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Cheng Wei : The Founder of China’s Biggest Transport Network DiDi Dache

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China has been the home for many startups and innovators including Jack Ma, the founder of the biggest eCommerce giant Alibaba Group, and Lei Jun, the founder of Xiomi. Another tech innovator who hails from China is Cheng Wei, the founder of China’s biggest autonomous technology conglomerate, DiDi. Wei is one of the fastest grown CEO in China and is often counted among the top three most successful CEOs in China.

Cheng Wei was born on 19 May 1983, in the southeastern province of Jiangxi, in Shangrao, China. He completed a graduate degree in administration from the Beijing University of Chemical Technology, and after graduating, joined as the assistant of the head at a foot massage company. Soon he realized that this is not the job he always intended to do, and after working for a period of one year at the company applied for the job of a salesperson for the business-to-business e-commerce service at Alibaba.

Cheng Wei
Image Source: fortune

Joining Alibaba proved to be a good decision for Wei, and in the span of six years, he was promoted to various positions in the company. He became the sales manager for the north of China. After six years he was appointed as the deputy general manager at the online payment department, Alipay, in Alibaba, becoming the youngest regional manager in the company.

In 2012, Wei left Alibaba to found his own company Beijing Orange Technology Co, and the first service that he started under the name of the company was DiDi Dache, a transportation service, with an initial capital of worth 15 million dollars from the tech giant Tencent. This car-rental service was a result of his experience with the cabs, as he had missed many flights due to as he could not catch the cabs on time.

People could use the service through an app and get an immediate pickup. The app also included a feature that allowed the users to book the cabs for the next day.

In 2013, the company completed its Series B funding, followed by a series C funding in 2014. In the same year, DiDi Dache appointed the ex-Goldman Sachs Asia managing director, Jean Liu (Liu Qing), as the as COO of the company.

In February 2015, DiDi Dache merged with the other major mobile-based transportation network Kuaidi Dache, making DiDi Kuaidi, keeping the management separate. In July 2015, the company had fundraising, which made it the world’s first private company having completed the largest single fundraising round and raised a worth of US$2 billion.

The company provides hiring service for cars, bus, minibus, chauffeur service, car rental service, bike-sharing service and has got over 10,000 employees working for the company. In 2013, Uber entered China, but DiDi maintained the strongest hold on the transportation market in China. In September 2015, Didi Kuaidi rebranded itself as Didi Chuxing

According to Wei, Artificial Intelligence is the next big thing, and his company is working on the very technology to bring new ideas and technology to DiDi. In 2017, the company started expanding in the other parts of the world starting from Brazil. Also, the company has invested in the other car-rental services like Grab, Lyft, Ola, Uber, 99, Taxify and Careem. The company currently is serving 550 million users across over 400 cities.

Wei is known as a Nationalist and many times has been heard of addressing China’s history and military in his speeches at big conferences. In September 2015, he got the chance to join China’s leader Xi Jinping, to visit the U.S. and attend the 8th U.S.-China Internet Industry Forum (USCIIF) and become the youngest person to participate in the forum.

The employees of his company see him as the greatest leader who is confident and knows how to deal with every situation. Despite the big rivalry between Tencent and Alibaba, he has been able to maintain a calm relationship between the two investors of his company.

In 2015, he was named in the list of “40 under 40” for the Chinese Business Leaders by Fortune. And in the same year, he was at number 1 in the list of China’s “40 under 40” along with Jean Liu. In 2016, he was named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year. In 2017, Time listed him among the 20 Most Influential People in Tech and was named one of the Global Game Changers by Forbes. In 2018 Forbes China named him among the 50 Most influential business leaders in China.

Sebastian Thrun : Father of Self-Driving Car & the Famous Educator who Founded Udacity

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Education is the biggest asset, but not everyone is able to get it due to many reasons like lack of money or resources. But to solve this problem, Sebastian Thrun, the famous educator, inventor, computer scientist and entrepreneur, took the initiative and founded Udacity. Many people might not be aware of this educational platform, but there are millions of people who actually have taken its advantage and have educated themselves. This online platform is providing academic as well as vocational educational courses to a global user base to help them get the best suitable job for them.

Early Life

Sebastian Thrun was born on 14 May 1967 in Solingen, West Germany to Winfried and Kristin Thrun. He completed a diploma in Computer Science, Economics and Medicine from the University of Hildesheim in 1988. In 1995, he received a PhD degree from the University of Bonn.

Thrun was always interested in robotics and automotive technologies. In 1994, he started working on the Rhino project under the guidance of his doctoral thesis advisor Armin B. Cremers.

Career

After completing his education, Thrun started working at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) as a research computer scientist. It was Thrun, who built the world’s first robotic tour guide along with his fellows at CMU, Wolfram Burgard and Dieter Fox, for the Deutsches Museum Bonn, in 1997. Another robot that he built was implanted at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, for a period of two weeks that guided over ten thousands of tourists.

sebastian thrun
Image Source: medium.com

In 1998, he was appointed as the assistant professor at the Robot Learning Laboratory of the university. Later, he co-founded a Master’s Program in Automated Learning and Discovery, along with the other faculty members. The course later became a PhD program for the students of CMU. At CMU he also built a humanoid interactive CMU/Pitt Nursebot and developed my mapping robots.

In 2003, he left CMU to join the Standford University as the associate professor and in 2004, he was promoted as the director of SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). In 2005, he started working on a new robot Stanley and made an entry in the DARPA Grand Challange. His robot won the first price.

In 2007, he again participated in the DARPA Urban Challenge with his robot “Junior” and won the second prize. Later in the same year, Thrun along with many Standford University students joined Google as sabbatical and co-developed the Google Street View.

After working for a period of seven years at Standford, in 2011, Thrun left the job to join Google as a Google fellow. He then attained the post of VP at Google and worked at on development of the Google driverless car system. At Google, he also founded Google X, where he founded Google Glass. In late 2011, he was introduced to Artificial Intelligence at Google, which was the biggest influence for him to start Udacity.

Founding Udacity

In January 2012, Thrun founded Udacity with David Stavens and Mike Sokolsky, a MOOC website, where he would teach people about everything. He sent e-mails to his students and to the people who were known to him about the website and asked them to enrol for the courses. For his surprise, he received 160000 enrollments for a class on Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, and more people joined from out of Standford. There were students who had never been to college, few were single moms and even students from war zone areas like Afghanistan joined the class. The platform was free, and Thrun was offering the same education to people that a Standford University student was getting by paying $58000 per year.

The company received its first investment from the venture capital firm, Charles River Ventures, and Thrun put his personal money worth $200,000 into it. In October 2012, Andreessen Horowitz invested $15 million in Udacity. By 2014, the company was teaching 12 full courses and 26 free courseware to 1.6 million global users.

Udacity basically partners with Universities and MNCs, to prepare courses that can help the students prepare for the competition and get the right job. The platform provides proper grades and certifications to the students on the basis of their performance in the tests.

In 2005, Thrun was named among the ‘Brilliant 5 by Popular Science’. He has been also awarded the Max-Planck-Research Award (2011), the Inaugural AAAI Ed Feigenbaum Prize (2011), Global Thinker number 4 by Foreign Policy (2012), ALVA Award by 99U (2013), and number 17 Influential Educator, by Noodle (2014), etc.

He has also co-authored a book named ‘Probabilistic Robotics’ along with his long-term co-workers Dieter Fox and Wolfram Burgard, which is a best seller in the Japanese market.

Wang Xing : Chinese Billionaire Businessman & the Founder of Meituan

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A geek and a curious guy, this is how the Chinese people know, Wang Xing, the founder of Meituan, the biggest Chinese group buying website. Wang Xing is a serial entrepreneur who emerged as one of the successful businessmen in China, even after facing multiple failures and now, he has built the biggest online-to-offline market in China. Also known as ‘Big Brother Xing’, he has been giving its rival, Alibaba’s Ele.me, a tough competition.

Wang Xing was born on 18 February 1979, in Longyan, to a Chinese businessman Wang Miao, the owner of a cement factory located in the city of Longyan in Fujian. Wang Xing completed a bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering from Tsinghua University in 2001.

wang xing
Image Source: fortune.com

Having born into a business family, Xing was always into starting up his own business. Inspired by the success of Facebook in the U.S., he dropped out of the University of Delaware, where he was pursuing a PhD in computer engineering and started his first social network named Duoduoyou. The startup specifically targetted the students in the various university, but like many of other startups, it was unable to make the mark.

The second time, he started Youzitu, that was built to serve the Chinese students abroad. But again the startup got shut down. The next startup that Xing started was Xiaonei that he launched in 2005. This startup also targetted the Chinese students and was the first of his startups, to get thousands of registered users in a small time.

But yet again, Xing faced problems like financial issues in handling the company and had to sell it to InterActive Corp, for US$2 million, only after a year of its inception. InterActive Corp renamed the company to Renren, that later raised US$740 million, in its IPO in 2011.

Having earned enough money in the deal, Xing was able to perceive a new startup idea and launch another social media app, which actually was a micro-blogging app inspired by Twitter, named Fanfou. This time, the startup went very well and had gained over 2 million user base. But then, in 2009, Government ordered to shut down the social network as a result of violent discussions that took place over the platform about the Ürümqi riots. But eventually, after a small time gap, Xing re-opened Fanfou and is still an active participant on this platform.

Even having faced many failures in his past start-ups, Xing never became discouraged and pushed his limits even further. In 2010, he came up with his another startup, Meituan, a group buying a website for local food delivery services, consumer products and retail services. Xing received the initial funding of worth $12 million for the startup from Sequoia Capitals. This startup again was inspired by another US-based company named Groupon and sold discount vouchers on various services and deals.

The company is backed by Tencent and is one of the biggest on-demand services providing platforms. By the year 2014, the company had employed over 5,000 people, and in 2015, it had registered over 200 million users. The company operates in 2800 cities in China and has partnered with 400,000 local Chinese businesses.

On 8 October 2015, Meituan merged with a Chinese group buying site named Dianping, and the merger became Meituan Dianping. In January 2016, the company raised $3.3 billion worth of funding. Meituan Dianping went public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2018 at a price HK$69 per share.

Wang Xing has always stressed on enhancing the efficiency and in fact, has done the same in the past fifteen years. Currently, he serves Meituan Dianping as the chairman and is also the member of the board at Beijing Mobike Technology Co Ltd. He is an avid reader and also writes blogs on topics like entrepreneurship, philosophy, etc.

In 2018, Xing was at number 37 in the Forbes China Rich List 2018 and at number 379 in the Forbes Billionaires 2019 with an estimated worth $4.1 billion. He was also listed number three on the Forbes 2018 “40 under 40” list.

Trip Hawkins : Silicon Valley Entrepreneur & the Founder of the Gaming Pioneer Electronic Arts

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“I’ve never been content with a straightforward job,” says Trip Hawkins, the American entrepreneur and the founder of startups like Electronic Arts, The 3DO Company, and Digital Chocolate. This may be the reason how a person who was once handling one of the most successful video game companies (EA), left it to pursue a new challenge of running a startup (3DO) all over again. Trip Hawkins, who has registered his name as the eighth person into the ‘Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences’ Hall of Fame for his contribution to the video game industry, believes that if one wants to succeed in life, he has to be ready to fail first.

Hawkins was born as William Murray Hawkins III on 28 December 1953, in Pasadena, California, U.S. He was a bright student and a video game lover. According to Hawkins, every time he played video games, it switched on his brain. Therefore, eventually, it became his passion.

trip-hawkins
Image Source: playworks.org

After completing his high school education from a local school, he entered Harvard University. Interestingly, here he majored and graduated in a self-designed course, Strategy and Applied Game Theory.

As soon as he completed his college, he joined Apple Inc. as the Director of Product Marketing in 1978. He was one of the first fifty employees of Apple. During this time, the company saw its first most successful years and also filed for its first IPO in 1982. The company also registered its name among the Fortune 500 companies and increased the number of employees to one thousand people.

In 1982, Hawkins decided to start his own financing venture named Amazin’ Software and met Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital to talk about the plan and raise funds for it. On the advice of Valentine, Hawkins left his job at Apple and shifted to a Sequoia office for his startup. On 27 May 1982, Hawkins started Amazin’ Software investing US$200,000 from his personal savings.

At the same time, he started working on his next startup Electronic Arts and hired a few ex-fellow colleagues from Apple. By November 1982, the company had hired over eleven people, and it was relocated to San Mateo.

Hawkins incorporated Electronic Arts on May 27, 1982. In the beginning, the company functioned with name Amazin’ Software, but most of the employees did not like the name and suggested for SoftArt, but eventually, ended up naming the company Electronic Arts. The company started building video games, and their marketing strategy included dealing with retailers directly. It was a great marketing move, and the company started running successfully.

Hawkins has always called the developers artists, and that is why the company name includes Arts in it. The next different thing that he chose to do in marketing was to give photo credit to his game developers on the game covers. In fact, the company released its first ever video game ad featuring the developers in it.

In 1987, EA released its first internally developed game named Skate or Die. The mega-hits from EA are Madden NFL, The Sims and Rock Band. In the early 1990s, the company started producing console games for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

In 1991, Trip Hawkins stepped down as EA’s CEO, after successfully leading the company for 12 years, to found another startup named 3DO. Currently, the company headquarter is located in Redwood City, California and Andrew Wilson heads it as the CEO.

3DO was a video game console company, which in 1993 released the most powerful and expensive gaming console of that time, costing US$599. Being at a higher price, the company failed to sell the gaming console, and eventually, stopped making them. Later in 1996, the company started producing video games that also failed to support the revenues, and it became bankrupt.

After shutting down 3DO, Hawkins went to found another video game company named Digital Chocolate, in 2003. The company produces video games for handheld devices. After serving the company as the CEO for over 9 years, Hawkins stepped down from the position in 2012.

In the same year, he joined the board of directors of Israeli technology company Extreme Reality, and in 2013 became the senior advisor to the board of directors of NativeX. He also joined the advisory board at Skillz, in 2014.

According to one of his interviews, when he was asked about if he was not an entrepreneur what would he be? He answered that he would have been a professor as he assumes himself a natural teacher.

In 2016, he joined the University of California as Professor of Practice in the Technology Management Program.

Charles Simonyi : American Computer Businessman & the Genius Behind Microsoft’s Word-Excel

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Microsoft has a history of great inventors and developers to its credit. One of such inventors is Charles Simonyi, who is the no. 40 employee of Microsoft and is also the man behind Microsoft’s most profitable products, including Word and Excel. Though he is famous for his inventions in the programming and development industry, he is also known as the only space traveller who has been to space twice. He is a philanthropist and a supporter of arts and science initiatives, too.

Early Life

Simonyi was born on 10 September 1948, in Budapest Hungary. His father Károly Simonyi was a Hungarian physicist and writer, who also worked as a professor of electrical engineering at the Technical University of Budapest.

Charles Simonyi
Image Source: hungarytoday

It was during his high school when he started working part-time as a night watchman at a computer laboratory and developed an interest in computers and programming. One of the computer engineers, from the lab, also started teaching him the basics of computers and by the end of his school, Simonyi mastered a few programming languages.

When he was 17, he moved to Denmark with a short-term visa and started working for A/S Regnecentralen. As a result, he got his visa extended, and he never went back to Hungary.

Career

In 1968, Simonyi moved to the US and joined the University of California, Berkeley, to pursue a B.S. degree in Engineering Mathematics & Statistics. As soon he completed his education, he got the opportunity to work with the Xerox PARC, where he worked in the development of one of the first personal computers Xerox Alto. And eventually, ended up inventing the first WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) text editor named Bravo, along with his co-worker Lampson.

In 1977, while working at Xerox, he received a PhD in computer science from Stanford University.

In 1981, Simonyi left Xerox and was hired by Microsoft to start an applications group at Microsoft. The first application he built was a WYSIWYG word processor, and Microsoft’s most valuable applications Word and Excel are the outcomes of the same application. It was Simonyi who introduced Microsoft with the concept of metaprogramming and OOPs which he learnt at Xerox. He also developed the “Hungarian notation convention” for naming variables, which was the part of his doctoral thesis and has been widely used inside Microsoft.

In 2002, Simonyi left Microsft to found Intentional Software, a company marketing the intentional programming concepts, along with co-founder Gregor Kiczales. The company works on developing designs tools and platforms, which programmers focus on capturing the intent of users and designers.

Simonyi was awarded the Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award for the industry-wide impact of his innovative work in information technology, in 2004. Microsoft acquired Intentional Software in April 2017.

Personal Life

Simonyi married 32 years younger Lisa Persdotter, in November 2008, in a personal ceremony. He lives in Medina, Washington, in his modern design villa, Villa Simonyi. He is fond of collecting paintings.

During 2006, Simonyi became interested in becoming a space tourist and took proper training for that. He signed agreements with the space tourism company, Space Adventures, Ltd., for a ten-day mission to the International Space Station (ISS) and rode a Soyuz TMA-10, on 7 April 2007, along with two Russian cosmonauts. On 26 March 2009, he went on his second trip to space aboard Soyuz TMA-14, becoming the only space traveller to have gone into space twice.

Simonyi and his wife both actively participate in philanthropy works, and in 2003 started a charitable organisation The Charles and Lisa Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences, to which Simonyi has donated over millions of dollars. In January 2004, Simonyi also started the Charles Simonyi Fund.

As an inventor, Simonyi currently holds 11 patents to his name.

George Hotz : The First Person to Unlock the iPhone & the Founder of AI Startup comma.ai

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iPhone indeed is the most loved smartphone and was one of the first keyboard-less mobile phones available in the market. iPhone is not only known for its unique features, but also for the high security it provides to its users. But there was a 17 years old hacker, George Hotz, from New Jersey, who unlocked the newly launched iPhone, allowing the phone to be used with other wireless carriers and became the first person to do so. He is not only a famous hacker but has also founded his vehicle automation machine learning company named comma.ai. Also known as Geohotz, even having hacked major security programs, Hotz has always said that he never support hacking into someone else’s server and stealing databases of user information.

Early Life

Hotz was born on 2 October 1989 in Glen Rock, New Jersey, as George Francis Hotz Jr. He completed his high school from Bergen County Academies in Hackensack, New Jersey and attended the Academy for Engineering and Design Technology. Hotz also attended the Rochester Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University for a brief time.

Being a brilliant student and always ahead in every competition in science and technology in middle and high school, he even won the $15,000 scholarship at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in 2007.

Hacking Career

Hotz was always interested in programming and had developed his interest in hacking. In August 2007, only after two months of the launch of the iPhone, Hotz was able to unlock the iPhone. After doing so, he became the first person to unlock an iPhone. Also in 2009, he released a jailbreaking tool for the iPhone 3GS on iPhone OS 3.0. Though in 2010, he discontinued the jailbreaking software.

George Hotz
Image Source: spectrum.ieee.org

In December 2009, he started working on a new program to breach security on the Sony PlayStation 3. by January 2010, he was able to create a thesis on the hack, but soon in July 2010, he abandoned the idea of entering the security of PS3. But another hacking group fail0verflow also started working on the same, generating the root signing and encryption keys for PS3.

Hotz too published those root signing and encryption keys over his website that led to a serious lawsuit from Sony for both Hotz and fail0verflow. After many court sessions, Sony and Hotz settled the matter outside the court on the condition that Hotz will never try to do any hacking work on Sony products.

Career with Facebook and Google

Hacking had always been his hobby, and his early achievements and knowledge of security algorithms landed Hotz a job with Facebook in 2011 for an unknown role.

Later in July 2014, Google hired Hotz to work with its security auditing team on Project Zero. He stayed in the team for five months and developed an open source program, for dynamically analysing application binaries, named Qira.

In January 2015, he joined Vicarious.com where he worked for 7 months and developed AI algorithms for the company.

Founding Comma.AI

In September 2015, Hotz founded comma.ai, that works on building AI based vehicular automation technology. In 2016, the company built a working self-driving Acura ILX. Later, the company started working on Comma One, a $1,000 software kit that could allow some cars to operate semi-autonomously. But after receiving a special order from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the further production of the software was cancelled.

During the same time, he was also in talks with Elon Musk to sell his autonomous software for Tesla cars, but the talks never met any conclusion.

On 30 November 2016, the company open sourced its self-driving car software. The open source driving agent from the company runs on some of the car models from companies like Honda, Toyota, and GM, making those models semi-autonomous. Reportedly in 2018, the company served over 4,500 drivers.

Personal Life

Hotz aka Geohotz has been always a keen learner for AI and software development. In 2004 he participated in the ISEF competition in Portland where he demonstrated “The Mapping Robot”. He was among the finalists and got featured on the Today Show and Larry King. He also developed another project named The Googler in 2005 and participated in the ISEF competition with the project, here too, he was one of the finalists.

In 2008, he was among the top 10 Overachievers under 21 listed in the March edition of PC World magazine. In 2014 he won the DEF CON CTF tournament for the second time in a row.

On 14 September 2018, Hotz stepped down from the post of the CEO of the company and became the Head of Research Team.