facebook towards the latter part of its runtime. Take a look at how Tom Anderson who founded MySpace, grew to become one of the world’s most popular men.

About the Founder

Tom Anderson did his BA in English from the University of California, before following it up with an MA in Film Studies from the same university. He began his career as a product tester at XDrive in 2000, before dropping out and joining ResponseBase a year later. This company was then bought by eUniverse, and became Intermix a year later. Finally, in 2003 he and DeWolfe founded MySpace, which two years later was acquired by News Corp.

Founding MySpace

In 2003, employees of eUniverse felt that social media networking would grow to become a successful venture. They all had accounts on the networking platform Friendster and found the platform to be successful. They decided to use the same model and redesign it to be better. For instance, they stripped their design of Friendster’s less popular features and named the working prototype MySpace. All this designing and redesigning took only 10 days, and the first version of MySpace was ready. The company came to be, with Anderson serving as the CEO and DeWolfe being the President.

eUniverse gave the team everything they needed, including programmers, resources and even funding. The employees themselves became the first users of the networking platform, and they began recruiting new users. Since eUniverse had a massive contact list comprising of over 20 million individuals, the crew was able to spread the word regarding MySpace quite quickly and efficiently. This helped them drive a lot of traffic onto their platform, making it immensely popular, incredibly fast.

Their quick growth and surging popularity inspired Rupert Murdoch to buy the company in 2005 for $580 million, and he proceeded to take the platform globally. He grew the company into markets such as the UK and China, helping make MySpace an industry leader. At its highest, the company was valued at $12 billion, and constantly outperformed Facebook when it came to website traffic. However, soon enough they put a break on innovation, becoming stagnant in the process. This led to a massive growth slow-down, which Facebook capitalized on, and by 2008, Facebook succeeded in eclipsing MySpace.

Fall from Grace

Tom Anderson built a platform that completely revolutionized the way people share music and communicate with each other. However, even having 200 million friends and Rupert Murdoch as a boss didn’t help MySpace when Facebook grew phenomenally. At its peak, MySpace boasted of over 110 million users, the first time this had occurred in social networking. But, MySpace founder Tom Anderson believes that the company’s true peak came when it was sold to News Corp. Throughout its growth, the main issues that people had with MySpace was that it wasn’t very easy to use, lacked robust security feature and hadn’t clearly defined its scope.

What Could Have Been

The company rose from Los Angeles instead of the usual Stanford, which is the base of most of the world’s largest start-ups. While this made them unique, it also made it harder for the duo to build connections within the developer community. The platform found instant success thanks to its creative music initiative, which built a loyal fan base for the platform. Boss Murdoch then wanted the company to expand its video content creation and marketing. This led MySpace to curate an extensive list of licensed video content from their new owners News Corp and also other sources.

However, since News Corp regarded property rights as an important part of business relations, its growth was halted due to complications with licensing. According to Anderson, this prevented them from being the next YouTube. Also, MySpace turned profitable very fast, making close to $1bn in revenues in 2005. The company was making money before News Corp bought it, and for a company that was only four or five years old, it did much better than others of the same age.

Furthermore, the company’s obsession with developing everything on their own, made development difficult and slow. Hence, new features rarely came in, making the interface look old and outdated. Further trouble came in the form of hackers who hit MySpace badly using malware, spam and phishing scams. All of this led to a slow-down in growth and revenue generation, which led to the founding duo running into trouble.

Soon enough Anderson stepped down, with DeWolfe taking over as CEO. What followed was two major rounds of layoffs, with staff reducing by 30% first and later by 37.5%. It later went up for sale, later on, generating very low interest. Finally, the company was sold to Specific Media for a meagre $35 million with Justin Timberlake taking an interest. While MySpace fell from grace publicly, it was a pioneer in the field of social media networking and will be remembered in the years to come as a torch-bearer for the industry.

Udemy

The E-Learning Platform Of Udemy Serves Dual Purpose At Its Best

Leave a Comment / start-up, Tech Story / By

By this time, we have already concluded that e-learning has become very demanding and important. Not only in India but also across the entire world students are benefited from these platforms. Many people have the idea that these platforms are only good for those preparing for competitive exams like JEE or NEET. But, this is just the wrong concept. Many websites have come up these days that provide online coaching for basics like Excel, PowerPoint, Java, etc. You can learn anything and everything with the help of these platforms. Udemy is one such online platform that allows us to learn, teach, and explore. The founders of Udemy are Eren Bali, Gagan Biyani, and Oktay Caglar. They founded the platform in 2010 intending to strengthen the educational culture around the globe.

About the Founders

Eren acquired a bachelor’s degree in two subjects from Middle East Technical University. He acquired a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering and a BS in Mathematics. After he graduated, he worked as a Front-end Developer at Gunlukbasin.com. In August 2005, he co-founded Eofer and became the CEO of the company.

Eren also worked at Lead Flex Developer at Dovetail.tv and as a Developer at BitGravity. In 2007, he co-founded Knowband and joined speedate.com as Director of Engineering. Currently, he serves as the Chairman of Udemy and CEO (also co-founder) of Carbon Health.

Gagan went to Mission San Jose High School and graduated in 2005. Later he went to the University of California for acquiring his bachelor’s degree in Economics. Apart from co-founding Udemy, he is also the co-founder of the Growth Hackers Conference. He has prior experience working at Microsoft, Accenture, and TechCrunch. He served as the CEO of Sprig for four years and as the President of Udemy for two years.

Oktay also graduated from the Middle East Technical University with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration. He is a very close friend to Eren since then. Currently, he serves as the CPO of Udemy.

The founding story

Gagan, co-founder of Udemy said that 9 to 5 job bored him very much. He worked at Accenture as a Strategy Consultant but he wasn’t satisfied with his job. He wanted to do something more challenging and was fascinated by the start-up culture. This is when he decided to co-found Udemy along with Erena and Oktay.

When they founded the company the other two co-founders apart from Gagan continued working in other companies as well. But, the three of them put their hundred percent in making this project successful.

The Business model

The most unique and best feature of Udemy is anyone and everyone can create a course. A student can be an instructor and vice versa. If you want to learn something new and already good in a different subject, you create a course and at the same time sign up for a new course. This feature attracted thousands of instructors within a few months. And, by the end of 2010, Udemy witnessed 10,000 registered users.

Growth, Success, and Investors

Though Udemy was publicly released in 2010, Eren started working in it from 2007. He built software for a virtual online classroom and later decided to make it free for everyone. To give his idea a perfect start, he fled to Silicon Valley and finally launched the website on 11th May 2010. Before launching Udemy, they approached many investors for funding. But, unfortunately, every single one turned them down. So, they provided the funding from their pocket and finally released it.

Once the platform went public, the response was unexpectedly high. So, they decided to conduct another funding round and they raised $1 million in August 2010. Next year, the company raised $3 million in Series A funding round lead by Groupon investors. In the Series B funding, Udemy raised $12 million and $32 million in Series C funding.

Some of the investors include Norwest Venture Partners, Insight Venture Partners, Learn Capital, etc. The Series D funding took place in June 2015 and Udemy raised $65 million from it. This was followed by another round of funding in 2016 where it raised $60 million from Naspers Ventures.

Udemy currently has more than 50 million students and 57,000 instructors. There is a variety of courses that are available in 65 languages. Udemy gives a chance to learn and educate others at the same time.