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Scott Heiferman : Founder of Meetup, A Platform Connecting People in the Real World

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Losing your mother at a young age might be a difficult situation, but when you have five elder siblings to hold on to, you can stay strong when the phase passes. Scott Heiferman considers his five siblings as his five parents other than his father, who guided him well when it came to his life as well as career choices. Even when he decided to work at a McDonald’s restaurant, there was no pressure on him. But the wake of September 11, attracted his attention to a crucial topic, which made him found Meetup.com.

Early Life

Heiferman is the youngest of his four siblings, born in Homewood, Illinois, in 1972. He was still a child when he grew an interest in technology and business. He started his first business when he was just 9, the “Scott’s Slave Service”, which of course was for his family members only, in return he received food and shelter for him. He went to the Flossmoor High School in Homewood and started learning programming languages on his Apple II. He even created a Commodore VIC-20 graphics program. In his teens, he started another business and sold coupon books to earn extra money. The money he earned from his coupon books business, was sufficient to pay for the fees for the first year of his college.

Scott Heiferman
Image Source: medium.com

He joined the University of Iowa, where he first took engineering as majors. But later, he changed his mind and took business studies. During college, he worked as the host of a weekly radio show named Advertorial Infotainment, at the college radio. The show became the first radio program on the internet. Being brought up among people from different fields helped him experimenting with his career choices.

Career

After graduating from college, Heiferman started working at Sony, as Interactive Marketing Frontiersman. After working for one year from 1994 to 1995, he flew to New York. In New York, he started an online ad-agency, named as i-traffic. Soon the company earned lots of profits and grew to 100 employees. The success of the company attracted the interest of Agency.com in it, that, in 1999, acquired i-traffic for $15 million. Heiferman continued working for Agency.com but left just in a year.

He was tired of meeting people from the corporate world, so to take a break from the same and to get in touch with the real world again, he started working at one of the McDonald’s restaurants.

Founding Meetup

At the time he worked in McDonald’s, Heiferman lived near the Twin Towers in New York. The attack of 9/11 made him connect with his neighbours for the very first time. A few days after the attacks, he started reading ‘Bowling Alone’, a book based on interacting with strangers and building trust.

At the same time, being a music lover, he used to go to different music concerts. He even attended the Luna concerts, 20 times, as it was his favourite band. In the beginning, his friends went with him, but later, he started going alone to the concerts. At the concerts, he started noticing people who were coming to the same concerts with him. The meetups with his neighbours and the meeting with the strangers at the concerts led him to think of creating a platform upon which people could meete other people who shared the same interest as them.

Soon in 2002, Heiferman founded Meetup along with five other co-founders. He started the company with a total of 10 employees. At the same time, he also founded another startup named Fotolog. Only in two years, Meetup reached one million users. In 2003, Barak Obama, who was a candidate for the U.S. Senate at that time, had promised to attend any meetup having a hundred supporters. For that Democrat, Howard Dean organised a campaign over Meetup.com and for his surprise more than hundred people had gathered through the website.

In 2005, Heiferman started imposing a fee for running Meetup groups. It was 2009, when the company made its first huge profit, having 32 million members in 182 countries. In 2017, Meetup was acquired by WeWork, Scott Heiferman remaining the CEO of the company, till in 2018, when he stepped down from the post to retain the office of Chairman of the company.

Personal Life

On 13 September 2008, Heiferman got married to Emily Krasnor an officer of the United Nations Development Fund for Women. The couple has two children together.

In 2013, Heiferman was named “Innovator of the Year Under 35” by MIT Technology Review. The book ‘Bowling Alone’ was the game changer for him, and still, the copy of the book is presented to every employee at their joining in the company.

Eric S. Yuan : CEO & Founder of Zoom Video Communications, ‘A Service That Connects People’

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In this fast running world where problems require an instant solution, face to face interactions are hard to get. At this time, people require a connection, which they can use, to interact with each other, without covering the actual distances between them. Also, many video calling apps in the software market doesn’t allow to connect more than 4 or 6 people at the same time. Eric S. Yuan also had faced the same problem, but instead of resenting over it, he stepped up and worked hard to give this industry ‘Zoom’.

Since his college days, Yuan had dreamt about building a communication platform that covered the distances between the people without even travelling. That’s when Zoom’s idea popped up in Yuan’s mind while he was still in his freshman year of college. And, in 2011, he founded Zoom. Zoom is a company that provides remote conferencing services using cloud computing. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California, United States and the software it brings, gives you the advantage of the combined video conferencing, online meetings chats and mobile collaborations.

Eric S Yuan
Image Source: bmmagazine.co

While in college, Eric’s girlfriend (now wife) lived at a place quite distant from his place. Whenever he wanted to meet her, he used to take excruciating 10-hour train rides. He wished that he could build a solution to this problem through which his girlfriend and he could stay connected, even without being together, physically. He wanted that he could visit her anytime without any travelling.

Eric always said that it was his dream to come to the United States and achieve something big due to his interest, he had grown in the new technology ‘Internet’ that was blooming at that time. At the time, when he applied for the Visa for the US, he got his application rejected a few times. He continuously applied for nine times over the course of 2 years. And after his ninth try, he was finally granted one.

“When I came to America, I did not even speak English, but I knew that I could write codes. I knew I had to work very hard, and so did I. Also, I’m very paranoid so I say to myself, I have to work harder’. Working hard, that is the only thing I know better than my competitor”, says Eric recalling his old days and his mantra of success.

In 1997, Eric came to the Silicon Valley and joined WebEx. WebEx was real time, and it had only a dozen employees. After Yuan’s joining, the company grew very quickly and went public in no time. In 2007, WebEx was sold to Cisco. He was appointed as the Vice President of Cisco and the in-charge of collaborations software.

At Cisco, he did consumer interactions directly with consumers. He found out that many of the consumers were not happy either with Cisco or WebEx. Eric knew that this was the time to do something big that he always dreamt of, something during his college times. He left Cisco and alongside geared up a team of 40 engineers, and came up with ‘Zoom’ in 2011.

After the release, Zoom frew to about a thousand users, and the numbers kept on growing with every update release. As of now, Zoom can process 1000 participants in a single video conferencing call. After being in the market for 5-6 years, it registered more than 20 Billion annualized meeting minutes.

Eric believes that keeping customers happy is something which runs a company. If the customers are not happy, the company will be long gone. Zoom was ranked 18 in the Forbes Cloud 100. Also, Eric was ranked number 1 in the top CEO by Glassdoor based on approval ratings from the employee reviews. Eric got an astonishing 99% approval showing that how he keeps his employees happy too.

He wishes that he could open his company a lot before, but he is still happy with his success. He thrives to do hard work. When asked upon start-ups, he said, “The journey is long and tough, but one must not be afraid to start. One should be vulnerable to taking risks. Also, find investors who want to invest in you, not only in your business”.

Eric S. Yuan, the CEO and Founder of Zoom Video Communications, has a story that motivates and says out loud that hardships are inevitable and without them, no one can reach the success they desire. Eric is an inspiring leader, leading his team to the best to provide the best.

Adobe : The Software Giant Transforming the Way You Look at the World

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Technology, today, has grown to such level that it has changed the way you look at the world. Not only the world, but it has changed the way you look at yourself! Shocking, isn’t it? There are many powerful tools available in the software market that people can use to make you believe in the things that can’t even exist. The creativity, the risks, the hard work, the growing power of multimedia, the inspirations and the motivations, when all were put together, the greatest software of all time, ‘Adobe’, became a reality. Great as it might seem, the story of the success of Adobe was not an easy one, but is the best one you can get inspiration from.

Adobe is an American Multinational computer software company. The headquarter of the company is located in San Jose, California, United States. The foundation of the company is purely based on creating software that enhances the creation of median and intensifies creativity.

adobe
Image Source: adobe.com

Adobe was founded by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, in December 1982. The company’s first office was the Warnock’s garage. It all started when both of the computer geniuses developed a programming language that was specially designed to describe position, shape and size of objects on a computer-generated page. The software was known as ‘Postscript’. But the company, Xerox, they were working in, refused to take the product to the market. Both John and Charles resigned and started working on their own on the same project.

‘Adobe’ name was inspired by Adobe Creek, Los Altos, California, a location near to their homes. The logo (A creative and stylized “A”) was designed by John’s wife, Marva Warnock.

The first product that Adobe launched in the market was a ‘PostScript’ software. It was a powerful computer language, the same that they had designed while working in Xerox. It described to a printer the whole layout of an electronic page. The product surprisingly made a breakthrough, and by 1985, Adobe had $1.9 million in sales. By 1986, the revenue that the company was generating was around $16 million, out of which, $4 million were income based.
Steve Jobs wanted to buy the company, but both of the creators refused. However, after giving second thoughts to the idea, and having words with their investors, John and Charles agreed to sell 19% of the company’s shares to him. For that, Jobs paid at least five times of their company’s value at that time. This deal made it the first company to gain such a profit in its first year only.

This was just a start for the company. Next, it launched a second product which was a type-1 interface. The interface provided digital type fonts that could be printed in any resolution. Subsequently, the company launched the marvellous ‘Adobe Illustrator’, which produced high-quality drawings that can be printed and published very easily. The product stood out brilliantly and generated approximately $85 million as revenues. This was a clear sign that with each product, Adobe was growing and that too on a rapid pace. The company, soon, became one of the best software manufacturers over the world. The quality of the work was very high which made the two founders of the company sit and relax, on the ‘top’.

Their next release, ‘Adobe Photoshop’, still stands best in the market. The software is a photo editor, which became the best seller in the market in no time. In the year 1990, the company had more than $170 million in revenue, including the $40 million total income. Within a period of 4 years, the revenue reached $670 million.

Every story has a point of downfall, and in 1998, such point arrived for Adobe, too. In 1998, Hewlett Packard (HP) made a similar PostScript software. Due to which, Adobe saw a reduction in sales by a massive 40 per cent. The company experienced a setback but was quick to react. Soon, it started rebuilding strategies, restructuring plans and started cutting down on employees.

In 1999, for a comeback, Adobe decided to launch a publishing tool, ‘InDesign’, with a risk of a similar tool already running in the market, sold by Quark. So, Adobe was not expecting much from it. However, when released, InDesign did the impossible. The product became a huge success, gaining Adobe more than $ 1 billion as revenues, over the time, reshaping and reviving the company.

Since then, Adobe has not looked back. Some of the software that they have in the market right now, are Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Flash player, Adobe Dreamweaver, Page maker, Adobe Scan, Adobe Premiere Clip, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Capture CC, Adobe creative cloud, Adobe connect and the ever-lasting Adobe Photoshop, which carries many more versions of it further.

Adobe has also been involved in social welfare activities. The company works to make its employees’ life more and more convenient by creating a healthy work environment. It has given cash grants and many contributions like volunteer support, software training, donated software to a non-profit organization. The company also supports the environmental stewardship.

As of now, Adobe is ranked number 10 by Forbes on the list of ‘Top 100 Digital Companies’. The company has more than $ 7.7 Billion sales in the market and a market cap of $ 119.1 Billion.

Adobe’s story gives us a glimpse of how something unique can create a spark among consumers. Also, that when you are walking on a path, where nothing goes right, it just requires a proper plan to get back on the track. One should never leave the creative ideas in their head, and the story of Adobe shows that and helps us get them out with the versatility of the software they offer.

Frank Wang : The Man Behind the Flight of Unmanned Drones

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Even the thought of flying gives us a sense of freedom. Flying means that we can see the world from another perspective, an open one, a wide one. But we cannot fly! Technology has been coping with everything we cannot do. The places where we lack, we take the help of technology to reach that potential. And so is the technology that DJI brings to you, to see the world from a perspective so different, the perspective of flying! And, the man behind the scenes of DJI, ‘Frank Wang’ shares a story so motivating.

SZ Da-Jiang Innovation, also known as DJI, is a drone manufacturing company. DJI manufactures unmanned, autonomous aerial vehicles, flight controllers, and the list goes on and on. At present, DJI is the largest drone-manufacturing company in the market, standing on top of the competition of drone companies.

Frank Wang
Image Source: Forbes

Frank Wang was born in 1980 as Wang Tao, in Hangzhou, China. His father was a small business owner and an engineer. During his childhood, Frank developed an interest in flying objects. He literally craved flying helicopters, and always begged his parents to buy him one. At 16, he finally received one, but the joy was short-lived because he crashed it in no time. He spent most of his youth reading about model aeroplanes and helicopters. His childhood dream was to build a flying robot that had a camera on it, and it could follow him anywhere he went. Over time, his interest in planes and helicopters kept growing.

Even having poor academic results, he was a genius when it came to helicopters and planes. He always intended to build a career in the flying field. But this setback of results landed him into East China Normal University, Shanghai, as top universities were out of range for him. In the university, he studied psychology. Further, he joined the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

It was the Hong Kong University, where his life took a turn, and things got interesting. During his senior year, he designed a ‘helicopter-flight control system’, which was the part of a college project. He was granted HK$18000 (US$2300) by the university, to conduct research and develop a ‘drone helicopter’. He built a helicopter with the help of one of his professors. For that, he skipped classes, worked and studied day in day out and without even having a good sleep! He knew the importance of his project and worked so hard that he managed to make an unmanned helicopter. Wang’s hard work paid off, and the drone made its first flight by nearly reaching the top of the Mount Everest.

In 2006, Wang started DJI from his dorm room, which today, stands as the largest drone company all over the world, with it owing almost 70% of all the drones industry. In 2017, he became Asia’s youngest tech billionaire. According to a report from Forbes, in 2018, his worth stood a huge amount of US $5.4 billion. Frank holds 40% of the shares of DJI.
DJI reportedly had more than US$2 billion as sales, and during the valuation of the company, in 2018, it came out that the company raised more than US$15 billion. The headquarter of the company is located in Shenzhen, China and has its operating divisions in China, Hong Kong, Japan, North America and Europe. The company which started with an employee count of 4 has now more than 4000 employees in different countries.

DJI is famous for its UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) and to be more precise, the ‘Phantom’ series. It manufactures devices like Camcorder, Camera stabilizers, flight platform gimbals, flight controls, etc.

The CEO and founder of SZ Da-Jiang Innovation (DJI), Frank Wang gives us the motivation that if we have the will, if we have the passion and the desire to work hard, we can achieve the dreams, even the ones that we saw as a child. Frank, achieved what he dreamt as a kid and puts an example in front of the whole world of what ‘true passion and hard work’ can do.

The Boeing Company: 100 Years of Aviation Pioneering

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The Boeing Company is one of the biggest names in the pioneering of aero products. The company derived its name from the surname of its founder William Edward Boeing, who was an American timber businessman. The company has an old history, as it was founded almost 102 years ago, on 15 July 1916, in Seattle, Washington, U.S. The founder and the former CEO of the company, William Boeing, had an immense interest in the aircrafts, which he developed when he first time saw a manned flying machine during the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, in Seattle, in 1909.

After the incident, Boeing himself joined the Glenn L. Martin Flying School in Los Angeles to learn flying. He even purchased a plane for himself from Martin’s. The idea of manufacturing his first plane hit his mind when he was unable to get the replacement for the damaged parts of his newly purchased aircraft from Martin’s. Hence with the help of his friend Cdr. George Conrad Westervelt, he built an amphibian biplane, the B & W Seaplane.

In 1910, William Boeing bought Heath’s shipyard in Seattle, where he founded The Boeing Company, his first aeroplane factory, on July 15, 1916, with the name Pacific Aero Products Co. Before founding the company, William owned business of timber. So his experience with the wood helped him a lot in the Airplane manufacturing business.

boeing
Image Source: almasdarnews.com

On 9 May 1917, the company was rebranded as Boeing Airplane Company. In the same year, it shipped its first 50 aeroplanes built for the US Navy for the first world war and moved its operations to its Boeing Plant1 located in the Washington state.

In 1919, the company manufactured the Boeing B-1 flying boat, which could carry two more passengers along with the pilot. The aircraft served as the international airmail from Seattle to Victoria, British Columbia, for eight long years. By the time, Boeing started manufacturing fighter planes for the U.S. Army Air Service. The early models of its fighter planes were PW-9 fighter and the Boeing P-12/F4B fighter.

Soon, Boeing’s Model 40 mail plane started operating between San Francisco and Chicago for the U.S. government, under the U.S. Post Office’s contract. In 1927, the company launched an airline named Boeing Air Transport and manufactured its first passenger plane Boeing 80 that took its first flight on 27 July 1928. The same year, the company went through a merger with the Pacific Air Transport.

In the early 30’s Boeing emerged as a leader in the all-metal aircraft construction and built a low-wing monoplane, named as Monomail, to carry mails. The Mononmail also became the basis of the Boeing YB-9 architecture. In 1932, the company brought the first all-metal monoplane fighter, Model 248, and in the next year Model 247, a standard passenger plane.

In 1938, the company built the largest passengers airliner, the Boeing 314 Clipper, to fly on transoceanic routes, under an agreement with Pan American World Airways. The plane had a capacity of 90 passengers in the day flight and of 40 passengers in the night flight. It took its first flight in June 1938 and started operating for regular passenger service from the U.S. to the U.K.

During the world II, Boeing won a contract to build the fighter planes for the U.S. Air Force. Almost all of the aircraft manufacturing companies cooperated at building them. They hired the family members of the soldiers who had gone to the war and built a large number of B-17 and B-29 bombers. The production had gone to a level that almost 350 planes were made in every month.

In 1947, Boeing built its first jet aircraft XB-47 followed by the successful launching of B-47 and B-52 bombers. It also started building the military jets, including the B-47 Stratojet and B-52 Stratofortress, in the decade of 50s. Soon Boeing entered into the manufacturing of the intercontinental missile, using the short-range missile technology.

In the mid-50s, the company started the manufacturing of the small turbine engines and became a leader in the same. Boeing built 2,461 engines before production ceased in April 1968.

The decade of the 50s and 60s were the decades of manufacturing jetliners for Boeing. It launched the 707, 720 as well as 727 commercial jetliners in those years. The 727 was the first commercial jetliner to reach 1,000 sales. Boeing’s twin-engine 737, become the best-selling commercial jet aircraft of all times.

In the 70s, the company faced a simultaneous decline and recession in the market. But by the mid of the 80s, the economic condition of the company started to improve, and it introduced new passenger airliners, the single-aisle 757, the larger, twin-aisle 767, and upgraded versions of the 737, with larger seating capacity.

Having been a part of the Apollo project, it also participated in other space programs and became the first contractor for the International Space Station program. In 1994, Boeing came up with the most modern, i.e., typical three-class layout aircraft, the twin-engine 777, with a seating capacity of 300-370 passengers.

In early 2000, the company purchased Hughes Electronics, in order to expand into the aerospace field. Boeing became the largest provider of rocket launch services to the U.S. government, through its joint venture, United Launch Alliance, with Lockheed Martin, in late 2006. Boeing also became the prime contractors in the U.S. military’s Future Combat Systems program.

Boeing revealed its Q4 profit of the year 2013 in January 2014, that was estimated to be about US$1.23 billion. In 2017, the company had 140,800 and made a revenue of US$93,392 million.

Dom Hofmann : The Founder of Vine “A 6 Second Entertainment App”

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In this era, where everything is becoming instant and fast, everyone wishes that their entertainment also becomes very instant, quick. Besides, these days, in the hectic schedules, who has the time to take out an hour to watch a TV show or a live comedy show to please themselves. People wish that their source of comedy becomes shorter and shorten in the time perspective and holds enough interest that cam amuses them. Such was the vision of Dom Hoffman when he built the app Vine which turned out to be a wide success all over the world and gained a fan base very much faster than ordinary start-up apps.

So, “What makes Vine so special?” you may ask. The standout in this app was that it made short videos. And by short, I mean, indeed very short! It produced not more than 6-second videos. This was something ‘new’ to the entertainment industry, which shook it! People went nuts over Vine because it brought a sense of an innovational challenge to make fun and creative videos in a time period of just 6 seconds.

Dom, born on 27th September 1986, is what we can say a creative entrepreneur. He created ‘Vine’ with his partners, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll. He feels, Vine becoming the internet’s most chosen video making tool, was rather an ‘accident’. He said that they imagined the tool would help people capture small moments of their lives Dom Hofmannand share them with their friends.

Vine was founded in June of 2012 and before even the official launch, Twitter bought it 30 Million $. The microblogging site, Twitter, thought of it as the perfect combination to its ‘short’ text way of socializing. The videos made by tool were published through the Vine’s social network and could be shared on other social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Vine is short of Vignette which is defined as a short impressionistic scene.

The tool was launched on 24th January 2013. In this, the videos could be surfed in accordance with theme, trending etc. It gave a tough competition to Instagram and Mobli.

“It became pretty clear as soon we launched it”, said Hofmann as the app gained a huge user base in just the span of less than 2 years. By December 2015, the tool had already surpassed 200 million active users. He (Dom), was surprised and excited about the way that people were using the app in strange ways. “Watching the community and the tool push on each other was exciting and unreal, and almost immediately it became clear that Vine’s culture was going to shift towards creativity and experimentation,” he said. Vine’s symbol displays an inverted 6 if you look at it closely.

But it eventually came to an end, when Twitter announced that it would be shutting down the Vine app on October 27, 2016. But Twitter said that viewing and downloading vines would continue. On January 20, 2017, Twitter launched an archive which contained all the previously captured vines.

Some of the reasons listed by the Vine community for the shutting down of Vine services were that Twitter’s own uncertain future in social networking and also the increasing competition from Snapchat which rolled out 10 seconds clip service to broadcast in the app itself.

Dom, even after the closing down of the app, did not close on the Vine community. He has been tweeting recently about ‘Byte’, the successor of Vine. Byte’s logo was tweeted by Dom on November 9th, 2018, and said that ‘Byte’ could be launching anytime soon in the Spring of 2019. The successor of Vine was supposed to come out early but Hofmann said that it was due to some “financial and legal issues.” He also said that ‘Byte’ would function independently and not under Twitter.

Vine was viewed by the users as both creative and monetary. Some of the famous Vine artists are Zach King, the magician who earned more than 1.4 Billion views. Other than this, Amanda Cerny, Logan Paul, Meghan McCarthy, Dwarf Mamba and KingBach. You can also check Vine compilations on YouTube.

Dom Hofmann showed us that entertainment does not need two-three hours of time. Even a small amount of time is sufficient enough to show one’s creativity and bring a smile on to people’s faces. He, in one way or the other, made us realize that happiness can be found even in the splits of seconds. The 6-second entertainment inventor is all prepped up to bring another entertainment app soon.