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Reid Hoffman : The Mind Behind the Largest Corporate Social Network

Founder, Inspiration, Social media, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Sometimes, it takes a long process for a person to understand and choose the right way that leads to his goals. Only a few can dream to help others achieve their dreams and bring out a positive change in the world. But if one truly wants to accomplish his dreams, he will find out a way. Same is the story of the infamous American internet entrepreneur and the venture capitalist- Reid Hoffman, who had initially dreamt about changing the world through his motivational speeches and eventually, reached out to a bigger platform and definitely have brought out his share of change.

Early Life

Reid Hoffman was born to William Parker Hoffman Jr. and Deanna Ruth, on 5 August 1967. He was born in Palo Alto, California and spent most of his childhood in Berkeley. He did his high school from The Putney School and earned his Bachelor Science degree in Symbolic Systems & Cognitive Science, from Stanford University. He was awarded a Marshall Scholarship and hence went to the Wolfson College, Oxford University to pursue a Master in Studies in Philosophy in 1993. He had also received a Dinkelspiel Award in his graduation from Stanford University.

Career

As a child, he always loved playing the tabletop roleplaying games. So in 1982, when he was just 12, he got his first job as an editor at a game developing company named as Chaosium. His work at the company was quite impressive, and in 1984, with the release of Chaosium’s ‘Borderlands’, a role-playing game, he got his name featured on its box, at the time he was just 14. He always wanted to become an influential person so that he can bring a change in the world. He had thought of becoming a professor. But soon he realised that writing books and reaching people can be a long way. So he diverted his mind towards entrepreneurship.

Reid Hoffman
Image Source: twimg.com

After graduating, he went to do an internship at Inglenook, a winery, followed by a job at Apple Computer. In Apple, he worked on a social network named as eWorld. After working for some time in Apple, he took a job at Fujitsu and in 1997, found his first company named as SocialNet.com. Soon after, setting up SocialNet.com, he joined PayPal as the COO, in 2000. His boss at PayPal, Peter Thiel says about Hoffman that he was a firefighter-in-chief at PayPal. At Paypal, he was responsible for most of the high-level jobs like payment infrastructure, government, legal issues, etc., that he handled efficiently under a great pressure.

Founding of LinkedIn

After eBay acquired Paypal, in 2002, Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, a professional social media network, with his old colleagues from SocialNet.com and Fujitsu. He also received some investment from his colleagues from Paypal, Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois. LinkedIn became a huge success and Hoffman became its founding CEO. Today, Hoffman holds a share worth $2.34 billion in Linked in and he serves as the Executive Chairman of the company. By 2014, LinkedIn had spread in more than 200 countries, with over 332 million members. In June 2016, Microsoft offered him an amount of $26.2 billion in cash for the acquisition of LinkedIn.

Investment, Writing & Motivational Speeches

LinkedIn was a huge success, after which, Hoffman found his interest in investment. He is one of the Angel investors, who are happily ready to invest in potential startups. It is said that Hoffman was the one who arranged the $500,000 angel investment meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel. Along with Peter, he had also invested in Facebook initially.

Reid Hoffman always wanted to become a positive influence the for its betterment. His desire of becoming a motivational speaker and writing books was always alive. He started writing from local blogs, followed by his ‘LinkedIn’s Series B Pitch to Greylock: Pitch Advice for Entrepreneurs’ and ‘LinkedinInfluencr’ blogs on LinkedIn. In February 2012, he released his first book ‘The Start-Up of You’ with co-author Ben Casnocha, that became the bestseller in New York and was critically acclaimed. In July 2014, he came with another release, ‘The Alliance’ with Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh.

Hoffman also started a podcast named as ‘Masters of Scale’ on 5 May 2017, where he discusses various counterintuitive business theories with successful entrepreneurs.

Personal Life

Hoffman got married to Michelle Yee, in 2004, and the two live in Palo Alto, California. Hoffman is also in Philanthropy and is a member of many NGOs. In 2016, he donated $20 million to a charity Biohub.

Matt Mullenweg : The Founder and CEO of WordPress

Founder, start-up, Tech Story / By

Breaking the stereotype, many common people coming from nowhere, have become the most important and influential leaders of the tech industry. Few names like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc., pop up in each person’s mind as their innovations are playing an so important role in our lives. These innovations have also introduced new trends. One such trend is blogging. And when we hear the word ‘blog’ how can anyone forget the name of WordPress?

WordPress is an open source platform for creating websites, preferably used by most of the bloggers, small businesses, etc. It is one of the best CMS available, which does not require much knowledge of coding language to set up one’s own website. Introduction of WordPress revolutionized the whole internet and today 30% of the internet sites work on the WordPress. That’s a huge achievement. And all the credit goes to the man behind the idea – Matt Mullenweg.

Early Life

Born on 11th January 1984, in Houston, Texas, US, Matt went to High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. He studied jazz saxophone in his school. Further, he went to the University of Houston to pursue the degree in Political Science. But, soon he dropped out in 2004 and accepted a job at CNET Networks. He worked at CNET for two years then quit to start his own venture Automattic.

Matt was never into computer programming. When he was just 18, he used to post blogs on b2/cafelog, an open-source blogging platform. But, after some time, he came to know that the lead developer of this platform had quit and the company had stopped developing it any further. This is when Matt decided to develop the b2 codebase blogging platform according to the web standards of that time. He posted this information on his own blog and soon was joined by his fellow coder Mike Little. They made some key improvements and added some more features to the platform, and this is how the revolutionary WordPress was born, in January 2003.

Rise of Career

Soon after, Matt and Mike were joined by the original b2 developer Michel Valdrighi in the development of WordPress. Matt was just a newbie in his college at that time, and he had already co-founded his another venture Global Multimedia Protocols Group, in March 2004. Next, Matt launched a hub, where one could get notifications about blog updates called Ping-O-Matic.

Matt Mullenweg
Image Souce: wikimedia.org

WordPress was still seeking a huge audience to get on the global level. In May 2004, a strong competitor of WordPress, called Movable Type, made some changes in their prices, which led thousands of people looking out for an alternate platform. Fortunately, WordPress was available and caught everyone’s attention.

Now that WordPress was receiving a good response, CNET offered to recruit Matt to work on WordPress for them. He grabbed the opportunity and dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco. A couple of months later, came the big announcement of bbPress. And, in February 2005, Matt along with the WordPress team released WordPress 1.5 ‘Strayhorn’. It introduced several top features like themes, moderation features, and redesign of front and back end.

Matt left CNET, in October of the same year to focus completely on WordPress. Just within a few days, he announced Akismet – an effort to stop comment and trackback spam. Later, in December, there came another venture called Automattic, the original company behind all his other ventures. Matt under Automattic, recruited all the people who had contributed to the development of WordPress.

In January 2006, Toni Schneider was appointed as the new CEO of Automattic. Exactly two years later, the company raised about $29.5 million from Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and New York Times Company. This was due to the increasing popularity of WordPress among the bloggers and various other funding offers from investors. By that time WordPress had a team of 18 people working.

In early 2009, WordPress was growing faster than anyone had ever imagined and was witnessing 10% growth each month. The platform was hosting around 15,000 new blogs daily. The growth kept increasing each year, tremendously. In April 2012, it was reported that WordPress empowered more than 70 million sites and made a revenue of $45 million that year.

Matt took the CEO position in Automattic, in 2014, and raised $160 million to take the company’s value to a billion dollars.

Personal Life

Matt has won several awards due to his achievements. Business Insider named him among the top 10 most influential people for changing the face of the internet. In February 2011 he was listed in the Forbes 30 Under 30 for the impact, he has made on the blogging world.

Matt supports a number of non-profit organizations and philanthropic organizations like Archive.org, Innocence Project, Charity: Water foundation, and many more. He is currently living in San Francisco.

Tom Preston-Werner : Co-founder of GitHub

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Almost every developer in the world has submitted at least one line of code or checked out for coding solutions on the social coding platform GitHub. GitHub is the largest online community of developers where they share programming code with other programmers to help them or seek help from them, to create better software. GitHub is among the fastest growing startups with having over 28 million users and 57 million repositories. It was founded by Tom Preston-Werner, a software developer, inventor and entrepreneur from America.

Early Life

Tom was born on 28 October 1979, in Dubuque, Iowa, US. He lost his father at an early age. His mother was a teacher and his step-father was an engineer. He did his schooling from Dubuque Senior High School and went to Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, to pursue his higher education. During his college, he realised that he is more interested in computer programming than the subjects he was pursuing at college. So after studying for two years in the college, he decided to drop out of the course and focus on learning programming languages.

Career

After leaving the college, Tom started with many small coding projects, one of which was based on flash replacement technique. At that time the websites had a limited set of fonts available for the users. His flash replacement project allowed the users to use any font on any website.

Tom Preston-Werner
Image Source: flickr.com

Later in 2004, he came with a new project named as Gravatar. The concept behind it was to maintain a single avatar for dozens of other services. The project was a success, but, without a business model, it was not paying the way it was supposed to. Finally, in 2007, a company named Automattic acquired Gravatar.

In 2005, Tom moved to San Francisco and started working with Powerset. Eventually, Microsoft acquired Powerset in 2008, and, offered Preston-Werner a $300,000 bonus and stock options in the company. But he had already started working on GitHub project, so he declined the offer to focus on it.

Founding GitHub

Tom was always in the favour of documenting the software codes so that other developers can easily understand how the codes exactly work. Being an active contributor to the open-source developer and hacker culture he came across with the idea of an open-source development community. Also, with the bad experience of the business with Gravatar, this time he was ready with a better business architecture for his new project. In 2008, he founded GitHub with his co-founders Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett and Scott Chacon. He had met Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett on one of the developer meet-up in San Francisco. GitHub was a commercial success and gained over 46,000 public repositories, in the initial year of its being online. Tom was appointed as the CEO of the company.

In 2014, Tom resigned from the company after he and his wife were accused of harassment by GitHub programmer Julie Ann Horvath.

After resigning from GitHub, Tom co-founded Chatterbug and Codestarter. Codestarter is a non-profit organization that donates computers to kid coders. He works as the advisor at Codestarter.

Personal Life

Preston-Werner is married to Theresa Preston-Werner, an anthropologist, known for her involvement in much historical research and social subjects.

Andy Bechtolsheim : German Electrical Engineer & a self-made Billionaire

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Being a successful entrepreneur depends highly on an individual’s decision making and risk taking capability. Higher the risk, greater the reward. This has been said and written, over and over. If you read about businessmen, who are highly successful today, you will find the huge array of risks, these people have taken to reach where they are. Out of these risks, emerges many successful companies. A company that produces valuable products and employs thousands of people. One such risk taker, and now a billionaire, is Andy Bechtolsheim.

Early Life and Education

Andy was born on 30th September 1955, in Bavaria, Germany and was the second of the four children in the family. He spent the most of the time of his childhood between the electronics devices, as there was no television or children in the neighbour to play with. So he chose to keep himself busy and entertained with electronics.

At the age of 16, Andy designed an industrial controller that worked on Intel 8080. He programmed it in binary code as he didn’t have any access to assemblers. He made this controller primarily for a nearby company, who then further paid him royalties for the product. These royalties paid for Andy’s most of the education.

Andy Bechtolsheim
Image Source: forbesimg.com

When Andy was attending the Technical University of Munich to pursue engineering, he entered the Jugend forscht contest that was organised for the young researchers. He kept participating in the contest for three years and finally, in the third year i.e. in 1974, he won the physics prize.

Andy, further, went to Carnegie Mellon University in the USA, after he received the Fulbright Award, in 1975. In 1976, at the same university, he received his master’s degree in Computer Engineering. Later, he went to the Stanford University to earn his PhD in electrical engineering, in 1977.

Early Career

While his time at Stanford, Andy came across the Xerox Alto computer, developed at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Inspired by this computer, he designed a powerful workstation, which had a built-in networking, named as SUN workstation (taken from the initials of Stanford University Networking). This workstation gained him free access to the researches at Xerox Palo Alto. During the same time, Lynn Conway was developing Very Large Scale Integration circuits (VLSI).

Birth of Sun Microsystems

The VLSI was developed on the workstation made by Andy. One such company called Daisy systems was also into building computers for the VLSI design. A man named Vinod Khosla worked at Daisy systems, who would soon partner with Andy. Khosla graduated from Stanford Graduate School of Business just a couple years earlier than Andy. He was good friends with his classmate Scott McNealy who was the manager of manufacturing at Onyx Systems. These three people came together and developed a business plan for their first company. They also received funding in no time from the venture capitalists in 1982.

Andy with three others was joined by Bill Joy as the fourth member responsible for the development of BSD series of Unix OS. In the earlier days, Andy and Joy shared an apartment in Palo Alto. Sun Microsystems launched their first product named Sun-1. It included Stanford CPU board design with expanded memory and a protective metal sheet casing. The company went public in 1986 and reached $1 billion in sales by 1988. Andy also launched a cheaper desktop computer for educational market under his project SPARCstation. The computer was known as Campus.
Changing Companies.

He left Sun Microsystems in 1995, after working there for almost a decade. The same year he founded Granite Systems. A startup working to develop high-speed network switches. In 1966, when Andy owned about 60% of the company, Cisco acquired it for $220 million. After this deal, he also acquired the position of Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s Gigabit Systems Business Unit.

After working for 8 years at Cisco, he left the job in 2003 and took the head position in Kealia, Inc. This was the company that Andy had founded back in 2001 along with a Stanford Professor named David Cheriton, also a partner in Granite Systems. Kealia worked on developing advanced server technologies using the Opteron processor from Advanced Micro Devices.

Andy was soon going to go back to where he started from. In the February of 2004, Sun Microsystems acquired Kealia, Inc., and Andy took the position of Vice President and Chief Architect in the company. He founded yet another company named Arastra which was renamed as Arista in 2005. The company was focused on developing high-speed networking. He left Sun and took Chairman and Chief Development Officer in Arista in October 2008.

Investment in Google

In the September of 1998, Andy and Cheriton decided to invest in the emerging search engine company Google. Both invested around $100,000 even before the company was founded and legally incorporated. His investment is now worth $1.6 billion.

Andy is known as the most successful investors in the electronics sector. He also invested in Magma Design Automation. His stake is valued at $60 million. He has invested in a number of startups and has been successful every time.

Achievements

Andy received the Smithsonian Leadership Award for Innovation in 1999. He also received Stanford Entrepreneur Company of the Year award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Personal Life

Andy is not married and has not taken US citizenship. He continues to be a German and does not intend to change it. He lives in Palo Alto, California, US.

Sean Parker : The Co-founder of Napster

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

In the advancement of the tech world, the college dropouts have made their different place with their vision and intelligence. Whether it’s the founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell from Dell Technologies or Microsoft’s Bill Gates, they have proven that one’s intelligence and talent cannot be judged with a mere degree. Sean Parker an American entrepreneur and philanthropist have also followed their lead and have discarded the worth of a physical degree by his knowledge.

Early Life

Sean Parker was born on 3 December 1979, to Bruce Parker and Diane Parker in Herndon, Virginia. His father was a U.S. government oceanographer and mother was a TV advertising broker. As a kid, Sean was an avid reader and started learning computer programming from his father on an Atari 800 at an early age of 7. The exposure to programming grew his interest in hacking and at the age of 15, he hacked into the network of a Fortune 500 company. His IP address got tracked by FBI and as a result, being an under-age, he was sentenced to community service.

Sean Parker
Image Source: wikimedia.org

Parker did his High School from Fairfax County, Virginia and Chantilly High School. During his school, he used to spend most of his time in the computer labs learning new programming skills. During his final year of high school, he got an internship at Zynga, Pincus’s Washington D.C. and later, got employed at CIA, while he was still a teen. Until the completion of his school, he was earning enough to be able to decide to become an entrepreneur.

Career

During his teenage, Parker met his future partner Shawn Fanning, and the two bonded with each other by their common interest- Hacking. After a few years, the two launched their startup as a free music file-sharing service Napster. At the time Parker was just 19 and he invested $50000 in their startup. Within the first year of its launch, Napster got millions of users, along with a few lawsuits by recording companies like Recording Industry Association of America. Even with the fastest growth of the company it got shut down in only two years.

In 2002, Sean founded Plaxo, a social networking tool that later got integrated into Microsoft Outlook. Plaxo also became viral in a short span of time, but this time Parker was driven out of his position in Plaxo by its investor over some argument.

Later, in 2004, Parker became familiar with a networking website The Facebook and managed to meet Mark Zuckerberg. After a few months of this meeting, he was appointed as the president of the 5-months old company. Sean played a pivotal role in creating the clean interface and the picture sharing features in Facebook. In 2005, he was arrested from a private party as the police founded cocaine in his rented house. After a few days, he was released from all the allegations, but, this brought a bad impact on the other investors and he had to resign from his post. Even after the resignation and the controversy, he has always been in touch with Mark Zuckerberg unofficially.

Being a music lover and after a bad experience with Napster, he got to know about Spotify and invested the US $15 million in it. Now he is serving as one of the board members of Spotify.

After investing in Spotify, he started a few new ventures like Airtime.com, Brigade and invested in other startups like Willcall, Quantcast, Path, and Knewton with its venture capital The Founders Fund based in San Francisco founded by Peter Thiel.

Donations and Charity

Sean Parker is associated with cancer research donations since 2005 and has created Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, in April 2016, with a grant of $250 million. He has donated $24 million to create the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford and $5 million grant to Stand Up to Cancer and the Cancer Research Institute. His foundation focuses on three areas: Life Sciences, Global Public Health and Civic Engagement.

Parker has got an interest in the politics and has also funded both sides of US political parties and spoke in favour of rich people paying higher texas. He has also been a part of many political campaigns and has supported them financially.

Personal Life

Sean got engaged to Alexandra Lenas, a singer-songwriter and the two got married in 2013. Their wedding was based on lord of rings theme and created news as it cost more than $10 million. The two have a daughter named Winter Victoria Parker and a son named Zephyr Emerson Parker.

He was featured on the cover of the Forbes 400 issue in 2011 and was ranked number 722 in the Forbe’s list of the world’s billionaires in 2016.

Morris Chang: The Father of Taiwan’s Chip Industry

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

China is known as the major manufacturer of electronics all over the globe. The reason is simple, it is blessed with leaders, who have worked hard to be ahead of everyone else and took the sole responsibility, to make their company as well as China, the leader of electronics manufacturers. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is the world’s first and biggest silicon foundry. The company became what it is today only because of the leader who served it for 30 years – Morris Chang.

Early Life

Born on 10th July 1931, in Ningbo, Chekiang, China, Morris Chang is the founder, former chairman and CEO of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. His father was an official in the Yin county government. Chang’s life’s ambition was to become a novelist or a journalist. But his father persuaded him to take up something else.

In 1948, Chang moved to Hong Kong at the age of 17, as it was the peak time of the Chinese Civil War. Just the next year the People’s Republic of China was established. In 1949, Chang moved to the United States to study at Harvard University. Later on, he transferred to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he completed his bachelors and master’s degree in mechanical engineering.

Career

In 1955, just after graduating, Chang landed his first job in the industry in Sylvania Semiconductor in the United States. After working for three years, in Sylvania Semiconductor he moved to Texas Instruments, in 1958. Chang spent the next 25 years of his life in this company. While working at TI, he learned everything about semiconductors and made advancements in it. He referred to these years as ‘youth of semiconductors’.

Morris Chang
Image Source: wikimedia.org

After his continuous hard work, Chang received a promotion in TI. He became the manager of the engineering section in 1961, i.e. just after three years of his joining the job at TI. Looking at his potential, Texas Instruments decided to invest a bit more in Chang and gave him the opportunity to obtain his PhD. He went to Stanford University and received his PhD in electrical engineering in 1964. He finally rose up to the rank of Vice President and took the responsibility of TI’s worldwide semiconductor business. During his time at TI, Chang worked on the four-transistor project, for which, IBM was handling the manufacturing unit. He also brought forward the idea of pricing semiconductors at low costs to gain larger profits in the long term.

Chang left Texas Instruments in 1983, and later, became the president and chief operating officer of General Instrument Corporation, from 1984-85. He left GIC and got a proposal from the government of the Republic of China for the post of chairman and president of Industrial Technology Research Institute. He accepted the proposal and set out to change the whole course of science and technology development in Taiwan.

Morris Chang was responsible to promote industrial and technological development in Taiwan. He used his decades of experience and founded TSMC, in 1987. This was the time when big companies considered outsourcing the manufacturing capabilities to Asia. Chang’s visionary aim became successful, as TSMC became the leading semiconductor foundry. It acquires 50% of the total global market share. Its major customers include Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Intel. TSMC became the profitable and biggest chip makers in the world.

Chang’s vision was clear and, that was not to pivot the direction of the company. It will always be a pure play foundry and will never compete with its customers. Chang retired from ITRI, in 1994 and took the position of chairman at Vanguard International Semiconductor Corporation the same year till 2003. He continued to serve as the chairman of TSMC. In 2005, Chang handed the CEO position to Rick Tsai, but, returned back again in June 2009.

Morris Chang announced his retirement from the company on June 5, 2018, but had already planned the future of the company. The new CEO of the company would be C.C.Wei and the chairman position would be filled in by Mark Liu.

Personal Life

Chang won many accolades due to his leadership quality and achieving great heights of success. Forbes magazine named Morris Chang as one of the most visionary leaders in the world. After retiring from his service, which took the electronics industry to next level, Chang wants to spend time with his family. He lives with his wife Sophie Chang and three children.