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William Li : The Founder of Chinese Tesla, Nio

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Everyone is aware of the potential of electric motor vehicles, as these can help the world save on fuel as well as money. Tesla has been the biggest inspiration for every other automobile company, and most of them have already built their electric cars, and are steadily moving towards manufacturing autonomous vehicles. One such company is Nio, founded by a celebrity entrepreneur William Li, that is working on something inspired by the same concept of Tesla electric cars, but a bit on the cheaper end.

William Li was born on born 9 August 1974 in Anhui, Eastern China. Li’s family did not have a very good financial condition, so they started saving for his college since he was seven. He had to work part-time while he was still in school to support his family. He attended a local school and later, joined the Peking University in Beijing to pursue a graduate degree in sociology. He also opted for a minor in law.

Despite the humble beginnings, Li managed to start a business at the age of 21 in 1996. The business was an internet-based startup, and the boom in the industry helped him grow as a successful entrepreneur.

William Li Founder Nio
bloomberg.com

In 2000, he started his second company, which later become his first biggest business. The company name was Bitauto, and it was an automobile Internet content and marketing services provider. Bitauto later became public and traded on the American Stock Exchange Copyright in 2010. It saw huge success and valued at $1 billion. It helped Li to gain enough experience as a businessman and established him as one of the most influential entrepreneurs in China. He served as the CEO and chairman of the company for thirteen years and finally sold Bitauto in 2013.

A fine entrepreneur is never out of ideas and cannot stay idle. Only in a year after he sold his second company, he came up with a new luxury electric car manufacturer startup, Nio, in 2014. Since he had always been into the automobile and stuff related to it, he was inspired to start his own automobile business.

But to start a huge vehicle manufacturing business, one needs a lot of money. For that, he started looking for investments. Li has got great convincing skills, which can be estimated from how he changed the mind of Xiaomi from starting its own electric car manufacturing brand to investing money into another such startup.

Li had always been inspired by the founder of Xiaomi, and how its business model worked. He even implemented some of the strategies from the business model of Xiaomi into his own startup. In a year of struggle, Li was able to bag investments from the major tech companies, including Tencent, Temasek, Baidu, Lenovo and TPG.

NIO EP9 is the first sports car model that the company produced and was launched on the same day as the company. In 2016, the company raised over a billion-dollar from its investors. To expand its specializations, the company received the “Autonomous Vehicle Testing Permit” from the California DMV, in October 2016. Since then, the company has been working on the level-three and level-four autonomy to build its own autonomous vehicles. By the end of the year, the company launched a new two-door coupé, named NIO EP9. Li being an experienced businessman is not afraid of taking risks, but he believes in steady growth. That is why Nio is still producing limited-edition vehicles. Though the company has now made some plans on mass production of its vehicles.

In four years of Nio, it produced over 14,000 units of electric vehicles, and by the end of 2019, the company expects to make the number 20,000 units. Till the year 2019, the company also raised over $2.5 billion through four rounds of investments. In September 2018, the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange and raised a US$1.8 billion.

Nio participated in the Formula E in the 2014–2015 season and also the other race championships. It also won the 2015 Long Beach ePrix and the 2015 Moscow ePrix. NIO has even set five records in their track-only EP9 for the fastest lap for an electric-powered car.

Along with his three startups, Li has also made some good investments. In fact, he has invested in 32 companies from the transportation sector. Li was famous before he started Nio, but the success of Nio has made him known globally. He, in fact, is often termed as the “godfather of the transport sector” in China and sometimes the “Elon Musk” of China.

shazam app

Chris Barton : The Founder of Shazam, A Product of Pure Innovation

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The past few decades have been the luckiest for new ideas and startups. There have been many such cases, where the budding entrepreneurs have got overnight success. But this ain’t true for all of them out there. As, for some of the ideas, it took a lot of persistence and patience of the founders, to become a successful one. One of such ideas is Shazam, a music identifying service, that took a decade to be under the limelight and get the success that it deserved. It was the endurance and willingness for the successe of the founder of Shazam, Chris Barton, that brought the service at the place, where it is today.

Early Life

Chris Barton’s parents were the biggest influence on him. His father was a nuclear physics professor, and his mother worked as a computer science professor. His mother introduced him with computers when she brought a Sinclair computer to their home. Chris loved working on the computer and taught himself the basics of programming. He loved experimenting with things, from where BSMSarton also grew an interest in inventions and creating new things.

After completing his school education, Chris went to the University of California, Berkeley, where he first opted for a double major in computer science. But eventually, he went to graduate in business studies, economics being the major subject of his course.

Chris Barton
Image Source: haas.berkeley.edu

Chris met Philip Inghelbrecht, the future co-founder of Shazam, at the university, where both were in the same class and later became project-teammate. On the other hand, he was already friends with Dhiraj Mukherjee, the other co-founder of the company, when he lived in San Francisco.

Beginning of Entrepreneurship

It was just in 1998 when Chris got his first mobile phone. The time was about the internet and the new mobile devices coming into the market. Though most of the people were looking forward to developing internet-related things, Chris was brainstorming about what he can build based on the tiny handset, that people carried with them 24/7.

When Chris Barton was interning at Microsoft’s internet search portal group MSN, in London, he again met with Mukherjee there, who was working on establishing the first international office of his startup company, Viant, in London. Chris introduced Mukherjee with Inghelbrecht, and all three coincided on a similar topic, starting up a new business.

All the three started looking for an idea that would transform their lives and the world. In the summer of 1999, during the height of the dot-com bubble, Chris saw an opportunity in identifying and providing people with the song they want to know about. Though at that time, many people had tried the same concept for their business, all of them were relying upon the radio for music identification.

Origin of the Idea

Chris Barton came up with the idea of a software that will help people identify a song playing on the radio using the sound of the music itself, and that too, using a mobile phone. But as simple the idea was, its implementation was equally difficult. There was no such technology existed at that time, that would make this very idea possible.

To implement the idea, they developed an algorithm with the help of a PhD scholar Avery Wang (the fourth co-founder of Shazam), that was based on the recorded sound identification technology. So in the year 2000, they launched the demo of Shazam, a mobile service, through which the users could record the piece of music (from radio, club, or any other place) and send it to Shazam, and in return, Shazam would reply the name of the artist and album of the song.

This innovative idea was way ahead of its time. Even before Apple launched its iPod and iPhones. In the beginning, Chris established its office in London and focussed on the European countries, as these countries were more drawn to music.

Founding Shazam

To bring the product out in the market, the co-founders took the help of their family members and friends. After three months of pitching the idea in front of the investors, they raised a one million dollar investment from HSBC. To make the service work properly, in the beginning, the co-founders decided to partner with the people who are related to the key technology that will be used in the service. They partnered with the IVR provider, the SMS aggregator for premium SMS integration, and with the four leading mobile operators in the United Kingdom, i.e. Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, and O2.

After getting everything in place, Chris Barton along with the other co-founders launched Shazam on 19 August 2002. Now, people could use the service by dialling a four-digit number, i.e. 2580, on their mobile phone, record the music, and receive the details about it, through an SMS, for just 50 pence.

A few years later, with the emergence of better Symbian mobile phones, the company offered the option to buy ringtones of the identified songs. The users could also get access to an unlimited use subscription pack for around $3 per month. And after the iPhone got launched in 2007, in 2008 the new Shazam app reached the heights of success. It had 11 million downloads in the year of 2010. According to a report from CNET, Shazam was the 4th most downloaded app of 2011. By 2012, Shazam had over 225 million users in more than 200 countries.

Today, all four co-founders sit on the board of the company, and Chris now works for Google. Shazam is one of the most popular apps today that allow the users to buy the music, watch music videos, as well as see the lyrics of a particular song.

IN 2016, Snapchat included the Shazam feature to its app, and in 2018, Apple acquired the company for $400 million.

shareit

The Success Story of Michael Qiu, the Co-founder of SHAREit

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When a software or a product is launched in the market, within a span of one or two years, a handful of the modified versions of the same are also released. This means we get technically outdated before we can explore every aspect of a product properly. So, in this era of digital phase, it becomes important for everyone to get smarter and use smarter tools to keep up with the fast-moving world.

For example, in the beginning, when smartphones just started heating up the market, we used Bluetooth to share files, such as the pictures, audios, videos, etc. But with time, Bluetooth was replaced by applications like SHAREit. SHAREit is an offline file transferring tool that works with speed 200 times more than the Bluetooth and Near-field communications.

SHAREit was founded in April 2015 with Michael Qiu as the co-founder and CEO of the company, SHAREit Technologies Co. Ltd. Whether it is an image, an audio file, contacts or even an app, one can send anything with the help of this amazing tool.

Lenovo and SHAREit

Michael Qiu
Image Source: iamwire.com

SHAREit was a product developed under Lenovo apps and at first, got introduced in the markets of China, before any other country. After its launch in India in 2013, it became one of the most efficient wireless file transfer tools. Within a year of its launch, SHAREit bagged 150 million Indian users and 500 million users around the globe. Within one year, SHAREit was already available in 30 different languages, and today, it supports over 45 languages. Apart from android, the SHAREit app is also available for both Windows and iOS.

After receiving a huge number of users from India, Qiu wanted to invest more in the Indian market rather than the Chinese market. Since India is a developing country, he saw a lot of scope for the future in India, rather than in China or any other nation. So, after a year of the launch of SHAREit in India, Qiu announced the opening of a new SHAREit office in Gurgaon in 2017.

At the same time, the company also focused on launching the series of ‘it’ products, which included LOCKit, CLONEit, CLEANit, WRITEit, etc.

Strategies of Qiu to deal with Indian start-up ecosystem

Qiu mentioned in an interview that after China and the U.S, it is India that is leading in the start-up community of the world. But, belonging from the start-up culture of China, initially, it was a bit tough for the SHAREit team to understand the business environment of India, as India is so diverse ethnically.

So, the first strategy of Qiu to grow firm roots on the ground of India was to create a simple tool that would bind the entire country’s smartphone users to a single thread. And, the second strategy was to invest more in India as technology here is developing at a remarkably fast rate.

Since India is a developing country, companies from developed nations try desperately to expand their business in India, which makes it a place of demand and also increases competition among different nations. But, Qiu being enough confident about his strategies, and how to deal with the business ecosystem of India, succeeded both on establishing a firm grip on our market and bridging the gap between two different cultures.

The team also focused on building a very simple and easy-going user interface, with no learning cost. And, when it comes down to publicity, they shared about their products on websites, like Quora and Facebook, the ones mostly used by the Indians.

Success of SHAREit

Today, SHAREit has reached beyond just India and China, with its wings spread over in more than 200 countries. In India, apart from Gurgaon, it also has its office in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of Asia. According to recent statistics, SHAREit has more than 1.8 billion global users, among which, 33% of the users are from India and Indonesia.

Currently, it is the leading platform for digital content throughout the world and is considered as the ‘Nationally Favored App’ in many countries.

Future Plans of Qiu

Qui learned that Indian start-ups lacked infrastructure, so he, and his team, planned to build a foundation for investing in the Indian start-ups. His plans are more than just expanding the user base of SHAREit, thus, building a strong relationship with the Indian start-up community. He is willing to offer everything which is lacking in Indian start-up society, and the government is unable to provide. And, above everything, he is keeping his product simple and efficient.

magento

Roy Rubin : The Founder of Magento, the Open-Source E-Commerce Platform

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With the advent of new technologies and rapid development in our world, especially in terms of science and technology, tech-savvies are crawling all over the surface. And, this rapid growth in technology and the development through it, can mostly be witnessed amongst the school and college students.

The most obvious evidence of scientific and technical development in our society is the innumerable establishment of tech-related start-ups, like e-commerce platforms, digital payment platform, Open-source community, online market place, etc., taking place currently.

Magento is one such gigantic open source e-commerce platform that was created in 2008 by a student, Roy Rubin. It all dates back to 2004 when Varien, the company that owned Magento overtook one of its competitors and changed the status of the business forever.

Varien-From Where It All Started

Roy Rubin
Image Source: powerretail.com

Since childhood, Rubin had a great interest in the development and technical stuff, and he was completely engrossed in the idea of the subject. He made his mind to pursue engineering, and alongside, he also grew an interest in starting a business of his own.

He didn’t have greater plans when he was working on this business plan of his, as he only saw it as an opportunity to gain more knowledge, more professionalism and enough money to maintain a sober lifestyle of a student.

Initially, he started making small progress with web development, web applications, e-commerce, and content management, as he wasn’t selective about picking a single domain. But soon, he felt like everything was going topsy-turvy in his business, and eventually, he realized that it’s important to be focused on one single thing to achieve success.

While Roy Rubin was making step-wise progress, a major breakthrough took place in 2004, when he started his own company named Varien and also got a job at OsCommerce. With a few weeks of studies related to OsCommerce, he concluded that the company shared mutual goals with Varien, but the former lacked better quality of services and enough employees. He saw it as a golden opportunity to stream down customers to Varien, which was better than OsCommerce in every aspect. Thus, he invested some of his own money in Google AdWords, and the result was unexpected.

This decision of Roy Rubin changed the future of Varien forever and gave him a better scope to expand his business.

Releasing Magento

After releasing an advertisement in Google AdWords, Varien landed its one of his biggest clients. Rubin, in one of his interviews, said that if it hadn’t been for the advertisement, the company could have never managed to launch a product like Magento. Because, that specific company was entirely responsible for the funding of this e-commerce platform, now known as Magento.

The first public beta version of Magento was released on 31 August 2007. Varien launched Magento, an open-source e-commerce platform, as its product. It was written in PHP, and the first general availability of this software was released on 31st March 2008.

Ownership, Growth and Success of Magento

In February 2011, eBay bought a 49% share of Magento, followed by the entire acquisition of the company on 6th June 2011. But, Rubin continued to work as the CEO of Magento. But, in 2013 he stepped down and left the company.

On 3rd November 2015, Permira acquired the company, and finally, on 19th June 2018, Adobe took the ownership of Magento for $1.68 billion.

On 17th November 2015, the company released the second version of Magento, i.e. Magento 2.0. Since then, Magento is considered as the top digital e-commerce platform around the world.

On 19th October 2016, Rubin joined Magento Board of Directors, and he said that the pace at which Magento was growing was really commendable.

Rubin and Akeneo

Rubin joined Akeneo, a French company for open source product as an advisor in 2016. Since, Akeneo was also a company related to open source, the CEO of Akeneo mentioned that they were grateful to have a person like Rubin in their team. In Akeneo, Rubin is responsible for making the strategic decisions for the short-term goals of the company.

Roy Rubin is a true businessman, and a visionary, who keeps inspiring every start-up related to open-source platform out there. His role in Magento followed by his strategies in Akeneo is incredible.

MobiKwik

Bipin Preet Singh : The Journey from IIT Delhi to Founding MobiKwik

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Here’s a story of another successful IITian whose name got added to the already glorious record of entrepreneurs from IITs. Bipin Preet Singh has become quite a significant figure in the start-up society after he launched MobiKwik in 2009.

MobiKwik is a Gurgaon based Indian start-up which provides a mobile application to carry out online payments. Hence, it contributes largely to the initiative taken to digitalize the payment system in the country. The company also built its Lite app in 2016 so that anyone with poor internet connectivity can also access the application.

Before founding MobiKwik, Singh explored different kinds of job which included Training Facilitator and SoC Architect.

Early Life and Early Career

Bipin Preet Singh MobiKwik
Image Source: inc42.com

Bipin Preet Singh graduated with a B Tech degree in Electrical Engineering in 2002 from IIT Delhi. Soon after graduating from college, he started working for Intel as the Senior Design Engineer. He worked there for three years in the Whitefield Project in Bangalore which has Intel’s first-ever project, including the server microprocessor designing. He worked mainly on circuit designing and formal modelling of microprocessors.

After leaving Intel in 2005, Singh joined Janaagraha in 2006, as a training facilitator. During his time in this company, he worked to build up a social awareness program (India’s first such program), which was mainly targeted to motivate the students and IT professionals to think of democracy beyond voting. This was a bit unusual profession to be picked up by an IITian, but he conducted training series in companies like Dell, NVIDIA, which exposed his skills and helped him fetch better career opportunities.

Bipin Preet Singh joined NVIDIA as a Platform Architect in 2006, while he continued working at Janaagraha. He worked there with a high-level global architecture team and dealt with some of the most complicated projects around the world. He also developed architectural infrastructure for RAID and SATA/AHCI.

In May 2007, Singh joined Freescale Semiconductor as an SoC Architect and worked there for two years. His main work in this company was to generate and analyze performance models, work on memory technologies, propose new features for Motorola Chipsets etc.

By this time, Singh already gained a work experience of 7 years, and the learning phase was about to get over. Moreover, the companies he worked for gave him a pretty dominant position, so he wasn’t looking for a promotion at all. This is when he thought of building something of his own, something more challenging and daring than regular 9 to 5 job.

From Designing Engineer to an Accomplished Businessman

In his entrepreneurial journey, Singh approached and got rejected by many people. But, finally, an old friend of his was very impressed by his idea and agreed to join him in this venture. He kept meeting people and built up his own team from scratch.

Finally, in April 2009, Singh along with his wife, Upasana Taku, founded MobiKwik with a motto to improve the payment system and money transfer scenario. Initially, MobiKwik only had a closed wallet facility, but later the company launched a mobile application for the same. When Singh and his wife founded the company, he invested eight lakhs from his own money and rented an office in Dwarka, Delhi.

Success of MobiKwik

MobiKwik was started as an initiative to eradicate all the payment problems and set up a hassle-free environment for the transaction. They set up a wallet system, where after saving the money, one can use it for different purposes like phone number recharge, payments to online merchants, and different service providers.

In 2012, the company launched the e-wallet system of MobiKwik, and in November 2016, it brought the MobiKwik Lite mobile app to the market. In 2014, the company won the mBillionth Award South Asia in the category of mobile business.

By April 2015, MobiKwik had around 15 million users, and according to Forbes magazine, one million new users were added every month. MobiKwik also started giving loans of a small amount (500-2,500 Indian rupees) in partnership with CashCare. By 2016, the number of users hiked to 55 million from 15 million. In February 2017, MobiKwik announced that the company is going to invest more in expanding the user base to targeted 150 million. By 2017, maximum e-wallet transactions in our country were done through Paytm, ITZCash and Mobikwik.

Today, MobiKwik connects 105 million of its users to over 3 million merchants providing a huge spectrum of services including insurance, investments and loans. MobiKwik’s next target is to reach a billion Indian users and hit $20 billion by 2022.

UPI

Mandar Agashe : The Man Who Brought a Revolution in the Indian Digital Payment System

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Receiving rewards for paying your bills is like the smartest scheme ever to digitalize the payment system of our nation. Most of us make payments through UPI apps like Tez to earn digital scratch cards and cash backs. The growth of UPI has been unbelievable from only 92,000 transactions in August 2016 to 105 million transactions in November 2017. Today, almost everyone with a smartphone uses these UPI apps for the transaction. And, the biggest advantage of UPI is you don’t have to walk to your bank to deposit money into someone’s bank account. From transferring money to bank accounts to paying for movie tickets, UPI has become the most convenient and the most successful initiative in terms of online banking.

But, who is the person behind this massive success that turned the entire scenario of digital payment in no time?

Mandar Agashe, the founder of Sarvatra Technologies, a company that provides financial and payment solutions to the Indian banking sector, came up with the idea of Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and launched it in 2016.

Early Life of Mandar Agashe

Mandar Agashe
Image Source: Facebook

In 24th May 1969, Agashe was born into an influential family of Mumbai to an Indian businessman, cricketer and philanthropist, Dnyaneshwar Agashe, and Rekha Gogte. Agashe had two other siblings, Ashutosh Agashe and Sheetal Agashe.

When Agashe was pursuing his B.E. degree in Computers, he created Musicurry.com, an online radio website. After completing his college, Agashe joined his family business in 1994 and started working in the firms. By 2000, he established EBZ Online in association with Oracle, followed by establishing Brihans Natural Products Ltd., and finally, Sarvatra Technologies in 2000.

Sarvatra Technologies

Agashe established his startup in Pune. The startup was basically to provide payment solutions and promote online banking through UPI and IMPS (Immediate Payment Service). The main goal of the company was to get the rural and semi-urban population connected to banking as well as the system of digital payment and get every citizen of India accustomed to EFT (Electronic funds transfer).

Since Mandar Agashe belonged to a family full of successful business tycoons, he had a clear idea of how the corporate sectors function. He wanted to come up with a solution that can be affordable to every single person out there and can easily carry out online transactions with minimal knowledge.

Oracle was the first company to invest in the strategies of Agashe, and eventually, investors like Vallabh Bhanshali and ICICI Bank participated in the following funding rounds. By 2018, the company brought 450 co-operative banks on National Financial Switch.

Agashe realized that both, the banks and the customers, faced a lot of issues during online transactions because of the poor connectivity. So, he provided the banks with SaaS-based technologies to enhance better performance, and also, reducing the operating cost at the same time.

The success of UPI and other payment solutions

After UPI was launched in 11th April 2016, the transaction volume increased unexpectedly. Transactions through the leading UPI apps like Google Tez, PhonePe and BHIM increased exponentially. By 5th December 2017, two months since the launch of Tez, the transaction volume hit 140 million, and the amount processed through PhonePe summed up to 100 crores per day.

Another advantage of Tez which accounts for 70% of the total UPI transaction is that the money one pays through it directly gets credited in one’s bank account instead of getting dropped into the wallets. By 2017, the apps that use UPI reached 20 million downloads from Play Store.

In the financial year 2017-2018, Mandar Agashe announced that they had a gross transaction value of 27,000, and by the next financial year, they will be going to make it 40,000 crores.

Agashe’s Musical Career

Apart from being an entrepreneur, a philanthropist and a successful businessman, Agashe is also a renowned singer. Releasing Musicurry.com was his first step towards the musical world, which led to launching his very own music album. His first role in the world of music was as a co-director with Pandit Hridayanath. He sang his first playback song with Asha Bhosle, and in 1998, his album ‘Nazar Nazar’ was recorded and released in Hindi and English. In 2005, another album, Jaan Le was released followed by 82 in 2016.