Your Tech Story

start-up story

Linus Torvalds : The Creator & the Principal Developer of the Linux Kernel

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

Necessity is the key to invention, and the story of Linus Torvalds is the greatest proof to that. A student and an enthusiast programmer from Helsinki University started working on his own Operating System when he was unable to buy a basic UNIX system that costed around US$5,000 at that time. Although it was a modest effort of improving the small clone of UNIX, his creativity and curiosity led him to build a whole new and free OS software, Linux, which accidentally became an alternative to the Microsoft monopoly.

Early Life

Linus Torvalds was born on 28 December 1969 in Helsinki, Finland. His father Nils Torvalds and mother Anna Torvalds, both worked as journalists. His parents named him after the Nobel Prize-winning American chemist, Linus Pauling. Torvalds was 11 years old when he got familiar with computers and the BASIC programming language. This was the time when he grew an interest in computers and coding. Soon, he was able to write codes for his own assembler and editor, as Finland was not a place where software were easily available. Later, he also developed a few games, including the clone of Pac Man, naming it the Cool Man.

linus-torvalds
Image Source: zdnet.com

Torvalds joined the University of Helsinki in 1988, where he studied Computer Science as his majors. But within the first year of his college, he joined the Finnish Army Uusimaa brigade and completed the 11-month officer training program, as the Second Lieutenant, under the mandatory military service of Finland.

After completing the military training, Torvalds came back to his home town, to resume his college. While in college, he got introduced to Unix for the first time. At the same time, he also started studying a book named ‘Operating Systems: Design and Implementation’, written by the computer science professor Andrew Tanenbaum, which described the educational stripped-down version of Unix, ‘MINIX’.

Founding Linux

In 1991, he bought the Intel 80386-based clone of IBM PC, having a 33MHz Intel 386 processor and a huge 4MB of memory. The system came with the MS-DOS operating system, that according to Torvalds did not do justice with the 386 Intel Processor. As he was already working on UNIX in the college, he was not much comfortable with working on MS-DOS but getting a UNIX copy too expensive. This led him to the other alternative for the OS, and he ordered a copy of MINIX for his system.

MINIX was faster than MS-DOS but still had some flaws. So he decided to make some changes to MINIX in order to improve the OS. To work on the idea, even before receiving his MINIX copy, he went into the depth of Unix and studied books covering all the aspects of the development phase. He started with writing a small piece of code that could improve MINIX. This also became the M.Sc. thesis project for Torvalds, and he titled the project as ‘Linux: A Portable Operating System.’

On Aug. 25, he posted to the internet’s Minix newsgroup, saying, “Hello everybody out there using MINIX – I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like GNU) for 386 (486) AT clones. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in MINIX, as my OS resembles it somewhat.”

Eventually, with great hard work, Torvalds managed to release the first version of the OS, i.e. 1.0, on September 17, followed by the second version, i.e. 2.0, on October 5, in the same year. The second version OS was a text-based user interface and was officially named as Linux. Torvalds put the 0.2 version over FTP and used Stallman’s GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) for his Linux kernel so that other developers could use it and modify it for further improvements.

Developers from across the world also became curious about Linux, started working on the same, resulting in rapid improvements to the platform. Even being a student at Helsinki University, Torvalds was doing really well. The college authorities appointed him as an instructor at the University, which helped him continue his development work for Linux.

By 1996, people started using Linux on their systems, and by 1997, Linux was installed on over three million computers. Organisations like NASA, Dell and IBM were also using Linux. At the same time, Red Hat started building software based on Linux, that boosted the popularity of Linux even more.

In 1999, when Red Hat went public, the company presented Torvalds with stock options in gratitude for his creation, making him an overnight millionaire. Also, when IBM started its research work on Linux in 2001, to support this free software, a few other companies also stepped in to do the same.

Today, Linux is serving those people, who need to use a computer, but cannot and does do not want to spend a huge amount on the other operating systems. According to Torvalds, he started working on Linux for fun, and it is also a fact that for almost a decade, he was working on it for free. Linux, certainly, is the result of his dedication and brilliance.

Personal Life

Torvalds is married to Tove Torvalds and has three daughters. In 2010, he obtained US citizenship. In 2000, he became interested in scuba diving and have received many certificates in the same. He also launched Subsurface, a software for logging and planning scuba dives, in 2011.

In 1998, Torvalds received an EFF Pioneer Award. He also shared the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Well-Being with Richard Stallman and Ken Sakamura. In August 2005, Torvalds received the Vollum Award from Reed College. He also received an honorary doctorate degree from Stockholm University.

Torvalds also founded the distributed version control system Git, in 2005. The system is widely used to track the changes in source code during software development.

Ubisoft : The Journey of the Leading Video Games Company; From a Small Village to a Global Market

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

Video games have seen a great transformation since its commencement. It all started with old 3D tic-tac-toe and Moon Landing games, and now, we see visually rich mission games and numerous small scale Smartphone games, which are really good at their functionalities.

The rise of video games not only provided people with new means of entertainment but has also given the opportunity to many businesses and developers to head into new horizons. The founders of the company Ubisoft also founded their passion in the same field, and now they are the owner of the third biggest video game development company.

Origin

Five brothers, Christian, Claude, Gérard, Michel and Yves, from the Guillemot family of northwest France founded Ubisoft in 1986. In the beginning, the Guillemot brothers had joined their family business. They started working even before they started going to University and had gained enough experience to start their own business.

ubisoft
Image Source: sharkone

Before Ubisoft, the Guillemot brothers had tried their hands in many other businesses. As their family business was based on farming, there was a real less margin in the business. Soon, they realised that the farming industry was not paying much and was going through a decline. So, the first business they did out of farming was selling audio CDs, as these were the latest trend in the market. The business was good, and soon, they were able to deal in personal computers and established a small shop.

The trade was going well, and along with selling computers, they also sold things that were needed in farming. The Guillemot then stocked up video games in the shop and installed 20 machines to play video games at the shop. In 1980, they shifted from buying the video games from France market to the US’s, as it was much cheaper to buy those video games from the US. This led to a huge difference in the profits, and as a result, the five brothers started another new business. In 1984, they founded Guillemot Informatique and began the mail-order business around computers and software.

By the year 1985, they were earning good profits through video games and realised that they can have much more of that if they start developing video games by themselves.

Founding Ubisoft

Guillemot brothers founded Ubisoft in Carentoir, in Brittany, on 12 March 1986. Ubisoft is the acronym for Ubiquitous Software, and formally, it was named as Ubisoft Entertainment S.A. For the development purpose, they gathered a team of developers from their neighbouring places and set up their first office in a chateau in Carentoir.

For two years of the startup, the brothers continued operating their company from the chateau only, but it was way expensive to maintain the office. So many of their developers relocated to Paris. One of their first recruited staff, Michel Ancel, who also returned to his hometown in the same year, came back with another developer Frederic Houde with a prototype of a game with highly-animated features in 1994.

The prototype caught the immediate attention of Guillemot brothers, and in 1994, they started working on the same, making it the prime project of the company. They also set up an office in Montreuil and hired 100 developers to work on the project. Finally, in 1995, Ubisoft launched its first hit video game Rayman, which targeted the new line of fifth-generation consoles, like the Atari Jaguar and PlayStation. The instant success of the game made the company popular worldwide.

The game was a huge hit, and only in one year, Ubisoft went for its IPO, in 1996, and raised over US$80 million in funds. The company also expanded to other worldwide cities, including Annecy, Shanghai, Montreal, and Milan, in a span of four years from its inception.

With the expansion of the internet in 1999, the Guillemot brothers found another opportunity to widen the growth of Ubisoft in the US market, too. They, then founded Gameloft, an online game publisher, in 1999. In the year 2000, Ubisoft acquired an American video game development company Red Storm Entertainment, that too, helped Ubisoft to expand in the American market, bringing titles like Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six series.

The success in the US market led Ubisoft to work with companies like Microsoft, at the time, when no one was ready to develop games for Xbox. With Microsoft, Ubisoft brought games like Halo and Ghost Recon, etc.

As of 2017, the estimated valuation of the company was registered at $6.4 billion. Currently, the company owns several video game studios across the world. The company gets the credits of many popular games to its name, including Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Just Dance, Prince of Persia, Rayman, Raving Rabbids, and Tom Clancy’s.

As of March 2018, it is the fourth largest publicly-traded game company in America and Europe after Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, and Take-Two Interactive in terms of revenue and market capitalisation.

Nick Woodman : The Founder of Sports-camera Manufacturing Company ‘GoPro’

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

Trying, trying, and trying, this is the basic rule to achieve your goals. If you fail once, you have to try harder next time, as giving up will lead you to nowhere, but failure. Except, if you keep trying, there will be a day when you will thank yourself for your own hard work and sustainability. The American businessman Nick Woodman also believes in the power of trying, and after failing in his first two startups, his third startup, ‘Go Pro‘, helped him achieve his dreams, and he finally, built a billion-dollar empire for himself.

Early Life

Woodman was born on 24 June 1975 to Concepcion Woodman and Dean Woodman. He spent his childhood in Menlo Park and Atherton, California. His father founded the Robertson Stephens, an investment bank based in San Francisco. He did his high school from Menlo School. He then attended the University of California, San Diego, where he graduated in visual arts, with a minor in creative writing in 1997.

Experimenting with Startups

Woodman was always curious about starting up his own business, for that he began with an eCommerce website named EmpowerAll.com, which was outlined to sell electronic goods for no more than a $2 profit. But the website could do well for him. Later, he launched a gaming and marketing platform, Funbug, again which could not live up to the mark.

Founding GoPro

It was then when he was travelling to Australia and Indonesia for a trip. He loves surfing, and while surfing in Australia during the tour, he tried to capture his adventure on the camera. He asked his friends to click his pictures while surfing, but they all failed. Later, he tried to take the pictures himself by attaching the camera to his hands with a rubber band, but again it was all in vain.

nick woodman
Image Source: engadget.com

This incident led him to brainstorm about developing ways to help people with such needs. The idea of developing cameras that can be attached with a belt came into his mind, and Woodman went forward to do the needful to transform the idea into a big business plan.

Woodman borrowed a sewing machine from his mother and started experimenting with different designs to formulate belts for cameras. He also took a loan of $2,00,000 from his father and $35000 from his mother in order to start the business. He also invested his savings, around $10000, obtained from selling the sea-shells, that he had brought from Bali and sold in the California coast, in his startup.

In 2002, he founded GoPro. The name was inspired by the Pro surfers who got their pictures clicked by professional photographers. Initially, the company focussed on developing camera models with ‘point and shoot’ property, in order to get high-quality pictures instantly.

The first model from the company was manufactured by a Chinese company named Hotax. The model was a 35mm film camera, attached with the belt designed by Woodman himself, after a few modifications in the design. The retail cost for the camera was set at $30. In the beginning, he went to sell his camera on his 1971 model Volkswagen bus. With the success of the camera, it went through a few improvements like support for Wifi, waterproof housing and addition of SD card.

After two years from the inception of the company, it got its first big order in 2004, from a Japanese company. In the same year, the total earned revenue of the company was $150,000 and the following year, it raised to $350,000.

In late 2012, Foxconn spent $200 million to purchase 8.88% of the company, making the company value at $2.25 billion and Woodman a billionaire. In the year 2014, the company went public.

Personal Life

Woodman is married to Jill R. Scully and has three children with her. The family lives in Woodside, California. In 2013, he won the national Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award. He has also been invited to many events as a speaker, to share his experience and some tips as a successful entrepreneur.

Woodman is also in philanthropy and has founded Jill + Nicholas Woodman Foundation, a charitable trust in the Silicon Valley.

BlaBlaCar : A Successful Startup that Simplified the Long-distance Journeys

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


Travelling, for some people is not just moving from one place to the other, but is something which includes emotions. Whether it be homecoming or a trip to one’s dream place, it brings emotion with itself. But the thing is, when it comes to travelling, the fare and the comfort don’t come on the same page. If you need affordable rates, then comfort is something that you need to compromise with, and that goes the other way round when you need high comfort.

But, according to the famous saying, where there’s a will, there’s a way, people have found their way to comfort and affordable travelling through BlaBlaCar. Carpooling, certainly, is a way that gives you the comfort and the affordable rates at the same time. When it comes to carpools, BlaBlaCar is a name that arises from within.

BlaBlaCar is a platform for long distance carpooling. Its app and website connect drivers to passengers who are willing to travel long distances. The benefits of the carpooling service are that the cost of the journey comes into sharing that means you get to experience comfort at an affordable price. Also, the drivers with empty seats get filled in. As of now, BlaBlaCar reaches more than 10 million rides per quarter year. The success story of BlaBlaCar is certainly is the one that inspires depicting that a small picture can be changed into a bigger one.

The idea of the startup came up to the current CEO and the co-founder of the BlaBlaCar, Fredric Mazzella, who in the winter of 2003, decided to visit his home on Christmas. But eventually, he found himself left with no options to travel, as all the trains in France were booked due to the holiday season. He didn’t have a car either, so he was stuck. Luckily, his sister offered him a ride home and during that particular trip, he noticed that most of the cars that were around them, had empty seats. That’s when the idea clicked. He thought, “If I put all those cars with empty seats, in a search engine, such that people can search the available seats in those cars, just like they do while booking a train.” The idea in his mind was something that was unique, and soon after realizing it, he started to work on the same, with his friends Francis Nappez and Nicolas Brusson.

blablacar-founders
Image Source: indexventures.com

However, the journey to build this platform did not start smoothly. The problem that arose was in the implementation of the idea. Precisely, the implementation of a business model was the issue that the co-founders were facing.

In 2006, when the service was launched, it was the ‘Premium Model’ of the platform, that was released first. This model was free to use, but users could pay a monthly or annual fee to get their service higher on the search engine. But the model was discarded, as soon as the company realized that money won’t benefit in the long run and also, that the model could be unfair to many of the users.

Then, BlaBlaCar jumped to ‘Monthly Fee’ plan, but it too was eliminated. Then, they picked up an advertising model, but keeping users’ privacy at stake was unacceptable.

Then the company induced ‘Phone Bridge Model’ into their system. In this model, users could choose to hide their contact numbers while remaining reachable via a pay telephone bridge. But the catch here was that if the company wanted to go global, then the telephone operators all over the world were different. So, this effort also went in vain.

Once during this phase, Fredric asked his M.B.A. professor at INSEAD that whether it’s possible to run a business, without a business model, to which, he replied, “You need a business model or you’ll die!” Those words gave Fredric so much motivation that he ended up on the idea to take risks and learn. As a result, it took 5 years for the company to restructure itself.

Soon, the company saw that there were other companies, like Carrefour, IKEA, that wanted to give services of BlaBlaCar to their employees. After that, there was no stopping, as 200 more companies bought the BlaBlaCar service for their employees. But in 2012, this business model was again put to an end, as each company’s each employee had different requirements which made it difficult to give a collective solution.

But with today’s business model that BlaBlaCar has put into effect has helped them reduce their cancellation from 35% to around 2.5%.

The company has a motto of FAIL. LEARN. SUCCEED. As a result of its past experiences, the company is open to failures and openly says about them. But they ensure that once a mistake is committed, it won’t be repeated. BlaBlaCar has grown all over Europe, and Asia too. For now, the company serves in more than 22 countries, including India, the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany etc. BlaBlaCar, currently, is also in talks with France’s National Railway company SNCF for its bus division, so that the platform can provide bus services, too.

The startup that started as a minor one has gained more than $1.5 as funding. The company itself generates revenue of around $91 million. It’s worth, too, is $1.5 billion, which makes it the mater on its own.

The success story shows that personal needs can also be turned into a million-euro idea. It gives us the glimpse that how much innovative ideas our surroundings hold for us. Who knew that the startup which was such a unicorn sized, would grow up to such an extent that it will serve more than 22 countries. The success story of BlaBlaCar is certainly a one filled with eternal inspiration.

Todd McKinnon : The Founder of Okta, a Company that Specializes in Enterprise Security

start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Taking risks, is what most of the people are afraid of, especially, when they are running in their late 30s. At the time when people are earning enough money by working under someone else, it was Todd McKinnon, who wanted to pursue his childhood dream of becoming an entrepreneur. Even he was heading a team of more than a hundred employees in his last company and was earning an adequate amount of money to survive in a place like Silicon Valley, he decided to leave the job and just work for his dream. Having years of experience and a great vision, today, he is the founder of a billion dollars company, Okta.

Early Life

McKinnon was born in Southern California and grew up in its bay area. His father was a VP of HR, who worked for various different companies, and his mother was a homemaker.

He completed his under graduation from Brigham Young University, and later, went to the California Polytechnic State University, where he completed a degree in computer science.

Career

McKinnon finds himself lucky, to be born and brought up in the capital of technology. Being a native of Silicon Valley, since his childhood, he was convinced that he would work for an IT company in Silicon Valley.

ToddMcKinnon
Image Source: sbnonline.com

During his graduation, he got recruited by PeopleSoft, in the campus placement, in 1995. At the time, he was building a database application for the recreation department on campus. Co-incidently, the recruiter from PeopleSoft was also working on a similar project and liked Mckinnon’s work and recruited him.

McKinnon was hired as an engineer in the company and received multiple promotions in the span of eight years.

After working for eight long years in PeopleSoft, in 2003, McKinnon left the job and started working at SalesForce. In 2009, he left SalesForce to start his own company, i.e. Okta.

Founding Okta

Besides the dream of working in a Silicon Valley company, McKinnon was also fascinated with the idea of starting his own business. The reason he gives for not starting a business earlier is that he always had good jobs in hand, and those were helpful in gaining good business experience.

In SalesForce, he was managing over hundreds of employees, and he had got a good reputation. He decided that it was the right time to start a business, as he was financially and mentally capable of doing that at the time.

At the same time, people got introduced to the cloud, and not many were sure how long it is going to last. But McKinnon saw an opportunity in the same. He started off developing with a macro product, and when he went out to talk and sell the product to people, he realized there was much more to the cloud, and finally, started working on identity management on the cloud.

McKinnon pitched the idea in over 75 meetings in a span of four to five months. He also asked a former SalesForce colleague, Freddy Kerrest, to join him for the startup, and finally, after seven months of hard, work was able to raise a million dollars seed funding to start the business and founded Okta in 2009. Okta provides cloud software that helps companies manage their employees’ passwords, by providing a “single sign-on” experience.

The company earned its first paying client, in December 2009. In 2015, the company was valued at $1.2 billion and raised $75 million in venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital.

In 2017, the company went public, and in its IPO it raised $187 million. Okta has its offices in Bellevue, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Sydney, San Jose and Washington D.C., and its headquarter is located in San Fransisco. In January 2019, the company reported a number of 100 million registered users on Okta and the company valued at over $7 billion.

Personal Life

McKinnon is married and has two children. He lives with his family in San Francisco. He is a fitness freak, and in 2017, he was named as the 14th fittest man on earth in the age group of 45-to-49, in the annual CrossFit Games, held in Madison, Wisconsin. Currently, he serves as the CEO of Okta.

Daniel Borel : Swiss Entrepreneur & Co-founder of Logitech

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

In any business, you must keep an eye on the upcoming opportunities and grab it as soon as it shows up. In business, the success comes to those, who keep the courage of doing the same thing in a different way. One of such business personality from Switzerland is Daniel Borel, who always knew that he wanted to do something big and that big thing resulted in a multimillion tech company, i.e. Logitech.

It was Borel’s capability to see in the future such that he was sure that starting a business of mice manufacturing, that was just arrived in the market and could be a risky one, surely will lead him to success. Today, Logitech is not only world’s largest mice manufacturing company, but it also supplies other products including remote controls, security cameras, keyboards, webcams, speakers, B2B video conferencing equipment, computer accessories, gaming products, etc. at a global level.

Early Life

Born, on 14 February 1950, Daniel Borel is a native of Switzerland. In 1973, he completed his graduation in Physics from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. Even being a physicist, he wanted to do something else, so he switched to computing and in 1977, did his masters in computer science from Stanford University.

Early Career & Founding Logitech

After his post-graduation, Borel moved to the Silicon Valley. It was a huge culture shock for him, as people were working on innovative ideas and the technology was changing at a rapid rate. This inspired him a lot, and he along with, Pierluigi Zappacosta, one of his friends from Stanford University, started working on word processing.

Borel Logitech
Image Source: itreseller.ch

The two were doing quite well in both software and hardware, and at the same time, they started Logitech. They started the company in a farm of Borel’s father-in-law in Apples, Vaud, Switzerland in 1981, along with a former Olivetti engineer, Giacomo Marini.

At the time, around the early 80s, the computer mouse had just arrived in the market along with the personal computer. Borel found an opportunity in the same, and as he was already in contact with big companies like Apple and HP, he decided to manufacture mice for those companies.

Borel, as already had made plans on manufacturing computer mice and its software interface, visited Taiwan and China, to look for companies that could help him manufacture them. At the time, Microsoft also had started using the mouse for its word processor.

Logitech was successful in developing mice for the personal computers, along with a software interface, and approached Microsoft in order to sell those mice to it. Microsoft also showed an interest, but the deal never happened. At last, Borel had to adopt another marketing technique. He published coupons along with an ad in the Byte magazine, where he offered a price as low as $100 for the Logitech mouse when others were selling the same at $170.

The marketing technique went quite well, and Logitech was showered with orders. Since then, the company is growing at a rapid rate and has developed many other products under its name.

In the year 2008, Logitech reported the manufacturing of over one billion mice since 1985. In the same year, the company acquired Ultimate Ears, a supplier of Bluetooth speakers and custom in-ear monitors for professional musicians. In 2011, it also acquired the mobile visual communications provider, Mirial and in 2017, it acquired Astro Gaming.

As of 2018, the reported revenue for the year was US$2.57 billion, and a number of its worldwide employees have grown to 7000 people since its inception. The the two of its headquarters are established in Lausanne, Switzerland and Newark, California, USA.

Personal Life

Borel worked as the chairman of the company between 1982 to 2008, and as the CEO of the company from 1982 to 1988 and 1992 to 1998. Currently, he serves on the board of directors of Logitech and Nestlé. He has also founded Defitech, a foundation to make computer technology for handicapped people, where he also serves on the board of the company.