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Tony Fadell : The Co-founder of Nest Labs, Who Revolutionalised the Ugly Thermostats

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iPod has been one of the most innovative products from Apple, and it was not just Steve Jobs that brought out this innovative product, but another brilliant mind that worked behind it was Tony Fadell. Tony Fadell is one of some rare innovators who has contributed to many major development projects in major companies, like Apple and Philips. Tony Fadell is also the founder of Nest Labs, a company that builds smart home products, especially the thermostats.

Early Life

Tony Fadell was born on 22 March 1969, as Anthony Michael Tony Fadell. His father is a Lebanese, and his mother belongs to Polish ethnicity. He completed his high school education from Grosse Pointe South High School, Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan. In 1991, he received a graduate degree in Science from the University of Michigan. He was still in college when he worked as the CEO of Constructive Instruments.

Career

After completing his graduation, Fadell got the opportunity to work with Apple, on Apple’s spinoff General Magic project, where he worked for three years, first as a diagnostics engineer, and then as a systems architect. During this time, he contributed to some major Magic Cap projects including the Sony Magic Link and Motorola Envoy.

Tony Fadell
Image Source: telegraph

In 1995, he joined Philips and became the CEO and the Director of Engineering of the Mobile Computing Group, after he co-founded it along with Philips. While in Philips, he played the major role in the development of a few Windows CE-based hand-held services.

Later in 1999, he got inspired to found his own company, named Fuse, that sold the small hard disk-based music players. The company failed to put an impact on the investors and got shut within a year of its inception.

In February 2001, Fadell joined Apple Inc., as a contractor designer and was employed to work on Apple’s new project, iPod. Within two months of his joining at Apple Inc., he was appointed to assemble and run its iPod & Special Projects group, and in 2006, he became the Senior Vice President of the iPod Division. He played a significant role in the designing and development of the iPod and is also referred to as ‘one of the fathers of the iPod’. In 2008, Fadell left Apple.

Founding Nest Labs

In late 2009, Fadell was busy building a green home for himself, where he was looking for alternates for everything that could help save energy. Here he found out that the thermostats are really helpful in saving and controlling over 50 to 60 per cent of money on the energy consumption every year, but people are unaware of how to do that with those ugly looking thermostat.

So finally, he conceived the idea of launching a thermostat that could automatically help people save more energy. Being known as one of 0the fathers of iPod, many raised questions on his decision of building thermostats and even tried to stop him, including Fadell’s wife. In the very beginning, even the co-founder of Nest Labs, Matt Rogers, doubted his plan, but Fadell was convinced that his decision could bring some revolutionary changes.

Matt Rogers was one of the iPod development team members. In 2010, the two founded Nest Labs and released new revolutionalised and awesome looking thermostats, enabled with wi-fi that worked using sensors and machine learning. The Nest Labs thermostats were able to adapt the user behaviour and work accordingly.

Even though thermostats had been there for many years, Fadell found out that there had been no alteration in those thermostats, not even in its design. So when he built the new smart thermostats, even Google became interested in investing in the company. Shasta Ventures and KPCB became the first investors in the company, and on 13 January 2014, Google revealed that it was planning to acquire Nest Labs for $3.2 billion in cash and on the very next day the tech giant acquired Nest Labs.

Fadell worked with Google and Nest Labs till 2016 and resigned from Nest Labs on June 3, 2016.

Fadell is one of the greatest inventors and engineers who has contributed to many famous and innovative developments. He has also received several awards and recognitions, including Alva Award for ‘The Next Great Serial Inventor’ in 2012 and was named among the ‘CNBC Top 50 Disruptors’ in 2013. He was also listed among the ‘Trailblazers: 11 people changing the business’ by Fortune in 2013, ‘The World’s Top 25 Eco-Innovators’ by Fortune in 2014 and in the list of ‘100 Most Influential People in the World’ by TIME Magazine in 2014. He has also authored over 300 patents in his 20 years long career.

Jamie Siminoff : A Lifelong Inventor Who Founded World’s First Wi-fi Video Doorbell

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‘Failing at the beginning is not always the end.” says the American entrepreneur and the founder of Ring, the world’s first wi-fi video doorbell, Jamie Siminoff. The journey of this entrepreneur has been quite tough but amusing and gives us the lesson that sometimes the biggest business ideas are hidden in small things, but we are not aware of their potential.

Jamie Siminoff was born and brought up in Chester, New Jersey. He was a naughty but creative child. After school, he used to spend most of his time building things. By building things, he came across to very basic but major chemical, mechanical, and electrical engineering stuff. He was never into academics, but later, started working hard to get A grade in tests, as his father had promised him if he would get As in his exams, he will be able to get his favourite Land Rover Defender 90. And after school, his father brought him his favourite car as promised.

jamie siminoff
Image Source: businessinsider

Jamie after completing his high school joined the Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. In college, he studied entrepreneurship and even won a business plan competition. He also received an offer worth $10,000 for writing a business plan while in college.

In college, he also used to paste posters around the campus saying that he would do anything for $10. These small jobs helped him learn new things.

After completing his college, Jaime was back into his garage, and with a few college mates, started working on different products. During the time, his wife, Erin complained that while he used to be in the garage, he would not answer the doorbell. So he started looking for a doorbell that was connected to a mobile app such that it could be answered from his garage without going to the main door.

After looking for a good long time, he found out that there were lots of video doorbells, but he did not find any doorbell that could fulfil his requirement. This was the point when he thought of building a wifi doorbell, that was safer and could be answered from a farther place, even outside the house.

According to Jaime, conceiving the idea was easy, but getting it done was tough. So without thinking more, he started working on this new product with his friends and built a prototype for the same. The next thing was to pitch the idea in front of investors, to get the backup for the product. And, the first thing he got to hear was, “It is impossible.”

But being a stubborn kid, Jaime wanted to prove that investor wrong, and finally, in 2011, built the first version of the device, DoorBot. The device had a few flaws but was good enough to find investors.

In 2013, he received an email from Shark Tank producer, in which he was invited to participate in the American business-related reality television series, Shark Tank. It was a tough time for him, as he was almost broke. So getting an email from a TV show, where he could win money to invest in his company, was like a ray of hope.

Though he did not win any capital in the show, he was able to reach more people with his idea as his product received free marketing. As a result, people started ordering DoorBot to gift it to people in festivals. Also, the product came into the eyes of many investors who became interested in it.

One of his first biggest investors Richard Branson came across to this product when one of his guests was remotely talking to a delivery guy at his doorsteps through an app. Branson was fascinated with the product and contacted Jaime for investment.

Later, during an investment pitch, he rebranded the product to Ring, as one of his investors suggested, “You said ‘ring’ about 1,000 times, just call it Ring.”

This was the start of his good time with the company, and in 2016, he even got the famous NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal to be the spokesperson for his company, who was also a customer of Ring and loved the way it worked. In fact, O’Neal himself had reached out to meet the CEO of Ring, Jaime, to thank for such safe invention.

In early 2018, news of Jeff Bezos making the second biggest investment in Ring, i.e. of a $1 billion, started making rounds, and finally, in February 2018, acquired the company with a worth estimated value of between $1.2 billion and $1.8 billion.

Before Ring, Jaime had also founded PhoneTag, the world’s first voicemail-to-text company, and Unsubscribe.com, a service to clean commercial email from inboxes.

Jaime says that the serial entrepreneurs are looking for that right product that they really want to sell, and Jaime found Ring which he believed in the most, and his persistence and faith helped him to get to the position where he stands today.

Cheng Wei : The Founder of China’s Biggest Transport Network DiDi Dache

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China has been the home for many startups and innovators including Jack Ma, the founder of the biggest eCommerce giant Alibaba Group, and Lei Jun, the founder of Xiomi. Another tech innovator who hails from China is Cheng Wei, the founder of China’s biggest autonomous technology conglomerate, DiDi. Wei is one of the fastest grown CEO in China and is often counted among the top three most successful CEOs in China.

Cheng Wei was born on 19 May 1983, in the southeastern province of Jiangxi, in Shangrao, China. He completed a graduate degree in administration from the Beijing University of Chemical Technology, and after graduating, joined as the assistant of the head at a foot massage company. Soon he realized that this is not the job he always intended to do, and after working for a period of one year at the company applied for the job of a salesperson for the business-to-business e-commerce service at Alibaba.

Cheng Wei
Image Source: fortune

Joining Alibaba proved to be a good decision for Wei, and in the span of six years, he was promoted to various positions in the company. He became the sales manager for the north of China. After six years he was appointed as the deputy general manager at the online payment department, Alipay, in Alibaba, becoming the youngest regional manager in the company.

In 2012, Wei left Alibaba to found his own company Beijing Orange Technology Co, and the first service that he started under the name of the company was DiDi Dache, a transportation service, with an initial capital of worth 15 million dollars from the tech giant Tencent. This car-rental service was a result of his experience with the cabs, as he had missed many flights due to as he could not catch the cabs on time.

People could use the service through an app and get an immediate pickup. The app also included a feature that allowed the users to book the cabs for the next day.

In 2013, the company completed its Series B funding, followed by a series C funding in 2014. In the same year, DiDi Dache appointed the ex-Goldman Sachs Asia managing director, Jean Liu (Liu Qing), as the as COO of the company.

In February 2015, DiDi Dache merged with the other major mobile-based transportation network Kuaidi Dache, making DiDi Kuaidi, keeping the management separate. In July 2015, the company had fundraising, which made it the world’s first private company having completed the largest single fundraising round and raised a worth of US$2 billion.

The company provides hiring service for cars, bus, minibus, chauffeur service, car rental service, bike-sharing service and has got over 10,000 employees working for the company. In 2013, Uber entered China, but DiDi maintained the strongest hold on the transportation market in China. In September 2015, Didi Kuaidi rebranded itself as Didi Chuxing

According to Wei, Artificial Intelligence is the next big thing, and his company is working on the very technology to bring new ideas and technology to DiDi. In 2017, the company started expanding in the other parts of the world starting from Brazil. Also, the company has invested in the other car-rental services like Grab, Lyft, Ola, Uber, 99, Taxify and Careem. The company currently is serving 550 million users across over 400 cities.

Wei is known as a Nationalist and many times has been heard of addressing China’s history and military in his speeches at big conferences. In September 2015, he got the chance to join China’s leader Xi Jinping, to visit the U.S. and attend the 8th U.S.-China Internet Industry Forum (USCIIF) and become the youngest person to participate in the forum.

The employees of his company see him as the greatest leader who is confident and knows how to deal with every situation. Despite the big rivalry between Tencent and Alibaba, he has been able to maintain a calm relationship between the two investors of his company.

In 2015, he was named in the list of “40 under 40” for the Chinese Business Leaders by Fortune. And in the same year, he was at number 1 in the list of China’s “40 under 40” along with Jean Liu. In 2016, he was named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year. In 2017, Time listed him among the 20 Most Influential People in Tech and was named one of the Global Game Changers by Forbes. In 2018 Forbes China named him among the 50 Most influential business leaders in China.

Sebastian Thrun : Father of Self-Driving Car & the Famous Educator who Founded Udacity

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Education is the biggest asset, but not everyone is able to get it due to many reasons like lack of money or resources. But to solve this problem, Sebastian Thrun, the famous educator, inventor, computer scientist and entrepreneur, took the initiative and founded Udacity. Many people might not be aware of this educational platform, but there are millions of people who actually have taken its advantage and have educated themselves. This online platform is providing academic as well as vocational educational courses to a global user base to help them get the best suitable job for them.

Early Life

Sebastian Thrun was born on 14 May 1967 in Solingen, West Germany to Winfried and Kristin Thrun. He completed a diploma in Computer Science, Economics and Medicine from the University of Hildesheim in 1988. In 1995, he received a PhD degree from the University of Bonn.

Thrun was always interested in robotics and automotive technologies. In 1994, he started working on the Rhino project under the guidance of his doctoral thesis advisor Armin B. Cremers.

Career

After completing his education, Thrun started working at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a research computer scientist. It was Thrun, who built the world’s first robotic tour guide along with his fellows at CMU, Wolfram Burgard and Dieter Fox, for the Deutsches Museum Bonn, in 1997. Another robot that he built was implanted at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, for a period of two weeks that guided over ten thousands of tourists.

sebastian thrun
Image Source: medium.com

In 1998, he was appointed as the assistant professor at the Robot Learning Laboratory of the university. Later, he co-founded a Master’s Program in Automated Learning and Discovery, along with the other faculty members. The course later became a PhD program for the students of CMU. At CMU he also built a humanoid interactive CMU/Pitt Nursebot and developed my mapping robots.

In 2003, he left CMU to join the Standford University as the associate professor and in 2004, he was promoted as the director of SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). In 2005, he started working on a new robot Stanley and made an entry in the DARPA Grand Challange. His robot won the first price.

In 2007, he again participated in the DARPA Urban Challenge with his robot “Junior” and won the second prize. Later in the same year, Thrun along with many Standford University students joined Google as sabbatical and co-developed the Google Street View.

After working for a period of seven years at Standford, in 2011, Thrun left the job to join Google as a Google fellow. He then attained the post of VP at Google and worked at on development of the Google driverless car system. At Google, he also founded Google X, where he founded Google Glass. In late 2011, he was introduced to Artificial Intelligence at Google, which was the biggest influence for him to start Udacity.

Founding Udacity

In January 2012, Thrun founded Udacity with David Stavens and Mike Sokolsky, a MOOC website, where he would teach people about everything. He sent e-mails to his students and to the people who were known to him about the website and asked them to enrol for the courses. For his surprise, he received 160000 enrollments for a class on Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, and more people joined from out of Standford. There were students who had never been to college, few were single moms and even students from war zone areas like Afghanistan joined the class. The platform was free, and Thrun was offering the same education to people that a Standford University student was getting by paying $58000 per year.

The company received its first investment from the venture capital firm, Charles River Ventures, and Thrun put his personal money worth $200,000 into it. In October 2012, Andreessen Horowitz invested $15 million in Udacity. By 2014, the company was teaching 12 full courses and 26 free courseware to 1.6 million global users.

Udacity basically partners with Universities and MNCs, to prepare courses that can help the students prepare for the competition and get the right job. The platform provides proper grades and certifications to the students on the basis of their performance in the tests.

In 2005, Thrun was named among the ‘Brilliant 5 by Popular Science’. He has been also awarded the Max-Planck-Research Award (2011), the Inaugural AAAI Ed Feigenbaum Prize (2011), Global Thinker number 4 by Foreign Policy (2012), ALVA Award by 99U (2013), and number 17 Influential Educator, by Noodle (2014), etc.

He has also co-authored a book named ‘Probabilistic Robotics’ along with his long-term co-workers Dieter Fox and Wolfram Burgard, which is a best seller in the Japanese market.

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.