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Ted Livingston : The Journey of the Founder of Kik Messenger

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Establishing a new innovative start-up is the ultimate dream of every young entrepreneur out there. And, especially, if a mind has both excellent technical skills and impressive business strategies, wonders can be created. But, how many of us realize that the real voyage begins after one has accomplished his or her dreams? Because with great power comes great responsibilities. Reaching the zenith is easier than holding onto it. It is obvious that one will face ups and downs during the entire journey of success, but one must be strong enough to not give up or choose a wrong path.

Ted Livingston, founder of Kik Messenger and an incredible tech genius, was sentenced to death in 9th June 2019 for committing fraud, drug trafficking and an endless chain of illegal activities. He confessed all of his crimes saying that he did everything to save his company from bankruptcy, though the press release gives enough evidence of Kik’s short-term success. He started the company after he was rejected by RIM (Research in Motion), which led him to join the Velocity program, and finally, open his own start-up. So, let’s have a look into Livingston’s life before he hit such a massive crisis.

Early Life

Livingston was born in 1987, in Toronto, Ontario to a prosperous family. His father was a financial advisor, and his mother worked in the advertising sector. From a very young age, Livingston showed a great interest in building robots, and he joined the robotics team of his school. He went to Crescent School in Toronto and graduated from there in 2005.

Higher Studies and Early Career

Ted Livingston founder kik
Image Source: Twitter

Livingston pursued a Bachelor’s degree in mechatronics at the University of Waterloo, but he dropped out later. During his time at the university, he took part in the Waterloo co-op program and landed placements at Honda and City of Toronto Government.

In 2007, he started working as a Systems Engineering Project Coordinator at RIM, and then, as a Technical Product Management Coordinator. The internship was a part of his engineering course, and, Livingston once said about it that the best part about the internship was having a smartphone with a full data plan which was very expensive at that time.

Since he acquired a very lucrative position at RIM, during his internship, he got to work with every product manager individually and learnt a lot of new things. He was so good at his job that his boss advised him not to go for a full-time job in RIM and rather open his own company. This was all the motivation he needed, and hence, he turned down the job at RIM in 2008.

Founding KiK

Ted went back to Waterloo to complete his Bachelor’s degree, but somehow he ended up participating in the Velocity program followed by founding KiK. At first, Livingston created KiK Music, which was then known as Unsycned for RIM (later known as Blackberry). The app was connected to BBM to allow users to share soundtracks via messenger. But, KiK had bigger plans, which were blatantly turned down by RIM. So, Livingston and his team started working on the Kik messaging app on their own, and it was released on 19th October 2010.

While messaging apps like WhatsApp and Ping were already ruling the market, KiK hit one million users within 15 days of its release. Pretty impressive for an infant company, isn’t it? Though KiK was initially released for iOS and BlackBerry, BlackBerry removed it in November 2010 from BlackBerry App World followed by filing a lawsuit against KiK, which was settled later in 2013.

Success of KiK

In 2014, KiK raised $38.3 million from Series C funding followed by $50 million in the next year, thus resulting in KiK’s total worth to $1 billion. Gradually, KiK decided to raise funding in cryptocurrencies, and it raised $125 million cryptocurrencies through an ICO in September 2017.

In June 2018, Kin Coin (for cryptocurrencies) was released officially in Beta version, and in the next month, Kinit Beta App was released which was exclusively for the US residents.

Death Sentence of Livingston

The news of Livingston’s death sentence hit like an unexpected jolt to the world. He was accused of multiple reasons which included conduction of an illegal ICO, drug trafficking, prostitution and fraud. And finally, he was given a death sentence by an SEC Commission.

shopclues

Sandeep Aggarwal : Serial Entrepreneur, Angel Investor and the Founder of Shopclues

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The emerging Indian start-ups are bringing a great revolution in the entrepreneurial world. The young Indian minds and their untamed passion is creating history in the 21st-century economy. But, it isn’t always the young minds, because it is known that experience makes you wiser.

Sandeep Aggarwal is one such passion-driven entrepreneur who has successfully launched two start-ups, Shopclues and Droom, and now is one of the most influential men in the business world. The idea of Shopclues was pondering in his mind since 2010, but finally, he founded it in July 2011, followed by the launch of Droom in April 2014. The entire business was set up in Silicon Valley, and later, it shifted to India. Aggarwal faced a lot of difficulties and failed plans before he finally founded Shopclues.

Early Education

After passing school, Aggarwal pursued a degree in B.Com followed by a master’s from Indore. While doing his master’s, he also interned with Kotak Mahindra, Mumbai.

The First Step into the Professional World

Sandeep Aggarwal Founder Shopclues
Image Source: techcircle.in

Aggarwal first stepped into the professional world when he landed an internship in Kotak Mahindra, in 1995. The internship was in Mumbai, and it was his first chance to interact with intelligent minds around him and learn from them. He was perfectly groomed in this duration of his internship on how to deal with people and work at a professional level. He realized that most of us might have proper skills and knowledge, but only a few knew how to expose it professionally. Aggarwal, in one of its interviews, said that this internship also helped him strengthen his analytical skills and strategic thinking, apart from business communication and personality development.

Life before Shopclues happened

After completing his master’s degree, Aggarwal worked in the field of investment banking. While working in it, something changed his mind, and he decided to move to the US. He joined the Washington University, St. Louis, USA to pursue an MBA degree, and after receiving the degree, he worked for two different companies. After leaving these jobs, he joined Wallstreet and served eight years as an internet analyst, where he was given research covers on companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo! etc. Aggarwal is also a chartered member of TiE Silicon Valley.

While Aggarwal was still working as an internet analyst, in 2010, he visited India quite a few times to launch research coverage for MakeMyTrip. It was the time when the idea of launching an online marketplace clicked in his mind. He started planning about his business with a website called DealsClues.com, but finally, he settled with Shopclues.com, in 2010 and established this marketplace in Silicon Valley.

Founding of Shopclues.com

With Radhika Ghai Aggarwal (Sandeep Aggarwal’s wife), Mrinal Chatterjee and Sanjay Sethi, he started his new business in Delaware. By September 2011, the team moved to India and permanently settled in Gurgaon. At the very beginning of Shopclues, Aggarwal raised $1.95 million from his social circle.

In 26th January 2012, the public beta version of Shopclues was released, and by next month, the team size expanded to 25 from only 3-4 members. The Alexa ranking dropped from 14,000 at the beginning of the year to 200 only in August of the same year. The company started making a jaw-dropping profit with more than 2 million monthly visitors.

In January 2013, Shopclues has ranked as the fifth largest e-commerce companies in India, and the Alexa ranking dropped to 90. The business was progressing swiftly, until, July 2013, when he found legal charges filed against him for the time he worked as an internet analyst in Wallstreet. Aggarwal said that it was a time of sheer crisis in his life, and it almost took a year or so for him to get back on track. He didn’t have any choice other than avoiding the press and any other formal role in Shopclues. His family suffered, too. But today, Shopclues, his first company is worth $1.1 billion, and it is one of the largest online stores to serve in India.

Droom

Aggarwal founded Droom in April 2014, and it was the first-ever online platform for selling and buying automobiles (used and new) and services related to the same. Droom has a very strong founding team with more than 75 years of experience in technology. It was only after a year of its founding that Droom raised $16 million in Series A funding led by Lightbox.

Even today, it is India’s most trusted platform for automobiles.

The emotional outburst

In 2017, Aggarwal was in the spotlight for posting about a private matter in social media which was concerning his wife, Sanjay Sethi and Shopclues. An emotional outburst in social media is often not considered as a very clever judgment especially for business tycoons like Aggarwal. But, he said it was a very fragile moment for him and it was definitely a mistake to attract negative attention. Though he went through an emotional turmoil, the companies didn’t suffer any such loss but his personal life is still a very big question mark.

discord

Jason Citron : A Video Game Lover and the Founder of the Digital Distribution Platform Discord

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The video game industry is vast and is growing even more through online gaming and live game streaming. Over a decade ago, people could only play games on the desktops or gaming consoles. But now, they can play games online with other gamers as well. While playing, they can even talk to each other in real-time. This is called the real evolution of technology. Earlier, the gamers made the use of other expensive chat apps, like TeamSpeak, Mumble, and Ventrilo to communicate through chat at the time, they played games. But soon, they got their hands on more convenient and a lighter platform, i.e. Discord.

Discord is a VoIP application that Jason Citron, an American developer and entrepreneur, developed for the video gaming community. With Discord, the gamers are capable of sending and receiving texts, images, videos and communicate, while playing a game using the internet in real-time.

Early Life

Jason Citron, the founder and CEO of Discord, had always been a video game lover. His father, and his grandfather, both were businessmen. His first encounter with video games was through one of his childhood friends, who introduced him to NES (Nintendo Entertainment System). Later, when in middle school, in Florida, he opted for computers as one of his subjects in school. One of his friends at school was good at fundamentals of QBASIC and taught him the basics of programming.

Jason Citron
Image Source: vox.com

Inspired by his father, he also aspired to be an entrepreneur. By the time he was 13, he had learned a lot about computers and started teaching the basics of computers to people older than him and charged them a small amount of fee. When he was sixteen, he started part-time freelancing and wrote codes for different companies.

Since, he had always been into gaming and coding, after completing his graduation from the Full Sail University in Florida, he started working for a game company, where he worked on a gaming console in San Rafael. Meanwhile, he moved to a new apartment where he lived with the students of the University of California, Berkeley, where he got to meet Rohan Relan. Rohan’s uncle, Peter, was the owner of an incubator called YouWeb that supported mobile and gaming-focused businesses.

Building Aurora Feint; The First Startup

As Citron was into starting his own business, he met Peter and joined his company as one of the developers. At the incubator, he started working on a new iPhone game and built a company named Aurora Feint along with a fellow developer Danielle Cassley.

With the launch of the iPhone in 2007, Jason Citron got the opportunity to build new games that would work with the small screens. He focussed on creating games based on RPG and puzzles. The company launched the first version of Aurora Feint for free to use for iOS during the Christmas in 2008. The game was a success but was not making any revenues. Citron was looking for a better business model but had no clue how to work with newly built iPhones.

After just a few months the game reached one million people, but still, there was nothing that would pay back Citron and his company.

Founding OpenFeint

One day, while discussing with the YouWeb Owner Peter, Citron realised that the iPhone did not have Xbox live in it, but their Aurora Feint 2 did have a similar feature. It was the kind of first asynchronous MMOG (massively multiplayer online game). So they decided to build a separate SDK that other platform could integrate and use.

In February 2009, Citron launched the beta version of the software at TechCrunch, where he got to showcase it in front of hundreds of developers. This way, the software also got hundreds of signups, and thus, he was able to raise the money to produce the next version of the product. The software was free, but the company monetize the sale through revenue sharing, mobile storefronts, and game features.

The company carried out its first round of funding at the end of 2009, which was led by DeNA in Japan and raised $6 million. In the second round of funding, the company raised $5 million. By 2010, the company had more than 10 million users registered on the network. In October 2010, Intel Capital also invested a $3 million in the company. The next year, Japanese company GREE, Inc. acquired OpenFeint for a whopping amount of US$104 million.

The Journey from Hammer and Chisel to Discord

After selling the company, Jason Citron started another startup named Hammer and Chisel, a game development company, that launched its first game named Fates Forever, in 2014. Citron tried to launch the game as the Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), but due to the lack of good communication methods, it could not be commercially successful. This led Cistron to develop a new chat service, that would help people to chat in real-time while playing video games online.

Citron was able to get a sufficient amount of funding from YouWeb, Benchmark capital and Tencent for the development. Finally, he launched the first version of the product in May 2015, with the name Discord. Soon, the platform was famous and was used by the esports, LAN tournament gamers, and by the Twitch.tv streamers. In January 2016, the company received an investment of worth $20 million. In the same year, the growth rate for the software had reached a million users per month. By the end of the year, the software had registered 25 million users worldwide, and in December 2017, it recognised a total 90 million users, subscribed to the platform and raised $50 million by December.

By the end of 2018, the company valued at $2 billion and raised an additional $150 million, in a round of funding, led by Greenoaks Capital. In May 2019, the company announced that it has more than 250 million users across the world, who use the software.

The reason behind the success of Discord has been the consistent hard work of Jason Citron, and the skills, as an entrepreneur he possessed in his genes.

Capital One logo

Richard Dana Fairbank : The Founder of One of the Largest Banks in the U.S.

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One of the most influential and financially predominant individual with quality of great leadership is what defines Richard Dana Fairbank. Banking business can make a profit like a spreading wildfire, and that is how Fairbank turned the wheel of his life.

Richard Fairbank, a billionaire in addition to the successful American businessmen, is the founder and owner of the bank holding company, Capital One Financial Corporation. He founded the company in 1994, along with Nigel Morris, an English businessman. Fairbank’s new strategies for credit models changed the entire face of the banking industry, thus, entering into a new era of entrepreneurship.

Education

Fairbank was born in 18th September 1950. In 1972, he graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in economics. Later, in 1981, he completed his MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. Almost 12 years after founding Capital One, he received an award on excellent leadership from his university.

Career Before Capital One Happened

Before founding Capital One, Fairbank worked in a few different companies. He worked as a partner and consultant in Strategic Planning Associates (1985-1990), followed by the head of the credit card unit in Signet-Banking Corporation (1990-1994).

Richard Dana Fairbank
Image Source: knownetworth.com

It was in the 1980s when Fairbank met Morris in a consulting firm, their mutual workplace. Since then, the idea of implementing new technologies to amend credit card plans hovered over their minds. Both Fairbank and Morris wanted to change the entire idea of charging an annual fee for credit cards holders, replacing it with different schemes for a different segment of the population. This is where they needed the contribution of information technology to manipulate data of consumers and their purchase list.

With the help of data management software, they were able to divide the entire population of credit card users into different categories, followed by offering them different plans and offers. They pitched Oracle Corporation for the job of database management, and they agreed to the new strategy of the company. It was due to this credit card model, both of them got hired by Signet-Banking Corp, in 1990.

Soon after the two economists joined Signet, the bank offered around three hundred different credit plans to its customers, charging the interest rate according to the divided categories. This was a breakthrough for both of them, but this was just the beginning. Fairbank along with Morris also developed a new strategy of transferring money from one credit card to another, with a relatively much lower rate of interest. This attracted quite a robust number of new customers, hiking the profit to an unexpected level.

And, in 27th July 1994, Signet announced the credit card division split-off, renaming it as Capital One. Richard Dana Fairbank was made the CEO of the company, and currently, it is the seventh-largest U.S commercial bank by assets.

The success of Capital One

The success of Capital One became so enormous that it superseded the sale and profit of Signet, its parent company. Fairbank made Capital One look like a massive credit card business in partnership with a bank rather than a spun-off segment of a banking business.

By 1995, Capital One completely became an independent business whereas Signet came under the acquisition of First Union Corporation. Within a single year of its establishment, Capital One made a 25% increase in the net income of the company, making it to the list of top 10 credit card issuers in the U.S.

Capital One is an ideal banking company, where excellent business models are backed up by strong database manipulating software. The company first analyses the needs of a customer and then build credit card plans accordingly.

After many years of successful business, during early 2000, people started questioning about the algorithms used by Capital One to access information about customers, and hence, the stock prices dropped. Though ultimately nothing risky was found in the algorithm, Fairbank and Morris saw it as a future threat to the company and decided to form an executive board to make decisions for the company.

Achievements of Fairbank

Richard Dana Fairbank was honoured with the award of Washingtonian’s “Business Leader of the Year” and Credit Card Management’s “Entrepreneur of the Year”. He is also listed among the top ten Bank CEOs, who became a billionaire and have achieved many other things.

Personal Life

Fairbank is married to Chris Fairbank, and they have eight children. They are settled in Virginia.

blackmagic design logo

Blackmagic Design : Some Startups are Not to Make Money But to Change the World

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There were times when production cost to create a TV program was way higher than it would earn at the end. This was because of the high price equipment that the film and TV series maker would pay for buying or renting them. At that time, buying these camera equipment used to cost over a million-dollar and renting them was not less than a thousand dollar per hour. But being an engineer himself, Grant Petty, founder of Blackmagic Design, knew that the cost the vendors are putting on these equipments are way higher than their actual cost. So he concluded that he needs to do something to change the way everything worked in the TV industry.

Early Life

Grant Petty is an engineer and entrepreneur from Australia, who initially worked in the TV industry as an engineer. As a kid, he lived in government quarters with his family. The financial condition of the family was not that good.

When he was in high school, he started working with a local TV studio, with the help of a grant his school had received from the government. At the studio, he got to operate two PCs at the same time, and hence, he got the opportunity to learn to code. He kept himself busy in learning the basics of programming, and eventually, grew immense interest in coding.

Grant Petty founder Blackmagic Design
Image Source: buildingaunicorn.com

In late 1991, Petty moved to Singapore to work at VHQ Singapore. It was the biggest firm that provided digital facility products to filmmaker and people from the TV industry. The equipment the company sold used to cost a fortune at times. After working for a while in the TV industry, he found out that technology in the industry was over-priced. The vendors were taking advantage of the fact that the creators are not the coders, and do not know much about the technology.

The Turning Point

In 1992, his roommate, Peter, bought a scanner for his Mac Duo Dock computer. The scanner came with an image editing software application named Adobe Photoshop, and that was a kind of turning point of Petty’s life. He was amazed to see the various useful tools that photoshop provided. The software was able to beat his company’s $70000 PaintBox.

Photoshop was for the design industry but was able to do much TV-related stuff as well. This led Petty to explore the software even deeper. He even bought other design software to learn more about the design industry. He pitched the idea of using the design software in place of film-making software. Nobody took an interest in his idea. He realised that there was no market for such software in Singapore, so he moved to Melbourne and started working with another company.

Petty decided to establish a new industry that would transfer the control into the hands of the creators. But deciding was not enough. To change the industry, he needed to produce the products himself, so that he could cut the production cost. So he along with his roommate Peter started working on a product. He now wanted to connect design with TV.

Founding Blackmagic Design

In 2001, Petty founded Blackmagic Designs and launched the first product, a capture card for macOS, named DeckLink in 2002. The card was first to offer uncompressed 10-bit video, and for its uniqueness, 163 units were sold in the very first month. He had started the production with his own money, so the sale of so many units helped him with further production. He even had to live on rice for a week as he was out of money and he had to pay for the supplies.

Soon, the company added support for Windows to the card, and also included colour correction features to it. It also included support for Adobe Premiere Pro and Microsoft DirectShow. This way, the product started becoming more popular.

By 2005, the company had launched other products as well. The main highlights of the new product series were the Multibridge family of PCIe bi-directional converters and the FrameLink family of DPX-based software. The next year, the company launched the Blackmagic On-Air television production software, which still is one of the world’s most advanced live production switcher control software. The ATEM Television Studio includes the support for both Mac or Windows.

The company announced its first Cinema Camera in 2012. With the passing time, the company also started to grow. At the time, Petty launched his company, only one or two high-end production studios were in Melbourne. With the growth of Blackmagic Design, 80 per cent of the production houses started using its products.

In 2018, Blackmagic Design joined its hands with Apple and created the Blackmagic eGPU. The next product that the company released with the partnership was the Blackmagic eGPU Pro. In the same year, Blackmagic and Netflix came into partnership.

The Company Today

Today, the company has established its offices in four different continents and has also acquired around six other companies, including Da Vinci Systems, Echolab, Teranex, Cintel, eyeon Software, and Fairlight. The company’s major products are Broadcast Hardware, Cinema Cameras, Production Camera and Editing Software, including Fusion, DaVinci Resolve, etc.

Petty, with his determination, finally, completed his mission, as he, with Blackmagic Design, cut down production hardware and software expenses for the TV industry by 50 per cent. Today, Blackmagic Design values more than $300 million.

Robinhood

Robinhood : The Platform that is Democratizing American Financial System

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Stock exchange and cryptocurrencies, both have proved to be the most beneficial financial industries, where people can invest and earn. But, it has always been tough for people to understand the whole process and make their investment wisely. Using some of the eCommerce platforms costs a big amount, and most of the time does not help the way it should do. This had always been the pain point, and the 2008 financial crisis also became the reasons for the two U.S. based immigrants, Vladimir Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, to work on a new platform that would allow users to buy and sell shares free of charge. The platform that they created is Robinhood.

Early Life

Vladimir Tenev was born in Bulgaria, in 1987. At the time, his father was studying at the University of Delaware, the U.S. After one year, when Tenev was four, he moved to the U.S. to live with his parents. He spent most of his childhood in Virginia, and later, moved to the Bay Area. The family was quite drawn towards studies, and Tenev himself loved to study maths and science.

In 2004, Tenev joined Stanford University, where he met his future co-founder Baiju Bhatt. Both had opted for physics and maths as their degree’s majors. Bhatt is also an immigrant from India. The two shared a common interest, i.e. maths, that helped in building the bond between the two, stronger.

Robinhood founders
Image Source: glassdoor.co.in

After graduating from the Standford University, Bhatt joined a finance firm as his first job in San Fransisco, whereas Tenev joined UCLA to complete a PhD in Mathematics. While working at the financial firm, Bhatt realized that there was a great business opportunity in hedge funds.

Entering into Entrepreneurship & Founding Robinhood

So the two started their first venture, Chronos Research, in 2011 and got a small apartment in San Fransisco, where they started working on their project. The business they started offered tools for hedge funds and banks to build automated trading strategies. While working for their first joint venture, the famous 2008 financial crisis took place. The Lehman Brothers went under, and the market got collapsed.

The financial crisis inspired the two to move to New York City and find a better solution for share market trading. Their joint venture was the first step for their new startup Robinhood. Thus, they brought their existing technology to the retail brokerage market and started Robinhood in 2013.

Being the Millenials, they knew that smartphones will play the prime role for their new ventures, so they worked on different layouts of a mobile app for the platform, and sent it for the regulatory approvals. Before the app, they launched their website, that would do the same work as the app. They wrote “commission-free trading, stop paying up to $10 per trade” on the front page of the app, and worked on a waitlist, that would show people their position among other traders.

The Biggest Turning Point

The waitlist got Robinhood a mention in the Hacker News, that too at third after news on China moon mission and Google in a single day. The specifying in Hacker News got the company its first maximum traffic. After one day, Robinhood had its press lunch, following which, the platform got 10,000 signups, and in the next week, the signup reached 50,000. The company offered free membership to the users for their sign-ups. It only charged the users with a monthly fee instead of charging a particular fee on every single transaction.

The next task was to get the investors on board. The company raised $3 million in its seed round, led by Index, Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, after pitching their startup in front of about 75 investors. Even before the company launched an official app, it had gained over 1 million signups, in the first year of its launch. After a year and a half, the company launched its app in March 2015. The Robinhood app offered the easiest interface for the users, such that it got most of the users under the age of 35.

The app has helped people to recover 90 per cent of their investment in the trade market, which is impossible with the traditional method. By the beginning of 2017, the platform had carried out the transactions of over $30 billion. In April the same year, the company raised another $110 million through a funding round led by DST Globa that made the company value at $1.3 billion.

The next year, on January 25th the company started to trade in cryptocurrency and announced a commission-free waitlist for the users from California, Massachusetts, Missouri, and Montana. By the end of the day, the waitlist had over 1,250,000 names registered. In May 2018, Robinhood raised $363 million Series D financing round led by DST Global and valued at $5.6 billion.

The Company Today

The company partnered with the Ohio-based Sutton Bank, such that to provide its users with checking and savings accounts as well as debit cards. The company raised an additional $200 million in a round of funding in 2019, that has led the company to value between in the $7 billion to $10 billion.

The company is registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Before 2019, the company’s primary source of revenue was from payment for order flow, but now, the source of revenue has been changed. The company earns its revenue from the interest earned on customers’ cash balances and margin lending.

Currently, the two co-founders are serving the company as the co-CEOs. Tenev was named among ‘30 Under 30’ in 2016, by Forbes. Robinhood became the first financial app to receive an Apple Design Award and was also listed among the top US FinTech startups of 2015 and various other rankings.