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David Welch : A Pioneer in the Field of Optical Devices & the Co-founder of Infinera

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Passion can not only help you discover new horizons, but it also leads you to the heights of success. In the past many years, we have been hearing about the discoveries that have been derived from passion, and today, are contributing to the world. One such passionate person is David Welch, an optical engineer, who is the pioneer in the field of optical devices and the co-founder of Infinera. David Welch started his journey as an optical engineer and ended up becoming an entrepreneur, who is also one of the famous contributors in the various sectors of science, engineering and technology.

Early Life

David Welch was born on 26 October 1960, in Washington, D.C. His father was in the navy and had also worked as an engineer at Westinghouse. David was inspired by his father and used to build small electronic equipment with him. He also built an electronic tic-tac-toe game for his science project while in school.

David Welch
Image Source: globenewswire.com

David completed his high school education from Severna Park High School in Severna Park, Maryland, and attended the University of Delaware where he pursued a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. During the freshman year in college, he played as the pitcher in his college baseball team. At the same time, he had applied for the naval academy to follow his father’s footsteps in career, but soon he realized that he is not much interested in navy. During his vacations, he used to take small jobs at companies that helped him to get involved in practical engineering works. One of his such jobs included a job at Aeronautical Radio, Inc. where he worked on radio technologies used in planes.

Later, in 1985, he joined Cornell University to earn a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering.

Career

As soon as David finished his PhD thesis, in 1984, he started giving interviews and finally, joined as the research scientist at SDL, in January 1985. Eventually, in the late 80’s he was appointed as the vice president of research in the company. In 1992, for his contribution to the optical science, David was awarded the Adolph Lomb Medal from the Optical Society of America. Throughout his seventeen years of career, he handled various important job titles at SDL including the chief technology officer and vice president for corporate development.

At the same time, he designed and developed the high power diffraction limited semiconductor lasers and was awarded the IEEE LEOS Engineering Achievement Award in 1998. Then in 1999, David received the OSA’s Joseph Fraunhofer and Robert M. Burley Award.

Founding Infinera

David met his future co-founders Jagdeep Singh and Drew Perkins at a 2000 Christmas party. The three had discussions on optics and bandwidths. Together they conceived the idea of starting a digital optical network and started working on the same.

In the year 2000, David founded Infinera as Zepton Networks, along with Jagdeep Singh and Drew Perkins. The company stayed underground until it produced its first product in 2004. The company is known for the production of WDM optical transmission equipment for the telecommunications service provider market. The company is also a pioneer in the design and manufacture of large scale photonic integrated circuits.

Within seven years of its inception, in 2007, Infinera went public on the NASDAQ raising a valuation worth $182 million. This was just the beginning, till now the company has registered over 300 patents in the field of optical transport and virtualization of optical bandwidth. Welch himself holds over 130 patents in the field of optics and has published over 250 articles on the same.

Personal Life

Welch married to Heidi Welch in 1993. The two have a daughter and two sons. Welch is one of the boards of directors of AntriaBio, Inc., which is a biopharmaceutical company. As of 2018, the estimated Net Worth of David F Welch is at least $11.5 Million.

Wang Xing : Chinese Billionaire Businessman & the Founder of Meituan

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A geek and a curious guy, this is how the Chinese people know, Wang Xing, the founder of Meituan, the biggest Chinese group buying website. Wang Xing is a serial entrepreneur who emerged as one of the successful businessmen in China, even after facing multiple failures and now, he has built the biggest online-to-offline market in China. Also known as ‘Big Brother Xing’, he has been giving its rival, Alibaba’s Ele.me, a tough competition.

Wang Xing was born on 18 February 1979, in Longyan, to a Chinese businessman Wang Miao, the owner of a cement factory located in the city of Longyan in Fujian. Wang Xing completed a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering from Tsinghua University in 2001.

wang xing
Image Source: fortune.com

Having born into a business family, Xing was always into starting up his own business. Inspired by the success of Facebook in the U.S., he dropped out of the University of Delaware, where he was pursuing a PhD in computer engineering and started his first social network named Duoduoyou. The startup specifically targetted the students in the various university, but like many of other startups, it was unable to make the mark.

The second time, he started Youzitu, that was built to serve the Chinese students abroad. But again the startup got shut down. The next startup that Xing started was Xiaonei that he launched in 2005. This startup also targetted the Chinese students and was the first of his startups, to get thousands of registered users in a small time.

But yet again, Xing faced problems like financial issues in handling the company and had to sell it to InterActive Corp, for US$2 million, only after a year of its inception. InterActive Corp renamed the company to Renren, that later raised US$740 million, in its IPO in 2011.

Having earned enough money in the deal, Xing was able to perceive a new startup idea and launch another social media app, which actually was a micro-blogging app inspired by Twitter, named Fanfou. This time, the startup went very well and had gained over 2 million user base. But then, in 2009, Government ordered to shut down the social network as a result of violent discussions that took place over the platform about the Ürümqi riots. But eventually, after a small time gap, Xing re-opened Fanfou and is still an active participant on this platform.

Even having faced many failures in his past start-ups, Xing never became discouraged and pushed his limits even further. In 2010, he came up with his another startup, Meituan, a group buying a website for local food delivery services, consumer products and retail services. Xing received the initial funding of worth $12 million for the startup from Sequoia Capitals. This startup again was inspired by another US-based company named Groupon and sold discount vouchers on various services and deals.

The company is backed by Tencent and is one of the biggest on-demand services providing platforms. By the year 2014, the company had employed over 5,000 people, and in 2015, it had registered over 200 million users. The company operates in 2800 cities in China and has partnered with 400,000 local Chinese businesses.

On 8 October 2015, Meituan merged with a Chinese group buying site named Dianping, and the merger became Meituan Dianping. In January 2016, the company raised $3.3 billion worth of funding. Meituan Dianping went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2018 at a price HK$69 per share.

Wang Xing has always stressed on enhancing the efficiency and in fact, has done the same in the past fifteen years. Currently, he serves Meituan Dianping as the chairman and is also the member of the board at Beijing Mobike Technology Co Ltd. He is an avid reader and also writes blogs on topics like entrepreneurship, philosophy, etc.

In 2018, Xing was at number 37 in the Forbes China Rich List 2018 and at number 379 in the Forbes Billionaires 2019 with an estimated worth $4.1 billion. He was also listed number three on the Forbes 2018 “40 under 40” list.

Rick Alden : The Visionary Genius & the Founder of Skullcandy

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A disruptive thinker and wildly unpredictable, the two terms can be associated with Rick Alden, the founder of Skullcandy, the American headphones manufacturing company. Alden is also known as a mad genius, who always believed in refinement and innovation. He wanted to create a product that was not owned by the user, but it could own the user.

Alden was born on 4 July 1964 in Baltimore, Maryland. Rick loved snowboarding and wanted to pursue a career in the same. He attended the University of Colorado Boulder, and while in college, he founded his first company National Snowboard Inc (NSI), along with co-founder Jim Gardner, in 1986. The company was an event management firm that hosted the consumer and pro-snowboarding events nationwide.

rick alden
Image Source: kcpw.org

Later, he moved the headquarter of NSI to Denver and migrated to the University of Colorado Denver, where he pursued a Bachelor’s degree in political science.

The next business venture that Rick founded was Device Manufacturing, which he founded along with the veteran snowboarder Brett Conrad and produced the step-in snowboard boot and binding system.

In the late 90s, the snowboarding was becoming more popular, and Rick himself was an active snowboarder. Rick liked to listen to music at high bass while snowboarding and knew that others also loved to do the same. But the chunky headphones never provided him with the experience he always expected for. This led Rick to think about a new business idea, i.e. a company that would produce headphones, especially for snowboarders and skateboarders.

In 2003, Rick founded Skullcandy and started manufacturing headphones for snowboarders. Skullcandy launched its first product, the Skullcandy Portable LINK Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas in 2003.

After the launch, he went out to market all the Skullcandy products directly to the snowboarding and skateboarding shops. In the beginning, pitching to those shop owners was not that easy, but slowly they got convinced and started selling the headphones at their shops. In fact, Rick offered those owners to buy back the headphones himself, if they did not find any customer for them. But the innovative product never brought such a situation and received much appreciation from its consumers.

In the following years, Rick pitched the idea of putting the speakers into the helmets to Giro, one of the most popular snowboards and ski helmets producers. The company liked the idea. Rick also convinced Giro to print the tag line “Powered by Skullcandy” on the packaging.

In 2007, Rick approached Best Buy, Target, and Circuit City to get picked for the Q4. All the three companies were impressed by him and placed immediate orders with Skullcandy. Rick never expected to get picked by all the three and did not have enough expertise to complete the orders within time. But then, he decided to visit China to figure out better ways to increase the company’s tooling cavities, and the plan worked. Rick completed the orders within the given time, and it was the biggest turning point for Skullcandy.

In 2008, the company rolled out all its products in all the retail stores. Bored of old chunky headphones, Rick manufactured more colourful and designer headphones and earbuds for Skullcandy consumers.

In the December edition of Forbes magazine, the Skullcandy earbuds were introduced as “the world’s coolest ear bud”. In 2011, the company acquired another headphones manufacturing company, Astro Studios. In the same year, the company filed for its first IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In 2016, Skullcandy was acquired by Mill Road Capital for $196.9 million at $6.35 per share.

Rick Alden has been issued the patents for inventing technology to integrates mobile phones and music players, known as LINK, and designing the Orvis Batternkill Large Arbor Fly Fishing Reel.

The Inc Magazine ranked Alden at number 31 in the Inc 5000 Award for Skullcandy’s three-year (2004–2007) growth. He was also named “Entrepreneur’s Entrepreneur of the Year” in 2009.

Trip Hawkins : Silicon Valley Entrepreneur & the Founder of the Gaming Pioneer Electronic Arts

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“I’ve never been content with a straightforward job,” says Trip Hawkins, the American entrepreneur and the founder of startups like Electronic Arts, The 3DO Company, and Digital Chocolate. This may be the reason how a person who was once handling one of the most successful video game companies (EA), left it to pursue a new challenge of running a startup (3DO) all over again. Trip Hawkins, who has registered his name as the eighth person into the ‘Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame for his contribution to the video game industry, believes that if one wants to succeed in life, he has to be ready to fail first.

Hawkins was born as William Murray Hawkins III on 28 December 1953, in Pasadena, California, U.S. He was a bright student and a video game lover. According to Hawkins, every time he played video games, it switched on his brain. Therefore, eventually, it became his passion.

trip-hawkins
Image Source: playworks.org

After completing his high school education from a local school, he entered Harvard University. Interestingly, here he majored and graduated in a self-designed course, Strategy and Applied Game Theory.

As soon as he completed his college, he joined Apple Inc. as the Director of Product Marketing in 1978. He was one of the first fifty employees of Apple. During this time, the company saw its first most successful years and also filed for its first IPO in 1982. The company also registered its name among the Fortune 500 companies and increased the number of employees to one thousand people.

In 1982, Hawkins decided to start his own financing venture named Amazin’ Software and met Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital to talk about the plan and raise funds for it. On the advice of Valentine, Hawkins left his job at Apple and shifted to a Sequoia office for his startup. On 27 May 1982, Hawkins started Amazin’ Software investing US$200,000 from his personal savings.

At the same time, he started working on his next startup Electronic Arts and hired a few ex-fellow colleagues from Apple. By November 1982, the company had hired over eleven people, and it was relocated to San Mateo.

Hawkins incorporated Electronic Arts on May 27, 1982. In the beginning, the company functioned with name Amazin’ Software, but most of the employees did not like the name and suggested for SoftArt, but eventually, ended up naming the company Electronic Arts. The company started building video games, and their marketing strategy included dealing with retailers directly. It was a great marketing move, and the company started running successfully.

Hawkins has always called the developers artists, and that is why the company name includes Arts in it. The next different thing that he chose to do in marketing was to give photo credit to his game developers on the game covers. In fact, the company released its first ever video game ad featuring the developers in it.

In 1987, EA released its first internally developed game named Skate or Die. The mega-hits from EA are Madden NFL, The Sims and Rock Band. In the early 1990s, the company started producing console games for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

In 1991, Trip Hawkins stepped down as EA’s CEO, after successfully leading the company for 12 years, to found another startup named 3DO. Currently, the company headquarter is located in Redwood City, California and Andrew Wilson heads it as the CEO.

3DO was a video game console company, which in 1993 released the most powerful and expensive gaming console of that time, costing US$599. Being at a higher price, the company failed to sell the gaming console, and eventually, stopped making them. Later in 1996, the company started producing video games that also failed to support the revenues, and it became bankrupt.

After shutting down 3DO, Hawkins went to found another video game company named Digital Chocolate, in 2003. The company produces video games for handheld devices. After serving the company as the CEO for over 9 years, Hawkins stepped down from the position in 2012.

In the same year, he joined the board of directors of Israeli technology company Extreme Reality, and in 2013 became the senior advisor to the board of directors of NativeX. He also joined the advisory board at Skillz, in 2014.

According to one of his interviews, when he was asked about if he was not an entrepreneur what would he be? He answered that he would have been a professor as he assumes himself a natural teacher.

In 2016, he joined the University of California as Professor of Practice in the Technology Management Program.

George Hotz : The First Person to Unlock the iPhone & the Founder of AI Startup comma.ai

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iPhone indeed is the most loved smartphone and was one of the first keyboard-less mobile phones available in the market. iPhone is not only known for its unique features, but also for the high security it provides to its users. But there was a 17 years old hacker, George Hotz, from New Jersey, who unlocked the newly launched iPhone, allowing the phone to be used with other wireless carriers and became the first person to do so. He is not only a famous hacker but has also founded his vehicle automation machine learning company named comma.ai. Also known as Geohotz, even having hacked major security programs, Hotz has always said that he never support hacking into someone else’s server and stealing databases of user information.

Early Life

Hotz was born on 2 October 1989 in Glen Rock, New Jersey, as George Francis Hotz Jr. He completed his high school from Bergen County Academies in Hackensack, New Jersey and attended the Academy for Engineering and Design Technology. Hotz also attended the Rochester Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University for a brief time.

Being a brilliant student and always ahead in every competition in science and technology in middle and high school, he even won the $15,000 scholarship at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in 2007.

Hacking Career

Hotz was always interested in programming and had developed his interest in hacking. In August 2007, only after two months of the launch of the iPhone, Hotz was able to unlock the iPhone. After doing so, he became the first person to unlock an iPhone. Also in 2009, he released a jailbreaking tool for the iPhone 3GS on iPhone OS 3.0. Though in 2010, he discontinued the jailbreaking software.

George Hotz
Image Source: spectrum.ieee.org

In December 2009, he started working on a new program to breach security on the Sony PlayStation 3. by January 2010, he was able to create a thesis on the hack, but soon in July 2010, he abandoned the idea of entering the security of PS3. But another hacking group fail0verflow also started working on the same, generating the root signing and encryption keys for PS3.

Hotz too published those root signing and encryption keys over his website that led to a serious lawsuit from Sony for both Hotz and fail0verflow. After many court sessions, Sony and Hotz settled the matter outside the court on the condition that Hotz will never try to do any hacking work on Sony products.

Career with Facebook and Google

Hacking had always been his hobby, and his early achievements and knowledge of security algorithms landed Hotz a job with Facebook in 2011 for an unknown role.

Later in July 2014, Google hired Hotz to work with its security auditing team on Project Zero. He stayed in the team for five months and developed an open source program, for dynamically analysing application binaries, named Qira.

In January 2015, he joined Vicarious.com where he worked for 7 months and developed AI algorithms for the company.

Founding Comma.AI

In September 2015, Hotz founded comma.ai, that works on building AI based vehicular automation technology. In 2016, the company built a working self-driving Acura ILX. Later, the company started working on Comma One, a $1,000 software kit that could allow some cars to operate semi-autonomously. But after receiving a special order from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the further production of the software was cancelled.

During the same time, he was also in talks with Elon Musk to sell his autonomous software for Tesla cars, but the talks never met any conclusion.

On 30 November 2016, the company open sourced its self-driving car software. The open source driving agent from the company runs on some of the car models from companies like Honda, Toyota, and GM, making those models semi-autonomous. Reportedly in 2018, the company served over 4,500 drivers.

Personal Life

Hotz aka Geohotz has been always a keen learner for AI and software development. In 2004 he participated in the ISEF competition in Portland where he demonstrated “The Mapping Robot”. He was among the finalists and got featured on the Today Show and Larry King. He also developed another project named The Googler in 2005 and participated in the ISEF competition with the project, here too, he was one of the finalists.

In 2008, he was among the top 10 Overachievers under 21 listed in the March edition of PC World magazine. In 2014 he won the DEF CON CTF tournament for the second time in a row.

On 14 September 2018, Hotz stepped down from the post of the CEO of the company and became the Head of Research Team.

Houseparty : A Social Network that Claims to Connects People in More Real Way

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Social media not only provide you with the means to connect with your dear ones but is also a place where you can share your thoughts with the world. But with the rise of social media, the pressure on the users have also increased, and the originality of connecting with the people close to them has lost somewhere. Houseparty is also a social network which has been specially built to solve this problem.

The founder of Houseparty Ben Rubin and Sima Sistani, came together to build a platform, which is solely for the people who want to spend real time together even being physically apart. The app allows a group video chat of up to eight people, giving the feel similar to friends sitting in a living room.

The Founders

Ben is an entrepreneur of Israeli descent, who had joined the army when he was 18 years old. He had always intended to become an architect and even studied architecture but ended up building mobile applications.

When Ben was in the third year of his college, he was introduced to the famous social media platform Instagram, which became the inspiration for his first project ‘Yevvo’. Yevvo was a social media platform, which became popular in no time. Ben started adding new features to the app, but was unable to handle the pressure and soon he had to shut down the app.

Next startup app that Ben came with was Meerkat launched in February 2015. Meerkat was a social media app that enabled its users to tweet live videos and comment on the tweet.

Houseparty co-founders
Image Source: greylock.com

Sima Sistani is an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and was working as the head of media at Tumbler when she met Ben. The two got introduced through a common friend. Sima was already aware of his startup Meerkat and was quite impressed by the success of Meerkat.

After four months from the inception of Meerkat, Ben and the co-founder of Meerkat, Itai, realised that the tweeting live video was only working for people who were famous or were celebrities, and the common people were not getting much of the benefits from the service. At the time Sima had also joined the team Meerkat.

Founding HouseParty

The problem with meerkat was that it was not applicable for the common people, so it led the two future co-founders, Ben and Sima, brainstorm about the concept of live video streaming for the common people. Since it was clear that not many people are interested in watching common people live stream, they reached to the conclusion that why not make the live streaming more personal?

The answer to this question was the private synchronous social network Houseparty. In the first six months of its development, Sima went to different schools to test the features of the app and Ben was constantly working on adding relevant features to it, including personal notifications and locked room.

Houseparty is not only providing its service to common people for live video chats but also offers the advertiser a cheaper platform to advertise their services and products.

By September 2016, after a rewrite of the code, the company was serving over 1 million people in all 50 US states and other countries. Houseparty is mostly focused on Generation Z: 60% of its users are 16 to 24 years old. Currently, Ben is serving the board of the company, and Sima is promoted to the post of CEO of the company, who previously held the position of COO in the company. Till now the company has raised over $70 million from Silicon Valley investors and is growing at a rapid rate. For the success of Houseparty, Ben says that he is happy that his first two startups were failures and he came up with a more feasible business model, that has its own future.