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Bipin Preet Singh : The Journey from IIT Delhi to Founding MobiKwik

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Here’s a story of another successful IITian whose name got added to the already glorious record of entrepreneurs from IITs. Bipin Preet Singh has become quite a significant figure in the start-up society after he launched MobiKwik in 2009.

MobiKwik is a Gurgaon based Indian start-up which provides a mobile application to carry out online payments. Hence, it contributes largely to the initiative taken to digitalize the payment system in the country. The company also built its Lite app in 2016 so that anyone with poor internet connectivity can also access the application.

Before founding MobiKwik, Singh explored different kinds of job which included Training Facilitator and SoC Architect.

Early Life and Early Career

Bipin Preet Singh MobiKwik
Image Source: inc42.com

Bipin Preet Singh graduated with a B Tech degree in Electrical Engineering in 2002 from IIT Delhi. Soon after graduating from college, he started working for Intel as the Senior Design Engineer. He worked there for three years in the Whitefield Project in Bangalore which has Intel’s first-ever project, including the server microprocessor designing. He worked mainly on circuit designing and formal modelling of microprocessors.

After leaving Intel in 2005, Singh joined Janaagraha in 2006, as a training facilitator. During his time in this company, he worked to build up a social awareness program (India’s first such program), which was mainly targeted to motivate the students and IT professionals to think of democracy beyond voting. This was a bit unusual profession to be picked up by an IITian, but he conducted training series in companies like Dell, NVIDIA, which exposed his skills and helped him fetch better career opportunities.

Bipin Preet Singh joined NVIDIA as a Platform Architect in 2006, while he continued working at Janaagraha. He worked there with a high-level global architecture team and dealt with some of the most complicated projects around the world. He also developed architectural infrastructure for RAID and SATA/AHCI.

In May 2007, Singh joined Freescale Semiconductor as an SoC Architect and worked there for two years. His main work in this company was to generate and analyze performance models, work on memory technologies, propose new features for Motorola Chipsets etc.

By this time, Singh already gained a work experience of 7 years, and the learning phase was about to get over. Moreover, the companies he worked for gave him a pretty dominant position, so he wasn’t looking for a promotion at all. This is when he thought of building something of his own, something more challenging and daring than regular 9 to 5 job.

From Designing Engineer to an Accomplished Businessman

In his entrepreneurial journey, Singh approached and got rejected by many people. But, finally, an old friend of his was very impressed by his idea and agreed to join him in this venture. He kept meeting people and built up his own team from scratch.

Finally, in April 2009, Singh along with his wife, Upasana Taku, founded MobiKwik with a motto to improve the payment system and money transfer scenario. Initially, MobiKwik only had a closed wallet facility, but later the company launched a mobile application for the same. When Singh and his wife founded the company, he invested eight lakhs from his own money and rented an office in Dwarka, Delhi.

Success of MobiKwik

MobiKwik was started as an initiative to eradicate all the payment problems and set up a hassle-free environment for the transaction. They set up a wallet system, where after saving the money, one can use it for different purposes like phone number recharge, payments to online merchants, and different service providers.

In 2012, the company launched the e-wallet system of MobiKwik, and in November 2016, it brought the MobiKwik Lite mobile app to the market. In 2014, the company won the mBillionth Award South Asia in the category of mobile business.

By April 2015, MobiKwik had around 15 million users, and according to Forbes magazine, one million new users were added every month. MobiKwik also started giving loans of a small amount (500-2,500 Indian rupees) in partnership with CashCare. By 2016, the number of users hiked to 55 million from 15 million. In February 2017, MobiKwik announced that the company is going to invest more in expanding the user base to targeted 150 million. By 2017, maximum e-wallet transactions in our country were done through Paytm, ITZCash and Mobikwik.

Today, MobiKwik connects 105 million of its users to over 3 million merchants providing a huge spectrum of services including insurance, investments and loans. MobiKwik’s next target is to reach a billion Indian users and hit $20 billion by 2022.

venmo

Venmo : The Experience of Money Transfer Made Easy

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You do not get success in the first few attempts, but you sure get the experience. Trying and trying again always gets you with some good exposure and enhanced skill, such that the end product you create is always ‘the product’ that changes your life. One such similar story is of the founders of Venmo, a mobile payment service, who from being clueless about their future were able to build a multimillion startup.

The Founders

Venmo, an online payment app, was founded by two friends, Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail. The two had joined the University of Pennsylvania in 2001, where they got to share their room as freshmen. Iqram and Kortina both opted for Computer Science as their major, but later, Kortina switched to philosophy and creative writing. The reason being that he was already able to study computers and programming through homework exercises, so to utilize the university fee, he changed his subjects.

With time, the two became good friends and together, started working on different projects. The first project, on which they worked together, was a college advertisement website. They named the website My Campus Post. Along with the website, they spent most of their time on various other projects, but all they were doing as a hobby.

Venmo founders
Image Source: fastcompany.com

But Kortina realised that the graduation time is near, and they had no plans for their career only when his mother asked him about his career plans. This hit his mind, as he and Iqram, both of them need to make a career plan for them.

Beginning the Career

The two decided to move to West Philly, as the rents were way cheaper there. Here they started advertising about website development services from door to door and started getting some work. They also started their own online music selling project named Philafunk, at the same time. The platform provided the musicians with the facility to sell their music, and the website would charge them a minimal fee on every sale.

The two had skills, but they did not have real-world experience. So they decided to take a job. For the next two-three years, they worked for different technology firms, including iminlikewithyou.com.

They kept their part-time work of developing websites running alongside and continued to look for the life-changing idea. They even developed software for shops that could be used as a ledger or register on a laptop.

They came up with the idea of Philafunk while enjoying a Jazz show in the city. Philafunk enabled the musicians to accept money for the subscription, music or the merchandise people bought from them.

Founding Venmo

While the two were working on Philafunk in NYC, Iqram forgot to bring his wallet and borrowed some money from Kortina and wrote a cheque to him. This hit his mind, as he was using the traditional method of paying the money when he was using their mobile for every other thing. The two knew PayPal was already there for online money-related transactions, but even though people were not using it.

This led them to think of a new idea of developing a method to send and receive money through their mobile. They started working on the project and made use of the text message, i.e. SMS, for sending and receiving the status of money transferred. The working of the new payment method was quite derived from the Philafunk model, where now everyone (not only musicians) could receive the money for anything (not just for selling music).

The two also included the option to add a small description about for what the payment was made, such that people could keep the record of when and who they paid money for. They put the name of the service as Venmo. ‘Ven’ in Venmo has been derived from the Latin word vendere, which means ‘to sell’ and ‘mo’ is short for mobile.

The two were ready with the prototype of Venmo and started meeting people for its seed investment. But unfortunately, they could not convince any major investors. But they had to launch the service, and they took the help of Magon-Ismail’s old boss at Ticketleap and his father with the investments. They launched Venmo in August 2009. But in the next few months, the popularity of the app led the two co-founders to raise a $100,000 in debt financing.

The Rise of the Company

By the end of the year, the company shifted the model from website and SMS to mobile application and launched an iOS app in December. In January 2010, they got the opportunity to represent their product at the Mobile Monday Mid Atlantic Demo Night. Here they asked the audience to send some donation money to the relief fund for people suffering from an earthquake in Haiti. The relief fund raised a $600 in just a few minutes of announcement and in a week, there was a total donation of worth $15,000 through Venmo. This was one of the best marketing moves for the company.

The company raised another $1.2 million in May 2010, in a funding round led by RRE Ventures, followed by another $400,000 in debt financing in June 2010. The next month, Venmo launched its Android app. The coming year, the company partnered with most of the banks running in the U.S, for the payments.

By 2012, the growth rate for the company reached 30 per cent per month, and it was carrying out $10 million in payments every month.

On August 16, 2012, Braintree, another technology and mobile payment company, acquired Venmo for $26.2 million. But in September 2013, eBay acquired Braintree and all its subsidiaries, such that Venmo became the part of PayPal.

Venmo still is one of the famous payment apps in the U.S. and only serve in the U.S. As of 2017, a million users were using Venmo for mobile payments, and it carried out nearly $50 billion worth of transactions in 2018.

Tumblr

David Karp : The Young Entrepreneur Who Founded the Biggest Microblogging Website Tumblr

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Experience matters, and when it is earned since childhood, it can help you achieve many things. As a kid, humans are sharper than adults and capable of learning even the toughest of things. These days we see many little kids coming up and showing off their skills and knowledge, whereas many are already launching their startups in the various fields. Thanks to the evolving technology. Though David Karp is not a teenage entrepreneur, he had achieved a lot before he passed his teens. David Karp is the founder of Tumblr, the microblogging website, and has an interesting success story to follow.

Early Life

Karp was born to a science teacher and a film and television composer, on 6 July 1986, in New York City. He was a bright student and got his primary as well as middle school education from Calhoun School, at the same place where his mother worked. Karp, at the age of 11, started learning HTML and was soon developing websites for businesses.

Karp always wanted to join MIT for his graduation, so, he after studying for one year at The Bronx High School of Science, dropped out and opted for homeschooling, to make his resume interesting for admissions in the university.

Career

David Karp
Image Source: charitybuzz.com

Things to go according to one’s will is not always possible. Karp wanted to add more to his resume, so he was doing many things alongside his homeschooling. He started working at the Frederator Studios as an intern when he was 14. At that time, he was also learning Japanese and had joined maths classes. Along with his maths tutor, he learned some of the programming skills. At the Frederator Studios, he got to work on various software products, and he even developed studio’s first blogging platform and its first internet video network, named Channel Frederator.

Later, he got to work with UrbanBaby. One day, at the firm, he solved a glitch in the software successfully in a comparatively lesser amount of time. The incident helped him to win the attention of John Maloney the founder of UrbanBaby.

Maloney appointed Karp as the head of product at UrbanBaby. Karp continued to work with the company for four more years and left it in 2006 after the company was acquired by CNET. Four years spent in a company made him leave the dream of joining MIT behind, as he had also not received a high school degree yet and he was doing great as a programmer.

Entrepreneurial Journey towards Tumblr

Karp work and experience opened new doors for him, and he went on to start his own development consulting company named Davidville. He hired a programmer named Marco Arment, through Craigslist, with the help of whom, Karp started to work on a new project. Karp had grown an interest in microblogging and was looking forward to developing a platform based-on microblogging. It took him a year and a half on deciding to finally work on his interest, and he launched Tumblr in February 2007.

David Karp was aware of the scope of a microblogging website, but he did not know that his website will gain 75000 users just within two weeks of its launch. In six months, he realised that Tumblr has got huge potential, so to focus on it, entirely, Karp shut down his consulting business and rebranded his company as Tumblr, Inc.

The Rise of the Company

In 2009, the company launched an iOS app for Tumblr, and in 2010, another app was launched for Blackberry phones. In 2011, the company valued at $800 million, and in the same year, raised a funding of $85 million. In October 2011, Tumblr became the first blogging website that hosted American President Barak Obama’s blog.

The 3.0 version of Tumblr launched in 2012, which also included support for Spotify. This way, the users could now post HD pictures on the platform and also use it at offline mode. In August 2012, the company monetized the platform through advertisements.

Major investors including Union Square Ventures, Fred Seibert, John Borthwick, and Sequoia Capital, etc. were the major investor in the company at that time. Karp sold 25% of the company share to few of its investors.

On May 20, 2013, Yahoo! announced that it will be acquiring Tumblr for $1.1 billion, Karp remaining the CEO of the company. After working together with Yahoo! for four years, Karp resigned from his post.

David Karp was named Best Young Tech Entrepreneur by BusinessWeek in August 2009. He was also named in the list of MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil : The Tech Visionary who Invented the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Technology

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The world is filled with possibilities and opportunities to build a better future. Once in a while, there comes a genius or two, who turn tap into these right set of circumstances and changes the face of the planet as we know. Raymond a.k.a. Ray Kurzweil is one such eminent personality with a flair for creativity and erudition. Ray can be reflected as one of the brightest minds of our generation, who has given major contributions to the field of Artificial intelligence. He has written several books and published papers on the same. One of the most remarkable of his contributions is the invention of OCR (Optical Character Recognition). The journey of this astounding visionary has a lot of interesting aspects and a fair share of ups and downs. Then again, what value does success have unless it is achieved after a little bit of toil and grinds?

Early Life and Career

Born in the favourable soil of US, Ray Kurzweil received normal education at a regular public school in New York City. Even though he had much humble upbringing, Ray did show an inclination towards the world of science. He belonged to a musical family, but at a tender age of 5 years, Kurzweil decided to become a scientist. This was fueled by his increased penchant for electronic gadgets that he assembled now and then. At the age of 15, Ray wrote his very own computer programme, with the assistance of his uncle, who was a computer science engineer at Bell Labs.

Quite predictably, keeping up his momentum, the young genius got into the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he built software that helped students find appropriate colleges according to their academic credentials. The application was welcomed with great spirit, which was later, launched commercially in the name Select College Consulting Programme. This was soon bought by an educational publishing firm called Harcourt, Brace and World. The most fascinating part of the story is that Ray was just 20 when he first built a firm and sold it for a huge profit.

Journey as an Entrepreneur and Inventing OCR

Ray Kurzweil
Image Source: pinterest.com

Raymond graduated from MIT in lightning speed with dual degrees in Computer Science and English literature. Later on, Ray started his very own company named Kurzweil Computer Products, where he built something that changed how we read faces. The firm developed an Optical Character Reader, which was one of a kind idea. This led to the invention of the flatbed scanners, which also shook the technology industry like a whirlwind.

The Kurzweil Reading Machine was the name of his series of inventions and was successfully launched in collaboration with Bell Labs. The man was not just an inventor or a scientist, but also a great visionary with a big dream about the future. Ray was selling the OCR like hot pancakes, and eventually, sold his Kurzweil Products Company in the year of 1980. It went on to be renamed as ScanSoft and was later taken over by Xerox Corporation.

After Kurzweil Products Company

Ray went on to invent a couple of other remarkable products and services that managed to make the lives better for every user across the globe. One such invention was a programmable synthesizer that could correctly reproduce the sounds of musical instruments such as a piano, drums and many others. Ray even started a company named Kurzweil Music System to pursue this line of ideas. This could be attributed to the fact that he hails from a family full of musicians. Its first product was the Kurzweil 250, which was quickly approved by musicians all over the world.

Ray Kurzweil also developed speech recognition software alongside, which was also a huge success. Later on, he started focusing on Artificial Intelligence, and its future, and interestingly enough, authored books such as Robots and Beyond, Fantastic Voyage, etc.

Currently, Ray works for Google, at the request of the company co-founder Larry Page. Such an awe-spiring story, isn’t it? Once in a while, the earth is graced by super-intelligent beings such as Raymond Kurzweil. We can consider it a privilege to have born in this millennia and have a piece of his wisdom. Science makes earth easier to live in, while people like Ray, make it a better place to live in.

4chan

Christopher Poole : The Founder of 4Chan Who Tasted Success Without Being Known

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The rise of computers and programming languages has brought a revolution in the world. The programming languages have become the biggest contribution to the world and the growth of the economy. That is why most of the people are not hesitant about taking a step in the same field. Little kids and teenagers are the ones who are more curious about them, and there is another reason behind it. The magic a person feels behind building things only by coding makes it interesting enough for the kids and the adults. Also, it has helped many people to grow financially as well.

One such teenage coder was Christopher Poole, who was only fifteen when he founded one of the biggest forum-based social network 4chan. An American enthusiast, Chris was always into programming and loved what he could do with it. Without letting people know, he used to code almost every night.

Chris Poole was born in 1988 in New York City. He lived with his mom and wanted to build a platform that would help him earn some extra money. While in school, he used to create comedy content and post it on ‘Something Awful’, a comedy website.

chris poole 4Chan
Image Source: cdn.vox-cdn.com

Chris was inspired by Japan’s famous imageboard of ‘Futaba Channel’ (2Chan) and wanted to create something similar for America as well. When he was still in school, he started working on a new project and developed 4Chan, the American version of the Japanese imageboard. He went on to follow the source code of Futaba Channel and took the help of AltaVista’s Babel Fish online translator to translate the code.

On 1 October 2003, when he was just 15, he finally launched 4Chan by pseudonym ‘Moot’. He used the name Moot as he did not want to mix his private and professional life. That is why there is not much information about Chris’s early life. His real identity was only revealed on 9 July 2008, after five years he launched 4Chan, that too, by The Wall Street Journal.

After launching 4Chan and completing his school education, Chris joined the Virginia Commonwealth University. But eventually, he had to quit college only after a few semesters, such that he could focus on his startup.

Soon, 4Chan emerged as a place where people could create and share meme and animes. They had the facility to share the content anonymously as well as non-anonymously. The platform was a great success, and even before revealing his real identity, he got the chance to speak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Yale University as Moot. He had become an influencer in no time.

In 2008, Leopoldo Godoy of Brazilian TV Globo called the site as “the ground zero of Western web culture”. He was named as the world’s most influential person of 2008 by the ‘Time’ magazine after it conducted an open internet poll.

In February 2010, Chris spoke at the ‘TED2010’ conference held at Long Beach, California. In the same year, he also raised a $625,000 for his next startup ‘Canvas Networks’, which he launched in January 2011. But unfortunately, he had to shut the platform due to the security breaches the site was facing.

Though he was running 4Chan with the name of Moot, he always conducted Q&As for the users and answered their questions. Chris worked for 4Chan as the administrator and had already left the job of programming at his company. He, after working for more than 10 years for the company, decided to step down from his post of administrator in 2015. During his career with 4Chan, he achieved a maximum user engagement, i.e. over 20 million monthly visitors to the site.

He announced the news on 21 January 2015 and on 23rd January conducted another Q&A on the platform and a live stream on YouTube.

In September 2015, 4Chan was acquired by Japanese internet entrepreneur Hiroyuki Nishimura for an undisclosed amount. In March next year, Chris revealed through a blog post that he will be joining Google. He joined the company and is still working as an employee.

Though Chris has been secretive about his life, one thing he has always been clear at the right to anonymity. The success he received at such an early age never put a bad influence on him. In fact, he always stayed away from the limelight.

skype

Skype : A Communication App that Won the World

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In the last few decades, the world has changed a lot. What seemed to be impossible a few years ago, is being executed with zero effort today. With the boom in entrepreneurship and startups getting the hang of the wave, human life is at its technological best. Our generation has witnessed a large number of success stories, but not every one of it has managed to stay with us for so long. The inventions that change the world are the ones that feed the depriving hearts of society. The success story of Skype is one such idea that changed the very nature of web business by revolutionizing the chat connectivity of the virtual world.

Founded in the year 2003 by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, Skype turned out to be the biggest surprise that changed the face of online communication for the years to come. One can say that Skype lessened the distance between people, or in other words, started bringing people together. It gained almost 6000 subscribers within just one week of its launch, and this is when the duo realized that they are in for something huge. This realization proved to be true as we look at the trail they have left behind.

Janus and Niklas developed the application with the help of a group of highly skilled individuals, namely Ahti Heinia, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn. The most attractive aspect of Skype is that it is free. During a time when the telecom industry charged a fortune for international calls, Skype provided free video calls through the usage of P2P connectivity. It was an actual boon to the people who were separated from their loved ones through distance. It also mitigated the location issues for major business meetings and other official programs.

skype founders
Image Source: taliawebs.com

Like every huge success story, Skype, too, has a humble beginning. Zennstrom was collecting the telephone bills of his friend in Europe when he realized how huge the telecom companies charge for long-distance phone calls. This is what led to the invention of Skype, as simple as that. They wanted to avert the escalating telephone bills and wanted to make communications across the globe more cheap and efficient.

Within just two years of its inception, Skype already had 20 million active users and was growing at an exponential rate of 5 new users per second. This growth soon attracted a lot of attention from huge names such as eBay and Microsoft. eBay later in 2005, acquired Skype for a whopping sum of 3.5 billion USD. The most successful project of the internet industry, Skype, again get attracted the interest of other tech giants. And, this time, Microsoft acquired Skype for 8.5 billion USD.

The innovation by a team of young minds changed the way people talk across the globe. It was an extravagant success, as there is no greater deed than filling the deficiency of society.

Back in 2003, it was the need for a more efficient and low-cost communication system. The founders say that they were very naïve and highly optimistic in their journey throughout Skype. But it was this same spirit that led them to launch the service. They did not dive into the what-ifs and other nitty-gritty of all the things that could go wrong. The other main highlight of the concept was that there was nothing much complicated about functioning. There were no complicated procedures or troubling interface. Everything was simple and clear. This also was a contributing factor to the immense success of the idea.

Every big change starts from a small spark. This spark comes to every one of us. The ones who can latch on to the spark and ignite a fire become successful. These build unicorn companies, multi-million dollar empires and some even end up becoming legends. Skype provides the biggest example of how small ideas can revolutionize the world. It started a chain of changes that still ripples across the surface of the virtual world and how people communicate with each other.