When you have a question or query in mind where you head for? Google, right? And when even Google fails to provide you satisfactory answer, you look for experts whom you can ask your question. While there are many forums and question answer platforms for specific niche like programming, android, Quora is one of the most popular question answer platform where you can ask or answer literary anything. Which other platform offers such liberty, engagement and answers from experts like Mark Zukerberg (Facebook CEO), Reed Hastings (Netflix CEO), Demi Moore, Marc Andreessen (VC)?
While working for Facebook, Adam D’Angelo felt that Facebook was stable now and he could leave. The co-founders of Quora Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever were having lunch in a Chinese restaurant and had a talk about the knowledge that is not shared on the internet or the knowledge that one has in his brain but is not shared. This problem statement gave rise to the development of “Quora”. Both had a vision in mind that there are lot many questions in our mind which are left unanswered and where many use internet to find answers, Quora could be the best solution to help with answers for these questions. They had a hard time deciding the name. After a lot of research and shortlisting many names which delineated questions and answers finally “Quora” was finalized.
Image Credit: WIkipedia
With a prototype code ready to be enhanced and developed they started with the development process in 2009. They had a code ready which they had to further develop. In a year they made the website available for public use. In the beginning they invited their friends to the site, who invited their friends which led to increase in the number of users significantly.
Quora has a community of people which consisted of Mark Zuckerberg, big business tycoons, VC’s, Entrepreneurs, people with excellent knowledge about a particular field, authors and bigwigs like Barrack Obama. This increased the quality of knowledge shared on Quora. Later on they also added credits and gifts feature, wherein if your answer was the best and good quality you would get credits for that. Quora also added a feature of blogging to let people share their knowledge and thoughts without limiting it to question answers format.
Once Mark Zuckerberg asked the Quora community that which company could help Facebook grow, and he ended up in buying “NEXTSTOP” which was a start-up. So this is what made Quora different than other sites. It bridged the gap between Twitter and Facebook. Since then Quora has come a long way where users can Upvote, Downvote and see the number of views. The continuous innovation has kept users engaged and its popularity has grown. Today there are approximately 100 million monthly users who visit the website.
Dhaval Nagare is an electrical engineer, a humourist, an impressionist and also likes writing. His writing include all sorts of topics and mostly he writes to inspire and motivate people. You can also catch him on facebook https://www.facebook.com/dhaval.nagare
Travis Kalanick, the man who today owns a $66 billion company, was once broke and faced a lawsuit of $250 billion which could have even landed him behind bars. It was his sheer determination and self-belief which gave him the power to rise up and shine on. He is the man behind the immensely successful company Uber. Uber, the taxi hailing app is a household name around the globe and has taken the transport industry by storm.
Travis Kalanick faced a lot of ups and downs in his life but despite the odds, with his skills and talent, he was able to start a worldwide ever-growing firm whose popularity stunned the world.
Image Credit: Wikipedia
Kalanick was born on August 6, 1976 in Los Angeles. He lived with his family, father, a Civil Engineer and his mother, a newspaper ad saleswoman, in Northridge, California. He did his graduation from Granada Hills High School Los Angeles, California. He had good interest in programming at a young age and started programming around seventh grade. From his childhood, he had skills necessary for being an entrepreneur which he used to hone by selling small items door to door.
After completing high school, he got admission in University of California, Los Angeles where he decided to pursue computer engineering to get a good job later but for a person, with high enough natural caliber of an entrepreneur like him, it was not supposed to last.
Dropping out of college and first startup failure
In University, he realized his true talent and the opportunities through College were insufficient for him to exercise his capabilities to their potential. In 1998, he made a risky yet bold decision to drop out of college with his friends. Travis Kalanick along with his friends Vince Busam and Michael Todd founded Scour Inc. and Scour Exchange which was a multimedia search engine and peer-to-peer file exchange service respectively. This was Kalanick’s debut into the corporate world.
The road to success is never easy and straightforward, so it was for Kalanick. He had to go through a lot of hardships and tough decisions to get to the point where he is today. Emerging in the corporate world with stunning pace it took him no time to get noticed by the big players of the industry.
Scour, the media search engine got very popular as it allowed people search and download videos, movies for free. This rising success of Travis Kalanick and his company was also seen as a threat to business by many other company owners of same niche. Soon Motion Picture Association of America and National Music Publisher Association along with more than 30 companies brought a copyright infringement lawsuit against Scour and sued Scour for a gigantic amount of $250 billion pushing Kalanick and his team to a corner.
With this lawsuit, his company was set to shut down. But, along with it, it could have also landed Kalanick and his team behind bars. But Travis Kalanick with his great presence of mind after considering various possibilities for future decided to save something than nothing and filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and avoided the fine as well as going to jail along with his team. However, as a result he had to shut down the company.
Sun rises but to set Again
This shutdown came as a shock to Kalanick but his persistence didn’t allow him to stop thinking new ideas. In 2001, considering previous incidents carefully along with the Scour’s engineering team he founded a new company called Red Swoosh which was also a peer-to-peer file sharing company that allowed users to exchange large multimedia files.
The idea of Kalanick with this company was to take on all the 33 companies who had sued Scour and turn them into Red Swoosh’s customers which he eventually did.
But things never go the way we want them to be. Soon the bandwidth prices declined and company lost its investments and they had to fire all their employees. But fate had more of it coming against Kalanick. IRS(Internal Revenue Service) ran a check on Red Swoosh and found that taxes were not being paid to the government completely, hence Kalanick’s company was asked to pay a fine of $110,000 or a jail term. Kalanick somehow managed to get the money as funding from Mark Cuban.
But this incident led to an internal dispute between Kalanick and Todd which eventually resulted in a falling out between the two and Travis took over the company. Thus, there was more pressure of work on him than he could handle, thinking about work all the time, he slowly lost all his friends and was left all alone in the end.
Later in 2007, things got completely out of hand and Travis had to sell the company to an American Corporation, Akamai Technologies, which bought Red Swoosh for $19 million.
“If someone can do it, then I can do it too”
With 2 such huge unsuccessful business startups at the age of 30, his life was in chaos, such circumstances could have broken down any human being but not Travis Kalanick. While trying his best to see through the current situation, he happened to see Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which is the work of a 70-year-old director. It instilled in him a thought process:
“If some old person can do something like that then I can still do much more than I have done yet”.
As a result, the diminished flame of perseverance to achieve the goal in his heart lit again and made him take another step in the corporate world. With his creativity and visionary thinking combined, he came up with a revolutionary idea of combining technology with everyday life.
Masterpiece: The Star-Lit Sky
In 2009, Travis regained the confidence of investors and managed to get a seed funding of $1.25 million and started Uber, which is a mobile application for hiring and ride-sharing vehicles. It works by connecting passengers and drivers of such available vehicles, and created a milestone in the history of both technology and corporate world by merging mobile technology with daily life in a creative yet very handy manner for common people.
Today, Uber is a well-known platform for hiring rides across the globe with just a tap. Just like many other products Uber has become a brand name for hiring rides. Being a convenient and easy to use application for mobile platform Uber was greeted by people with open hands. Since its launch in 2009, it has been able to increase its user base to more than 66 countries with the company’s net valuation to $66 billion, making Kalanick a Star Shining proudly in the Corporate World.
“The Lone Wolf”
Today being acknowledged as one of the world’s most renowned entrepreneurs, Kalanick is often invited to speak at various business events and conferences like LeWeb and Tech Cocktail to share his views on the present business matters being discussed worldwide.
It is Kalanick’s sheer determination and will power to reach greater heights with which he has gone against the tide from time to time to reach his goals. No matter how difficult a situation is, he always makes sure to work his way through it and see it to the end the way he wants.
Chasing his dreams with all he’s got did place him in Forbes’s List Of World Billionaires, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg compared to his achievements in life.
As Kalanick states:
“The entrepreneur community, there’s a certain kind of founder, they call them a ‘lone wolf.’ I probably fit in that category.”
Ikrant Kumar Bhatia is a Digital Marketing Enthusiast and is passionate about becoming an Entrepreneur. He is currently working as an Internet Marketer and planning to come up with his own Startup.
Sridhar Vembu is living the dream of every entrepreneur. He is constantly chased by VCs and he is rejecting them! The company, who are the makers of online Zoho Office Suite and other similar products, has reached to an extent where Mac Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, is desperate to buy the company, due to nervousness of getting out-beaten. But Sridhar rejected his offer as well.
Beginning of an era
image Credit: https://www.zoho.com
Sridhar Vembu belongs to a modest middle class family, situated in Chennai, India. He completed his schooling from a government aided school in Tamilnadu. He then went to IIT-Madras and obtained his undergraduate degree. At IIT, he met Tony Thomas, who was three years senior to him, and who is the co-founder of AdventNet, which later became Zoho Corporation. Later on, Sridhar moved to Princeton University, in 1989, and completed his Electrical Engineering.
In 1994, he completed his Ph.D. and joined Qualcomm, where he worked for two years. When his brother suggested the plan to start a company, he quit his job at Qualcomm and rushed back to India. The two brothers along with Tony Thomas founded Vembu Software.
All the business was bootstrapped, with the investment made only by family and friends. To this day, when the Zoho had become a multi-million dollar company, they still work without any external funding, rejecting the continuous offers they keep on receiving.
“On those fundamental principles, we are not budging,” says Raju Vegesna, 37, Zoho’s chief evangelist. “We keep getting calls from venture capitalists but Sridhar (CEO) has even blogged asking them not to bug us.”
The business started well and they sold their products to a lot of companies in Silicon Valley and in Japan too. By the end of the year 2000, they’d grown to 115 engineers in India, 7 employees in US, with a business of $10 Million USD.
The setback and the comeback
In the year 2001, during the Dot Com Bubble burst, the networking faced a huge setback. The company customers list reduced from 150 customers down to just three customers. This resulted into a lot of resources and engineers being idle.
What seemed like a setback was blessing in disguise. They took two mandatory decisions.
They took the management networking software which they sold as Order Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) and converted it into an Enterprise model. This gave birth to ManageEngine.
On the other hand they had an on demand effort. They invested some man power and resources into that and this gave rise to Zoho!
The company changed its name to AdventNet in 2005, and later changed it to Zoho Corporation in 2009. The business started growing over the internet for the rented software rather than selling the licensed copy for expensive software. They started Zoho.com, offering internet based software for work. They also started three more divisions, Zoho.com, WebNMS and Manage Engine. The graph of company’s growth headed upwards rapidly. Sridhar and team so loved the name Zoho that the domain name was purchased for $5000 from a us based startup that was in liquidation process.
By the end of the year 2012, the total revenue of the Zoho Corporation was near to $120 million USD and that of 2006 was $500 million USD, with 18 million users worldwide!
Image Credit: Wikipedia
Company culture and competition
Zoho has its own way of recruiting. They had set up their own Zoho University where they hire college dropouts and underprivileged students from low income backgrounds and train them to code and develop software products in India.
“I hardly spoke any English at the time, but I was really good at math… maybe that’s why they hired me,” says Babu, who was one of six young people recruited into what would become the first batch of trainees at Zoho University. He is now 28 and is product manager at Chennai based Zoho corporation private limited. Unlike other big shots in software industry, Vembu believes in smartness of individuals and hence recruits in a very innovative fashion. On one hand, where all the toppers are the point of attractions for regular recruiters, Vembu, who is an alumni of an elite institute, invests in training dropouts.
Today Zoho has more than 30 products that compete with big companies like Google & Salesforce. Vembu believe that he makes his prime minister and country proud in their Make In India campaign. ‘I am a great fan of Modi,’ says Vembu.
Although their customer base is spread worldwide, their major man power source is in India, that too, otherwise neglected youth. Thus, the true objective of make in India is fulfilled by Vembu and company.
Yogesh Pandey is the author of the novel, The Pragmatic (2016). He is currently pursuing his masters from Fergusson College, Pune.
He also runs a YouTube channel named Hard Reads, which is all about books and reading. He is an avid reader and is doing research in the field of Astrophysics.
Wangchuk from Ladakh, India is among the five Rolex award recipients of 2016, chosen from 144 participating countries. Ironically, at the age of nine, when he first moved to Srinagar, Sonam Wangchuk was thought to be a stupid child!
The reason was he didn’t look like his peers and would not respond to their addressing as he would not understand their language. This was the darkest period of his life. Unable to bear the treatment, he escaped to Delhi. After pleading his case to the principal, he got admission in the Vishesh Kendriya Vidyalaya (Special Central School).
He then went to National Institute of Technology, a premier Engineering Institute in India (known as REC at that time), to pursue an Engineering degree. He financed his own education by teaching students of tenth grade during his summer vacation. This experience was enlightening for him and it was here that he decided to enhance the education system rather than adding one more engineer to the crowd.
With this in his mind he founded SECMOL, the Students Educational and Cultural Movement Of Ladakh. SECMOL later launched Operation New Hope in collaboration with government education department and village population, which led the rise of 10th grade exam results from 5% to 75%! One more peculiarity of SECMOL is that it is powered by solar energy alone. And even in the numbing temperature of -30 degree Celsius, it is capable of keeping the students warm.
This was just the beginning of Sonam’s innovations.
Image Credit: http://icestupa.org
Sonam Wangchuk- The real Fung Suk Wangdu
In January 2014, Scrutinizing the situation faced by farmers in the critical planting months of April and May, he launched a project called Ice Stupa (artificial glacier), to find a solution against water crisis.
Before Sonam, many change-makers tried to build artificial glaciers. The solution was indeed feasible but had its own limitations.
‘I saw the problems these people were facing. The artificial glaciers were built at a very high altitude and villagers or workers were reluctant to climb so high. I wondered why we couldn’t construct glaciers right there in the village. The temperature is low enough to keep the water frozen – we just needed a smart way to make these glaciers,’ says Wangchuk.
Within two months, Sonam Wangchuk and his team successfully built a two story prototype of ice stupa that could store around 150,000 liters of winter stream water which nobody wanted at time. The ice stupa was located at the height of 10,400 feet above the sea level, the lowest possible altitude and the warmest possible location. It was the most challenging location and if it could be build there, it could be built anywhere.
Another problem surfaced up when the complete project almost failed due to the low quality and spurious pipes supplied by unethical traders resulting in loss of 2.5 million Indian rupees and many days of hard work and labor put in by villagers and the team.
But Sonam Wangchuk, who is also said to be the inspiration behind the Rancho’s character in the superhit Bollywood movie 3 idiots (2009), is the last person who will quit his work after getting disheartened by a setback.
“We were cheated and disappointed and were staring at a failed project when thankfully Mr. Ajit Jain of Jain Irrigation stepped in to supply the correct pipes immediately and Commander B. Manikantham of the Indian Air Force volunteered to airlift the pipes to Phayang. That is how we were able to salvage the project,” says an optimistic Wangchuk.
In addition to a solution to the ultimate water crisis, Ice Stupas also reduces the threats caused by glacier lake outbursts floods or GLOF. The Himalayan states of India- Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir are surrounded by about 300 potentially dangerous lakes formed by glacier melt. His efforts were appreciated worldwide and he received the honorable Rolex award in 2016.
With this endeavor, Wangchuk and his team intend to build up to 20 ice stupas, each 30 meters in height and capable of supplying millions of liters of water.
“The Rolex Award funds will support the project and promote ice stupas as a climate-change adaptation and desert-greening technique,” Mr Wangchuk said in a statement released by Rolex.
Yogesh Pandey is the author of the novel, The Pragmatic (2016). He is currently pursuing his masters from Fergusson College, Pune.
He also runs a YouTube channel named Hard Reads, which is all about books and reading. He is an avid reader and is doing research in the field of Astrophysics.
What started as an attempt to suffice the monetary requirements of a teenager, is now a multi-million dollar company whose customer list includes Google, Facebook, Microsoft and the federal government of United States. When Nadhanis moved to Kolkata, Pallav Nadhani was admitted in the La Martiniere for Boys School.
‘Here I got the aspiration that I want to be like them. And for me to be like them, I really need to work hard. I need to be on top of the game in whatever I am working on,’ he says.
It wasn’t feasible for him to be like them with a measly pocket money of Rs. 1,000. He was reluctant to ask his father for extra pocket money. Thus emerged the necessity of finding a way to make some fortune of his own.
His first endeavor was in the field of writing. He came across Wrox Press’ website ASPtoday.com, which paid a generous amount for innovative articles. Pallav Nadhani made an impressive amount of $2,000 by writing two articles. The third article he wrote turned out to be a life changing milestone in his journey.
Nadhanis owned a computer, which was a luxury in those days(2001-02). His father owned a web design company where Pallav initially worked. His share of work included preparing charts on Microsoft Excel. He found those charts extremely dull and boring. Along with this, he was also working with Macromedia Flash player (Adobe Flash now) for making designs for senior Nadhani’s company. He began exploring ways in which he could combine both to create better charts. He wrote an article on this idea for ASPtoday and made $1,500 from the article, which was the primal investment for his entrepreneurial journey.Image Credit: http://www.fusioncharts.com
Still in his school, Pallav, who calls himself an accidental entrepreneur, started his company Infosoft Global, based on the very idea of making interactive charts for business world. For the first three years, he did the work of designing, marketing, making and receiving calls, all by himself.
The company started growing and things were never the same again. The growth was so stupendous that in the year 2005, senior Nadhani, who according to Pallav is a sucker for growth and adventure, shut down his company and joined his son’s venture. Currently, he holds the position of CFO in the company. They also hired 20 employees and acquired office space in Bangur, Kolkata.
But Pallav Nadhani isn’t someone whose thirst is quenched easily. Expanding his company’s profile, he moved to Bangalore in the year 2010. In Bangalore he set up a company which excelled not only in the quality of the product it delivered, but also in the management and organizational aspect. The next year FusionCharts earned a revenue of 4.5 million USD.
Unlike his father, whose business ventures ranged from selling bicycles to writing books and running a computer training center, Pallav believes in a focused approach. Even after being a millionaire, he is still stuck with the idea he believed in when he was just a teenager.
‘I wish I could be like him (senior Nadhani). Being multi-faceted helps you have a very nice perspective of life. But if you have to really excel at something, you need focus,’ he said in an interview with Forbes magazine. In the same interview he talks about his plan for the next ten years, ‘I know that for the next 10 years, I want to do just one thing. Build software products and build the software product industry in India.’
Today, FusionChart’s client list includes 50,000 clients spread over 118 countries. In 2010, US president Barack Obama selected FusionCharts to design digital dashboard for the federal administration, the Federal IT Dashboard. It became the first Indian start-up to gain the attention of the Obama administration.
Yogesh Pandey is the author of the novel, The Pragmatic (2016). He is currently pursuing his masters from Fergusson College, Pune.
He also runs a YouTube channel named Hard Reads, which is all about books and reading. He is an avid reader and is doing research in the field of Astrophysics.
Larry’s wife divorced him saying that he lacked ambition and was irresponsible. Three decades later, the same unambitious guy was amongst top ten richest men on the planet with a net worth of $48.6 Billion USD
‘Virtually everyone important in my life, my family, my teachers, (cis) my girlfriend wanted me to be a doctor. Over time, their dreams became my dreams. They convinced me I should be a doctor,’ said Larry Ellison, a billionaire, a philanthropist and a tech genius, in his USC commencement speech.
But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t do it. After a few unhappy years in the pre-medical school it became clear to him that he didn’t like the courses he was taking. His anatomy class appeared to him as a pointless form of psychological torture. He couldn’t study something that didn’t interest him. He even thought of himself as a person who lacked discipline or was selfish. But he was not able to make himself into a person he wasn’t.
Eventually, he stopped trying and at the age of 21, he dropped out of college. He drove from Chicago to California, a ride that was about to change the course of database managements systems forever.
“It (Berkeley) was the perfect place for an undisciplined, selfish, twenty-something to begin his search for himself, a righteous cause and a job that he loved”, Larry said. In Berkeley he wrote songs, became an environmentalist and worked as a river guide and a rock climbing instructor. Although he loved the jobs, they didn’t pay him much, so he started working as a computer programmer. He got a similar satisfaction from programming as he got from solving math problems or playing chess.
It was here that he made real progress in his journey of self-discovery and he had also found a cause. He had jobs that he loved and one amongst them paid his bills. He was happy with his life. His wife wasn’t. She thought of him as a college drop-out who spent too much time doing stupid things. She wanted him to be a full time programmer. As a compromise, he took a job at UC Berkeley and started taking classes. One of the several classes he took was of sailing. After the class was over he was in love with the ocean and wanted to buy a sail boat.
According to his wife, this was the single stupidest thing she had heard in her entire life. She accused him of being irresponsible and lacking ambition. She kicked him out and divorced him.
His family was already mad at him for leaving the medical school. Once again, he wasn’t able to stand up to others’ expectations. He wasn’t disappointed with himself though. He enjoyed the company of nature around him. He had a job that he loved and made money which was more than he needed. For the first time he was certain that he was going to survive in this world. A huge burden of fear had been lifted.
Throughout his twenties he continued experimenting and kept changing jobs till he realized that most fulfilling programing jobs were found in a cluster of companies situated in Silicon Valley. He worked with various software start-ups and also with well-established companies but he never found a job that pleased him as much as sailing. Therefore, he created one.
He founded a company, Software Development Laboratories (SDL), later named Oracle, with an intention to create a satisfying job for himself. The initial investment was of $2000 USD of which $1200 USD was of Larry’s. He estimated that the company will employ no more than 50 employees.
Today, Oracle has employed more than 150 thousand people. He intended to establish the world’s first relational database. Everyone said it was a crazy idea. It turned out to be the craziest. And as his beloved friend, Steve Jobs, who was also the official wedding photographer in his fourth wedding, once said, ‘People who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.’
With this idea he became one of the richest man on the planet with a net worth of $48.6 Billion USD. He also loves flying and has two military jets at his disposal and is amongst 129 Billionaires to sign The Giving Pledge. In 2012 he bought an island called Lanai in Hawaii.
Oracle turned out to be one of the most successful software companies ever. In the year 2016, the annual revenue of Oracle was $37.04 Billion USD.
Yogesh Pandey is the author of the novel, The Pragmatic (2016). He is currently pursuing his masters from Fergusson College, Pune.
He also runs a YouTube channel named Hard Reads, which is all about books and reading. He is an avid reader and is doing research in the field of Astrophysics.
