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Rick Alden : The Visionary Genius & the Founder of Skullcandy

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

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

rick alden
Image Source: kcpw.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

trip-hawkins
Image Source: playworks.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Simonyi : American Computer Businessman & the Genius Behind Microsoft’s Word-Excel

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Microsoft has a history of great inventors and developers to its credit. One of such inventors is Charles Simonyi, who is the no. 40 employee of Microsoft and is also the man behind Microsoft’s most profitable products, including Word and Excel. Though he is famous for his inventions in the programming and development industry, he is also known as the only space traveller who has been to space twice. He is a philanthropist and a supporter of arts and science initiatives, too.

Early Life

Simonyi was born on 10 September 1948, in Budapest Hungary. His father Károly Simonyi was a Hungarian physicist and writer, who also worked as a professor of electrical engineering at the Technical University of Budapest.

Charles Simonyi
Image Source: hungarytoday

It was during his high school when he started working part-time as a night watchman at a computer laboratory and developed an interest in computers and programming. One of the computer engineers, from the lab, also started teaching him the basics of computers and by the end of his school, Simonyi mastered a few programming languages.

When he was 17, he moved to Denmark with a short-term visa and started working for A/S Regnecentralen. As a result, he got his visa extended, and he never went back to Hungary.

Career

In 1968, Simonyi moved to the US and joined the University of California, Berkeley, to pursue a B.S. degree in Engineering Mathematics & Statistics. As soon he completed his education, he got the opportunity to work with the Xerox PARC, where he worked in the development of one of the first personal computers Xerox Alto. And eventually, ended up inventing the first WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) text editor named Bravo, along with his co-worker Lampson.

In 1977, while working at Xerox, he received a PhD in computer science from Stanford University.

In 1981, Simonyi left Xerox and was hired by Microsoft to start an applications group at Microsoft. The first application he built was a WYSIWYG word processor, and Microsoft’s most valuable applications Word and Excel are the outcomes of the same application. It was Simonyi who introduced Microsoft with the concept of metaprogramming and OOPs which he learnt at Xerox. He also developed the “Hungarian notation convention” for naming variables, which was the part of his doctoral thesis and has been widely used inside Microsoft.

In 2002, Simonyi left Microsft to found Intentional Software, a company marketing the intentional programming concepts, along with co-founder Gregor Kiczales. The company works on developing designs tools and platforms, which programmers focus on capturing the intent of users and designers.

Simonyi was awarded the Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award for the industry-wide impact of his innovative work in information technology, in 2004. Microsoft acquired Intentional Software in April 2017.

Personal Life

Simonyi married 32 years younger Lisa Persdotter, in November 2008, in a personal ceremony. He lives in Medina, Washington, in his modern design villa, Villa Simonyi. He is fond of collecting paintings.

During 2006, Simonyi became interested in becoming a space tourist and took proper training for that. He signed agreements with the space tourism company, Space Adventures, Ltd., for a ten-day mission to the International Space Station (ISS) and rode a Soyuz TMA-10, on 7 April 2007, along with two Russian cosmonauts. On 26 March 2009, he went on his second trip to space aboard Soyuz TMA-14, becoming the only space traveller to have gone into space twice.

Simonyi and his wife both actively participate in philanthropy works, and in 2003 started a charitable organisation The Charles and Lisa Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences, to which Simonyi has donated over millions of dollars. In January 2004, Simonyi also started the Charles Simonyi Fund.

As an inventor, Simonyi currently holds 11 patents to his name.

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

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

Early Life

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

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

Hacking Career

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

George Hotz
Image Source: spectrum.ieee.org

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

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

Career with Facebook and Google

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

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

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

Founding Comma.AI

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

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

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

Personal Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Founders

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

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

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

Houseparty co-founders
Image Source: greylock.com

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

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

Founding HouseParty

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

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

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

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

Larry Kim – The Man Providing Ultimate Solutions To Advertising Industry

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Businesses are a great way to provide something to the world. But at the same time, businesses are also a big risk, because you never know what will happen at what time in the market. You also can’t assure whether your business will bloom or not. Being an entrepreneur means that you are always under immense pressure. One of the things that bug an entrepreneur is how to advertise their business. Advertising online is easy but tricky and takes a lot of expenditure. But with every problem comes a solution and that solution is provided to you by Larry Kim – the founder of Wordstream.

Wordstream is a company that provides services and software that help marketers get more out of online advertising. The company has been in the market for more than a decade now. The company is a Google Premier Partner and Bing Elite Partner. The company was founded by Larry Kim, which provides a suite of cross-platform advertising solutions. Wordstream started from a keyword research tool and has since evolved.

larry kim
Image Source skyword.com

Larry opening Wordstream is something that he himself had never expected. The story behind this journey is inspiring and explains how life throws random opportunities at us.
Larry, who is also known as ’Larry the Marketing Hack Artist’ never planned to be an entrepreneur. Brought up in Winnipeg, Larry joined the University of Waterloo through the tests the university held and enrolled self in Electrical Engineering. He was maintaining an excellent academic record and joined a co-op program. The program, however, was not much appealing to him. 

“I learned what I was not interested in, which is as important as learning what you’re interested in,” said Larry about his co-op program. He was employed in a software company, and that’s when he sensed the opportunity. The company introduced Larry to paid search as they wanted to look over their AdWords account.

Of course, Larry was no expert, but he soon evolved very fast in this job. His AdWords account generated a ton of clicks and millions of dollars in revenue. “The co-op program made me work in the Silicon Valley, and that is something magical. When you work there, the mind bug you to start your own startup.” But Larry faced a problem here. The question that bothered him was how will he turn his visionary idea in reality as it would take a lot of investment to build a company. 

He determined himself to get a venture capitalist to invest in him but a dozen meetings, hundreds of emails and calls resulted in nothing. Larry never gave up and ended up investing his own money to at least bootstrap the business. He hired two-three engineers and a marketer and started to work at Panera Bread. After some time, when Larry got his product right, he returned to the VCs. The VCs were surprised yet impressed by his efforts and decided to invest in the idea. (Two investors)

Since then, the company grew, and today is one of the top choices when it comes to learning to advertise. Wordstream analyzes, optimizes and maximizes your business advertisements. The rise of the company has also led it to win many awards including the Boston’s Globe ‘Best Places to Work’ in 2017. The service reduces the hassle of long PPCs by converting them into shorter time periods which is done week by week.

A year after the launch of Wordstream, Larry stepped down as the CEO of the company to become the CTO, so as to focus solely on marketing and product management. He left the company in early 2017 to start a new gig, ‘MobileMonkey’ which builds marketing bots for messaging platforms.
When enquired about leaving Wordstream, he said, “It’s a big company now, and I’m looking to go back to my roots as a product developer. I’m very excited about chatbots and AI, and there are some really interesting applications of this technology in marketing. I want to be one of the leading companies bringing this to market.”

Larry has been named Search Marketer of the Year by PPC Hero several times (2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017). He is also, very active on social media and is ranked #8 most popular author on Medium. The story of Larry Kim gives us the inspiration to not give up in hard times and get back up every time one gets a huge blow in life. He surely is the one to follow if you have an interest in businesses and entrepreneurship.