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fixcraft.in

Vivek Sharma : The Founder of Fixcraft.in who has Set the Indian Auto Sector on Fire

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Talking about fancy expensive car companies, we can name hundreds of them, isn’t it? But what after you purchase the car? Do you get proper servicing at an affordable rate, or is it like spending your month’s half salary to fix the car? Indeed, the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) workshops are not affordable for everyone, but currently, they are dominating the market. So do you have any names in mind that are up for the game, but at cheaper prices? Well, we have one. Fixcraft.in it is!

Yes, Fixcraft.in is a fresh start-up in the automobile industry, established to improve the Auto After Sales services in India. Vivek Sharma, the founder of Fixcraft.in, founded the company on 10th October 2018 to make significant growth in the automobile sector and especially, to remove the burden of expensive garage costs for all the car owners.

Education and Early Career of Vivek Sharma

Sharma went to Marine Engineering and Research Institute and graduated with a B.E. degree in 2006. After passing out as a marine engineer, in 2006 he joined Seaarland Shipping Management B.V. as an assistant to chief engineer. He worked there for three years, and during this period, he was also exposed to the work culture of foreign countries. He travelled across 26 different countries and trained a team on how to act at the time of various emergencies. His major works included managing, operating and maintaining the schedule of the engine room of the ship.

Vivek Sharma Fixcraft.in
Image Source: crunchbase.com

He left the company in 2009 and joined Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore in 2010 and graduated with a Post Graduate Diploma in Management, Strategy and Marketing, in 2012. During his time in IIM, Bangalore he did a summer internship from the Philips Electronics India Ltd. He learned about the cluster analysis, competition analysis; develop a market strategy with information and data making and estimating market potential.

After graduating from IIM, Bangalore, he was again back to Philips Electronics as a Deputy Manager (Lighting) and worked there for a year. His main job there was to manage B2B sales in Delhi.

In May 2013, he joined the Hyderabad branch of the company as ASM, Andhra Pradesh (Lighting) and became the sales head for B2B Lighting Division of Andhra Pradesh.

In the next year, his career met huge success, as he joined Snapdeal as Associate Director. He was the founding member of the Account Management Team, and also, the Head for Sales and Strategy for key categories. He left Snapdeal in November 2016.

The last company he joined before founding his own was Droom Technology, a start-up by Sandeep Aggarwal. He joined the company as Senior Director of Business Development as was promoted to Associate Vice President of the same department after 9 months. He left Droom just one month before founding his own company.

Fixcraft.in

By the time Sharma founded Fixcraft.in, he had already gathered more than enough experience and knowledge in the automobile sector. The main motive of Sharma was to bridge the gap between local garages and OEM workshops for After Sales Services. Moreover, the market for After Sales Services was expected to reach a value of 20 billion in the next five years. And, this section of the industry includes both old and new customers, which means there will be possibly no drop-in rate of consuming services in this sector.

Fixcraft.in is the first Indian full-stack cloud-based garage which provides service starting from parts replacement to car painting at a very fair price.

Sharma’s biggest challenge while founding Fixcraft.in was to build a strong team and get it to work together. But with time, he has built a good core team and now working on expanding his business. Since Sharma’s main goal was to provide quality services at an affordable price, he is operating on the Cost Plus model of pricing.

In this very year, Sharma’s business received an undisclosed amount of money in seed funding, which included some significant angel investors, like Ranjan Kant, Former Director at the Furniture Republic and CBO at Ofbusiness; Rahul Taneja, ex CBO at Jabong, and from the other existing investors. The company also has Rishab Malik in the advisory team, who worked with Droom and GSF India.

Future Plans

With less than a year of its establishment, Fixcraft.in is doing well in the automobile sector. With its business running only in Delhi NCR, they are planning to expand it to Pune and Bangalore, within next few months. By the end of 2020, Fixcraft.in plans to establish a business in the top 15 cities of India.

Docker

Solomon Hykes : The Founder of Enterprise Container Platform, ‘Docker’

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Open-source is one technology that has helped developers to improve their software and lead it to the next level with the help of other developers, without even knowing them. This technology not only helps the main developer but also the other developers to grow their skills. WordPress being one of the biggest examples of such successful startup that has emerged mostly because it is open source and the community behind it. Soloman Hykes, also known as a French founder in Silicon Valley, is another startup owner, who made use of the open-source technology and established one of the biggest open-source development and deployment container providers, Docker.

Solomon Hykes was born to an American father and a French-Canadian mother in New York. But his family flew to France when he was four years old. He was introduced to computers when he was seven and instantly, became interested in coding. Hykes joined the Epitech School in 2001, where he started learning to programme. Alongside his studies, he got a job at a nearby cyber cafe, where he practised coding and ran the cafe’s servers. During this time, he also spent six months at the University of California, San Diego, and even, worked for a French movie company in Los Angeles.

In 2006, he graduated as a computer engineer and bagged a job at a computer security company. But there was something else he wanted to do. Only two years after starting his first job, in 2008, Hykes resigned to start a company of his own, along with Sébastien Pahl, a fellow student from Epitech. The two named the company as dotCloud, with which the two started working on a software that would offer a platform for developers to code on Amazon’s cloud.

Solomon Hykes Docker
Image Source: techcrunch.com

The two co-founders took the startup to Y Combinator in summer 2010 but got rejected. They again applied for the startup program in the winter session of the same year. But yet again were not selected. But at the very last moment, Paul Graham from Y Combinator changed his mind and selected dotCloud on a condition. The condition was to make all the Y Combinator peers to signup for dotCloud’s software.

At the startup program, Hykes presented the idea of a common container for software development and deployment. He wanted to create a container that could be accessed from anywhere, such that many computers interconnected into a cluster. With the very idea, dotCloud raised a decent amount of seed funding and started developing the software.

In 2011, Hykes shifted the company to the Silicon Valley, and the company raised an $11 million in Series A in April in the same year, from names like Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital. At that time, the company was the only PaaS provider, and even, AWS was providing better support for the software. The company started to grow rapidly, and in 2013, the company dotCloud became Docker.

Though the company was going through a good time, there was still something that it was lacking. During the same time, Hykes got a decent offer for selling the company, but he decided not to and was tinkering around to make things right for the company.

So in the same year, Hykes made the company’s software an open-source platform, and RedHat was the one big company to step in to use the very software for its PaaS platform, OpenShift. In 2014, Microsoft announced that it will be integrating the Docker products into its Windows Server version in 2016. The same year, Google, Amazon and IBM also came in a partnership with the company. In 2014, the company raised a $40 million in the Series C funding led by Sequoia Capital. The company also acquired another startup named startup Orchard.

In 2015, the company became a unicorn company, after it valued $1 billion through a $95 million Series D fundraising led by Insight Venture Partners. By the end of the same year, the company again raised an $18 million in the Series D round. In the latest round of funding in 2018, the company has raised a $92 million.

In the beginning, Docker started with a single project, but now, it hosts projects like containers, LinuxKit, SwarmKit, and the Moby, etc, based on the Docker technology.

On 28 March 2018, Solomon Hykes stepped down as the CEO of the company, remaining on the board of the company valued $ 1.3 billion.

Kobo

Michael Serbinis : A Significant Entrepreneur who Founded Kobo

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There always doesn’t have to be a reason for reading. Reading has always been valuable as it only adds up to your knowledge. That is why the community of book lovers is expanding with every passing second. But, we do know that everyone can’t afford the highly expensive original editions of classic novels every time. So for such a crisis, the e-books become the true guardian angels in our life.

Kobo Inc. is a Canada-based platform that is famous for selling e-books and electronics. The company serves customers at a global level and has attracted more than 10 million readers by now. Its founder Michael Serbinis, who is an engineer, entrepreneur and an angel investor, is even more famous for founding more than just one company.

Where Michael Serbinis belongs?

Born on 28th October 1973, Michael Serbinis belongs to the land of maple syrup, i.e., Canada. His keen interest in science made him win gold at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, for which he designed a high-temperature superconductor propulsion system. So, his first big achievement happened when he was in high school, that led to big opportunities for working with NASA and Intel.

Michael Serbinis founder Kobo
Image Source: alejandrocremades.com

In 1996, Serbinis graduated from Queen’s University with a bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics, followed by graduating from the University of Toronto with a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering. While he was a student, he entered into the Ontario Engineering Competition, and his creation of motor, that ran on an advanced software coding, helped him fetch a summer job at Microsoft. He also conducted thorough research on neural networks and artificial intelligence.

The Journey in the Late 90s

Serbinis’s journey into the entrepreneurial world started while associating the Musk brothers. He received a call from the Musk brothers, who were his university classmates to help them build a business. And thus, Serbinis was one of the first ten employees of Zip2, the company that was established by Elon and Kimball Musk.

Since Serbinis was already a very efficient programmer, at the age of twenty-four, he built a cloud-based document storage service called DocSpace. After a couple of years, it was sold to a San-Francisco based company for $530 million.

In 2000, Michael Serbinis joined Critical Path as CTO and EVP Marketing. It was then one of the largest companies which ran one-third of the world’s emails through their software. After he moved back to Canada, Serbinis joined Indigo as CIO and EVP Online, and this is the point at the juncture, where Kobo spun out to become an independent business.

Founding Kobo

At first, a global e-reading platform called Shortcovers was released in February 2009, under the main company Indigo. But, once they gained board approval and funding, they cut out from Indigo and established as an independent company. In late 2009, the company was rebranded as Kobo, an e-reading platform for worldwide customers. This was just the beginning for Serbinis to do great things in his homeland.

The Success

Kobo received a very good response from all over the world, shortly after its release. Kobo, today, attracts over 18 million users from more than 190 countries. It has over more than 3 million magazines, eBooks, and even, newspapers. Thus, creating the largest e-readers catalogue in the history of the e-reading platform.

In January 2012, Kobo came under the acquisition of a Japanese e-commerce company called Rakuten for $315 million. The catalogue of Kobo has e-books on 77 different languages, helping readers connect to their native land.

After Kobo

Since it was only the beginning, Serbinis founded 3 Angels Capital in 2014, to invest in a disrupted market and create a better world. Serbinis has always been a determined and optimistic man for sure. He mostly invests in areas, like the internet of things, digital content, digital health, etc.

Michael Serbinis is also the board director of MaRS Discovery District, an innovation hub in Toronto. He serves as a board director in another institute called Vector Institute, a non-profit research institution in Toronto.

In November 2014, Serbinis founded League Inc., an online platform that connects worldwide users to provide health benefits and much more.

After developing so much on his homeland and contributing to science, Serbinis still lives in Toronto with his family.

PHP

Rasmus Lerdorf : An Insightful Programmer and the Creator of PHP

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The history of PHP programming language narrates the story of a programmer who prefers to be known as an engineer than a coder. Because according to this engineer, the end product is what matters the most and not the journey to it. Well, seems like his mind works more like a thermodynamic state function and less like a path-dependent parameter, isn’t it?

This remarkably excellent engineer is none other than world-famous programmer Rasmus Lerdorf. On one of his interviews, Lerdorf said that coding is quite boring and tedious, which is insignificant contrast to who he is and his occupation. So, let’s get to know more about this big guy and his ‘path’ to success.

Early Life

Rasmus Lerdorf
Image Source: staticflickr.com

Born into a family from Disko Island, Greenland, on 22nd November 1968, Rasmus Lerdorf moved to Denmark at an early age of three. At the age of fifteen, Lerdorf and his family moved to King City, Ontario. In 1988, Lerdorf graduated from King City Secondary School and pursued his higher studies from the University of Waterloo. He graduated from the university in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree of Applied Science in Systems Designing Engineering.

After he graduated, Lerdorf made significant contributions to the relational database management systems like Oracle Rdb.

Working With Programming Languages

When the programmers and the tech-savvies were working in the mid-90s with their main motive to make the internet more efficient and faster, he got hindered by languages like C and Perl. According to Rasmus Lerdorf, designing websites with these languages were too time consuming and needed to come up with a new one.

Lerdorf, along with some of the technical writers, assembled their ideas together and got them online as an HTML page. He wanted to take a step ahead, only when some companies asked for these documents or expand the idea and implement it in the practical world.

Creating PHP

He started working in CGI (common gateway interface), developed few libraries, wrote some programs in C, and finally, developed PHP, an entirely new language. Lerdorf created PHP (personal home page, now known as hypertext preprocessor) in 1994, and till now, many modified versions of the language has been released.

In a generalized way, PHP is a programming language that was designed for web development and can be used almost on every operating system. The most recent version of PHP is PHP 7.3 released on 6th December 2018.

After PHP became a very well known and useful language to big companies, Rasmus Lerdorf explained that he never intended to create a programming language, as he had no clue how to build one. He was making logical implementations to create something simpler than Perl, and one thing led to another. Finally, after forming a tech team to assist him with technical documentation, which followed beta testing, PHP/FI 2 was released in November 1997.

The Success

Today, PHP is a majorly used programming language, being used by websites like Etsy, Wikipedia, Tumblr, Yahoo, Flickr, Facebook, and many more.

Over the years, many features have been incorporated in PHP, but Lerdorf keeps telling one thing to every emerging engineer out there, that for a programmer, it is very important to understand C very well. Though he accepts that as compared to languages, like Python or C++, the user needs to put comparatively more effort using C, but it is the fundamental unit of learning for any programmer.

After releasing PHP, he worked with different big tech companies, and currently, he is working with Etsy.

Career of Lerdorf

In January 2000, Rasmus Lerdorf joined Linuxcare Inc. as a senior research engineer and continued for a year. In September 2002, he joined Yahoo! where he continued for seven years, as an Infrastructure Architecture Engineer. Lerdorf said that eventually, he became tired and kind of demoralized working in an ad centric web company, as it involves tricking your customers.

He joined Room 77 as an advisor in 2010, and then, it’s all about WePay and Etsy. It’s been eleven years, that he has been working in Etsy, first as an advisor, and then, as a distinguished engineer.

Lerdorf as every other enthusiastic programmer is very much interested in open source, and he attends the open-source conferences as a speaker throughout the world.

logo vneda

Vneda : One-stop Solution for All Organizational Learning Needs

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The market is evolving at a fast pace, and along with that, the need for skilled and well-educated employees is also increasing as everyone realizes the value of knowledge. Organizations are losing millions because they are unable to take care of their knowledge. According to a study published by the International Data Corporation (IDC), It’s estimated that poor knowledge-sharing practices cost the Fortune 500 companies a $31.5 billion annually. And therefore, organizations are looking for better options to enhance employees’ skills and knowledge, which eventually, helps them to increase their productivity. This Edu-tech startup named Vneda is one of resource providing company, which is on the mission to solve these problems by their services.

What is Vneda

Vneda is an Edu-tech startup that started on 8th March 2018. It provides a unified learning solution for skill development, knowledge management and knowledge sharing among organizations and their employees. It provides a hybrid approach for the corporate, NGOs and government organizations for the better utilization and administration of knowledge resources. Vneda allows users to manage their knowledge and enhance it through knowledge sharing with the use of smart tools.

Users can create and consume digital content such as podcasts, videos, articles, e-books, courses on the platform. They use Proprietary Algorithms for the curation and indexing of the content. Vneda helps users to manage and store their important data on a cloud-based server, and apart from this, it also provides doorstep delivery of physical books from approx 1.5 lac+ book library.

founders Vneda

Vneda works on employee recognition as well by rewarding the users for consuming and sharing knowledge, to cultivate a habit of knowledge-sharing in them.

Co-founders

Vneda is an idea of two colleagues, Aman Sharma, and Ritesh Kumar. Aman Sharma is a Computer Science graduate who had an interest in developing something new and innovative. He developed many B2B and B2C products in the last seven years. Ritesh Kumar is an IT graduate and is a technology expert (Full Stack Developer), who likes to work on both the front end as well as the back-end of the product’s website and application.

Founding Vneda

When Aman Sharma ventured into the corporate learning market, he researched and found this market, especially in India, was relatively new and yet to be explored. There was not much focus on knowledge management and knowledge sharing. And because of this lack of focus, they were losing big monies and resources. On the contrary, this market got its due importance and was flourishing in the developed nations. From this fact, he drew his assumption that the knowledge sharing and knowledge management market would find its due recognition in India as well.

What is unique about Vneda

There is no single platform that caters to all the learning needs of an organization. They have to manage and opt for different platforms for digital learning and development, knowledge sharing, knowledge management, corporate library, knowledge repositories, etc. Having multiple platforms leads to increased costs for the organization, it becomes problematic for employees to manage and use so many platforms. On the contrary, Venda is a single corporate learning solution that caters to a wide range of learning needs such as corporate learning and development, knowledge sharing, knowledge management and much more.

It also helps in uniting external knowledge to internal knowledge. Vneda is providing a platform where publishers can publish their content that can be consumed by the users.

Accomplishments

It’s never been an easy task for entrepreneurs from convincing investors to invest in their ideas to users for adopting their services. Vneda was started with the seed investment of its co-founders, and since then, they are bootstrapping. Yet the hard work pays, as the company is catering to 25,000+ users across 13 corporate, like Axis Bank, Honda 2 Wheelers, Volkswagen, Orient Electric are to name a few.

How it works

Vneda works on two pricing models; one is free where a user does not pay a single penny for using the knowledge sharing and management platform. And then the other where the organization is charged a subscription fee. Under this, the organization gets a subscription to the created and curated content, which includes third party premium content and physical book delivery.

The vision

Vneda was created with a vision to construct an ecosystem of shared knowledge. The team is working to achieve a larger goal to create the knowledge management & sharing culture in all communities. But at present, they are focusing on their ideal target audience and eyeing to close 100 corporate by the end of this year and become profitable. Vneda is now a team of 10 hard working fellows putting efforts to create a strong tech product that can be integrated with any other existing system to make the knowledge access experience easy and interesting.

TransferWise

TransferWise : A UK based Startup that Made Transfering Money Abroad Cheaper

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The people who live in a different country from their home for work would know the pain of paying the extra fee for sending money back to their home. Though with the rise of the internet and new fintech apps, the pain has been reduced to an extent. But, if we go a decade back, and even earlier, there were no such apps or any online platforms. People had to pay an extra fee, and mostly, in the currency which was the expensive one. This problem led two Estonian fellows, Taavet Hinrikus and Kristo Käärmann, to found TransferWise, a fintech platform for transferring money abroad without paying additional hidden fees.

Taavet Hinrikus and Kristo Kaarmann both belonged to Estonia and were working in London. In fact, Taavet Hinrikus was Skype’s first employee. The two had met a party and ultimately, became good friends.

The Problem

In 2008, Kaarmann was rewarded a Christmas bonus of £10,000 ($13,147) by his company, which he wanted to spend in something big. The only problem he faced was that he was paid in pounds, but he had a mortgage back in Estonia, that he had to pay in Euros. He used to regularly send money to his Estonian bank account. The transfer usually used to take 4-5 working days to complete, and the bank would charge a specific fee.

transferwise founders
Image Source: standard.co.uk

In general days, he had never sent such a big amount to his Estonian bank account. So the fee charged did not feel much for him. But when he had to send the earned bonus to that bank account, it shook him hard. Before sending the money, he looked at the exchange rates on Bloomberg and Reuters, that came out to be a £15 fee. But after he sent the money, he checked the balance and found out that the bank had charged him a £500. Here he realised that the banks were charging an extra fee other than the exchange rate and that too, in pounds.

The Solution

Kaarmann discussed the matter with Hinrikus, who was also suffering from the same problem. Living in London, Hinrikus had to pay bills in pounds, but his salary came in Euro. This led the two think of saving the exchange fee by transferring money to each other. The two built a private exchange system, in which, Kaarmann transferred Hinrikus money in pounds, whereas the latter sent money to Kaarmann in Euro and for free of cost.

For a few months, they followed the same method, and then they talked about the transfer system to some of their colleagues and friends, too. This way, they formed a small group for sending and receiving money without spending extra cash on exchange fees.

Launching TransferWise

Finally, in 2011, the two decided to launch a whole system for people, through which they could send and receive money across the border, without having to spend extra on exchange fee. They introduced the new online money transfer system, TransferWise, on TechCrunch through a simple blog post, and in no time, they started receiving emails regarding it.

In 2012, the platform got the approval from the UK financial regulator, and in the first year of its inception, it carried out transactions of worth €10 million. Though TransferWise was hitting off good, it was not able to reach more people. The investors were sceptical about the idea. But one person who was also the owner of a startup believed in the idea. It was PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. In 2013, Thiel led the Series A round funding for the company and raised over a $1.3 million.

In 2016, it was found out that TransferWise on an average was 83% cheaper than the bank transfers. Till now, the company has raised a $400 million in all rounds of funding collectively. According to TransferWise, it carries out over $1 billion transactions every month and has saved around a billion pounds of its customers on the transfers.

Today the company has got offices in London, Singapore, Tallinn, and New York, etc. In 2017, the company also launched borderless accounts for its users and also a multicurrency master card to handle borderless transactions. TransferWise offers a peer-to-peer money transfer for more than 175 different currencies.

Becoming the Unicorn

In May 2019, the company had another round of funding and raised $292 million. With the fundraiser, the company reached a total valuation of $3.5 billion. TransferWise got the investments from some of the reputed investors in the world, including Peter Thiel, Richard Branson, and Andreessen Horowitz. Other than that the capital ventures that invested in the company, include Global Investors, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, Japanese Mitsui & Co, and World Innovation Lab.

TransferWise has received several accolades to its names. The Guardian named it as one of “East London’s 20 hottest tech startups”. It also got named as Wired UK Start-Up of the Week. The company was at number 12 in Startups.co.uk’s list of the top 100 UK start-ups of 2012. TechCrunch also named TransferWise as one of five “start-ups to watch” at Seedcamp’s 2012 US Demo Day. In August 2015, the company was named a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer.