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Jack Ma: A self made billionaire

Inspiration, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspiration, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

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

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

ELON MUSK
ELON MUSK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Man at the helm for an innovative future

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

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

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

Moikit: A preventive tech solution to avoid Kidney Stones

Health, start-up, Tech Story / By

There has been a sharp rise in Kidney stones (also known as a renal calculus or nephrolith) cases around the world in recent years. Approximately 1 in 11 people in the United States are affected by Kidney stones.

The leading cause of kidney stones is not drinking enough water. Stones commonly have been found in those who drink less than eight to ten glasses of water a day. When there is not enough water to dilute the uric acid (constituent of urine), the pH level of kidneys drops and becomes more acidic. This acidic environment in the kidneys is instrumental in the formation of kidney stones.

What if there is someone who reminds you to drink water and also keep track of your daily water intake. Moikit a Chinese tech startup has come up with a smart water bottle to track your water consumption, compile your health data and keep you hydrated.

Story behind Moikit

In 2012 Xiaoliang Li’s (founder of Moikit) wife got diagnosed with kidney stones due to poor hydration habits. When Xiaoliang studied more about Kidney stones, he learnt that less water intake leads to a host of other diseases and problems in people all over.

Drinking less water means less frequency of urination. Less urination tend minerals that cause kidney stones to settle down in the kidney nephrons and the urinary tract. When one drinks plenty of water, these minerals get flushed out through the urine instead of settling down.

In order to fix this widespread problem of hydration, Xiaoliang brought together a team to create a smart bottle that uses technology to keep people hydrated. Seed the smart water bottle from Moikit is one of the many products that Moikit is developing to solve the problem of hydration.

Seed’s built-in smart water consumption algorithms compute your body’s hydration needs according to water intake, body composition, daily activity level, and outside temperature. With this information, Seed will custom design a water intake schedule that meets your individual needs. Through small vibrations and the LED display, Seed will remind you when you have forgotten to drink enough water.

Seed using inbuilt Bluetooth transfers your water intake data to Moikit app on your smartphone. Seed also integrates seamlessly with third-party health apps and devices.

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

India, Inspiration, start-up, Tech Story / By

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video credit: InMobi YouTube, Nasscom

Watch short films from India on Shortfundly

start-up / By

Chennai-based startup Shortfundly has chosen to create a niche platform for short film publishers. The startup offers an  online video platform for showcasing curated short films from India.

On Shortfundly users can browse through different short videos based on variety of languages, genres and channels. Shortfundly is currently offered for free. Filmmakers can submit their existing YouTube, Vimeo or Dailymotion work to Shortfundly. Shortfundly is trying to build an online video platform that combines curation and social publishing to distribute the best Indian short films to niche audience globally.

 

 

Current design of platform is in pretty infancy stage and would need lot of improvements in order to get users hooked to its platform to checkout short films which are anyways available on top video platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. Read more on Shortfundly blog.

 

 

 

Buy PowerPoint templates and diagrams for $3.99

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Online presentation sharing website authorSTREAM has launched a marketplace for PowerPoint templates and diagrams where different templates providers are offering high quality templates and diagrams at very competitive prices. Any template or diagram costs just $3.99 in comparison to stand alone templates websites where this price varies from $9 to $300.

 

Currently the marketplace has 60,000 professionally designed slides under more than 40 categories which means there is a template for all the occasions and business needs. With this launch authorSTREAM wants to bring PowerPoint templates industry together at one platform thus providing more business opportunities to template companies and high quality affordable templates to presentation creators. On the lines of iStockphoto if authorSTREAM extends this marketplace to individual template designers who today have no way to showcase and sell their PowerPoint templates, that would be a game changer and win-win for everyone involved.