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Venmo : The Experience of Money Transfer Made Easy

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You do not get success in the first few attempts, but you sure get the experience. Trying and trying again always gets you with some good exposure and enhanced skill, such that the end product you create is always ‘the product’ that changes your life. One such similar story is of the founders of Venmo, a mobile payment service, who from being clueless about their future were able to build a multimillion startup.

The Founders

Venmo, an online payment app, was founded by two friends, Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail. The two had joined the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, where they got to share their room as freshmen. Iqram and Kortina both opted for Computer Science as their major, but later, Kortina switched to philosophy and creative writing. The reason being that he was already able to study computers and programming through homework exercises, so to utilize the university fee, he changed his subjects.

With time, the two became good friends and together, started working on different projects. The first project, on which they worked together, was a college advertisement website. They named the website My Campus Post. Along with the website, they spent most of their time on various other projects, but all they were doing as a hobby.

Venmo founders
Image Source: fastcompany.com

But Kortina realised that the graduation time is near, and they had no plans for their career only when his mother asked him about his career plans. This hit his mind, as he and Iqram, both of them need to make a career plan for them.

Beginning the Career

The two decided to move to West Philly, as the rents were way cheaper there. Here they started advertising about website development services from door to door and started getting some work. They also started their own online music selling project named Philafunk, at the same time. The platform provided the musicians with the facility to sell their music, and the website would charge them a minimal fee on every sale.

The two had skills, but they did not have real-world experience. So they decided to take a job. For the next two-three years, they worked for different technology firms, including iminlikewithyou.com.

They kept their part-time work of developing websites running alongside and continued to look for the life-changing idea. They even developed software for shops that could be used as a ledger or register on a laptop.

They came up with the idea of Philafunk while enjoying a Jazz show in the city. Philafunk enabled the musicians to accept money for the subscription, music or the merchandise people bought from them.

Founding Venmo

While the two were working on Philafunk in NYC, Iqram forgot to bring his wallet and borrowed some money from Kortina and wrote a cheque to him. This hit his mind, as he was using the traditional method of paying the money when he was using their mobile for every other thing. The two knew PayPal was already there for online money-related transactions, but even though people were not using it.

This led them to think of a new idea of developing a method to send and receive money through their mobile. They started working on the project and made use of the text message, i.e. SMS, for sending and receiving the status of money transferred. The working of the new payment method was quite derived from the Philafunk model, where now everyone (not only musicians) could receive the money for anything (not just for selling music).

The two also included the option to add a small description about for what the payment was made, such that people could keep the record of when and who they paid money for. They put the name of the service as Venmo. ‘Ven’ in Venmo has been derived from the Latin word vendere, which means ‘to sell’ and ‘mo’ is short for mobile.

The two were ready with the prototype of Venmo and started meeting people for its seed investment. But unfortunately, they could not convince any major investors. But they had to launch the service, and they took the help of Magon-Ismail’s old boss at Ticketleap and his father with the investments. They launched Venmo in August 2009. But in the next few months, the popularity of the app led the two co-founders to raise a $100,000 in debt financing.

The Rise of the Company

By the end of the year, the company shifted the model from website and SMS to mobile application and launched an iOS app in December. In January 2010, they got the opportunity to represent their product at the Mobile Monday Mid Atlantic Demo Night. Here they asked the audience to send some donation money to the relief fund for people suffering from an earthquake in Haiti. The relief fund raised a $600 in just a few minutes of announcement and in a week, there was a total donation of worth $15,000 through Venmo. This was one of the best marketing moves for the company.

The company raised another $1.2 million in May 2010, in a funding round led by RRE Ventures, followed by another $400,000 in debt financing in June 2010. The next month, Venmo launched its Android app. The coming year, the company partnered with most of the banks running in the U.S, for the payments.

By 2012, the growth rate for the company reached 30 per cent per month, and it was carrying out $10 million in payments every month.

On August 16, 2012, Braintree, another technology and mobile payment company, acquired Venmo for $26.2 million. But in September 2013, eBay acquired Braintree and all its subsidiaries, such that Venmo became the part of PayPal.

Venmo still is one of the famous payment apps in the U.S. and only serve in the U.S. As of 2017, a million users were using Venmo for mobile payments, and it carried out nearly $50 billion worth of transactions in 2018.

Capital One logo

Richard Dana Fairbank : The Founder of One of the Largest Banks in the U.S.

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One of the most influential and financially predominant individual with quality of great leadership is what defines Richard Dana Fairbank. Banking business can make a profit like a spreading wildfire, and that is how Fairbank turned the wheel of his life.

Richard Fairbank, a billionaire in addition to the successful American businessmen, is the founder and owner of the bank holding company, Capital One Financial Corporation. He founded the company in 1994, along with Nigel Morris, an English businessman. Fairbank’s new strategies for credit models changed the entire face of the banking industry, thus, entering into a new era of entrepreneurship.

Education

Fairbank was born in 18th September 1950. In 1972, he graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in economics. Later, in 1981, he completed his MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. Almost 12 years after founding Capital One, he received an award on excellent leadership from his university.

Career Before Capital One Happened

Before founding Capital One, Fairbank worked in a few different companies. He worked as a partner and consultant in Strategic Planning Associates (1985-1990), followed by the head of the credit card unit in Signet-Banking Corporation (1990-1994).

Richard Dana Fairbank
Image Source: knownetworth.com

It was in the 1980s when Fairbank met Morris in a consulting firm, their mutual workplace. Since then, the idea of implementing new technologies to amend credit card plans hovered over their minds. Both Fairbank and Morris wanted to change the entire idea of charging an annual fee for credit cards holders, replacing it with different schemes for a different segment of the population. This is where they needed the contribution of information technology to manipulate data of consumers and their purchase list.

With the help of data management software, they were able to divide the entire population of credit card users into different categories, followed by offering them different plans and offers. They pitched Oracle Corporation for the job of database management, and they agreed to the new strategy of the company. It was due to this credit card model, both of them got hired by Signet-Banking Corp, in 1990.

Soon after the two economists joined Signet, the bank offered around three hundred different credit plans to its customers, charging the interest rate according to the divided categories. This was a breakthrough for both of them, but this was just the beginning. Fairbank along with Morris also developed a new strategy of transferring money from one credit card to another, with a relatively much lower rate of interest. This attracted quite a robust number of new customers, hiking the profit to an unexpected level.

And, in 27th July 1994, Signet announced the credit card division split-off, renaming it as Capital One. Richard Dana Fairbank was made the CEO of the company, and currently, it is the seventh-largest U.S commercial bank by assets.

The success of Capital One

The success of Capital One became so enormous that it superseded the sale and profit of Signet, its parent company. Fairbank made Capital One look like a massive credit card business in partnership with a bank rather than a spun-off segment of a banking business.

By 1995, Capital One completely became an independent business whereas Signet came under the acquisition of First Union Corporation. Within a single year of its establishment, Capital One made a 25% increase in the net income of the company, making it to the list of top 10 credit card issuers in the U.S.

Capital One is an ideal banking company, where excellent business models are backed up by strong database manipulating software. The company first analyses the needs of a customer and then build credit card plans accordingly.

After many years of successful business, during early 2000, people started questioning about the algorithms used by Capital One to access information about customers, and hence, the stock prices dropped. Though ultimately nothing risky was found in the algorithm, Fairbank and Morris saw it as a future threat to the company and decided to form an executive board to make decisions for the company.

Achievements of Fairbank

Richard Dana Fairbank was honoured with the award of Washingtonian’s “Business Leader of the Year” and Credit Card Management’s “Entrepreneur of the Year”. He is also listed among the top ten Bank CEOs, who became a billionaire and have achieved many other things.

Personal Life

Fairbank is married to Chris Fairbank, and they have eight children. They are settled in Virginia.

Monzo: A Banking Business that Turned Out to be an Innovative Success

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In a world where technology is advancing at an exponential rate, services like online banking are quite common to people. The banking apps that are being launched these days have already been proven to be very useful, due to the ease and the various facilities these provide. With the help of those apps, we are able to pay without withdrawing cash, transfer money abroad, and what not. Monzo Bank Ltd. is one such exclusive mobile-based bank, based in the United Kingdom. Only four years to its establishment and Monzo has made a jaw-dropping profit serving more than 2 million customers.

The History Behind the Success

Monzo was launched in 2015, with headquarters in 38 Finsbury Square, London, and back then, it was known as Mondo. Currently, Tom Blomfield is serving the company as the CEO, and Gary Hoffman is the company’s chief executive and the chairman.

Mondo was founded by Tom Blomfield, Jonas Huckestein, Jason Bates, Paul Rippon and Gary Dolman. The five of them used to work in the same challenger bank (Startling Bank) before they founded Mondo. The growth curve of the company impressed everyone since the beginning, especially when Mondo made history in the quickest crowd-funding campaign, in February 2016. The company raised $1 million within a time span of 96 seconds, and hence brought some good fame and lucrative investors to the house.

monzo
Image Source: bluegg.co.uk

Initially, the company was approved to have a restricted banking license by the financial regulatory bodies of the UK, but later in April 2017, the restrictions were withdrawn. The customers of this app used prepaid debit cards until the current accounts were accessible to them, and in April 2018, the prepaid scheme was shut down.

When the company carried business under the trade name Mondo, there were many complains launched and open challenges, that there already exists a company with the exact trade name. So, without going into many grimy situations, the founders changed the name of the company. They announced the name Monzo, officially on 25th August 2016. In the same year, Monzo raised around £4.8 million through ‘interim’ funding round, followed by another £2.5 million by Crowdcube crowd-funding campaign.

From 29th September 2016, the app for Monzo was made available to the public of the UK, and those who visited the office in person were provided with private beta. So, all you needed was a mobile app and a prepaid debit card to become a customer of Monzo and enjoy the endless facilities.

One of the biggest reasons that the company turned out to be such a mammoth corporation in no time was its transparency. The official website of Monzo had a live counter which showed the rollout with constant updates.

In July 2017, all the eligible customers were welcomed to sign in for a preview of the full current account, and in October 2017, Monzo declared that it would cease the free ATM withdrawals (abroad). The company replaced it with a new system, where it provided free withdrawals up to £200 and charged a 3% fee on each transaction after the limit is over. This new scheme started working on 18th December 2017. Monzo also issued Debit Mastercard cards for all the new and existing customers who signed up for the current accounts.

In June 2018, Monzo declared direct collaboration with IFTTT, which enabled the users to connect Monzo with smart devices. The company gained more attention and fame after it spotted a Ticketmaster (An American based ticket sales and distribution company) data breach in June 2018, which had held in April 2018. By this time, Monzo had already outweighed the competitions in the market and embraced more than a million customers.

In June 2018, Monzo declared that incorporation with TransferWise will now allow money transfers globally through the app. And later, the company announced that on savings of more than £1,000, it will provide interest in partnership with Investec. In November 2018, Monzo added another feature of paying cash into its respective Monzo accounts charging £1 for every deposit. And the year ended with Monzo having an enormous win in the Crowdcube crowd-funding campaign where it held £20 million and reached the target within a few hours.

In January 2019, Monzo declared its collaborations with Flux to give loyalty points to the customers and thus gaining more popularity.

Thinking Out of the Box

Undoubtedly, there are many other tech savages out there with better versions of online banking and finest technology, but what makes Monzo so different? Everyone focuses on the victory, the team has achieved in the journey of four years, but not the strategies that made them conquer it.

The major key to their success was the vivid observations that the team made, which helped them grab the earliest opportunity to expand the business with the beginning of the digital age. By the time Monzo established its business, more than 45% of the population used net banking for their daily purpose. So, only a little or no investment was needed to promote the technology among commoners.

The company focused more on listening to what the customers suggested, to make it more user-friendly, and the opinions were welcomed through social media platforms. This played a very important role in strengthening the bond between the customers and the company. And consequently, when the referrals increased, Monzo started making its customers feel comfortable and safe.

All these brilliant policies resulted in such an overwhelming success of Monzo, making every start-up dream about its glorious triumph. Today, the company has around 776 employers providing support to millions of customers 24/7.

Dennis Crowley: Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Foursquare

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Passion and dream when mixed together, results in great combinations, and when you meet with people with similar interest, the resultant is a success story. Crowley Dennis got lucky when he met his partner Naveen Selvadurai and both co-founded Foursquare. Foursquare is a local search-and-discovery mobile app, which became popular in no time, due to some of its unique features like Tips and Tastes. It offers awards to its old users and calls them Superusers.

Crowley was born on 19 June 1976, in Medway, Massachusetts, where he attended the Xaverian Brothers High School. After completing his school education, he went to Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where he received a B.A. degree, in 1998. As soon as Crowley graduated, he started working with Jupiter Communications, and later, in 2000, became the product developer at Vindigo a mobile app development company.

crowley dennis
Image Source: irishamerica.com

After working for two years with the company, Crowley left his job, in order to complete his higher education, and in 2004, he received an M.P.S. master’s degree from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. During his time at the NYU, he started working on his graduate thesis project, Dodgeball, along with one of his fellow student, named Alex Rainert, in 2003.

Dodgeball was a location-based social networking software, that enabled its users to enter their location and find out the locations of the friends as well as interesting venues nearby. The project later became Crowley’s first startup and earned popularity. In fact, only after two years of its inception, Google acquired Dodgeball in 2005, and Crowley started working with the company. But the company shut down all the operations of Dodgeball in 2007, and Crowley left Google.

In the same year, Crowley joined another tech company named, Area/Code. This was the place where he met his future business partner Naveen Selvadurai. Naveen belongs to the Indian descent and has got a master’s degree in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. After working with tech giants like Lucent, Sony, Nokia and Sun Microsystems, he was working with a startup company in the same office space as Crowley was.

The two met and shared a common interest, ‘location-based services’. Naveen had experience with iPhone stuff and was interested in hacking city apps. On the other hand, Crowley was working on mobile apps and has just sold his own location-based service to Google. After discussing ideas, the two came to the conclusion that they must build another location-based service similar to Dodgeball.

The two started working on the idea, Naveen working on the iPhone stuff, and Crowley handling all the website’s work. As a result, after working for a few months they developed FourSquare, in late 2008, and launched the service at the SXSW in 2009. The service was launched in 100 metro cities worldwide.

The service not only allowed to put the check-ins to find out nearby friends but also suggested the users of the nearby interesting places. The service provided a new feature a personalised list for the users titled To-dos.

In the span of 4 years, the company had registered over 7 million users, and by the mid of 2011, it was expected that the company would pass 750 million check-ins. In fact, the then President Barak Obama also registered to the service in 2011, in order to take tips from the White House staff from the locations he had visited.

The main reason behind the success of the app was the gamification it rendered. The gamification in the app helped it become more interesting and encouraged more user engagement. In the year of 2010, there were news making rounds that the major tech giants like Yahoo!, Facebook and Microsoft were rivalling to acquire Foursquare for a rumoured $100-150 million. The app offers services for both enterprises and consumers.

Crowley worked as the CEO of the company for a long period of 7 years, and later, became the Executive Chairman of the company.

Crowley was named in the list of Fortune Magazine’s “40 Under 40” for two consecutive years in 2010 and 2011, and further was named in the list of Vanity Fair’s “New Establishment” in 2011 and 2012. He was also named one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35 by MIT Technology Review TR35.

SoundCloud : The Success Story of YouTube of Music

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Today, there are several audio streaming services, including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Amazon Unlimited, etc., available online, but there was a time when there was no such platform, where people could access audio music online. But then, in 2007, two students from Stockholm School of Economics, Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, influenced with the success of YouTube and Flickr, realized the need for a music sharing website, where artists could connect, and founded SoundCloud.

The Founders

Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, both belong to the Swedish descent and were always interested in music. Since his childhood, Ljung was interested in both music and technology and had decided to become a sound engineer in future. By the time, he had become quite skilled in the music creation and produced an album and was able to secure a job at a post-production studio, after completing his school education. But again, he was more concerned about his studies, so he joined the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

ljung and wahlforss
Image Source: sign-in-box.com

On the other hand, Wahlfros was also another alumni at the same institution pursuing a degree in MA. The two met at the college UNIX lab and found many things in common with each other, especially the passion for music. The two started spending more time together and did many university projects together.

Founding SoundCloud

At the time, Flickr was doing exceptionally well, and YouTube was emerging as a powerful video hosting platform. As the two were into music creation themselves, they thought of a new startup, through which they could make other music artists to share their music with other people and collaborate with different global artists, online.

After digging deep and working hard for a long time, the two launched SoundCloud, in 2007, keeping music and sound as its core objective. They founded SoundCloud in Stockholm, Sweden, but eventually established the headquarter of the company in Berlin in the same year.

In 2008, they launched the website for SoundCloud, where artists could share their creation and look for collaborations. But soon, the popularity of SoundCloud turned the platform into a music distribution platform.

The concept was unique, so it became popular in no time. In fact, in just two years, SoundCloud received worth €2.5 million investment from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, in the Series A funding. In 2010, the company reported one million registered users for the service. In 2011, in the Series B funding, SoundCloud raised a worth of US$10 million. In the same year, the company got raised to 10 million registered users, and in the next year, the number went to increase up to 15 million users.

Although since 2014, the company has been incapable of handling the huge empire it has built in a few years, SoundCloud is still working hard to maintain its spot in the music distribution industry. Even there has been the rise of several other new music platforms, it is SoundCloud that took the first step in providing the new artists to share their work on an online platform, and eventually, gave birth to new music distribution system.

SoundCloud has been the biggest medium for many artists to showcase their talent, and artists like Iza Lach from Poland and Lorde from New Zealand got their first break, through SoundCloud, and today are one of the most in-demand singers.

Alex Ljung served as the CEO of SoundCloud for almost a decade and stepped down from his position in 2017. Wahlforss holds the position of CPO in the company. He has also produced a few tracks that are available on SoundCloud itself.

Masaru Ibuka : Japanese Electronics Industrialist & Co-founder of Sony

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Don’t work for the profits, work for innovation, this is what the Japanese researcher and the entrepreneur, Masaru Ibuka, had always followed. The co-founder of Sony Co. is one of the revolutionary figures of Japan’s electronics industry. The believer of hard work, Ibuka, is the biggest inspiration for not only the people of Japan but people from around the world. His dedication and hard work gave new means to the global electronics industry.

Early Life

Ibuka was born on 11 April 1908, in Nikko, Tochigi Prefecture, Japan. He was a studious kid at school and loved performing experiments in the labs. He completed his bachelor’s degree in electrical communications from the Waseda University, in 1933. During the college, he researched on experimental projection-type television system using a nitro-benzol Kerr cell and wrote his college thesis on the same.

masaru ibuka
Image Source: prabook.com

After graduating from the college, Ibuka started working at the Photo-Chemical Laboratories Inc. He was employed as a researcher and was involved in the research work for the technology of sound recording on movie films. In 1937, he joined Nippon-Ko-On where he worked on the development of the home-based movie sound equipment. Later, in 1940 he left Nippon-Ko-On and joined the Japan Measuring Instrument Co., Ltd where he was involved in the research work on the mechano-electronic frequency-selective relays and telecommunication system. In the wake of World War II, he joined the department of Imperial Navy Wartime Research Committee.

Founding Sony

In 1945, Ibuka left his job in Navy and opened a radio repair shop at the Hirokiya Department Store in Nihonbashi, Tokyo. Later, with the capital of 190,000 Yen, he founded Tokyo-Tsushin Kenkyusho (Tokyo Telecommunications Laboratory) Co., following a merger into the Tokyo-Tsushin-Kogyo Co. In 1946, another Japanese researcher, Akio Morita, found out about Ibuka’s venture through the newspaper and was wanted to work with him. So he met Ibuka and the two co-founded Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation. Morita’s helped the two raise the funds for the company.

With the end of World War II and the big atom bomb attacks on Japan, the economy of Japan was devastated. Both the co-founders wanted to help in the economy of Japan and started their research work under the name of their newly founded company. In 1950, they were able to get a license to work on the transistor technology, becoming one of the first companies to use the transistor technology to non-military purposes. In the same year, the company launched Japan’s first tape recorder, the “G type.” In 1958, the company released another transistor radio, which was first of its kind. The company was soon providing its services to its international clients.

In 1958, the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation was re-branded as Sony, after the co-founders realized that the Americans had trouble saying the name of the company. The next big invention of the company was the world’s first transistor television. In 1967, Sony Co. launched its first colour TV named Sony Trinitron.

Ibuka served the company as the president from 1950 to 1971, and then became the chairman of Sony from 1971, and retired in 1976.

Sony Co., released its first Walkman personal stereo in 1979, followed by a Handycam video camera in 1989, the famous PlayStation in 1994, and a Blu-ray Disc recorder in 2003. The company is a conglomerate and currently manufacture almost everything from a Smartphone to laptops, cameras to television, the electrical vehicle to home-based products. Sony Co. has built an international empire and has set its arms into the finance, entertainment and health sector as well.

According to the records, the company made a total revenue of 507.6 billion yen in the financial year 2017. In 2018, the company had 117,300 employees working in its different branches in different countries.

The company headquarter is located at Minato, Tokyo, Japan.

Personal Life

Ibuka was one of the prominent research engineers who brought innovation in the field of his interest. For his contributions in the rise of technology and the economy of Japan, he was awarded multiple awards. He even received the three doctorate degrees from three different institutions, i.e. from the Sophia University (1976), Tokyo, Waseda University, Tokyo (1979) and Brown University, US (1994). He also received the IEEE Founders Medal in 1972 from IEEE and the highest distinction of the Scout Association of Japan, the Golden Pheasant Award, in 1989.

Ibuka also wrote a book named ‘Kindergarten is Too Late’ in 1971. According to the book, the leaning for humans begins at the age of 3. On 19 December 1997, he died at the age of 89 in Tokyo, Japan.