Your Tech Story

Story

Craig Newmark : American Internet Entrepreneur and the Founder of Craigslist

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

Great ideas are the result of curiosity, and when you have gained enough experience, it might be easier to visualise those ideas and its scope too. Craig Newmark, an American entrepreneur, who first struggled in life due to bad financial conditions, as a result of his hard work, got the opportunity to work with major tech giants of the industry. It was with those big companies he was able to understand the technology well and get to work on his own project, which later became Craigslist, a web communication company that makes the annual profits more than US$700 million.

Early Life

Craig Newmark was born on 6 December 1952, in Morristown, New Jersey, where he lived with his parents, Joyce and Lee Newmark, and his brother Jeff Newmark. His father was an insurance salesman who died when Craig was only 13.

Craig Newmark
Image Source: zimbio.com

After the death of his father, the family went through major financial issues, so his mother brought him and his brother to an apartment in Jacob Ford Village. Craig joined the Morristown High School where he completed his high school education. Despite the difficulties, he was doing good at the studies and won a scholarship. He joined the Case Western Reserve University from where he completed his graduation in Science in 1975, followed by a master’s degree in the same subject in 1977.

Founding Craigslist

As soon as he completed his education, he joined IBM as a programmer and worked for a long 17 years, in the same company. In 1993, he quit his job at IBM to join Charles Schwab & Co. At the same time, the internet was a hot new topic, and the people were trying to discover more about it. They were becoming familiar with the same by helping each other.

Craig, too, came to know more about the internet in his new company and liked how people were helping each other. This incident made him think of creating a new distribution list to friends. Craig posted about the events happening around San Francisco Bay Area, that attracted the interest of the software and Internet developers, living and working around the same area. The mailing list also included feedback feature in it.

Soon, the platform became popular and started featuring job-related queries on it. People had started looking for skilled people on the very platform, and it wasn’t an event-only platform anymore. This led Craig to add more categories to the platform including alongside ‘Jobs’.

In 1996, Craig launched the official website for Craigslist with the domain name ‘craigslist.org’. In 1999, the company started functioning as a private firm. At the same time, Craig decided to leave his job in order to completely concentrate on Craigslist.

By the year 2000, Craig had employed nine people to work on Craigslist. The platform was featuring discussion forums, flagging system, self-posting process, homepage design, personals categories, and best-of-Craigslist feature. In fact, it had its own search engine. The platform started expanding, and in the same year, it was functioning in more than nine U.S. cities.

In 2004, the company started charging its users for posting in the Job category, in the New York and Los Angeles pages, but at the same time, launched a new category, ‘Gigs’ where the users could post vacancies for free. The paid job section is the main income source for the company.

The website has become more of an advertising platform and serves over 49.4 million unique monthly visitors, in the U.S. alone.

Personal Life

In December 2012, Newmark married Eileen Whelpley.

Alongside being a successful entrepreneur, Craig is also an active philanthropist. He has been donating to various non-profit organisations for many years now. In 2006, he donated $20,000 to NewAssignment and founded craigconnects in 2011, in order to support other non-profit organisations. In 2017, Newmark donated $500,000 to Wikipedia to help the platform to fight with harassment and vandalism on it. He also donated a $1 billion to Mother Jones magazine to help reduce the spread of fake news. Newmark also supports military families, voter registration efforts, and women in technology, through his private charitable foundation.

According to a report from Forbes, Newmark had a net worth of at least $1.3 billion in 2017. But Newmark said in an interview, “By monetizing Craigslist the way I did in 1999, I probably gave away already 90 per cent or more of my potential net worth.” So according to him, “no one should be a billionaire”, and he does not possess assets more than he requires according to his needs.

Mark Jonathan Pincus – The Pinnacle of Social Gaming and Entrepreneurship

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

Online games are interesting as you do not have to download them or build a separate setup for it. A few clicks on the computer, and you are ready to play. Not only, the availability of the internet makes them better, but also, playing with friends increases the fun. Zynga, one of the best social video gaming services, provides the best in-game experience when it comes to social gaming. The mind behind Zynga, Mark Pincus Jonathan, is a spirit of pure passion for entrepreneurship, and his story shows that innovation can make anything happen.

Mark was born on February 13, 1966, in Chicago, Illinois. He studied from Francis W. Parker School, till his 12th grade. He has two Ivy League degrees. In 1984, he graduated from Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he pursued a B.S. in economics. After graduating, he worked in venture capital and financial services, for 6 years. He then joined the New Media Group at Lazard Freres & Co. Later, Mark moved to Hong Kong to serve as the Vice President of Asian Capital partners, but returned to the USA, only after two years, to complete an MBA degree from the Harvard Business School. Alongside, he continued to work in the industry with Tele-Communications (AT&T Cable) and Columbia Capital.

mark pincus
Image Source: usatoday.com

He took an overview of the startups at Columbia Capital, where he invested in New media and software startups. In 1995, he started his entrepreneurship career with ‘Freeloader’. The company received investments from Fred Wilson and Softbank. The startup was a web-based push technology. Within seven months of its launch, Individual Inc. acquired the company for $38 million.

After Freeloader, in 1997, Mark started another startup named ‘Support.com’. The product of the company was a help desk automation software. He ensured that his startup left no stone unturned and made the company as the leading provider of its services. The public valuation of the company was $1.5 billion. Later, the startup was renamed as SupportSoft Inc.

In 2003, Mark and Reid Hoffman purchased Six degrees patent for $700,000 from the extinct Sixdegrees.com. The patent has never been used to date. Both the purchasers state that the purpose of the purchase was to protect the innovation in social networking.

Tribe.net was his next milestone. His third startup was funded by The Washington Post, Knight Ridder Digital, Mayfield Fund and Guy Spier. The startup was about social networking. Cisco Systems, in 2007, acquired the company to develop a more comprehensive social networking platform for its digital media services group.

Alongside starting his own startups, he also invested in other ones out in the market. He made early investments in Facebook and Twitter. Napster, Snapchat, Friendster, Xiaomi, JD.com, Brightmail, Buddy Media. He invested in several other ventures like HVMN and Wealthfront.

Zynga Inc., his fourth company, was started in July 2007. Zynga is named after Pincus’ late dog, Zinga, an American Bulldog. The company’s red and white logo is a rendering of the bulldog. Zynga provides the best social gaming experience and has developed games for Facebook, Myspace and Bebo. Zynga states its mission as ‘connecting the world through games.’ The first game was Texas Hold’Em Poker (now Zynga Poker). In April 2009, Zynga became the developer with most active users on Facebook (reportedly 40 million). In the same year, Zynga released ‘Farmville’ which turned out to be an absolute blockbuster. It was Facebook’s first game to surpass 10 million active users per day. In December 2010, CityVille surpassed Farmville, as the company’s most popular game, with over 16 million active users per day. At its public offering, the company was valued at $1 Billion. Zynga, since then, has released games like Farmville 2, Words with Friends, CSR Racing 2, Mafia Wars, etc., which are played all under ‘Zynga with Friends’ Network.

Pincus served as the company CEO from 2007 to 2013. He made headlines when he sold around 16.5 Million shares of Zynga. He remained the Chairman of the Board of Directors and the Chief Product Officer of the company. He stepped down as the CPO in April 2014. In April 2015, the company announced Mark as the CEO of the company following his step down on March 7, 2016. He ceded his voting rights from 70% to 10% in order to vote of confidence in Zynga’s current leadership.

He has been involved in community service, too. He started Zynga.org committed to transforming the world through virtual social goods. The service raised more than $20 million and has donated it to several international non-profit.

Mark Jonathan Pincus, the founder of Zynga, has provided one of the best games the world ever witnessed. He made social gaming possible through ‘Zynga with Friends’ campaign. He has a real-time net worth of $1.2 Billion. He was named ‘Founder of the Year’ in 2009 and in the following year, by the Crunchies Technology Awards. He is a pinnacle of online gaming and entrepreneurship promoting innovation all the way.

Charles Wang: The Software’s Tough Guy and the Co-founder of CA Technologies

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

Some people are born with leadership qualities, and some grow them with experience. For the founder of CA Technologies, Charles B. Wang, the case might be both. Despite many controversies, he stands out to be a strong leader, who led his company to new horizons. This visionary was not only a great entrepreneur but also guided many for mastering technology with the books he wrote, i.e. Techno Vision and Techno Vision II.

Wang was born on 19 August 1944, in Shanghai, China, to Kenneth Wang and Mary Wang. His father was a judge at the Supreme Court in the Republic of China. Wang was eight when his parents brought him and his two brothers, Anthony W. Wang and Francis Wang, to Queens, New York.

Charles Wang
Image Source: wsj.com

After coming to the U.S., Wang joined the Brooklyn Technical High School in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. And after completing his high school, he entered Queens College to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in Science. Later, Wang joined the Columbia University’s Riverside Research Institute, after answering a help-wanted job ad for a computer programmer. Though he had never studied programming and coding, for the job, he self-taught himself the programming languages.

In the 1960s, while working at the Columbia University, Wang became familiar to a fellow colleague, Russell M. Artzt. Russell was working at the Electronic Laboratories of the University. The two shared a common interest, i.e. computers and became good friends. Later, the two joined the same company to work in, i.e. Standard Data.

In 1989, when IBM separated its hardware sales division from its software division, the other companies got the chance to launch their products in the market. At the same time, Wang and Russell both saw an opportunity in the same and started building software products to sell in the market.

After gaining much experience in the field, the two co-founded Computer Associates International, in 1976. For the venture, the two partnered with Sam Goodner and Max Sevcik of Swiss Company Computer Associates and got the North American distribution rights for CA-Sort. Wang became the CEO of the company, whereas Russell served as the co-president of the company.

The venture was established with the credit card money, but soon, Wang’s leadership took the company to the new heights of success. Soon the company became the first enterprise software company to provide multi-platform products and one of the largest independent software vendors.

The credits for the success of the company is given to the strict methodology Wang used for hiring the candidates for the Computer Associates International. He would look for the capabilities of the candidate and depending upon the performance he would promote or demote the employees. The good employee’s got early promotions whereas the employees with performance below average got fired at once.

In 1989, Computer Associates was the second software-only company that generated $1billion annual revenue. In the late 90s, the company started working towards improving its own products and their compatibility with the products of the other companies.

In the years 1994 to 1998, Wang was the highest paid CEO in the U.S., with having earned a $700 million stock in1998. During the same time, the company was heading towards acquisitions, starting with ASK Group in 1994. By the year 2000, Computer Associates had acquired over 200 companies. In the same year, Wang resigned from the post of CEO in Computer Associates remaining the member of the board of the company till 2002.

Along with being the co-founder of CA Technologies, Wang is also known as a philanthropist and the majority owner of the New York Islanders hockey franchise. Initially, Wang had a minority share in the Islanders, and in 2000, he became the part-owner of the hockey franchise. From 2001 to 2016 he was the majority owner of Islanders.

In 2004, he acquired the original Iowa Barnstormers Arena Football League franchise and for some superstitious reasons, renamed it to New York Dragons.

In 1999, Wang founded the Charles B. Wang Foundation, a charitable organisation dedicated to bettering the lives of children and the disenfranchised. Along with his own foundation, he has worked with the World Childhood Foundation and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. He also donated to the Chinatown Health Clinic, which was later renamed as Charles B. Wang Community Health Center.

Till his death on October 21, 2018, at the age of 74, he lived in his Cove Neck mansion, on the Gold Coast of Long Island. Wang was suffering from lung cancer, which became the cause of his death.

Justin Kan : The Serial Entrepreneur Who Founded the Lifecasting Platform Twitch

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

Sometimes, the little thing we do can make a lot of difference in how we pursue our career, and moreover, our life. The founder of Justin.tv and Twitch.tv, Justin Kan shares a similar course of events, where he says that all the credit for is success goes to his mother, and the way, she used to assigned chores to him and his brothers when they were little kids. According to him, the methods they opted for carrying out those daily chores, has helped him learn the art of leadership and build a $1 billion empire for him. Kan is one of the youngest entrepreneurs who has started their career in the early 20s, and with their innovation have left their mark on the respective industries.

Justin Kan
Image Source: flickr.com

Kan was born on 16 July 1983, to Chinese immigrant parents. He has two siblings, Daniel Kan and Damien Kan. Daniel is also a young entrepreneur who has found another $1 billion company Cruise. Kan’s youngest brother Damiem is a software engineer at Alto Pharmacy.

Kan is a graduate from the Yale University, where he received a double major degree in physics and philosophy in 2005.

Founding Twitch

Initially, Justin launched Justin.tv, where he started broadcasting every moment of his daily life live, with a video camera tied to his cap. The platform live-streamed of what he did on a daily basis. This way, a new word ‘lifecasting’ was invented. Within less than a month of him lifecasting, his idea became famous, and he was invited to a few interviews by the leading media of the country, to know more about lifecasting as well as his platform, Justin.tv.

Later, Kan realised the potential of this platform and relaunched Justin.tv along with his friends Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel and Kyle Vogt, in 2007, as an internet startup, in San Francisco, California. The newly launched platform allowed people to add their own channels to it, and live stream. The company raised a seed funding from Y Combinator as well as a Series A funding with Alsop Louie Partners and Draper Associates.

Justin.tv became a similar platform like YouTube but allowed the users to broadcast for free. By the mid of 2007, the platform had 60 registered channels, and by the month of August 2007, it started registering international users, including from Australia, Brazil, UK, France, Netherlands and Sweden, etc. Within a year from the inception of Justin.tv, the platform had registered over 30,000 broadcasting accounts.

In March 2008, the platform added various different categories, including gaming, which later, became the most popular category having earned most of the active users. This led Justin to build another platform dedicated to gaming live streaming and inspired by the term twitch gameplay, Justin founded Twitch.tv, on 6 June 2011.

In the following two years, Twitch was registering 35 million unique visitors every month, and by the end of 2013, the company had hired over 100 employees.

The increased popularity of Twitch.tv led to the rebranding of Justin.tv, Inc., the parent company for both Justin.tv and Twitch.tv, to Twitch Interactive, on 10 February 2014. In the same month, the recorded number of views on Twitch.tv reached over 6.5 million.

In May 2014, news of Google planning to acquire Twitch started making rounds, and Twitch discontinued its services with Justin.tv in August 2014, to solely focus on Twitch.tv.

On 25 August 2014, Amazon acquired Twitch Interactive for an amount worth US$970 million.

Other Ventures

On 7 March 2011, Kan launched another video social media platform, named Socialcam, that allowed its users to record and share videos, using their mobile phones. This startup was acquired by Autodesk on 17 July 2012 for $60M. On 29 February 2012, Kan founded a service out-sourcing platform, that let the freelance service providers charge $25 per hour for any type of service. Later, the startup was bought by Handybook.

In early 2015, Kan launched another startup along with his college friend, Ranidu Lankage, naming it ‘The Drop’, which is a music discovery platform.

In March 2014, Kan joined Y Combinator as a partner, guiding the new startups with their investments. After working for three years with Y Combinator, Kan left the company to found his own investment firm named Zero-F, in March 2017.

In 2017, Kan founded a full-service corporate law firm for high-growth companies, named Atrium, where he works as the CEO.

William Wang : The Founder and Chairman of Vizio

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

Keep trying is the basic mantra for success, and if one keeps on trying without expecting much in return, it becomes easier to achieve the goals. The life of the founder of Vizio, William Wang, is a great example of the fact that giving up is never an option, but keeping the faith alive and trying, again and again, will definitely land you to a better place. And, for Wang, it is not good, but the best, his hard work could pay him.

Early Life

William Wang was born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan. He was 14 when his parents brought him to California, USA. After moving to the USA, Wang faced a lot of difficulties in adjusting to the new environment, mainly due to linguistic issues.

After completing high school education from a local school, he joined the University of Southern California, where he pursued a degree in Electrical Engineering and graduated from the college in 1986. Though he aspired to become an architect, since architecture was not a well-paying job, he dropped the idea and pursued Electrical Engineering.

Career

As soon as he completed his graduate degree, he joined a Chinese company as tech support. The company sold computer monitors, and his job included answering the clients’ calls. The job was paying well, so he continued working at the company for four years.

Being an electrical engineer and having worked with a company selling computer monitors, he was exposed to a new market. With the experience, he was convinced that he could build better computer monitors than the IBM computer standards.

So, in 1999, along with his own savings, he borrowed money from his parents, former boss, and a shareholder from Asia, and raised an initial capital of worth $350,000, to start his own company.

Wang founded MAG, employing two or three people, and started manufacturing computer monitors. At the time, the computer industry was booming really fast, and the company grew to $600 million in six years. But since the technology was changing, the challenges started coming in front of him. The revenues for the company lowered down to $470 million, in only two years, and eventually, Wnag had to sell the company to its manufacturers.

Later, to recover from the losses, Wang tried his hands in other businesses, including founding a computer monitor company called Princeton Graphic Systems, and an R&D facility in Asia. But nothing worked and were a waste of time and money. But still, Wang kept on looking for that big idea, which could help him grow as a successful entrepreneur.

The Turning Point

In November 2000, while coming back to Los Angeles from a meeting in Singapore, his plane Singapore Airlines Flight 006, got crashed as it took the wrong runway and bumped into a construction site. Half of the passengers and the crew died in the crash, and Wang was one of the survivors.

Wang did not have any physical injuries but suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning. According to him, when he was in the hospital, all the business related worries faded away, and he was only thinking about his family.

It was a tough time, and it took two years for him to recover from the incident.

In 2001, one of his old MAG clients, the then chairman of Gateway, Ted Waitt, asked him to build a plan for launching new age TVs for his company. Wang shared a close bond with Ted and assumed him as his mentor. Gateway sold the personal computers, and at its retail store, Ted wanted to sell other products too.

Together, Wang and Ted brought a $2,999, 42-inch plasma TV in the market, which was way cheaper than the other plasma TVs in the market and an instant hit.

Founding Vizio

The partnership between Wang and Ted as well as the success of plasma TV, motivated Wang to start another new company. Within a year of his partnership with Gateway, Wang founded a firm named ‘V Inc.’ in 2002, along with Laynie Newsome and Ken Lowe with a capital worth $6,00,000. For the money, he turned to his parents, friends, and even mortgaged his house.

The company was founded with the intention to gain most of the customer satisfaction by providing them with high-quality products at reasonable prices. The idea worked for him, and within four years the company reached an annual revenue worth $700 million. In 2007, the revenue was estimated to be $2 billion. At the same time, Wang renamed the company from V Inc. to Vizio Inc., as many people found it difficult to pronounce V Inc.

Wang had started the company with only three employees, and by 2012, the company had hired over 400 employees, half of the workers dedicated to customer service. On 31 December 2014, in order to expand the services of its smart TV, the company acquired Advanced Media Research Group, Inc.

Till now, along with the smart TVs the company has released its Tablets, Ultrabook, Mobile phones, Soundbars as well as Google TV. The company has grown to become the largest LCD HDTVs manufacturer and seller in North America.

Amar Bose : A Researcher, Educator and the Founder of Bose Corporation

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

There will be rarely any person who is not aware of Bose Corporation. Bose has been a leading brand in the field of audio equipment development for past more than 50 years. The company was never founded to earn profits, but to provide better user experience for the consumers. And the man behind this revolutionary company was Amar Bose. Almost sixty years ago, Amar Bose became dissatisfied of the sound quality of an expensive and high tech speaker of that time. And today, his dissatisfaction had led to one of the best audio equipment manufacturers in the world, Bose Corporation.

Early Life

Amar Bose was born on 2 November 1929 as Amar Gopal Bose, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Noni Gopal Bose, was a Bengali Hindu, and his mother, Charlotte, belonged to a French-German decent. Noni Gopal Bose was an Indian freedom fighter, and Charlotte was a school teacher.

While growing up, Bose developed an interest in electronics and during World War II, started a small business of repairing model trains and home radios, at the age of 13. He completed his high school education from Abington Senior High School in Abington, Pennsylvania.

Amar Bose
Image Source: patch.com

After receiving a high school degree, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he first pursued a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, and later, completed a PhD from the same institute in Electrical Engineering. The topic for his PhD thesis was non-linear systems.

Bose had become quite active in researches starting from the time of his graduation and even spent a year in Eindhoven, the Netherlands for the research work at the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium. In the following year, he spent another year in Delhi, India as a Fulbright research student.

Career

After completing his bachelor’s, he got the opportunity to work at MIT, as an assistant professor. While working at MIT, in 1956, he bought an expensive high-end speaker but was disappointed with the performance. Despite having great technology of that time, the speakers could not retain the live audio experience. This, later, became the inspiration for his future business venture.

Acoustics became the prime research subject for Bose, and he started working towards achieving that live experience of a concert hall, for the high-end speakers.

Founding Bose Corporation

After extensive research on the speakers, in 1964, Bose was ready to start his own company. He pitched to the angel capitalists for the funding. He also took the help of his PhD thesis guide professor, Y. W. Lee. The loudspeaker model that the company produced was the model 2201, designed to set up in the corner of a room, reflecting the sound from the walls of the room.

The next research program that the company carried out focused on the dominance of the reflected sound arriving at the head of the listener, to provide the listeners with the live audio experience.

In 1968, the company launched its first commercially successful loudspeakers, Model 901. The model was such a huge success that the company produced it for almost 50 years, and discontinued it only in 2017. This loudspeaker is the longest running product of the company.

In the past more than fifty years, the company has been researching in the field of psychoacoustics and has been improving on its product quality. In fact, “Better Sound Through Research”, is the official slogan of the company, which was a statement given by Bose in an interview.

Bose continued working at MIT, even after founding Bose corporation, as he wanted to support the research work for Bose Corporation. He retired from MIT in 2001. Bose has been one of the best professors at MIT. In fact, many of his students have credited him for helping them in gaining life skills and problem-solving skills. He was awarded the Baker Teaching Award in 1964. For his contribution in the field of electronics and to the development of MIT, MIT established the Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching (1989), and the Junior Bose Award (1995) to honour him.

Bose has got two patents in the field of loudspeaker design and non-linear, two-state modulated, Class-D power processing. In 1994, he received an honorary doctorate in Music from Berklee College of Music. In 2008, his name was registered at the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

In 2007, Bose was listed at number 271 in the Forbes list of richest persons Forbes 400. In 2011, his recorded net worth was $1.0 billion. Bose donated the majority of company shares (non-voting) to MIT, to continue the research work for Bose Corporation.

Bose will be remembered for his outstanding contributions to consumer electronics, his great teachings, and for his leadership qualities.