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belkin

Chet Pipkin : The ‘Low Profile’ Wealthiest Tech Person in the U.S.

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Most of the people are desperate to get fame, and for that, they don’t mind doing anything. But there are some people who believe in sheer hard work, and no fame is more important for them than their work. So despite having achieved a lot in life, the popularity does not affect them, and they rather try to stay away from the limelight. One such personality is Chester J. Pipkin (aka Chet Pipkin), the founder, chief executive and chairman of Belkin International, a company that manufactures and deals in computer hardware and peripheral devices.

Early Life

Chet Pipkin was born in a working-class family in California. His father worked as a machinist in World War II, and his mother was a machine operator in aircraft factories. Since his parents never had gone to a college, they wanted Pipkin to join one.

Pipkin was always interested in history, so he went on to opt for history as his major in college and joined the UCLA university. But soon, amid the revolution that the personal computers were ready to bring, he decided to switch to computer science as his graduation subject. Meanwhile, he also joined a part-time job at an electronics company to earn his daily expenses. He then joined the YMCA as a camp counsellor, he met his future wife Janice.

Chet pipkin
Image Source: theaustralian.com

Founding Belkin International

While working and attending school, he realised that though people are getting familiar with the new personal computers, they still find it difficult to connect the computers with the printers. This brought him an idea to invent cable assemblies that would help people easily connect computers with printers, and he started Belkin in his parent’s two-car garage.

Caught up between studies, job and his own business, he decided to drop off from the college. But soon, he realised that he was more focused on Belkin, so he had to leave his job too. So finally, he started to work solely on Belkin and established the company in 1983. In the beginning, he worked on inventing cables to connect printers and modems. The company’s first product was the Belkin Hamlet, which was made to connect an Apple IIc computer to the non-Apple printers.

While trying to establish the business, it was not a smooth ride, and like every other startup, he had to go through a lot of ups and downs. But he did not come out of these situations with regrets or discouragements, but life lessons. Despite the challenges, the company earned a $100,000 revenue in the first year of its inception.

Developing and selling the PC hardware for around 6-7 years, Belkin moved its focus to the USB storage devices in the early 90s. Since then, the company has focused on reinventing things and has become a leader in the field of IoT devices manufacturing and selling.

Since Chet Pipkin has always been low-profile about him as well his company, there has been no information on the revenues for the past many years. But the company is surely in profit. Pipkin has even kept the company private despite the trend of silicon valley companies going for their IPO within 4-5 years of tasting success.

In 2013, Belkin International acquired the Cisco Systems, and its further units, including Linksys. Since then, Belkin has been dealing in three divisions, Belkin International, Linksys and WeMo. Linksys deals in the data networking hardware products, whereas WeMo sells devices like wireless chargers, screen protectors, USB-C cables.

The success of Belkin has made Chet Pipkin one of the wealthiest men in the U.S.

Achievements

Belkin has been named in the Inc.’s ‘500 Fastest growing privately held companies in the United States’ list multiple-times. It has also been among the ‘Los Angeles Technology Fast 50 Company’ around nine times. The company also got featured around six times in the LA Business Journal’s list of ‘100 Fastest-growing Privately Held Companies’.

On the other hand, being the owner of such an innovative company, Chet also has been a finalist in the ‘Los Angeles Entrepreneur of the Year Awards’ three times. He even won the ‘Southern California Regional Award’ in 1996. He has also featured in the ‘Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame’ of the Dealerscope Magazine in 2006. Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce awarded him the ‘Lifetime Still Achieving’ in 2013.

snaplogic

SnapLogic : One of the “Coolest” Cloud Platform Companies

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Another software company in the marketplace to deal with data integration is excelling in the field and satisfying millions of customers worldwide. The company provides clients with better and many efficient tools to connect applications and transfer data in a hassle-free way. Gaurav Dhillon’s company, SnapLogic was founded in 2006 and is majorly known for web data integration. After the internet has bathed the world with a new aura of possibilities, companies like SnapLogic had reached cloud eleven. The never-ending demand of cloud data sources, SaaS applications and most importantly, efficient data transfer gives a pictorial representation of the success of SnapLogic.

The Founder

SnapLogic was fully functional and became public from 2006. Before Dhillon created SnapLogic, he was already a founder of 2 more start-ups, including Informatica Corp and jaman.com.

Dhillon created Informatica, a software company in 1993 based in California, the United States with $75,000 provided to him by the National Institute of Health. He didn’t have many facilities then, so with this little amount of capital, he started the company in his garage. Informatica was quite a success, and it was acquired in 2015 for $5.3billion.

Snaplogic founder
Image Source: cbronline.com

Dhillon’s next start-up was Jaman.com, which was founded in 2005 in California as well. The website ceased all its operations in 2017. Jaman was a site that provided movie discovery sites and thus, let users download videos on demand.

SnapLogic

EAI stands for enterprise application integration, and this is what Dhillon’s interest lied upon. After Informatica emerged as one of the most successful start-ups in the world of EAI, Dhillon’s passion triggered to create more in this area. According to him, a lot of areas was unexplored in this field, and he buckled up to roll the stones.

So SnapLogic was created in 2006 after Dhillon himself invested in this business, and in 2009, he became the CEO of the company. The main focus of Dhillon was to reduce the problems the users faced with cloud computing. The company is based in San Mateo, California and serves throughout the world.

Success of SnapLogic

The first big news of SnapLogic was raising $2.3million in Series A funding in 2009. The prime investors were Andreessen Horowitz, Maples Investments, Brian McClendon (Google Engineering Vice President), Naval Ravikant and a few more. After the closing of this funding round, Dhillon was declared the CEO of the company, and he announced that the money will be invested in improving the DataFlow platform. The data integrating solution of SnapLogic turned out to be very useful for SaaS applications and websites, like SalesForce, Twitter, and SugarCRM, etc.

In 8th December 2010, Dhillon announced that the company has raised $10million in Series B funding, and new technologies have been incorporated in the products of SnapLogic, which is both time and cost-efficient. After this funding round, Dhillon planned to expand the business in the European market. One of the biggest success of SnapLogic was that it became the world’s first company to integrate data that existed both on-premise and in the cloud. This was followed by the launch of elastic integration in June 2013, which made application integration in the clouds even simpler. By the end of 2013, SnapLogic provided the users with 150 various data connectors for applications like SAP and Oracle.

On 10th December 2015, SnapLogic raised $37.5 million in the funding round led by Microsoft, Silver Lake Waterman, Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, and Triangle Peak Partners. At the end of this year, the net worth of SnapLogic turned out to be $96.3million. By this time, machine learning and artificial intelligence already started spreading like a wildfire in the tech market. Taking a note, the company made a very smart move by introducing the SnapLogic Integration Assistant, an AI-powered product of the company in May 2017. In this year, the company also raised $136.3 million from the existing investors.

SnapLogic Today

The latest and one of the biggest successes in the history of SnapLogic is Gartner naming the company (SnapLogic) as a leader in the Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) Magic Quadrant for four consecutive years. The fascinating performance of SnapLogic in data integration has driven the world crazy with more time-efficient and better ways to connect applications and integrate data.

omnivis

OmniVis : Medical Science Meets Technology to Make the World Better and Disease Free

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In the bigger picture, the present condition of our world is no less than mayhem. On the one hand, science is creating wonders with technology making our lives easier but on the other hand, millions of people are dying every day due to lack of treatment and development in medical science. Who is to blame for this? Are we way too ignorant to make significant contributions in the medical community? Or the price is so high that we have blatantly stopped trying? There are so many people dying every minute suffering from incurable diseases or due to late detection of infections in their body. Though the renowned and biggest research centres of our world are working together to invent instruments that can easily detect diseases, they are way too costly for common citizens.

With the zeal to alter the future of our world and stop it from destruction, four scholars of Purdue University, Katherine Clayton, Tamara Kinzer-Ursem, Jacqueline Linnes and Steve Wereley, came up with a unique solution to detect infectious and deadly diseases, which are both times efficient and affordable. With the mission to create affordable medical equipment, these four enlightened minds founded OmniVis, a company that will reach out to common people, help them detect disease and make out society better in terms of well-being.

Founders of OmniVis

Currently, Katherine Clayton is the CEO of the company with Ursem, Linnes and Wereley working as the Advisors.

Katherine Clayton Founder OmniVis
Image Source: halcyonhouse.org

Clayton, who is originally from San Francisco, went to Pursue University to complete her PhD in mechanical engineering. When she was an undergraduate student, she had already decided to work with healthcare products and make easy infection and disease detection equipment available to common people. When Clayton was a kid, she lost someone very close to her, due to the absence of better tools in the medical field, and hence, this was the beginning of her dream to do better for the community. She, with other three scholars, co-founded OmniVis in 2017, and since then, it has received worldwide support and funding.

Ursem is associated with Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering as an assistant professor which is under Purdue University. Her main area of research involves molecular biology, computational biology and neuroscience.

Linnes is also an assistant professor in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering as well. The Linnes Lab basically works to create technologies that can detect pathogens in a time-efficient way and stop them from propagating. She also has her own start-up, PotaVida founded in April 2010. The company’s goal is to develop pocket-friendly water purifiers and reach to the rural areas of the entire world.

Currently, Wereley is a professor at the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. His specialised fields are fluid mechanics and optics. He is also the founder of a company called Microfluidics Innovations.

The Idea

Since all of them belonged to a strong research background, OmniVis emerged out as a successful idea. More than a business, it is really an idea that inspired every company, research institutes throughout the world. OmniVis has created products that can detect Cholera with less than an hour with its concepts and techniques.

Currently, OmniVis works with iPhone but soon it will incorporate the software in Android and start testing the beta version. OmniVis works in a simple process with few steps, collect the sample, detect pathogen and map location. OmniVis detects and shows the location on the map from where the sample was taken to alert the authorities. And all of these are getting done within 30 minutes with the technology of OmniVis.

The Achievements

In 2017, OmniVis acquired the first place in Vodafone Wireless Innovation Project funded by Vodafone Foundation. In 2018, OmniVis was nominated for World Changing Idea Finalist. In June 2018, the company received Phase I SBIR Grant from National Science Foundation. In the same year, OmniVis won the 2018 AMPLIFY Pitch Competition where participants from 46 different countries participated. After winning the Biological Innovation Award in February 2019, OmniVis took a step ahead and expanded out of Indiana. In May 2019, the team reached out to Bangladesh and shared the benefits of OmniVis products with them.

Some of the major investors at OmniVis are Vodafone Foundation, Deloitte, Fast Company, Purdue University, halcyon and many more.

cookpad

Cookpad : Success Story of the Largest Recipe Sharing Platform

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In earlier times, it was the dinner table where people had most of their interactions and the family members connected with each other. Slowly, the time changed, and people were more into buying readymade food and eat it alone. We can call it a lack of time that people no more find time to sit and eat food with their family. This way, people also started forgetting the recipes of traditional food and preferred not to cook. But there is a man named Aki Sano, the founder of Cookpad, who understands the value of self-cooked food. It not only helps people save a lot of money but also keeps people in touch with their traditions.

Aki Sano founded Cookpad about 22 years ago in Japan. It is not that he hit the idea, and the startup was an instant success. There were a number of incidents that took place before Cookpad could really be one of the largest online recipe-sharing platforms in the world.

About the Founder

Aki Sano is a Japanese entrepreneur, who was born on 1 May 1973 in Tokyo, Japan and studied at Keio University, Tokyo. He had always been interested in technology as well as alternative energy. When he was in high school, he built solar-powered cars. Following his passion, he took alternative energy as a subject at the university. He then went to attend a one year Solar Summer Camp, too. Later, during his graduation, he also made it to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) conference in New York. Though he found the conference quite boring and dull, he met an interesting fellow from West Indies named Abdu.

Aki Sano Cookpad
Image Source: cookpadteam.com

Abdu had got a degree from the US but returned to his homeland, where he grew his own vegetables and did farming. Sano found it quite interesting, and it had a great impact on him. Back to Japan, while buying vegetables from a supermarket, Sano realised that he was about to buy imported vegetables when he could get fresh ones from across the road from the local farmers. This incident and meeting with Abdu got him to sell vegetables from the farmers to the students at the university.

He managed to join in many farmers who would deliver vegetables to the students at the university who had placed the orders, and if there were any extra veggies, they would sell those to people passing by. This way, it became a huge business, and Sano had to build a website for the same. This, eventually, became his first startup. He managed the business for two years, and after two years, it was the time to graduate. His friends had started cracking the interviews with companies and were already placed. But Sano was still thinking of what he should do.

Founding Cookpad

With his experience with the vegetable selling business as well as his interest in corporate business, he decided to start his company and named it COIN. But despite he launched the company, he had no idea what he would be producing or selling. He ended up with three ideas, expanding his vegetable selling business, build products that endorse alternative energy or do something around housing. But eventually, he discarded all those ideas and came with Cookpad.

Initially, Cookpad was known as Kitchen@Coin, which was a side by side business that he was running along with a full-time job. The idea behind the startup was that people were avoiding cooking food and ultimately, buying the vegetables, just because they did not have the right recipes. With Cookpad, he wanted people to find the right recipe to cook the right food. It was a subscription-based service, where people could put their food recipes. The subscription fee for the platform was $5 per month. Sano set the target of 50,000 people joining the platform within two months, but only 100 people joined the platform and that too, in three months.

This discouraged Sano badly, and he asked his subscribers how he could return the money as he had decided to close the platform. But for his surprise, the subscribers were ready to pay more to keep the service going. This way, he made the service free for his subscribers and changed the name Kitechen@Coin to Cookpad in June 1999.

The Success

By March 2002, the company started advertising the business across the country. In September 2004, Cookpad launched premium service for the users. After two years, the company launched its first mobile service naming it as MOBAREPI. It then announced a premium service for the MOBAREPI users as well, in November 2008. Cookpad hosted its IPO on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on July 2009. This was the time when the company really saw the success and had earned revenues increased by 80 per cent.

Cookpad was named in the list of the TSE Mothers in July 2009. By 2010, the company started expanding across borders and opened its first office in California, USA, followed by opening one in Singapore in 2011. Today, the company has its offices in countries, including the UK, Spain, Indonesia, Lebanon, Brazil, India, Taiwan, Hungary, Greece, Russia, etc. The company has established its international headquarters in Bristol, UK.

Today, Cookpad has got around 5 million registered recipes on it and hosts 40 million monthly unique users globally. Sano stepped down from the post of the CEO of Cookpad, and in 2014, he owned a 44% stake in the company, which valued more than $1 billion. In 2016, Sano ranked at #42 in the Forbes Japan’s 50 Richest 2016 list.

patreon

Patreon.com : An Online Crowdfunding Platform to Support Your Favourite Creators

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Today YouTube is the biggest platform for the creators from different fields to gain fame and money. But, in the beginning, there were not many creators on it, and it had not reached many people. There was a time when the creators did earn praise from the audience, and it was their passion that kept them hooked to the platform, not the money. But not many might know that there is a huge expenditure when it comes to creating a simple outdoor video. Considering this, a singer/computer science graduate/entrepreneur Jack Conte and his college buddy, Sam Yam from Stanford, came up with the idea of Patreon.com, a platform where the subscribers can support their favourite content creators financially, not only on YouTube, but also on many other platforms, to keep them encouraged to create more and more content.

About the Founders

Conte was studying at the Standford University, where he opted for music as major for his undergraduate. He formed a duo named Pomplamoose with his then-girlfriend (now wife) Nataly Dawn in 2008. At the time, YouTube had just started getting popular, and the two started their YouTube channel at the same time, along with working for some of the famous labels. They also registered to various other platforms, where they could connect with their fans directly.

On the other hand, a computer science student at Stanford University, Yam was doing significantly well at studies. He even got the letter of recommendation from Marc Andreeson for his Master’s in Computer Science from the same university. While studying at the university, he took leave of absence and joined a startup company named Loopt, as one of the first engineers. The company was acquired in 2006, and Yam went to found his own company named AdWhir, which he later sold to AdMob in 2009. Yam then joined Google as an engineer, but soon, he left the job to look forward to finding new ideas for his startup.

Patreon.com founders
Image Source: forbes.com

Founding Patreon.com

Despite being really popular on YouTube, the duo had to face a three-years long hiatus. The income was really low as compared to the investment Conte made on every video for YouTube. Conte thought of building a website, from where his fans could donate him some money as support. He then printed his whole plan and reached out to Sam Yam, who was his roommate at Stanford and a coder too. The two met at a coffee shop in March 2013 and started working on the idea. They, finally, built a website naming it Patreon in 2013. Yam, at the same time, was working on another startup named OurSpot a photography marketplace.

The next month, Conte built his account on Patreon and put a link to his account asking his fans to support him financially, in the description of his YouTube videos. He and Yam also asked many other creators to create an account on Patreon, but nobody really took an interest in the same. In the first few weeks of his announcement, Conte got over $5000 donation from his supports (also known as Patrons). This was one big achievement for both Conte and Yam, and the other creators also got attracted to the platform, creating their accounts on Patreon.

Raising Money & Growth

In June 2013, they received a funding of $700,000 from Josh Felser giving a kickstart to the company. Later in August, it raised a $2.1 million in the seed round of funding, led by CRV and Freestyle, including other investors like Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. In June 2014, the company hosted the A-Series round of funding and raised a $15 million, and in its Series B round of funding, the company raised a $30 million in January 2016.

Patreaon.com was an instant hit, and in 18 months it had registered 125,000 users. By this time, the platform was receiving around $1,000,000 per month. In 2015, the company acquired a similar platform named Subbable, and the next year incorporated payment through PayPal feature into it. By January 2017, the platform had managed to bring in $100,000,000 for the different creators registered to Patreon.com from their Patrons. In the second quarter of the same year, 50,000 creators were active on the platform, and around 1 million monthly patrons were sending about $150 million to their favourite creators through the platform.

Jack Conte serves Patreon.com as the CEO and has also continued his career in music. Similarly, Yam, besides serving the company as CTO, is also working on other projects side by side. He has even joined Y Combinator as the YCE. Patreon has headquartered at San Francisco.

Gett

Gett : Online Taxi Service, Making the Lives of Israeli People Easier

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Have you ever noticed that the majority of the successful start-ups have emerged out during the time of crisis? Bored with the monotonous life, saying no to 9to5 jobs, addicted to gaming, and in this case, a 30 long minutes waiting for a taxi resulted in a successful story of getting a Taxi. We all have heard about the famous online cab hiring companies, like Grab, Uber, Lyft, which are majorly dominating in the United States. But, Gett is an Israel based start-up, launched in 2010, not only used for customer’s transportation but also couriers.

Shahar Waiser and Roi More are the two entrepreneurs, who created the Gett app for people of Israel and expanded it to Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. It was in the year 2009 when Waiser decided to open his own company when he became tired of waiting for a taxi for more than 30 minutes. Since Waiser was already good at doing business; the journey wasn’t that hard for him at all.

Shahar Waiser

Before further confusion arises, Shahar Waiser and Dave Waiser are the names of a single person, that is, founder of Gett. He completed his education in Computer Science from The Academic College of Tel-Aviv, Yaffo. Waiser mainly focused on learning Java, and Gett was not his first startup. Before Gett, he founded Infoauto, an online service that provided information about used cars and real estate. He created Infoauto while studying in college, and it became the first and largest company for classifieds informational system. Later, it was acquired by MARAM Group.

Shahar-Waiser Gett
Image Source: sk.ru

In April 2001, Waiser became the first CEO of Comverse, a company dealing with mobile data, telecommunication and related things. He then moved to Moscow and worked there for the Russian Federation and also received the “President Annual Sales Award”.

After leaving Comverse in March 2005, he founded Loyalize. Waiser designed a Social TV solution that dealt with real-time management that can be used by millions at a time. This product was used during the times of Oscars, Grammys, and many such prestigious awards, and even, got featured in Forbes as one of the topmost entertaining technologies. Later, it was acquired by Function(x).

Before launching GetTaxi, Waiser already became famous due to his smart inventions and entrepreneurial skills. Gett success emerged out as the brightest solution to the poor transportation condition of Israel, followed by becoming a very profitable company.

Roi More

More completed his graduation from Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya and passed out in 2002 with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration. Apart from co-founding Gett, More also founded Kamay Holdings (later acquired by 888.com) and MyLotto.com.

Success of Gett

Waiser started his work in 2009 and released the beta version of the app in Hebrew, which only operated in the area of Tel-Aviv. The company was officially launched on 1 November 2010 and eventually, expanded to London in 2011. In 2012, GetTaxi expanded to Moscow as well and opened their first United States office in the city of New York. The company raised $30 million in the funding round held in June 2012, in addition to which, an American Billionaire offered $9 million to help Gett enter the U.S market. The company operates as Juno in New York.

In 11th April 2016, Gett launched the new feature of splitting the payment among six people at the max. This definitely increased the number of booking, as it was more affordable. The biggest news of Gett, in 2016, was its partnership with Volkswagen Group, which helped Gett raise $300 million only from this partnership.

In June 2018, the company raised more than $80 million from its existing investors, Volkswagen Group, private firm Baring Vostok Capital Partner, and the American billionaire Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries. By 2018, the company raised $700 million in total and sales rides worth more than $1 billion. Among all the markets, Gett doing business in the New York market is expanding exponentially with approximately 45,000 drivers. This was closely followed by the London market, where most of the black cabs available were doing business with Gett.

Today, Gett is available in more than 120 cities, used by 20,000 companies worldwide to transport goods and couriers. The last round of funding helped Gett achieve the status of Unicorn, which is really a great success for any company.

The company is also focused on making rides more eco-friendly, hence reducing the dead mileage. Gett also invests in R&D significantly to use more recycled products.