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habito

Daniel Hegarty : The Founder of Habito, UK’s Digital Mortgage Broker

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Getting a lovely and comfortable house to live is still a dream for many, and it will continue to be one of the most required things for every person living. First, finding a house that goes with one’s requirements, and then buying that specific house is a quite a complicated task, as it takes a lot of efforts from finding the house, meeting the broker, finalising the price, and not to forget the tedious paperwork that everyone has to go through. To solve this very problem, a UK based musician, Daniel Hegarty, founded Habito- an online mortgage broker service.

Hegarty is a native of London, who left school at the age of sixteen to join a rock band as a guitarist. Though he was working locally with the band and was attending school alongside, after he became more involved in music, he got suspended by the school authorities for low attendance. His band name was Serum, and while touring with the band, he started earning good money. The band got signed by a record label, and his weekly earning reached £100.

Hegarty moved to LA, where he started playing with live bands. After working for over ten years with different artists, he started losing interest in the same kind of job. He returned to the UK in 2007 and started looking for a job other than in the music industry. He asked one of his friends about jobs in the UK, and she introduced him to the team of Wonga, an online loans lenders.

Habito Founder Daniel Hegarty-1
Image Source: businessinsider.in

The company was small and had been the centre of criticism for many reasons. But Hegarty liked his job, as he was in the designing, and the marketing team, at the company. In fact, while working with Wongo, he found out that there was something other than music that he could do well. To know the financial field, and also get better in web designing, he started taking online courses from Standford University and involved himself in mathematics. Hegarty continued to work with the firm for five years, and despite a lot of criticism, in 2013, the company had over 1000 employees.

After finding the job, it was the time to get that dream house that Hegarty and his wife always wanted. After looking for a few properties, the two finalised a house. But then, buying the house has never been so easy. The two had to go through a lot of paperwork filled with complex jargons. The legal work was going all wrong as the broker made the mistake with Hegarty’s wife’s name twice in the papers. The mistake by their broker lead them losing the house, and the couple was on the roads.

The thought of losing a house because of the mistake of the broker disgusted him, and he wanted to find out a better way to buy a house. This time, he was not ready to contact with a careless broker and lose the deal again.

So Hegarty decided to try his own hands in the same field. He started studying more about the mortgage and home loans. He even met many brokers and found out that these brokers always neglected the buyers. The only thing mattered to them was money. People had to waste a lot of their time and money to get a house for them. Buying even a small was like a nightmare for every person.

Hegarty finally founded Habito in January 2015 as a fee-free online mortgage broker with the help of investors Toby Coppel and Meyer Malka. In a year of its launch, the company was analysing over 60 applicants in seconds. The company launched a mortgage search and comparison service in April 2016 adjoining with over 70 mortgage lenders.

By September 2017, the company had lent £250m to 50,000 borrowers, and by November 2018, over 150,000 people had used the company’s website to get mortgage advice and applications. Since the inception of Habito, it has been growing with a rate of 20 per cent every year. Today, the number of employees at Habito has raised from 4 people to 160 people.

The company has created the world’s first artificially intelligent Digital Mortgage Adviser (DMA) for regulated mortgage advice. That means the users get their advice from the bots and unless necessary, there no human interaction with the user. Though every employee of the company plays the role of customer support every in every two weeks to provide personalised solutions to the customers.

Due to the robot-assistance, the company has faced a lot of criticism, but the ability to provide a customer with a solution within 8-10 days has made it the most efficient mortgage advice platform, whereas with the normal brokers the application process takes minimum 20 days.

The unusual idea of online mortgage advice and application processing has helped the company raise a total of £8.2 million in capital money from investors, like TransferWise CEO Taavet Hinrikus, Funding Circle CEO Samir Desai, and Yuri Milner of DST Global, etc., in just four years.

The most basic reason for the success of the Habito is that the people in the UK wanted a service that could help them with the difficult process of finding the right house at the right price, without wasting much time, and without the risk of losing the deal. And, this is what Habito is providing to them.

Ableton

Ableton : The Company that Revolutionised the Electronic Music Industry with Technology

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The music industry is vast, and so are the range of instruments used to compose a masterpiece in the same. But arranging a whole lot orchestra to create a small music composition always cost a hefty amount, and sometimes it can cost even more. But with changing technology trends, the music industry has also got its own music software that helps musicians to produce the amazing music that was impossible without a professional music team. Ableton is such music software, and one of the earliest, that has been helping numerous musicians with their composing and music production work.

Ableton was founded by two computer music artists Robert Henke and Gerhard Behles. The two belonged to Munich, Germany, and had met through a common friend at the University of Munich, who ran an electronic music instruments store. At that time, they did not share good vibes with each other and had no plans to work together.

After some time, Behles moved to Holland, whereas Henke shifted to Berlin, for higher studies. Somehow, again, Behles had to move to Berlin, where he joined Computer Science same as Henke at Berlin’s technical university. This time, the two get along well, as both shared the common interest, i.e. Music. The university has a studio for electronic music, where the two started studying more about music and got introduced to a lot of electronic music. Here they began to design sounds and did a lot of installation work.

Ableton founders
Image Source: roberthenke.com

Henke and Behles collaborated in 1995, to produce electronic music under their Monolake project. At that time, they used Drum machines, synthesizers and software, like Cycling ’74/IRCAM’s music coding environment, to create music, but these could only create a limited type of music and was becoming boring with time. But being the computer engineers, the two were able to enhance the capability of the software and create better music.

With time, Henke and Behles started performing live and became famous. Some of the most popular creations of the two under Monolake includes Gravity (2000), Interstate (1998), Hongkong (1997), etc.

Even though the two were becoming popular with their compositions, they wanted something new and better for music creation. At that time, they used the Apple G3 laptop to compose music and play it live. This helped them to reduce the need to take big musical equipment with them.

Being engineers worked for them, and they developed software to create different transitions in music named PX-18, but purely for their personal use. The software worked on the Silicon Graphics workstation. For building the software, Behles met another software engineer and music enthusiast, Bernd Roggendorf, who also advised them to start a business of music software development.

The development of the software was to replace the big heavy instruments with computer and laptops. They created small pieces of programs to get the right sounds for their live performances. But still, they were not planning on selling those programs to other musicians.

But soon, they realised that there were no such programs at that time, and a new music software could do wonders for every other musician. So the two got convinced to commercialise their software, and the next step was to find investors for their idea.

The two partners participated in the trade show NAMM in 2001, with the beta version of their music software, named ‘Live’. Here they got to bag the first investment from Hans Zimmer, a German film score composer and record producer. After Hans Zimmer showed interest in their project, many other investors came forward to invest in the same. And in 2001, Henke and Behles founded Ableton the company and launched the first commercial version of the software, ‘Live’.

The two opened the first office of Ableton in the Mitte district of Berlin, Germany, Behles becoming the chief executive officer of the company. The software became famous in no time and was opted by big names in the field of music production.

The company joined its hands with Cycling ’74 in 2007 to build a new product, ‘Max for Live’, that they launched in 2009. The software creates Max/MSP patches directly inside of Live. Ableton has also developed many programs, that help the users to learn about how to use the Ableton software.

In June 2017, Ableton acquired Cycling ’74. Till now, the company has released ten updates to Ableton Live. The latest version of the software, Ableton Live 10, includes features like new melodic step sequencing layout and MIDI note view, etc.

The company sells three versions of the software, i.e., Live 10 Standard, Live 10 Suite and Live 10 Intro. The standard version is the core software for music performance and creation. The Suite version includes features like Ableton Live, Max for Live and all the Ableton software instruments as well as effects. The third version is the introductory version of Live and has the track and effect limitations.

Henke worked at Ableton for over ten years and continued to record and perform his own music. Henke left the company in 2009 to completely focus on music. Since then, he has been writing and speaking about sound engineering, specifically at the Berlin University of the Arts, and Stanford University, whereas Behles still serves as the CEO of Ableton.

unacademy

Unacademy : India’s Online Learning Platform Helping People To Move a Step Forward Towards Their Dream

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Almost all the students of our country are pressurized for signing up in coaching classes after the secondary examination. But life becomes hectic after long hours in school followed by coaching and then self-study. This is the reason why students lose interest and tend to give up. Moreover, even in coaching classes, the lectures are equivalent to long hours of speech and every doubt of students is not solved.

So here, Unacademy comes to the rescue. Unacademy brings to India an online learning platform, where you can get to watch online videos of your curriculum prepared by experienced educators. The app is not only useful for 10+2 students but also for the college students preparing for exams like CAT, GATE, UPSC, etc.

History

Gaurav Munjal, Roman Saini and Hemesh Singh, launched Unacademy.in, a Bangalore based start-up, in January 2016. The organisation is run by Sorting Hat Technologies Pvt Ltd. Before launching this free learning platform, Unacademy used to be an educational youtube channel, started in 2010, which now has around 15 million video views. The channel was created and run by Gaurav Munjal, and then later in 2015, the other two members joined in.

Unacademy Founders
Image Source: techcrunch.com

Munjal and Singh before launching Unacademy, worked at Flatchat which came under the acquisition of CommonFloor in 2014. Saini was one of the civil service aspirants, who cracked the examination at a very young age, but he left his job as Assistant Collector, in order to build Unacademy. At the age of 22, Saini became an IAS Officer by ranking 18th in the civil service examination 2013. He realized that among 6.5 lakhs IAS aspirants, only 1.5 lakhs were able to afford coaching classes. So, he decided to join Munjal in the platform of Unacademy and give online coaching to help the underprivileged students.

Growth and Investors

Only after a year of launching the free app, Unacademy raised a good amount of funding. In 2016, the company raised $500,000 in the seed round of funding hosted by Blume Ventures. Some of the investors who participated in this funding round were Rajan Anandan (Google India Head), Sumit Jain (Co-founder of CommonFloor), Aprameya Radhakrishna (Co-founder of Taxi4Sure), Sujeet Kumar and Phanindra Sama (Co-founder of redBus). Flipkart’s co-founders Sachin and Binny Bansal and Paytm’s founder Vijay Sekhar Sharma also funded $1 million to Unacademy. By this time, Unacademy already gained more than 200,000 subscribers and 729 videos from online coaches. The videos were short (around 8-10 minutes) and crisp with a lot of visuals like graphs and images to make sure that the students don’t lose interest.

In 9th August 2017, Bhavin Turakhia, CEO and founder of Directi (an online application for business and communication) joined the board as Director. Turakhia is a huge tech entrepreneur who apart from founding Directi also founded Flock, Radix, CodeChef, Ringo, Media.net (co-founder) and Zeta (co-founder). According to the estimates of Forbes magazine in 2017, he was ranked as 95th richest person of India. He looks upon the overall business strategy of Unacademy and focuses on creating more versatile contents.

In 2017, the company raised $11.5 million in series B funding, from Sequoia India and SAIF Partners. The company announced that the funds will be invested in hiring new employees and for increasing the number of products. The company was hiring online educators on the basis of their experience and the educational background.

The three founders got featured in ‘Forbes 30 Under 30 India’ for their commendable work and progress. In July 2018, the organisation raised $21 million funds through another round of funding, Sequoia India, SAIF Partners and Nexus Venture Partners being the main investors. The company has raised a total of $38.6 million through all the funding rounds so far.

The success

With the increasing number of active students and teachers, Unacademy has become India’s largest online learning platform. There are over 2,400 lessons in Unacademy, covering topics from the various competitive exams. With more than 2 million views on the videos, Unacademy is reaching every corner of India to help the youth and empower them. Unacademy also has some top ideal educators, like Kiran Bedi, on board. More than 300,000 students have been benefited from the free app and have cracked even the toughest competitive exams of India.

grubhub

GrubHub : One of the Top Ten Online Food Delivery Services Of United States

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Be it a lazy Sunday or a tiring Tuesday, at times we don’t really wish to step out of our house for dinner. But who can stop the craving for good food? In those cases, the online food delivery services have become the real saviour.

GrubHub is one such online food delivery marketplace that has made the life of diners better and easier. Long before Zomato, Uber Eats or Foopanda stepped into the business of mobile food delivery; Grubhub was launched in the United States. It is one of the most famous and oldest online food delivery platforms that serve in the cities of the United States and London. The company was founded in 2004 by Matt Maloney and Mike Evans, with its headquarters based in Chicago, Illinois, United States.

Matt Maloney

Matt graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and did his MBA from the University of Chicago. He currently serves GrubHub as the CEO. Apart from his leadership in Grubhub, he is also an advisory board member in The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship. He is also a member of ChicagoNEXT, an organization established to nurture the young entrepreneurs of Chicago.

GrubHub founders
Image Source: businessinsider.com

Mike Evans

Mike graduated from MIT and wrote the first version of GrubHub in 2004. After the company followed a very tempting growth trajectory with his and Maloney’s contributions, Evans left it to try something new. He also wrote a science fiction novel and launched a new company, Fixer in 2017.

History

After the launch of GrubHub in 2004, the co-founders won the first place for the business plan of GrubHub at the Edward L. Kaplan New Venture Challenge in University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2006. This was the first victory of the company.

In 2007, the company raised a $1.1 million in the Series A funding led by Amicus Capital and Origin Ventures. This funding was used for expanding the business to San Francisco and New York markets. In 2009, another $2 million was raised in Series B funding which was led by Origin Ventures and Leo Capital. The funding received in Series C was five times the previous funding and was led by Benchmark Capital. In March 2011, the company raised $20 million in Series D funding hosted by DAG Ventures followed by raising another $50 million in Series E funding in the same year. The Series E funding was led by Lightspeed Ventures, and after this round of funding, the company acquired Dotmenu, the parent company of Campusfood and Allmenus. Both the funding and the acquisition made Grubhub’s position even stronger in the industry. In the same year, the company also acquired FanGo (a mobile ordering and payment solution provider).

In May 2013, Grubhub announced its merging with Seamless, its prime competitor in the market. The merged company planned to expand the business to more than 500 cities across the United States and take orders from more than 20,000 local restaurants. The signed agreement declared 58% of the share for Seamless and 42% for GrubHub. The agreement was finalized in August 2013.

In April 2014, the company went public for trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ‘GRUB’.

In 2015, the company acquired Delivered Dish followed by the acquisition of LAbite in May 2016. Both companies provided restaurant delivery services. In 2017, it took over Eat24, a food ordering platform from Yelp. A lot of acquisitions by Grubhub took place in the next few years, which includes LevelUp and Tapingo.

In February 2018, the company launched RestaurantHER, an initiative to support nationwide restaurants that are led by women and expanded its partnership with Foursquare. In April 2018, the company expanded its business further to 34 markets across the nation.

In May 2019, GrubHub came in partnership with Smoothie King, world’s leading smoothie brand.

Marketing Strategy

The biggest strength of Grubhub is collaboration. This helped GrubHub in expanding and escalating the growth. The company came in collaboration with the majority of the local restaurant outlets rather than in-house production of food, which cuts the labour cost and increases the profit. There are around 80,000 restaurants in alliance with GrubHub, which helps to maintain its stability in today’s market.

The increasing number of competitors is a potential threat that leads to market saturation irrespective of the growing number of customers. In order to eliminate its competitor from the market, GrubHub either came in partnership with these companies or acquired them.

The company also provided bonuses and special benefits to highly rated customers. This lures more users to order food through GrubHub.

The hassle-free delivery where the diner can track his or her valet and multiple payment options also attracts many users.

Statistics

Currently, there are 19.3 million active users who use GrubHub to make online food orders from 115,000 restaurants located in different cities of the United States and London. Around 521,000 orders are processed every day.

sinovation ventures

Kai-Fu Lee : The Indisputable Rockstar of China’s Technology Industry

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Technology is the field that is introducing people to new things almost every day. Whether it is the smartphone, self-driving cars or a mission to Mars, technology is taking us to new horizons. In fact, in the past few years, it has completely transformed the way people live their lives. Great minds are coming with greater ideas, and one such great mind is the Chinese technology enthusiast and the AI expert, Kai-Fu Lee.

Kai-Fu Lee is the founder of the venture capital fund, Sinovation Ventures, and the inventor of the world’s first speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system, which he developed as his PhD thesis subject.

Early Life

Lee was born on 3 December 1965, in Taipei, Taiwan to a legislator and historian, Li Tianmin. In 1973, when he was thirteen, he moved to the U.S. In the U.S., he attended the Oak Ridge High School. In 1983, he completed a B.S. degree in Computer Science from Columbia University followed by obtaining a PhD degree from the Carnegie Mellon University in 1988.

Kai Fu Lee Sinovation Ventures
Image Source: edge.org

During his PhD at the Carnegie Mellon, he got interested in machine learning and pattern recognition. He even participated in a few competitions, one of which was the US national tournament of computer players, where he represented a Bayesian learning-based system used to play the board game, Othello. He developed the system with his classmate Sanjoy Mahajan and even won the competition.

The topic of the thesis of his PhD was speech recognition, and he developed the world’s first large-vocabulary, speaker-independent, speech recognition, in 1988, as a Kluwer monograph, titled Automatic Speech Recognition: The Development of the Sphinx Recognition System.

Career

After completing his PhD, he joined the Carnegie Mellon University as the member of the faculty. In 1990, after working at the university for two years, Lee left the job and started working for Apple Computer as one of the leading research scientists. At Apple, he was appointed as the head of the research and development groups that worked on the major Apple projects, including Bandai Pippin, PlainTalk, Casper, Galatea, etc. Lee stayed with Apple for six years, and in 1996, left the company to join Silicon Graphics.

At Silicon Graphics, Lee worked as the vice president of the company’s Web Products division, and then was promoted to as the president of Cosmo Software.

After two years of his job at Silicon Graphics, Lee then joined Microsoft and was sent to Beijing, to set up the Microsoft Research (MSR) division there. In 2000, he shifted back to America, where he held the post of corporate vice president of interactive services division at Microsoft.

In 2005, Lee after leaving his job at Microsoft moved to join Google. This move of Lee led Microsoft to initiate a lawsuit against Google and Lee, as Lee had joined Google within one year of leaving Microsoft, which was against the company’s non-compete agreement. Google soon resolved the lawsuits, but Lee was restricted to work on Google’s projects similar to Microsoft’s. So Google sent Lee to China to handle its Asian subsidiary, as its President. Lee held the position till 2009. He became one of the key people for the establishment of Google.cn, and the achievements that the company had during this time in China.

Founding Sinovation Ventures

Despite a great career with Google, Lee left the company in 2009, to found a venture capital to provide support for Chinese talent and technology. On 7 September 2009, Lee formed Innovation Works, later renamed as Sinovation Ventures. The company funds the five most innovative technology ideas from the Chinese entrepreneur and startups every year. Sinovation Ventures involves some big names from the tech industry as the prime investors, including YouTube, Legend Holdings, WI Harper Group, etc.

Lee collaborated with Google to bring an OS for Android specifically built for the Chinese people. The collaboration also brought a desktop phone manager for Android for China.

By 2017, the company had raised over $1 billion funds, and in 2018, it raised over $500 million from its investors. Since its inception, Sinovation Ventures has helped over 300 Chinese startups with their business establishment.

Lee is an iconic personality that has been inspiring not only Chinese people, but people from around the world. In his career, he worked with big tech companies and even chaired some big-name organisations. He held the position of the chairman of the World Economic Forum’s Global AI Council. He was named under the Time 100 list in 2013 and was also featured as the Asia House Asian Business Leader in 2018.

Lee has also published a few books including Be Your Personal Best (2005), A Walk into The Future (2006), Making A World of Difference (2009), Seeing Life Through Death (2015), Artificial Intelligence (2017) and AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (2018).

Brian Dean : The Founder of Backlinko, ‘the Future of Modern Day’s SEO’

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Blogging is one trendy and the easiest business for earning some good cash. It has lured and helped a lot of young minds who can nurture their creativity through an online platform. But before one decides to open their own blogging site, there are certain rules and strategies one should get accustomed to. SEO, CRO, social media marketing, higher traffic, top ranking are some of the common terms that one usually comes across while blogging.

So, what if we tell you that you can get online training for becoming a good blogger, increase more traffic over your blogs, and even, get your site to the first page of Google? Backlinko, a site that maintains its own blogs and SEO expertise, is an awesome guide for all potential bloggers, digital marketers, and entrepreneurs out there.

Brian Dean, founder and CEO of Backlinko, formed the company back in 2013, to teach people more about practical blogging strategies. In no time, he became a very significant figure in the world of SEO and content marketing. But, success did not come to him overnight. He went through a number of failed businesses and tight financial circumstances before Backlinko happened. The flawless strategies of Backlinko seized the attention of the innumerous audience and brought immense success to the company in just a few years.

Early career of Brian Dean

Dean quit his job in 2010 to focus more on creating a niche in the world of SEO, but initially, there were a lot of failed attempts. The most fascinating thing about Dean is he always accepted failure as a path to success. He never thought of giving up even though he didn’t have sufficient money to invest in his business. Before his own startup, he worked as a freelance writer on Elance and Livestrong.com. After Demand Media (a company that owned Livestrong.com) went out of business, he was able to think of starting something of his own.

Backlinko

Starting from scratch, he started the business all by himself. His first successful website was live in 2012, achieving immense traffic. He started reading more SEO blogs to take this to the next level, but he was utterly disappointed. And, that is when he started to create his own blogs, and eventually, built Backlinko. The first blog of Backlinko was posted in 2013, and it attracted a lot of readers. With the overwhelming response, the company decided to take a step ahead and created its first flagship course, ‘SEO That Works’, in the same year.

Since he was the only member of Backlinko at the beginning, he did not have access to many amenities to shoot the videos for the courses. So, one of his friends helped him out by shooting the videos in Dean’s apartment. It took him around four months to deliver the first version of this course. But once it became popular, it started receiving around 200,000 unique visitors per day.

Business strategy

Dean, from the very beginning, focused more on the content, rather than the products of the platform. He was aware that most of the audience will gather around the unique blog titles and their content. So, he decided to focus on the quality of the content and posted one blog per month. These blogs comprised of unique content and effective strategies that, at the same time, were practical and achievable, too. Instead of writing several paragraphs, he crafted his articles in the form of tutorials and focused on making them easier to comprehend for the readers.

The first launch of Backlinko made around $80,000, and since then, it is only rising. The company also focused more on email marketing, and according to Dean, it is the key to the success of every business. The company also focused more on gathering customer stories and interviews. The process was time-consuming but quite fruitful. It helped the company grow and move ahead of its competitors.

Within a span of six years, and with only three team members, the company has become one of the top small online businesses. Currently, the site receives 25,000 visitors per month, and thousands of subscribers are regular over the Backlinko newsletter.

Dean targets on understanding his audience thoroughly, and according to him, once he figures out the type of audience he is dealing with and their demands, it becomes a lot easier for him to write the right content for them.