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go-jek

Go-Jek : The Popular Ride-hailing Service and One of the First Unicorns of Indonesia

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Two decades ago, there were a few companies like eBay and Amazon that dreamt about the home-delivery and online shopping service. Later, people went to start ride-hailing through apps making our lives even easier. And today, we have got hundreds of such services, some really successful and some are still struggling for survival. One such service or we say platform, providing multiple such services, is Go-Jek. A company, despite running in only five countries, is a Unicorn, and in fact, is the first Unicorn company from Indonesia. The company is dedicated to providing three services in three categories, i.e., Go-Ride, Go-Send and Go-Mart, offering 18 app-based on-demand services.

Go-Jek was founded by Nadiem Makarim in 2010, as motorbike hailing service with a fleet of 20 motorcycles. The company ran a call centre to receive bookings for the motorbike rides and would send a notification to the drivers nearby for the pickup.

The Founder

Nadiem Makarim, a native Indonesian, was born on 4 April 1984 35 in Singapore to a lawyer father. Makarim completed his high school education from Jakarta, and later, joined the Brown University, from where he received a graduate degree in BA. He then went to Harvard University and pursued an MBA degree.

go-jek founder
Image Source: vulcanpost.com

After completing his education, he came back to Jakarta and started working at McKinsey & Company as a management consultant. He then left his job to start his entrepreneur journey, and to co-found an online fashion shop, named Zalora. But later, he had to leave the company and joined Kartuku a payments service provider, as the Chief Innovation Officer.

Founding Go-Jek

Makarim mostly used motorcycle taxis for transport. This was the cheapest and convenient method for daily travel. With time, he realised that there is a great opportunity in the business. So he went to co-found Go-Jek in 2010. The name was inspired by word Ojek that means motorcycle in Indonesia.

In the beginning, there was a lot of wait time for the drivers as there was no effective method to connect the driver and the passenger, such that the passenger took a lot of time to find the driver. This was a big issue, and Makarim wanted to solve it. Despite that, the company had joined in about 200 drivers by 2014. The next year, finally Makarim launched an app for the platform, such that it became really easy for the drivers and the passengers to track each other in time.

Becoming the Unicorn

The company raised a $1.5 billion in fundraising in 2014, becoming a unicorn within four years of its inception. In another round of funding, the company raised a $550 million in August 2016, and companies like, Google and Tencent, being among the prime investors. It also received a sum of investment from Indonesia’s biggest companies, Astra International and Blibli.com, the same year. The company was the most popular ride-hailing service provider in the country.

The same year, Go-Jek partnered with the renown Indonesian taxi company Blue Bird and expanded its service to taxis with the name Go-Car. It also launched an auto service, named Go-Auto, the same year. It also went to acquire two Indian companies, C42 Engineering and CodeIgnition. Other than that, Go-Jek also acquired India-based app development company named Leftshift and a healthcare startup Pianta. It also took over another Indonesian company that provided online ticket booking and event management service, named Loket.com.

In 2017, Go-Jek expanded its services into the fin-tech field through its Go-Pay virtual wallet and acquired companies named Kartuku, Midtrans, and Mapan. The users can use the wallet to pay in any retail shop, both online and offline. They can also withdraw money at the partner banks’ ATMs. The company also added the payments through QR scanning after getting a license from the central bank in the same year. Go-Jek has also partnered with Google for its GPS service and soon will be partnering with Amazon for its retail services.

The Expansion

In 2018, the company valued at $5 billion, exceeding the total market cap of all transportation companies in Indonesia Stock Exchange. Today, the company has its international offices in Singapore, India, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines.

Through its food delivery services, Go-Jek has partnered with about 250,000 merchants in Indonesia. The company has also established a food and beverage selling service through its Go-Food merchants. The company is hosting a fleet of 1,000,000 vehicles for its ride-hailing service alone in Indonesia. Along with that, the Go-Jek branches include Go-Ride, Go-Shop, Go-Mart, Go-Box, Go-Tix, Go-Clean, Go-Plus, Go-Bills, Go-Massage, Go-Play, Go-Studio, and more.

As of February 2019, the estimated value of the company is about US$10 billion.

kingston

Kingston : The Largest Memory Module Manufacturer Company in the World

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Change is the basic rule of life, and along with life, there are many things that go through changes with time. One of the main thing that has been changing with a high pace is technology. In the past decade, we have seen the most dramatic advancement in technology, and thus, we are introduced to many unusual things. Memory devices, being the most important part of the technology products, has seen a lot of good transformations, and for such innovative products, we can give the credit to the tech companies like Kingston.

Kingston Technology Corporation is a multinational computer technology company, and one of the most popular flash memory products manufacturers, based in California. David Sun a native of Taiwan, and John Tu from Chongqing, China, founded the company in 1987 in California. At the time, they were completely broke, the two spotted the opportunity in the shortage of 1Mbit surface-mount memory chips in the market and built Kingston.

About the Founders

David Sun is the COO of Kingston Technology, born in October 1951 in Taiwan. He graduated from Tatung University, and after completing his education, he moved to the U.S.

Founders Kingston
Image Source: moneyinc.com

On the other hand, John Tu had to go through some hardships to get the education. He was born in 1941 in Chungking, China, but had to move with his family to Shanghai in 1945. After around two years, as the Chinese civil war broke, his family moved to Taiwan. Lack of availability of good schools and college, Tu then moved to Germany to pursue a degree in electrical engineering. But again, as he did not know the language, it became difficult for him to choose the college and start studying.

After a lot of struggle, with the help of a priest, Tu joined a language school in Munich and started working at a shipbuilding factory for his apprenticeship. Finally, he got enrolled in the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt and received a graduate degree in electrical engineering. As soon he completed the degree, he got a job at Motorola in Wiesbaden, and after working for a year, he moved to California on the recommendation of his sister, who was already living the U.S.

Founding Kingston Technology Corporation

Coming out of a life full of struggles, John Tu had to start working, as soon as he reached the new country. He started a gift shop in Arizona, and later, invested in various other ventures. In 1982, Tu met Sun in California, and being from the same background, they became friends. The same year, they decided to start a computer hardware company named Camintonn Corporation. The company was then acquired by another company, and each of them received $1 million after the deal.

But due to some bad business decisions, in 1987, they were broke. They could do nothing but try their luck with another business. They started Kingston Technology Corporation focussed on manufacturing computer memory products to fulfil the demand in the market. Kingston started manufacturing memory devices for different PCs, as a result, started growing at a rapid rate. The company was the result of the biggest failure of the two co-founders, but still, it was their biggest success, too.

The Success

In 1990, the company expanded its manufacturing lineups to processor upgrades, networking and storage products. And, in two years, Kingston was ranked as the number one fastest-growing privately held company in America by Inc. The company received its ISO 9000 certificate in a single attempt in 1994. The next year, the company was a unicorn, with the sales exceeding $1.3 billion, and it had grown to 500 employees.

It was in 1996 when for the first time, a PC company (Toshiba) and a memory products manufacturing company (Kingston) collaborated to develop co-branded modules. The same year, the Softbank bought 80% of the company shares for $1.8 billion, but in 1999, the two co-founders bought the shares back for $450 million. The company expanded its branches to Europe, establishing its first office in London, United Kingdom, in 1996. The next year, the company had offices in Taiwan, Japan, Dublin, and a in few other locations.

In 2000, the company formed two spin-off companies named Validation Labs, Inc. and StorCase Technology, Inc. Kingston has featured in The 500 Largest Private Companies in the U.S, by Forbes over five times. It has also been named as the world’s number-one memory module manufacturer for the third-party memory market by iSuppli for 12 consecutive years. It was also named the world’s number-one memory module manufacturer for the third-party memory market by IHS multiple times.

Kingston has always believed in the motto of “be real good at what you do, or do nothing!”. It has been the symbol of reliability and quality since its inception. The story of Kingston inspires us to put the hard work in the right direction and persistence, such that success will be never un achievable.

cloudian

Success Story of Cloudian, a Data Storage Company, Co-founded by Hiroshi Ohta

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The advancement of technology is providing us with stairway to a new world. Every day, every second, our world is changing. New gadgets and new phenomenons are discovered daily. The path, that we have chosen for modernizing our world, depends vividly on data. Today, everything that we do, from launching a website to posting a picture on our Instagram account, data is needed. And, after a few decades, our world will reach a certain position where the development of every nation will be decided by the amount of data one can store or have access to.

And, speaking of data, as such an integral part of the modern sphere, it is definitely necessary to mention Hiroshi Ohta. Hiroshi Ohta, along with Michael Tso founded Cloudian, a company that brought innovation in the data storage system. Founded in 2011, the company has its headquarters based in San Mateo, California, United States.

The main product of Cloudian is object storage software that was built for big enterprises as with new software and applications from a huge number of companies made data storage really tough and complex. So, an easy to use data storage system was the cry of the hour.

The Idea Behind Cloudian

cloudian founder hiroshi ohta
Image Source: advertisingweek.com

Before Hiroshi Ohta came up with the idea of building his own company, he used to work at J-Phone. It is a telecom operator company, based in Japan, where Ohta was in charge of service development. During his time in this mobile company, he pioneered many skills and also provided the base for “Sha-Mail”, first mail in the world with pictorial advantage. Since he worked in the sector of communication, Ohta spotted a significant increase of users in the telecommunication world, and this resulted in the gathering of data in networks.

With an increase in the number of smartphones, laptops, and tablet in today’s world, the audience might likely run out of data and need to pay for storage. And, if such a situation arrives, where data becomes an integral part of our basic requirements, then it definitely has to be affordable. Thinking about this, Ohta decided to quit the company and built data storage product for the traffic insanely driving to the cloud world. He started working on Cloudian Hyperstore software (a software having Amazon S3 support).

Why Object Storage Technology?

The biggest advantage of this kind of storage software technology is that you can store and have access to data irrespective of your geographical location. Previously, the software that had been created by many companies only limited the scope of accessing data from nowhere, but the data centres. But, Ohta undoubtedly solved this problem through Cloudian software.

Another big problem that started arising was the cost of maintenance because some software programs were targeted to increase the data volume. This increased the cost of storage and got off track from one of the data storage’s biggest goal, that is being economical.

Cloudian’s products solve both the major problems, along with keeping the quality of products high. From media to medical school, every institution, company, organization, including a single user, need data storage facilities for various reasons. And, there is no scene of “market drop” in this area, at least, for half a century now.

Success of Cloudian

One year, after founding the company, Cloudian signed a deal with a Japanese telecommunication company to fuel its cloud object storage service. This was the big start after which Cloudian has entertained many lucrative clients, including Motorola, Element Fleet, Tyco and many more.

The company also has a very fancy list when it comes to investors. In 2014, the company raised $24 million from Intel Capital, Goldman Sachs, INCJ and Fidelity Growth Partners Japan. In 2016, four new investors were added to list including Lenovo, City National Bank, Epsilon Venture Partners and DVP Investment. Cloudian raised $41 million in the funding round of October 2016. After the new Series E funding round, the total worth of Cloudian hit an impressive figure of $173 million. The company has also established a partnership with Cisco, which triggered the list of investors, and basically, means more funding.

Future Aspects

One of the most important targets that Ohta talks about is the users should be very familiar and comfortable to use these products. Also, the applications that are being created with Cloudian’s storage technology as the backbone should be at best interest of the audience.

Plaid

Plaid : Powering Innovation in Financial Sector by Connecting Apps to Banks

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There has been an explosion of multiple payment apps in the past couple of years, to be more precise, last two years. These apps have made it easy for all of us on how to manage our finances and bank accounts, making us able to send and receive money from and into our bank accounts in just a few taps on our smartphone. But is it that easy to do all of these processes? It looks like but is definitely not. These companies create an infrastructure to connect the banks with the app or use a ready-made API for the same. Plaid is one of the companies which creates those APIs for the app makers who then can connect the banks through their apps and provide financial services to their customers.

Plaid was founded by Zach Perret and William Hockey in 2012. Perret is a Duke University pass out with a bachelor’s degree in Science, and William has a degree in Computer Science from Emory University. The two worked at Bain & Company, Perret as a consultant and Hockey as an associate. The two met at work and gelled well due to their common interest, i.e. coding. While working at the company, they discussed ideas for a new startup and started working on some. And, in 2012 finally left their job to start their own business. They moved to New York and spent over eighteen months to conceive the right idea.

Like every other startup founders, it was not their first startup. Before Plaid they had tried their hands on various consumer-based products as well, but none of them worked. Once, they decided to create an app for connecting bank accounts and do the transaction. But it was again a failure.

Plaid founders
Image Source: wsj.com

So they decided to create an infrastructure for connecting the apps and the banks altogether, like a pipeline, moving their focus from consumer-based products. Following that, the two created personal financial management and tracking tool for consumers and named it Sliver. Later, the product was renamed as Rambler, which later won the $5,000 grand prize at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon as a winner in 2013. It was the first time that a team made a full-scale financial services application live within 24 hours.

With Rambler, the two co-founded Plaid, an application programming interface, or API, that would do almost every type of banking work, like generating PDFs for the transaction and connecting the banks, just by using a bank customer’s online user name and password. The two moved to San Fransisco to set up an office and join more engineers to work on the product. Along with that, they started looking for investors and got rejected more than 50 times.

Finally, in July 2013, the company was able to raise a $2.9 million in a seed round led by Spark Capital. Later, the company raised a $60 million in Series A and Series B funding. Since then, the company has been growing in every which way. Within two years, the startup idea took the two co-founders of Plaid into the list of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2015.

According to Plaid, as of December 2018, 25 per cent of people in the United States having a bank account had connected to Plaid through an app. It was a fair increase of 13 per cent in 2017.

In 2019, the company raised a $250 million Series C investment and valued at a $2.65 billion. In total, the company has raised a $310 million investment from names like Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Goldman Sachs, NEA, Spark Capital, etc.

Today, more than 15,000 banks are connected through various apps with the Plaid infrastructure and extend to thousands of apps, including Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, Acorns and LendingClub.

box

Box : The Journey from A Class Project to Becoming a Unicorn

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File storage has become the biggest issue of the current time. With changing time, the need for storage capacity is also changing. In previous years, some KBs were sufficient, and now, even TBs are not able to fulfil the business requirements. But then, the introduction of the cloud has helped people to cop-up with their needs, such that they can buy as much online storage as they need to store their files on the cloud. This is a similar concept behind one of the successful startups, Box, which is a cloud content management and file sharing service. The founder of Box, Aaron Levie, started working on Box as a college project, which now is one of the Unicorn companies of the Silicon Valley.

Levie was born as Aaron Winsor Levie on 27 December 1985 in a Jewish family, settled in Mercer Island, Washington. He did his middle school from Islander Middle School in Mercer Island, Washington, where he met his best friend, and the future CFO of Box, Dylan Smith. Levie and Smith had always shown an interest in business as well as coding. In fact, when they were in high school, they had already built a few websites for people.

After completing his high school education, Levie joined the University of Southern California to pursue a degree in business and marketing, whereas Smith went to Duke University, and enrolled in a Bachelor’s course in economics.

Dylan Smith Aaron Levie Founders Box
Image Source: techrepublic.com

While at the University of Southern California, Levie constantly kept on working on new projects with his classmates. When he, with his other friends created code files, all of them created separate files on separate devices, so it was difficult for them to bring the code together and run. And this was the time when he realised that there has to be a single place to store files. It was the first pain point towards the development of Box.

At the same time, in one of their business studies class, a new project came up for their finals. Levie chose the same topic for his project that was a big issue for him and other businesses out there, centralised storage system. He wrote a paper for the project that represented the difficulties that the businesses were facing due to the lack of such systems.

While working on the project, Levie realised the scope of the project and decided to take the project more seriously. In 2004, he asked his friend Dylan to join him for help. Levie was working on the front end coding for the project, and then, brought his high school friends Sam Ghods and Jeff Queisser on board, too, to run the engineering work. Along with that, he hired some back-end developers on contract for the backend coding. The $20,000 seed funding for the project, and the company they founded, came from online poker earnings of Smith. They also invested the money that came from their previous projects in the company.

Levie knew the potential of his new project but was not sure what type of industry to target first. He, along with Smith, went to meet various business owners to clarify the same. Finally, they launched their company Box, and the service as Box.net in April 2005. At the end of 2005, the two went to Washington to work together on the project, and Levie took absence leave from his college. Soon, they moved their company to Berkeley, California.

Box received its first angel investment from Mark Cuban, a billionaire from Texas. During the beginning, the service was a consumer service, but the increased demand made Levie turn it into cloud storage and sell it to the businesses. In 2009, Box acquired Increo Solutions for its document collaboration and preview technology.

The company hosted a round of funding led by growth equity firm General Atlantic, where it raised a $125 million, in 2012. It also extended its operations to Europe and built its office in London, England. In 2013, the company in an F series round of funding raised a $100 million.

In 2014, 40% of Fortune 500 companies were using Box as their cloud storage and raised a $150 million in series G round of funding. Box also filed for an IPO at the New York Stock Exchange. The company became public in January 2015 and raised $175 million in the IPO. The IPO valued the company at around $1.6 billion, establishing it as a Unicorn company. In the same year, Box acquired another cloud management company named Airpost. The next year, the company built its headquarters in Redwood City, California. It even reached 44 million users around the world.

Box works in three types of offering, enterprise, business, and personal, IBM, Schneider Electric and Procter & Gamble, being its enterprise customers.

shutterstock

Jon Oringer : The Founder of No Less than Ten Startups, including Shutterstock

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Today no business promotion is complete without HD images. Relevant images are the most helpful in grabbing the attention of people for every type of business. Why only promotions? Images help create presentations, websites and fulfil many other purposes. But getting copyright-free images for a cheaper price is not easy. And no one wants to get hit by a copyright strike by just picking an image from the web either. Also hiring models and renting places for clicking those HD pictures is not pocket-friendly. So for these issues, websites like Shutterstock comes for the rescue, where you get lakhs of images for a cheap subscription fee. The website was developed by Jon Oringer in 2003, and since then it has been ruling the stock image industry.

Jon Oringer was born on 2 May 1974 in Scarsdale, New York. He got lucky to get to learn computer programming when he was studying in elementary school at the age of five. So he automatically became interested in programming. As a kid, he had already developed entrepreneurial skills, and when he went to high school, he developed photographs and taught guitar to make money. He completed his school education from the Scarsdale High School. As a teenager, he also repaired computers to earn some extra cash. With his programming skills, he was soon able to create small software and sold them to people.

In 1993, he joined the Stony Brook University to pursue a BS degree in computer science and mathematics. During this time, he built the world’s first pop-up blocker programme and sold over thousands of copies of the same. In 1997, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree and joined Columbia University, where he graduated with an MS in computer science. After the success of the pop-up blocker, he tried hands-on building a personal firewall, cookie blocker and other similar software and was sole owner and employee of about ten companies.

To promote his business, Jon Oringer chose e-mail marketing. But he found out that the mails with images had a better impact on people than without any. In the beginning, he bought stock photos for promotions, but later, it became quite expensive for him to buy images from the third party. So finally, he bought a camera and changed his hobby of photography to professional photography for his business. Later, he started posting the clicked and unused pictures online and invited people to use them. Eventually, it came out to be that he clicked around 100000 in just six months. So he decided to build a website, where he could put all the photographs for downloads.

Jon Oringer Shutterstock
Image Source: forbes.com

In 2003, he developed and launched Shutterstock, a website, where he put 30,000 images filtered from his vast collection. These pictures were based on different scenarios and were best of the 100000 pictures Jon Oringer had clicked. Seeing a good business opportunity in expanding the photo stock business, he took some of his savings and rented a 600-square-foot office in New York for the company. The website offered subscription-based services and cost $49 a month. Like his other startups, Oringer initially took all the responsibilities himself. With time, he started joining his friends for the photography and to ccarry out other operations in the company.

Soon, with the expansion of the company, he ended up hiring professional photographers and contributors to fulfil the demands. In 2006, the company became the largest subscription-based photo-stock company, offering over 570,000 images. From August 2008, the company also started providing videos through its new platform named Shutterstock Footage, and in 2009, it launched Shutterstock for iPad offering free images to the users. It also introduced a new marketplace like Spectrum and Offset for high-quality images and videos.

Oringer filed for an initial public offering for ShutterStock public on the New York Stock Exchange, in May 2012, and in October of the same year, the company went public. After the IPO, the stock value of the company increased drastically, and in 2013, Oringer was a billionaire with a net worth of USD$1.05 billion. The company revenues of the same year reached $2.5 billion, and it also launched an Android app.

Along with new tools and features, the company also started collaborating with different companies, like in 2013, Facebook integrated Shutterstock into its Ad Creator tool. The next year, Salesforce also included the ShutterStock library to its platform. The company also formed a partnership with companies like Penske Media Corporation and Associated Press for a free license for access to their archives.

Oringer, with his skills and experience, took the right opportunity at the right time. This intelligent entrepreneur has been a guest speaker at various educational institutions. He has also received numerous awards for his achievements. In 2013, Business Insider named Oringer the coolest person in all of New York technology. He was also named as the New York’s Technology Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young.