Your Tech Story

entrepreneur

shopclues

Sandeep Aggarwal : Serial Entrepreneur, Angel Investor and the Founder of Shopclues

Leave a Comment / Founder, India, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

The emerging Indian start-ups are bringing a great revolution in the entrepreneurial world. The young Indian minds and their untamed passion is creating history in the 21st-century economy. But, it isn’t always the young minds, because it is known that experience makes you wiser.

Sandeep Aggarwal is one such passion-driven entrepreneur who has successfully launched two start-ups, Shopclues and Droom, and now is one of the most influential men in the business world. The idea of Shopclues was pondering in his mind since 2010, but finally, he founded it in July 2011, followed by the launch of Droom in April 2014. The entire business was set up in Silicon Valley, and later, it shifted to India. Aggarwal faced a lot of difficulties and failed plans before he finally founded Shopclues.

Early Education

After passing school, Aggarwal pursued a degree in B.Com followed by a master’s from Indore. While doing his master’s, he also interned with Kotak Mahindra, Mumbai.

The First Step into the Professional World

Sandeep Aggarwal Founder Shopclues
Image Source: techcircle.in

Aggarwal first stepped into the professional world when he landed an internship in Kotak Mahindra, in 1995. The internship was in Mumbai, and it was his first chance to interact with intelligent minds around him and learn from them. He was perfectly groomed in this duration of his internship on how to deal with people and work at a professional level. He realized that most of us might have proper skills and knowledge, but only a few knew how to expose it professionally. Aggarwal, in one of its interviews, said that this internship also helped him strengthen his analytical skills and strategic thinking, apart from business communication and personality development.

Life before Shopclues happened

After completing his master’s degree, Aggarwal worked in the field of investment banking. While working in it, something changed his mind, and he decided to move to the US. He joined the Washington University, St. Louis, USA to pursue an MBA degree, and after receiving the degree, he worked for two different companies. After leaving these jobs, he joined Wallstreet and served eight years as an internet analyst, where he was given research covers on companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo! etc. Aggarwal is also a chartered member of TiE Silicon Valley.

While Aggarwal was still working as an internet analyst, in 2010, he visited India quite a few times to launch research coverage for MakeMyTrip. It was the time when the idea of launching an online marketplace clicked in his mind. He started planning about his business with a website called DealsClues.com, but finally, he settled with Shopclues.com, in 2010 and established this marketplace in Silicon Valley.

Founding of Shopclues.com

With Radhika Ghai Aggarwal (Sandeep Aggarwal’s wife), Mrinal Chatterjee and Sanjay Sethi, he started his new business in Delaware. By September 2011, the team moved to India and permanently settled in Gurgaon. At the very beginning of Shopclues, Aggarwal raised $1.95 million from his social circle.

In 26th January 2012, the public beta version of Shopclues was released, and by next month, the team size expanded to 25 from only 3-4 members. The Alexa ranking dropped from 14,000 at the beginning of the year to 200 only in August of the same year. The company started making a jaw-dropping profit with more than 2 million monthly visitors.

In January 2013, Shopclues has ranked as the fifth largest e-commerce companies in India, and the Alexa ranking dropped to 90. The business was progressing swiftly, until, July 2013, when he found legal charges filed against him for the time he worked as an internet analyst in Wallstreet. Aggarwal said that it was a time of sheer crisis in his life, and it almost took a year or so for him to get back on track. He didn’t have any choice other than avoiding the press and any other formal role in Shopclues. His family suffered, too. But today, Shopclues, his first company is worth $1.1 billion, and it is one of the largest online stores to serve in India.

Droom

Aggarwal founded Droom in April 2014, and it was the first-ever online platform for selling and buying automobiles (used and new) and services related to the same. Droom has a very strong founding team with more than 75 years of experience in technology. It was only after a year of its founding that Droom raised $16 million in Series A funding led by Lightbox.

Even today, it is India’s most trusted platform for automobiles.

The emotional outburst

In 2017, Aggarwal was in the spotlight for posting about a private matter in social media which was concerning his wife, Sanjay Sethi and Shopclues. An emotional outburst in social media is often not considered as a very clever judgment especially for business tycoons like Aggarwal. But, he said it was a very fragile moment for him and it was definitely a mistake to attract negative attention. Though he went through an emotional turmoil, the companies didn’t suffer any such loss but his personal life is still a very big question mark.

Craig Newmark : American Internet Entrepreneur and the Founder of Craigslist

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

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

Early Life

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

Craig Newmark
Image Source: zimbio.com

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

Founding Craigslist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal Life

In December 2012, Newmark married Eileen Whelpley.

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

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

Tim Norton : The Kiwi Serial Entrepreneur & Founder of 90 Seconds

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

Startups these days have certainly become a trend. Several good ideas are revolving around the investors to get their initial fundings. Many of which are successful in receiving the same, but happens to the ones who are not able to get one and end up with failure? Surely owner of those idea gets disheartened and drop their plan of startup.

But when you are really talented and have helped many other companies with their businesses, you get the confidence to start your own a hundred times even if you have failed multiple times.

The New Zealander self-made entrepreneur, Tim Norton, is one such personality, who kept on working on his ideas and built multiple startups until he founded 90 Seconds.

Early Career

Tim Norton, the serial entrepreneur, is a native of New Zealand, often described as the Steve Jobs of New Zealand. He was born and brought up in Matamata, a town in New Zealand’s North Island. He completed his graduate degree in commerce from the University of Canterbury, in 1999.

Tim Norton
Image Source: Twitter

Soon after he graduated, Tim started working at Energy Intellect Ltd. as the Product & Growth Manager and led many projects there. With his leadership quality, Norton was able to raise $1 million revenue within first 12 months of his entry in the company. Later in the same company, he also handled the post of IT systems administrator and managed the development team. He also successfully raised capital funding for the company.

Beginning of Entrepreneurship

After working for three long years in Energy Intellect, Norton left the job in May 2003. Having gained much experience as a leader, he thought of starting his own business. In the same year, in the month of July, he started his consultant firm Little Ones, where he managed projects for web application development companies.

Although the company was doing really well, he wanted to try out other businesses too. After Little Ones, he started another venture, EvolutionOne, that hosted many open source business apps on the cloud, to provide the various organisations with a single platform, where they could manage their business online.

After these two startups, Norton went to found a few other startups, too, including Decisive Flow, StartupMedia, Airspace and Love to Ride.

Although, not all of his startups succeded, and he ended up borrowing up to a million dollars of debt.

Founding 90 Seconds

In 2010, Norton founded his most successful startup, 90 Seconds Limited, the Cloud Video Production Service. At the time, he was still under a huge debt. In the beginning, Norton shot small videos for free and posted on the platform. He knew that people do not like to watch ads in between the videos and also avoided watching longer videos, so he selected a 90 seconds’ time frame for the videos to be uploaded on the platform, and from here only he discovered the name for his startup.

At the same time, Norton started travelling to various other countries to shoot videos on different topics and to promote his startup in other countries too. In the early stage of the inception of the company, 90 Seconds opened an office in London.

The startup was a huge success, and within one year of its launch, Norton was able to pull off all his debt.

In 2015, the company reported the production of over 10,000 videos for more than 1,000 brands, in 80 countries. The recorded growth rate of the company had reached to 10% month on month, in the same year.

In 2016, 90 Seconds raised a $7.5million funding from Sequoia Capital. At the same time, it also got investment from 40 other investment firms. By Feb 2016, 90Seconds had established offices in five countries and seven cities.

The life story of this Kiwi entrepreneur is really inspiring in terms of the failure he faced in some of his startups, and even then he kept on experimenting to find the one business that would transform his career entirely.