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Busuu

Busuu : An Interactive Online Language Learning Platform

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There can be any reason if a person wants to learn a new language, whether it is required for a new job, or settling down in another country, or for fulfilling a long-time desire or hobby. But it is not necessary that one would get the required language’s classes near them, and that too, at affordable prices. But worry not. There are numerous mobile apps and online platforms that are helping people learn new languages. One such platform is Busuu, one of the world’s largest social networks for language learning, founded by Bernhard Niesner and Adrian Hilti as their MBA project, and today, over 90 million people are registered to the platform.

Bernhard Niesner was born and brought up in Vienna. After completing his school education, he joined the Vienna University of Economics and Business to get a graduate degree in business. On completing his graduate degree in 2003, he moved to Madrid to work with Roland Berger as a consultant. After working for a 9 to 5 job for two years, Niesner realised that he does not want to get stuck into a 9 to 5 job, but wanted to start a business of his own. He left the job and to enhance his business skills, he joined the IE Business School in Madrid and took an MBA for his post-graduation.

While at the business school, Bernhard met his future partner and co-founder of Busuu, Adrian Hilti, at a seminar. The two were sitting together and shared friendly vibes. Hilti was also a student at the business school. But before that, he had been worked with companies like Shockfish and Arthur D Little.

busuu founders
Image Source: ie.edu

The two became friends and collaborated for their MBA project. For the project, they decided to build a language learning platform that would ease out the process of learning for different types of people by letting them interact with each other. Though the project could not make through the Bootcamp, the two kept working on the same. By the time, they had realised that their idea may transform as a great project. Since they were studying in an international university, they got the opportunity to test their project on people from different culture and backgrounds. They also had the accessibility to the computer labs, as well, so they get to work on the project full time, even they were studying.

In 2007, eventually, they get to rent their own office in Madrid, and their project became their first startup. While their friends and colleagues were applying for jobs in big MNCs, the two remained focussed on their project and stayed in Madrid to grow it. The two officially launched their startup naming it Busuu in 2008 (named after the endangered language from Cameroon), a free version of an online language learning platform.

The two being business students knew that their startup needs more promotions. So they connected with a few bloggers and ran some ad campaigns as well. In fact, one of their video ads even won the Silver Lion award in the International Advertising Festival in Cannes.

In 2009, the company launched the premium version of the service, and the next year, the company introduced its first mobile app. The same year, the company even launched a short course to encourage the usage of Busuu language.

In 2012, the company hosted its Series A round of funding and raised 3.5 million euros. This helped the company expand to the international markets and add new features to the platform. In the same year, Busuu shifted its headquarters to London from Madrid. In 2014, the company partnered with London-based educational company Pearson, offering gSET certificate in English on Busuu. After another partnership with McGraw-Hill Education in 2015, the company started providing the users with the McGraw-Hill Education certificates for completing a course in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. The company also received a €6 million investment form the company.

Busuu then introduced educational courses for organisations, colleges and universities in 2016, which gave the learners the access to the Busuu premium service, and the platform acted as a Learning Management System. In 2017, Busuu partnered with Google, adding voice-activated lessons in Spanish to Google Home. It even built a VR app for Oculus Gear and Oculus Go to help people learn Spanish.

Busuu and its co-founders, since its inception, has won over 19 awards, including Best Language App by the German Association for Consumer Studies, the Bloomberg Innovator award, and was selected as ‘best of 2015’ apps by Google Play.

grab

Grab : One of the Biggest Startups in South-east Asia

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“The youth of today is the future of tomorrow”, probably one of the famous quotes, you will find written almost everywhere. It is expected of the young generation to build a better tomorrow by eradicating today’s problem, be it a social, or an economical cause. The success of Grab narrates the story of a start-up based in Malaysia, which improved both the social environment of the city and made taxi booking much economical plus convenient.

The community of taxi drivers in Malaysia didn’t have a good reputation, as at times the customers were overcharged, the security of women was a big question, and the economic condition of the drivers was unsatisfactory. Anthony took the crisis of his city into a note and together, with Hooi Ling, started a business plan to launch a ride service.

Both the founders of Grab, Anthony Tan and Hooi Ling Tan graduated from Harvard Business School, and that is how they met each other. Grab was founded as GrabTaxi in June 2012, and after a couple of years, the headquarters shifted from Malaysia to Singapore. Today, Grab provides more than just a taxi service and has customers around eight countries.

Anthony Tan

Grab founders
Image Source: yourstory.com

Anthony pursued his Bachelor’s degree in economics followed by completing his MBA from Harvard Business School. Anthony belonged to a financially dominant family of Malaysia. His father ran a family an automobile business named Tan Chang Motors. After coming back from Harvard, Anthony joined his family business as head of marketing. But, after being a spectator of the degrading condition of transportation companies in Malaysia, he came up with the idea of opening his own start-up like the ones dominating in the U.S. Especially, when he found his friends and family complaining about it, he decided that he had to do something. He contacted Hooi Ling Tan, his classmate from Harvard, who chalked down a business plan.

Hooi Ling Tan

Unlike Anthony, who after Harvard joined his family business straightway, Hooi Ling had a better taste of the corporate world. Since she was a mechanical engineer graduate, she worked as an equipment engineer in Eli Lilly before going to Harvard. She was also a business analyst at McKinsey and Company and worked there for a couple of years.

After graduating from Harvard, Hooi Ling again joined McKinsey and Company as an associate and later, switched to salesforce.com as a senior director of pricing intelligence and monetization. She worked there till 2015, a couple of years even after co-founding Grab.

The Hurdles

Initially, when both Anthony and Hooi Ling stepped into the outer world and started pursuing the taxi companies, they received several rejections. The concept was new to them, and nobody was really that enthusiastic. So, they needed to approach drivers, and the common crowd, individually, to make them understand how they could be benefited. Both of them also took feedback from the citizens of Malaysia if they would like to bring a change to networking.

Finally, after several rejections, one taxi company with thirty taxis was willing to give it a shot. They even received a sum of $25,000 from Harvard Business School to start the business and the mobile app. Finally, the company was launched in 2012, and in the first couple of years, Anthony learned a lot from his mistakes and implemented better strategies.

The Flaws

In the beginning, the capital for Grab was funded by the Tan family, and it continued for quite a long time until chaos was created. After the funding round in April 2014, the company was confused about the total fundraised, which created a lot of fuss followed by some unnecessary expenditure. Things turned upside down, resulting in no salary for the drivers for one month.

Anthony realized it was high time to buckle up and manage the finance. He brought some discipline to the company by bringing some professional investors in the house and not relying fully on the Tan family.

The Right Decisions

Since Anthony focused on the betterment of social relations between a driver and the customer, especially, on the security of the women, every driver was interviewed personally. He said that though this process was time-consuming, he couldn’t compromise with it.

Today, Grab serves customers in more than 168 cities, across 8 countries. Apart from GrabTaxi, services, like GrabFood, GrabPay, GrabBike, has also been released. By 2017, the company completed one billion rides and 68 million downloads.

The company also started investing in R&D, as he is focused more on hiring smart people who can contribute more to the business than spending millions on advertising. Anthony truly is a person to admire with great passion to ameliorate the condition of our society.

xerox

Joseph C. Wilson : The Founder of Xerox Who Brought an Innovation in the Printing Industry

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The great inventions in the sector of printing and photocopy have made our lives much easier. Think about a world where we needed to pay a few dollars just for one colour print, absolutely not affordable right? Given that photocopy is essential in every sector starting from an educational institution to a corporate company and even a hospital, it had to be made pocket-friendly. And, with the inventions made by Xerox Corporation, especially Joseph C. Wilson the industry of photocopying will not be dealt with casualties at least for the next century.

Xerox Corporation, a multinational conglomerate pioneering in the world of the printing industry was founded more than a century ago in 1906. The company then was established as The Haloid Photographic Company, and the three masterminds behind this mammoth transforming setup were Joseph C. Wilson, Chester Carlson, and Jeff Leonard. Let’s have a detailed look into the life of Wilson, and his inventions, and how it led to founding Xerox.

Life of Wilson

Born in 1909 to J.R. Wilson and Kate Wilson, Wilson spent his childhood in Rochester. During his early childhood, Wilson grew a love for literature in his heart. He completed his high school from West High School, Rochester and pursued economics in the University of Rochester. Later, he went to Harvard to complete his MBA. After getting his business degree, he joined Haloid and became the head of the company.

History of Xerox Corporation

Xerox founder
Image Source: Xerox Twitter

Xerox was founded on 18 April 1906 as Haloid. During this time, Carlson worked independently on his innovation that revolved around printing images. He was a very promising physicist, and Wilson after taking over the company from his father showed keen interest to work with Carlson’s product. And all of these happened during the time of the Second World War, which added up mostly to the sale of photographic papers for government work. Though the photographic papers were in demand, Wilson had strong competitors, too. So, he needed to come up with an excellent idea at the earliest hour to save Haloid from dissolving.

Wilson wanted to launch a new product called Xerox 914, which had Carlson’s technology incorporated in it. It took Carlson almost two decades to perfect the technology, and finally, it was released in 1959. The product brought a revolution in the industry, resulting in $60 million revenue of Xerox at the end of 1961, which escalated to $500 million by 1965. The technology that was used in the product was Electro-photography, and Wilson gave it a new term called “xerography’.

That is how Haloid came into the spotlight, and its most important goal was to make photocopying easier and cheaper for the world.

Wilson’s Idea Flooded the Company with Profits

A year after the launch of 914, Wilson Center for Research and Technology was established in Webster, New York, and the following years, the company was enlisted on the New York Stock Exchange as Xerox (XRX). In this year, the company’s earnings grew to 151%.

In 1969, another invention followed. It was a laser printer, Xerox 9700 and brought billions of dollars of business to the company. Once the company settled on firm grounds, it made multiple acquisitions, including University Microfilms International, Scientific Data Systems, Electro-Optical Systems, etc. Even after Wilson’s death in the early 1970s, the company is still embarking with new technologies, acquiring gigantic businesses and making great innovations. In 1970, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center was developed, and it started developing modern technologies like graphical user interface and laser printing.

With the advent of a new decade, a new century and a millennium, Xerox started the year 2000 with a big acquisition of Tektronix colour printing for $925 million. This was followed by further acquisitions of companies like XMPie (software provider) and Newfield IT.

Currently, Xerox Corporation is a major part of the IT industry with its headquarters based in Norwalk, Connecticut, New York. The products of Xerox include printers, scanners, projectors and other office equipment. With John Visentin as the Vice Chairman and the 10th CEO of the company, around 35,000 people are working together to find more efficient equipment for the near future. Today, Xerox has become a significant brand name both in research and development and marketing.

copia

Copia : Founder Komal Ahmad Solving Hunger with Technology

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Two people sitting inside a restaurant orders the food of four, but can’t finish it. They pay for the food and leave the left-over on the table. What will happen to the left food? Obviously, the restaurant will throw it in the garbage. But is it right to do so? Komal Ahmad, the CEO of Copia, does not agree with that too. Throwing the food away is not the solution when many people out there are homeless and cannot afford a one time meal. But how to reach out to these people? Of course, there are many charitable organisations that partners with restaurants and other firms, to get the food, but these organisations have also rules about the food they accept.

While studying international health and global development at the University of California, Berkeley, Ahmad found it disgusting how the management used to throw the leftovers near the mess. Meanwhile, she met a former army man, who had just come back from Iraq, begging for food on the streets. He was waiting for his finances to come but had no money to buy food. Ahmad took the man for lunch, but a one-time meal could not fix the whole problem of wastage of food and poverty.

She thought of taking the leftover food from the mess to such needy people, but the process had many management rules to follow. This way, not even the home-less could have that food nor the charitable organisations would accept it. But Ahmad was too determined to solve this problem and with her college management produced new ways to donate the food to the needy. But this was not it. She knew that the problem is even bigger, and they need to manage all the food in the world. But there is a lot of difference in thinking and doing.

Komal Ahmad Copia
Image Source: generalassemb.ly

After digging deep, Ahmad decided to mix the technology with her food management plan. She was aware that there are many online car rental and food delivery services. So her idea was to get a similar app for picking up the wasted food and deliver it to the person in need.

She has mentioned a few times in her interviews that she finds the food-wastage problem as “literally the world’s dumbest problem.” Since she wanted to expand the idea of saving the food from wasting, she hired a development team, to develop a similar app, like Uber and other delivery services, where the working of the app was a bit different. Through the app, the corporate cafeterias, hospitals, universities, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses would book a pickup for the wasted food, and a delivery guy would pick it up and deliver it at a place where it is needed the most.

Finally, in 2016, Ahamd founded Copia, a non-profit company at the beginning, and an app for accessing the service. She put all her life-savings into the startup and with her team participated in the Y-Combinator accelerator program, where she learnt how to manage a business. Along with that Copia received a $120,000 in exchange for 7% of the company from Y-Combinator.

Since she was not from a business background, Ahmad had to learn a lot. She had devoted all her time to her startup, so she had to make the company a for-profit firm by charging a small fee from the restaurant or others who wanted to donate their food. In fact, the donors get the enhanced tax deduction of up to 15% of its fair market value. So they are also a profit. At the delivery, the donor gets full receipt and pictures as proof. The app includes a testimonial from the receivers like non-profits, as well as data analytics service too.

The delivery guys on Copia are mostly homeless people. There are eight permanent employees at the company, and around 200 people have been delivering the food as a part-time delivery person. The platform is responsible for recovering 900,000 pounds of food and feeding up to 2 million people a year. During the Superbowl event in San Francisco in 2016, the company fed 24000 people in two days.

In 2016, at the Women in the World Salon in Los Angeles, Toyota named Ahamd one of the company’s “Mothers of Invention” and awarded her a $50,000 grant to fuel the startup.

Komal Ahmad is happy how the company has grown in the past three years and want to include clothing, medicine and blanket supply into the service shortly. She also wants to expand the service in major cities of the U.S., and later, to the other parts of the world. According to some reports, the German and Austrian governments also contacted Ahmad in the same regard.

The inspiring startup story of Ahmad gives us hope for humanity and another example of how technology can help one change things in a better way.

rivian

Robert RJ Scaringe : The Founder of Rivian; The Tesla of Trucks

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It has been said tons of times that one must follow their passion to be successful in life. But if the passion has bad effects on the environment, would you still follow it? Maybe not. Or maybe you will figure out another way to pursue your passion. Robert RJ Scaringe had fallen in love with the process of car manufacturing, but when he realised that vehicles are the most responsible for the environmental pollution, he had to look for some other way to follow his dream. And, the electric vehicle was the only answer to it; better and energy-efficient. This way, he founded Rivian, an automaker and automotive technology company.

The idea behind the company is not only to protect the environment but is also to release people from car-ownership. Scaringe wants that nobody should own a car, but must have access to automotive vehicles through the press of a button, and whenever or wherever they need the vehicle, they get it.

RJ Scaringe was a little kid when he was introduced to a Porsche 356. One of his neighbours in Melbourne, Florida, was working on reinventing his Porsche and Scaringe got the chance to look at the process closely. This ignited an interest in mechanics for him. He became so interested in car manufacturing that he decided that he will be starting up a car manufacturing business when he was still in school. This led him to get a graduate and postgraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering, followed by a PhD in the same from MIT’s prestigious Sloan Automotive Lab.

rj scaringe
Image Source: bnnbloomberg.ca

This was the same time, when he encountered problems with normal motor vehicles, as these were one of the causes of pollution and other environmental issues. So instead of fuel engine vehicles, he started researching about the environmentally-friendly electric vehicles.

After receiving a PhD from MIT, RJ Scaringe started working in an MNC, where was learning on how to improve the efficiency of the motor vehicles. His jobs at various MNCs gave him enough exposure, and since Scaringe was always aware of his passion for entrepreneurship, he was also ready with a sorted plan.

In April 2009, he started Avera Automotive (later renamed Rivian Automotive in 2011), all by himself. Initially, RJ Scaringe hired 20 people as his first employees, holding the position of the CEO. He took things slow and focussed on more research. In 2011, the company shifted its focus from general electric vehicles to autonomous electric vehicles and started working on luxury utility vehicles. His idea also drove the attention of a few major investors, like the Saudi Arabia-based investment group Abdul Latif Jameel, Sumitomo Corp forms Japan and Standard Chartered Bank from London.

With time, the company also hired engineers like Mark Vinnels (as the Rivian’s executive director of engineering) and Jeff Hammoud (as the vice president of design). In 2015, the company opened its research facility in Michigan and set up the company headquarters in Livonia, Michigan. At the same time, the company also started working on ride-sharing vehicles and driverless vehicles.

In 2017, the company acquired the Mitsubishi Motors’ Normal, Illinois plant for $16 million, which became the Rivian’s primary North American manufacturing facility. The company also received a $1 million grant and a five-year tax abatement from Normal contingent as well as $49.5 million in tax credits from the state government, on its strategical money investment over a certain period and for meeting the employment targets.

By the end of 2016, 100 employees were working for Rivian, and Today, over 1000 people are working in Rivian at its different branches, including Michigan, Illinois, California and the United Kingdom. Through the company was growing rapidly, in 7-8 years of its inception, there was no product of its own. It had been working on different parts and technologies for its new car models, which it had planned to assemble at the end.

By December 2017, the company started testing the alpha prototypes of its first vehicle and announced its first two products, i.e., an electric five-seater pickup truck (A1T) as well as an electric seven-seater SUV (A1S). The company took it to the LA Auto Show in November 2018, to launch the two vehicles. Both the cars are semi-autonomous, and the production will start anytime soon in 2020.

With a $200 million in debt financing from Standard Chartered Bank, till 2018, Rivian raised around $450 million. In 2019, the company received a $700 million in a round of funding led by Amazon, and the same year, it also received another $500 million from Ford Motor Company.

Cox Automotive also made a $350 million investment into Rivian. In September 2019, Amazon made an order of 100,000 electric delivery vans from Rivian.

The potential of RJ Scaringe’s idea behind Rivian can be estimated through the fact that no Rivian cars are currently running on the road. Despite that, the company has raised about 1.5 billion in funds in past ten years. The company is not only planning to contribute to the environment but has also helped America to raise employment and offer better money to people.

vianai

Vishal Sikka : Ex-CEO of Infosys and the Founder of AI-based Startup Vianai System

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Speaking of artificial intelligence, it is quite important to mention machine learning too, because both of these go hand in hand. Today, most of the huge software companies use the concept of ML and AI to build their software and products. In a nutshell, artificial intelligence is becoming the building block for the new tomorrow, with its past rooted to the core of science. It is kind of mandatory to learn about ML and AI for most of the programmers today. Because it opens a window of vast opportunities for one’s career as well as a scientific development.

A lot of companies have started adopting the concept of AI and ML to enhance their products and the approach of development. And, one of the most recent start-ups based on AI has been launched in this very year by Dr Vishal Sikka, Ex CEO of Infosys. After leaving Infosys in 2017, Dr Sikka decided to start his own business, and hence, launched it on 12th September 2019. With a sky-limit scope in the area of AI, Dr Sikka’s main motive is to harness its power and make every industry adopt this concept and implement it in every product.

Early life and education

Born into a Punjabi family in Madhya Pradesh, India, Vishal Sikka’s father was an officer in the Indian Railway and his mother was a teacher. At the age of six, the family moved to Vadodara, Gujarat from Shajapur, Madhya Pradesh. Since his father was an engineer and his mother a teacher, academics turned out to be his strength and engineering his love.

Vishal Sikka founder Vianai
Image Source: thehindu.com

He went to Kendriya Vidyalaya, Rajkot and completed his schooling from Rosary High School. Following his father’s foot trails, Sikka pursued his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. Though he was admitted to one of the renowned colleges in India, Vishal Sikka wasn’t satisfied with it. He left the college immediately after he got admission to Syracuse University, New York. He pursued a B.S degree in Computer Science and later, went to Stanford University to complete his PhD.

Early Career

After completing his PhD, he started working with Xerox’s research lab, and after working there for some time, he realized his dream, i.e., launching a start-up. He founded iBrain, his first start-up which was acquired by PatternRX, and his second start-up was Bodha.com, which was acquired by Peregrine Systems. At this time, Sikka joined Peregrine as the Vice-President for Platform Technologies. His main area of work was application development and technical designing.

One of the advantages in Vishal Sikka’s career was the time when he just started accelerating in his professional world. He came very close to Hasso Plattner, founder of SAP. This helped him a lot in landing a job in SAP. He joined SAP in 2002 as the head of strategic innovative projects. Eventually, he was promoted to Senior Vice President and ultimately, to the position of first-ever CTO in April 2007. After working for more than a decade in SAP, Sikka finally resigned from the company on 4th May 2014.

Once you reach a certain point in a career, you don’t have to turn back twice to question your decisions. And, this happened to Sikka the moment he joined SAP. Sikka decided to leave SAP for some personal reasons, and undoubtedly, a person of his calibre was on-demand in the tech market.

Soon after he left SAP, Vishal Sikka joined Infosys on 12th June 2014. The ex-CEO of SAP was named the new CEO and Managing Director of the second-largest IT industry of India. He was declared as the whole-time director of the board of Infosys on 14th June 2014. After serving in this company for three long years, Sikka stepped down from his position and set off his course towards establishing his own start-up.

Vianai Systems

In 12th September 2019, Sikka finally launched his own AI-based start-up Vianai systems with the dream that AI and ML have the full potential to change every industry. Sikka’s start-up received a seed funding of $50 million which is going to increase with rocket-speed shortly.