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Mark Jonathan Pincus – The Pinnacle of Social Gaming and Entrepreneurship

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Online games are interesting as you do not have to download them or build a separate setup for it. A few clicks on the computer, and you are ready to play. Not only, the availability of the internet makes them better, but also, playing with friends increases the fun. Zynga, one of the best social video gaming services, provides the best in-game experience when it comes to social gaming. The mind behind Zynga, Mark Pincus Jonathan, is a spirit of pure passion for entrepreneurship, and his story shows that innovation can make anything happen.

Mark was born on February 13, 1966, in Chicago, Illinois. He studied from Francis W. Parker School, till his 12th grade. He has two Ivy League degrees. In 1984, he graduated from Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he pursued a B.S. in economics. After graduating, he worked in venture capital and financial services, for 6 years. He then joined the New Media Group at Lazard Freres & Co. Later, Mark moved to Hong Kong to serve as the Vice President of Asian Capital partners, but returned to the USA, only after two years, to complete an MBA degree from the Harvard Business School. Alongside, he continued to work in the industry with Tele-Communications (AT&T Cable) and Columbia Capital.

mark pincus
Image Source: usatoday.com

He took an overview of the startups at Columbia Capital, where he invested in New media and software startups. In 1995, he started his entrepreneurship career with ‘Freeloader’. The company received investments from Fred Wilson and Softbank. The startup was a web-based push technology. Within seven months of its launch, Individual Inc. acquired the company for $38 million.

After Freeloader, in 1997, Mark started another startup named ‘Support.com’. The product of the company was a help desk automation software. He ensured that his startup left no stone unturned and made the company as the leading provider of its services. The public valuation of the company was $1.5 billion. Later, the startup was renamed as SupportSoft Inc.

In 2003, Mark and Reid Hoffman purchased Six degrees patent for $700,000 from the extinct Sixdegrees.com. The patent has never been used to date. Both the purchasers state that the purpose of the purchase was to protect the innovation in social networking.

Tribe.net was his next milestone. His third startup was funded by The Washington Post, Knight Ridder Digital, Mayfield Fund and Guy Spier. The startup was about social networking. Cisco Systems, in 2007, acquired the company to develop a more comprehensive social networking platform for its digital media services group.

Alongside starting his own startups, he also invested in other ones out in the market. He made early investments in Facebook and Twitter. Napster, Snapchat, Friendster, Xiaomi, JD.com, Brightmail, Buddy Media. He invested in several other ventures like HVMN and Wealthfront.

Zynga Inc., his fourth company, was started in July 2007. Zynga is named after Pincus’ late dog, Zinga, an American Bulldog. The company’s red and white logo is a rendering of the bulldog. Zynga provides the best social gaming experience and has developed games for Facebook, Myspace and Bebo. Zynga states its mission as ‘connecting the world through games.’ The first game was Texas Hold’Em Poker (now Zynga Poker). In April 2009, Zynga became the developer with most active users on Facebook (reportedly 40 million). In the same year, Zynga released ‘Farmville’ which turned out to be an absolute blockbuster. It was Facebook’s first game to surpass 10 million active users per day. In December 2010, CityVille surpassed Farmville, as the company’s most popular game, with over 16 million active users per day. At its public offering, the company was valued at $1 Billion. Zynga, since then, has released games like Farmville 2, Words with Friends, CSR Racing 2, Mafia Wars, etc., which are played all under ‘Zynga with Friends’ Network.

Pincus served as the company CEO from 2007 to 2013. He made headlines when he sold around 16.5 Million shares of Zynga. He remained the Chairman of the Board of Directors and the Chief Product Officer of the company. He stepped down as the CPO in April 2014. In April 2015, the company announced Mark as the CEO of the company following his step down on March 7, 2016. He ceded his voting rights from 70% to 10% in order to vote of confidence in Zynga’s current leadership.

He has been involved in community service, too. He started Zynga.org committed to transforming the world through virtual social goods. The service raised more than $20 million and has donated it to several international non-profit.

Mark Jonathan Pincus, the founder of Zynga, has provided one of the best games the world ever witnessed. He made social gaming possible through ‘Zynga with Friends’ campaign. He has a real-time net worth of $1.2 Billion. He was named ‘Founder of the Year’ in 2009 and in the following year, by the Crunchies Technology Awards. He is a pinnacle of online gaming and entrepreneurship promoting innovation all the way.

Rick Alden : The Visionary Genius & the Founder of Skullcandy

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A disruptive thinker and wildly unpredictable, the two terms can be associated with Rick Alden, the founder of Skullcandy, the American headphones manufacturing company. Alden is also known as a mad genius, who always believed in refinement and innovation. He wanted to create a product that was not owned by the user, but it could own the user.

Alden was born on 4 July 1964 in Baltimore, Maryland. Rick loved snowboarding and wanted to pursue a career in the same. He attended the University of Colorado Boulder, and while in college, he founded his first company National Snowboard Inc (NSI), along with co-founder Jim Gardner, in 1986. The company was an event management firm that hosted the consumer and pro-snowboarding events nationwide.

rick alden
Image Source: kcpw.org

Later, he moved the headquarter of NSI to Denver and migrated to the University of Colorado Denver, where he pursued a Bachelor’s degree in political science.

The next business venture that Rick founded was Device Manufacturing, which he founded along with the veteran snowboarder Brett Conrad and produced the step-in snowboard boot and binding system.

In the late 90s, the snowboarding was becoming more popular, and Rick himself was an active snowboarder. Rick liked to listen to music at high bass while snowboarding and knew that others also loved to do the same. But the chunky headphones never provided him with the experience he always expected for. This led Rick to think about a new business idea, i.e. a company that would produce headphones, especially for snowboarders and skateboarders.

In 2003, Rick founded Skullcandy and started manufacturing headphones for snowboarders. Skullcandy launched its first product, the Skullcandy Portable LINK Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas in 2003.

After the launch, he went out to market all the Skullcandy products directly to the snowboarding and skateboarding shops. In the beginning, pitching to those shop owners was not that easy, but slowly they got convinced and started selling the headphones at their shops. In fact, Rick offered those owners to buy back the headphones himself, if they did not find any customer for them. But the innovative product never brought such a situation and received much appreciation from its consumers.

In the following years, Rick pitched the idea of putting the speakers into the helmets to Giro, one of the most popular snowboards and ski helmets producers. The company liked the idea. Rick also convinced Giro to print the tag line “Powered by Skullcandy” on the packaging.

In 2007, Rick approached Best Buy, Target, and Circuit City to get picked for the Q4. All the three companies were impressed by him and placed immediate orders with Skullcandy. Rick never expected to get picked by all the three and did not have enough expertise to complete the orders within time. But then, he decided to visit China to figure out better ways to increase the company’s tooling cavities, and the plan worked. Rick completed the orders within the given time, and it was the biggest turning point for Skullcandy.

In 2008, the company rolled out all its products in all the retail stores. Bored of old chunky headphones, Rick manufactured more colourful and designer headphones and earbuds for Skullcandy consumers.

In the December edition of Forbes magazine, the Skullcandy earbuds were introduced as “the world’s coolest ear bud”. In 2011, the company acquired another headphones manufacturing company, Astro Studios. In the same year, the company filed for its first IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In 2016, Skullcandy was acquired by Mill Road Capital for $196.9 million at $6.35 per share.

Rick Alden has been issued the patents for inventing technology to integrates mobile phones and music players, known as LINK, and designing the Orvis Batternkill Large Arbor Fly Fishing Reel.

The Inc Magazine ranked Alden at number 31 in the Inc 5000 Award for Skullcandy’s three-year (2004–2007) growth. He was also named “Entrepreneur’s Entrepreneur of the Year” in 2009.

Ankit Singh : The Success Story of the Founder of Techugo

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The Internet has helped many people to bring out the entrepreneur in them and establish their own startups successfully. The idea of a startup is interesting, but the obstacles that one has to face in this journey always get registered to a separate big book of failure and rejections. One such startup is Techugo, a four years old startup, which has established its name as one of the leading software development companies, despite going through big challenges and hurdles.

Ankit Singh, the founder of Techugo, was born in Varanasi, India, in a working-class joint family. He was born to a lawyer father and was pursuing electrical engineering from Uttar Pradesh Technical University (UPTU). Studying at the university, he was determined that after completing his education he will join an MNC. His aim was clear, but when the placements came, he found out that the students with a good personality and the ones who could present themselves well were getting the jobs, and even the toppers of the class were rejected at the placements.

Ankit Singh

It was a reality check for him, and Singh realized that this has been happening to many talented candidates for years. Even being much skilled, the ones lacking at personality were not able to get the opportunities. The incident was enough for him to rethink about working with an MNC. At the same time, Singh started thinking about ways to help such candidates with their interviews. He did not know about what but definitely wanted to do something for them.

Being good at academics as well as capable of representing himself in front of others, he was able to go through the interviews and get a job in a famous MNC at the placements. Even have got a good job, he was not excited about the opportunity he had received. Even before a week from the date of the joining, he became confused about joining the job or dropping the offer. But like any other college graduate, accepting the offer was more reasonable at the moment, and he became prepared for starting his career as an employee at the MNC.

“Just a day before my joining, I called my mother, and she sensed the agitation and discomfort in my Voice and without blinking the eye, she simply said, ‘Don’t you think somebody more deserving than you need this job? You are born to make it different in your family, go ahead, we are with you.’ ” said Singh in an interview.

This was the Eureka moment for Ankit, and he decided to drop the job and start his own company, where the candidates will be chosen on the basis of their talent.

A startup needs a good team, and before that a good investment. Being a fresher, and the owner of the idea of a startup, he only seemed to be an immature young graduate to the investors and was rejected at the very first business pitch. One after another, he was rejected by eleven investors. People learn from mistakes, and Ankit also was among those people. The 12th pitch he made became more polished than the previous ones, and within fifteen minutes of his presentation, the US-based investor Sumer offered him the initial investment.

Finally, on June 13th 2015, Ankit started his company from a shared office space, where at first he played the role the owner, HR and the office boy of the company. Sumer became the co-founder of the company and Ankit started hiring other people too. But again it was also not easy for a startup, as no experienced people wanted to join a freshly started company.

After becoming a team of three, Ankit hired one of his friends in college as the tester. Within the next fifteen days, the company had a CEO, CTO, a professional HR and started adding up more people in the Techugo family. Today the company has raised to 143 employees including Ankit, all under the age of 30.

With the inception of the company, Ankit has been hiring employees who are technically skilled, even if they are not good at communications. The company hires such candidates and help them to grow confidence and improve their communication skills with the help of personal training.

The company currently works on building mobile applications for its clients with businesses of every scale. The most successful project that the company carried out was Fanzir app which is powered by Euroleague. In the first five days of launch, the app received the 5,000+ installations, and in mere 15 days, it made $1M.

Techugo has provided its services for the Fortune 500 Company Airtel, Global 2000 Company like Godfrey Phillips, the largest political party in India BJP, and the budding and successful startups like Prozata, Fanzir and many more.

The company, currently, along with its India office has established its branch offices in the US and Dubai. Soon the company will also be opening its off-shore offices in Australia and Canada.

SoundCloud : The Success Story of YouTube of Music

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Today, there are several audio streaming services, including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Amazon Unlimited, etc., available online, but there was a time when there was no such platform, where people could access audio music online. But then, in 2007, two students from Stockholm School of Economics, Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, influenced with the success of YouTube and Flickr, realized the need for a music sharing website, where artists could connect, and founded SoundCloud.

The Founders

Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, both belong to the Swedish descent and were always interested in music. Since his childhood, Ljung was interested in both music and technology and had decided to become a sound engineer in future. By the time, he had become quite skilled in the music creation and produced an album and was able to secure a job at a post-production studio, after completing his school education. But again, he was more concerned about his studies, so he joined the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

ljung and wahlforss
Image Source: sign-in-box.com

On the other hand, Wahlfros was also another alumni at the same institution pursuing a degree in MA. The two met at the college UNIX lab and found many things in common with each other, especially the passion for music. The two started spending more time together and did many university projects together.

Founding SoundCloud

At the time, Flickr was doing exceptionally well, and YouTube was emerging as a powerful video hosting platform. As the two were into music creation themselves, they thought of a new startup, through which they could make other music artists to share their music with other people and collaborate with different global artists, online.

After digging deep and working hard for a long time, the two launched SoundCloud, in 2007, keeping music and sound as its core objective. They founded SoundCloud in Stockholm, Sweden, but eventually established the headquarter of the company in Berlin in the same year.

In 2008, they launched the website for SoundCloud, where artists could share their creation and look for collaborations. But soon, the popularity of SoundCloud turned the platform into a music distribution platform.

The concept was unique, so it became popular in no time. In fact, in just two years, SoundCloud received worth €2.5 million investment from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures, in the Series A funding. In 2010, the company reported one million registered users for the service. In 2011, in the Series B funding, SoundCloud raised a worth of US$10 million. In the same year, the company got raised to 10 million registered users, and in the next year, the number went to increase up to 15 million users.

Although since 2014, the company has been incapable of handling the huge empire it has built in a few years, SoundCloud is still working hard to maintain its spot in the music distribution industry. Even there has been the rise of several other new music platforms, it is SoundCloud that took the first step in providing the new artists to share their work on an online platform, and eventually, gave birth to new music distribution system.

SoundCloud has been the biggest medium for many artists to showcase their talent, and artists like Iza Lach from Poland and Lorde from New Zealand got their first break, through SoundCloud, and today are one of the most in-demand singers.

Alex Ljung served as the CEO of SoundCloud for almost a decade and stepped down from his position in 2017. Wahlforss holds the position of CPO in the company. He has also produced a few tracks that are available on SoundCloud itself.

Colin Huang : From Son of a Factory Worker to the CEO of a Billion Dollar Company ‘Pinduoduo’

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There are rare chances that the destiny of a person meets his talent and help him achieve the things that at a point might be unimaginable. But there are real examples in the past that has proved that in the success of a person his hard work and talent work even more efficiently if his destiny is working with him too. The son of worker Parents, Colin Huang, would have never thought that his brilliance, and his destiny, will coincide and he will have his own rag to riches story. The 13th richest person in China, in just three years. The life story of Huang surely is a great example and inspiration for many.

Colin Huang was born in 1980, in Hangzhou, to the worker-class parents. While in school, he participated and won a medal in a Mathematics Olympiad, after demonstrating an aptitude in Mathematics. This was the point when his destiny started pushing him towards a good life. The prize of the Olympiad was a scholarship to a reputable school in Zhejiang province.

Colin Huang
Image Source: colinhuang.com

In the school, he got to know many elite students and was even introduced to the daughter of the Mayor of the school, as she too studied in his class. This helped him a lot to build up confidence in him and hence became more comfortable in interacting with the most brilliant students of the school.

As soon he completed his school, another opportunity came into his lap, and he was chosen to study at the prestigious Zhejiang University, where he pursued a degree in computer science. In his first year, he was also selected to be a part of the Melton Foundation.

During his college, he started an internship at Microsoft Beijing, where he earned the stipend worth 6,000 yuan. According to an interview, Huang accepted that the stipend he received for the internship was already greater than the salary of his parents altogether, at that time.

After completing his graduation, he went to the University of Wisconsin to pursue a master’s degree. At the university, he was doing exceptionally well, and his professor impressed by his brilliance provided him letters for the recommendation for a few of the biggest tech giants of that time.

After completing his education in 2004, he received the offer letters from three big companies, i.e. Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. Turning down all the three offers, he decided to work with Google, the company which had just filed its IPO in the same year.

Huang joined Google as an engineer. After working for three years with the company, in 2007, he resigned from his post, as he had got tired of flying back and forth, from the US to China, to resolve even the tiniest of matters. By the time, he had earned a lot of good money and was able to take the decision of quitting his job.

He flew back to China and started his first venture, an eCommerce website named Ouku. The website became popular soon, and after three years, in 2010, Huang sold the website. After Ouku, he founded Leqi, another website, and then, Xunmeng, a gaming studio.

All the three ventures he started, paid him well to lead to him to found another venture, Pinduoduo, which is also the most successful venture of the serial entrepreneur, Huang.

Pinduoduo is an eCommerce platform that provides its users with offers on group purchases. The company was founded in September 2015. Within a year, Huang was able to raise investments from the leading companies of China, i.e., Tencent, Gaochun and Xintianyu. The three companies alone invested a worth of US$110 million in company’s B round funding.

In 2018, the company reported the number of users, more than 200 million. On July 26, 2018, the company went public on NASDAQ, and with a US$1.6 billion IPO, it became the largest IPO of 2018. Pinduoduo is one of the youngest companies which is giving a tough competition to the more than a decade old eCommerce giants like Alibaba and JD.com. In fact, it is the third-largest e-commerce company in China by sales numbers, after the mentioned companies.

According to Huan, he had never thought of changing the world, but if he is contributing to that, there is nothing bad in that.

Pinduoduo, gets most of its traffic from the lower-tier cities, such that people belonging to the lower-class are also able to buy things on the website. The success of the company has even made Huang the 13th richest person in China. Currently, he is working as the CEO of the company, and his net worth is estimated to be $15.6 billion.

Duan Yongping : The Secretive Chinese Entrepreneur & the Founder of BBK Electronics

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The competition is not always with others, there are many who wants to compete with their own self, to be their own improved version. The famous Chinese inventor and entrepreneur, Duan Yongping, has similar thoughts on self-improvement. According to him, he does not believe in surpassing anyone, but he focuses on self-improvement. He is the real example of simplicity and brilliance, all together. The chairman and the founder of BBK Electronics Corporation, Yongping, is an inspiring personality, and the source of motivation for many.

Early Life & Career

Duan Yongping was born on 10 March 1961, in Nanchang, Jiangxi, China. He received a graduate degree in wireless electronics engineering from Zhejiang University, in 1978.

duan yongping
Image Source: alchetron.com

As soon he graduated from college, he started his career as a teacher and joined the adult education centre of the Beijing Radio Tube Factory. But soon, he left the job and entered the Renmin University to pursue econometrics, and later, completed an EMBA from CEIBS.

After completing his education, he started working at the state-run vacuum tube plant.

Career as Entrepreneur

During the time Yongping was working at the plant, China was moving towards capitalism swiftly, leading to the formation of many private industries. Influenced by the same, in 1989, Yonping left his job and moved to Guangdong province to try his hands in the business.

In the same year, he joined a newly founded electronic plant in Zhongshan. Soon he became the CEO of the company and was the biggest influence in the success of the company. At the beginning of the company, it was under 2 million RMB debts, but in the leadership of Yongping, the company became one of the leading companies of that time, i.e. Subor Electronics Industry Corporation.

Subor developed the learning computers and was one of the biggest suppliers of the same in China. It also entered into the video-game facilities production market and built its first gaming console named “Subor” embedded with dual-cartridge slots. The console was an instant hit, and even, gave a tough competition to its rival Nintendo.

Yongping left the company on 28 August 1995, when the company was at the peak of success, to found his own venture named BBK. He founded BBK in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, and started with the production of DVD and MP3 players. BBK also started its subsidiary company, Bubugao Communication Equipment Co., that produced the feature-phones and became the biggest manufacturer of the same in the year 2000.

By the end of the same year, there was a fall in the sales, and Yongping was looking for peaceful ways to shut down the company, such that the employees stay unhurt. But then his protege Tony Chen advised him to start a new company.

In 2001, along with Chen Mingyong, Yongping founded Oppo to manufacture and sell music players. The company became the subsidiary of BBK.

At the same time, BBK also started the production of other electronic devices such as television sets, MP3 players, digital cameras, etc.

In 2007, with the launch of the first iPhone, like other cell phone producers, BBK was also inspired to start building those new and revamped smartphones. The famous smartphone manufacturing company Vivo is also the sister company of Oppo and another subsidiary of BBK. In 2009, both Oppo and Vivo started their operation in smartphone production and became the biggest pillars in the success of BBK and Yongping. Currently, both the brands are providing their service in over 100 countries and are among the best sellers.

In 2017, BBK was the second largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, ahead of Apple and Huawei, and sold 56.7 million smartphones in the first quarter of the year.

Currently, BBK is working on improving its smartphone lineup and involved in the R&D for the next-generation 5G network for smartphones. The headquarter of the company is located at Chang’an Dongguan.

Personal Life

Yongping is also active in the philanthropy works and donated US dollar 40 million to Zhejiang University in the year 2006. At the age of 40, he moved to California to focus more on investment and philanthropy works. He was the second largest individual shareholder of NetEase in the years 2002 to 2004.

Yongping is a private person and likes to keep away from the limelight. Even though, his life story is one of the most inspiring ones for not only the people of China but also the world.