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

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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.

Min-Liang Tan : The Lawyer, Turned Billionaire Gaming Tycoon

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Having your name ranked with leaders like Elon Musk and Jack Ma, in the Top 10 Most Influential Leaders in Tech, is a real achievement, and when you are a non-tech person, then it is huge. It’s the Singaporean entrepreneur, Min-Liang Tan, who got his name ranked ahead of these two tech savvies. Tan studied law and eventually, ended up starting up a tech company, i.e. Razer and became one of the most influential people in the Tech world. This billionaire from Singapore is in love with video games and shares an inspirational story with the world.

Early Life

Tan was born on 5 November 1977, in Singapore. His father, Tan Kim Lee, worked as a real estate consultant and his mother, Low Ken Yin, is a homemaker. He has three siblings, one of whom is the famous clinician-scientist Min-Han Tan. One of the other two is also a doctor, and one is a renowned lawyer.

He completed his primary education from Raffles Institution, and then, attended the Hwa Chong Junior College, to pursue high school education. Later, he went to join National University of Singapore Faculty of Law and received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Law. He got ranked 20 in his master’s degree.

Early Career & Founding Razer

As soon as he completed his education, Tan started working as an advocate and solicitor for the Supreme Court of Singapore. But the future had held some other plans for him.

Tan, since his childhood, loved playing video games, as he was not much into outdoor games. His father had brought an Apple II computer, for him and his brother, upon which he played lots of games.

Image Source: alchetron.com

The idea of starting a video gaming peripheral manufacturing company came up to Tan, when he met the future co-founder of Razer, Robert Krakoff, through a social media website, in 1999. The two coincided on their interest for video games and started working together to design the world’s first gaming mouse – the “Razer Boomslang,” when Tan was still in college. Even, after graduating in 2002, along with his job as an advocate, he devoted most of the time on working for Razer.

Finally, in 2005, the two acquired the rights to the Razer brand and Founded the company Razer. The two headquarters of Razer are located at San Francisco and Singapore. Tan holds the post of the CEO of the company.

The company produces the peripherals for gamers, and the software for those peripherals, but does not publish games. The motto of the company is “For Gamers. By Gamers”, as both of the co-founders are avid video game lovers.

As one of the first products of Razer, the Razer Boomslang was more responsive, accurate, and faster than what tech companies were producing at that time, it attracted the attention of many venture capitalists. The company started obtaining funding from many investors, and it started manufacturing other gaming hardware, including headsets, a handheld gaming device, the Razer Edge gaming tablet computer and Razer Blade laptops, etc.

In 2015, Razer acquired software division of video-game company Ouya. It also acquired THX in 2016 and Nextbit in 2017.

In 2017, the company went public through an IPO in Hong Kong and was the 2nd most successful IPO of 2017 in Hong Kong stock exchange. In November 2017, the company launched its first Smartphone named Razer Phone.

Personal Life

Tan, currently, lives in Singapore in his family house with his parents. However, he keeps travelling back and forth from Singapore to San Francisco. Tan despite being an owner of a gaming hardware manufacturing company lives a life of a celebrity as many of Singapore people consider him as their idol. People get tattoos of the company logo, and one of them even tattooed Tan’s face on his arm.

In 2015, Tan was listed among the “Top 10 Most Influential Leaders in Tech” by Juniper Research. He was also named in the list of “The 25 Most Creative People in Tech” by Business Insider and was ranked one of the top 40 most powerful people in gaming by Kotaku. TechinAsia ranked him No 1 of the 30 top South East Asia tech founders and was also named the Asian of the Year in 2016 by the Straits Times.

In 2016, he was among the Forbes Singapore Rich List with a net worth of $600 million and was the youngest Singaporean self-made billionaire.

Tan is also in philanthropy and in 2014, he donated a US$10,000 to raise funds for ALS and a £10,000 to fight Motor Neuron Disease, in 2015.

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

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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.

Pankhuri Shrivastava : The Founder of GrabHouse, the First Indian Broker Free House Hunting Platform

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Moving from one city to another or shifting your whole setup from one place to the other, within the city, is as painful as finding the perfect rental apartment in the required budget. In the cities, this painful work starts from going to different brokers offering various awful deals, and in the end, you have to pay a huge amount on brokerage too. Sometimes the place is good but is far from your workplace. Sometimes it has all the facilities but there is a shortage of water. Though many of the online platforms have sorted out this problem through many good deals, still, these platforms are not completely broker-free. Then there comes GrabHouse, which have been built to provide people with the broker-free services, such that to help them find the perfect apartment, as the founder of GrabHouse, Pankhuri Shrivastava, was also a victim of the same.

Early Life

Pankhuri was born and brought in Jhansi. She went to Rajiv Gandhi Technical University, Bhopal, to receive a B.Tech degree. After graduation, this young entrepreneur had two choices, completing higher education, or attending the two years fellowship program with Teach India. Pankhuri went with the fellowship program and started teaching in a municipal school in Mumbai.

Founding GrabHouse

The time Pankhuri was working with Teach India, she moved to Mumbai and her struggle to find the suitable shelter began. In three years of her living in Mumbai, she had moved from over five flats and had gone through bad brokers experiences.

Pankhri Shrivastva with Prateek Shukla
Image Source: officechai.com

This was the time when Pankhuri realised that there should be a better way to find a suitable home at a suitable price. As she had already paid hefty brokerage amount for the five flats, she had lived in before. She had got fed up of this conventional method of house hunting.

In the end, she came to the conclusion that someone has to create a better platform to avoid those hurdles during the home search, and that someone could be her. So, without waiting anymore, Pankhuri approached another fellow from Teach India fellowship Prateek Shukla, who is an IIT Kanpur pass out and the other co-founder of GrabHouse.

The two started working on the concept and launched GrabHouse, India’s first brokerage free house hunting portal, in 2013. But launching the startup was just not enough, the startup also needed the funding to move further. So the two co-founders participated in a boot camp, organised by India Quotient and the potential of their idea made the company reach to the top 10 companies, that would get the funding.

Finally, the company received its initial funding from India Quotient, and soon other investors were also approaching them. The company managed to raise $12million in Series A funding from Kalahari and Sequoia capital with the help of India Quotient, in 2015. As soon Pankhuri and Prateek started the development and coding process, they decided to move the company to Koramangala, Bangluru, where all other startup companies had established their headquarters.

Reaching out to house owners and heading up as a rival against the conventional broker-based house hunt, was the most challenging task. But yet again Pankhuri found the most convenient way. She used the various Facebook flat finding groups to reach out to people and expand the scope of Grab House.

In the span of two years the company grew to 11 cities and got enlisted among the top five house hunting web portals.

In November 2016, Online classifieds company Quikr acquired Grabhouse in an all-stock deal. Allegedly, Quikr paid a sum of $10 million for the start-up.

Personal Life

Pankhuri is an avid reader and also love writing blogs. Her fellowship with Teach India also turned her into a philanthropist.

MobiGarage : The Online Garage to Get Your Smartphone Repaired

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The emergence of mobile, or we shall say, the Smartphones has added another luxury expense to our lives. Smartphones are no more just calling equipment, but it has become that one thing we can’t think of living without. The constant enhancement in the features of those smartphones is leading to an increase in its demand, and we are compelled to buy new phones to get those new features. Eventually, spending more money on the same thing.

But spending so much on Smartphones also make us sceptical about what if the phone or its software breaks down. How much will it cost to repair the phone, or will it recover the injuries? And, we often see, the same thing happening after the warranty period is over. In such cases, people often go buying new phones rather having repaired their broken phones, as it is difficult to find trusted repair person, and it is quite inconvenient as well as expensive, to go to the authorised service centres, where people barely understand the real problem and instead make you take rounds of the centre multiple times.

MobiGarage
Image Source: MobiGarage

This is where the mind of the founder of MobiGarage, Vaibhav Kapoor, hit the idea of launching a website (i.e. mobigarage.com) that would provide people with online and offline assistance, for reliable mobile repair and spare-part services at their doorsteps.

The Founders

Vaibhav Kapoor, the Director and CEO of MobiGarage, is an engineer having experience in working with Fortune 500 companies, including Accenture Strategy and ZS Associates, in India and abroad. At MobiGarage, he is responsible for creating the roadmap, business and go-to-market strategy and leads MobiGarage – B2C online mobile repair and spare unit of the company.

Kapoor started the company with other three co-founders Pulkit Kapoor (Director, Product and Services), Abhinav Mahajan (Director, Operations) and Ujjwal Sehgal (Director, Procurement/Supply Chain).

Like Vaibhav Kapoor, all three of them are engineering graduates. Before MobiGarage, Pulkit Kapoor worked as a manager at Reliance Industries Limited.

From the beginning of his career, Abhinav Mahajan had that thing about entrepreneurship, and after working with ZS Associates for a few years, he settled up his first start-up Helfis Technologies for Preventive Healthcare.

Founding MobiGarage

The four co-founders founded MobiGarage in 2017. The idea behind starting such a business was to help people with their mobile repair needs, at affordable prices and with most of the comfort. The company headquarter is situated in Delhi, India, and currently, it offers its services to 15,000 zip codes across India.

MobiGarage has seen a prominent increase in the revenues and the number of clients since its commencement. Currently, the company is fulfilling over 3000 orders in a month and has seen a 100x boost in its users, since its inception, including a 500% increase in its enterprise clients, from the last year. MobiGarage has projected its revenue to get 5 folds to 2.5Cr, in this fiscal year and a 400% growth compared to the last fiscal year.

Just in one year, the company has made its own place in the Smartphone repair industry, with a 100% growth rate for the Q3-2018, as compared to Q2-2018. For the past more than a year, it has been catering to most of the top repair and refurb companies as well as to more than 150+ brands.

MobiGarage is one of the fastest growing companies among its contemporaries and based on a unique concept, the company has got the reasons to be on the top.

Peter Beck : The Rocket Man from New Zealand

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There has always been a debate between people about the need of education to get successful in life. Some are who really stress over completing the education to achieve the goals, and some are who can’t wait to get to their dreams for so long so that they just skip the higher education. But in the success story of this Kiwi startup entrepreneur, Peter Beck, the case was a bit different.

Beck, who was a sharp student, had to quit education after high school, as there was no such curricular course that could lead him to his targets. This engineer from New Zealand is just not one of the best visionary rocket scientists but also a skilled businessman, who knows how to sell his idea to the right people.

Early Life

Beck was born and brought up in Invercargill, New Zealand, to a gemologist father and a teacher mother. As a teen, he became interested in machines and rockets, as his family was also in love with machines. While growing up, he decided that he wants to create rockets and satellite.

peter beck
Image Source: spaceflightnow.com

According to one of his interviews, one day the career counsellor from his high school administration called his parents up and told them that the school did not have any courses that could fit to help Beck achieve his dreams, rather his goals were “absurdly unachievable”.

Career

Since it was clear that there was no relevant educational course for Beck in school, just after finishing high school, Beck moved to East Tamaki, New Zealand, where he joined Fisher & Paykel for an apprenticeship, at the age of 17. He not only became familiar with the top of the line machinery and materials there but also kept on experimenting with his mini rockets at the workshops.

In 2001, he started working at the Industrial Research (now Callaghan Innovation). This was the place where he met one of the future investors of Rocket Lab, Stephen Tindall.

Founding Rocket Lab

His passion for rockets led him to work hard and found his start-up company Rocket Lab, in 2006. As the name suggests, the company was dedicated to building rockets and satellites. The company received its seed funding from New Zealander internet entrepreneur, Mark Rocket. Beck became the CEO and the CTO of the company and appointed Mark Rocket as its co-director.

It was in 2009 when Beck successfully launched the company’s first suborbital sounding rocket, named ?tea, becoming the first private company in the Southern Hemisphere to reach space.

In 2010, Rocket Lab received a contract from the U.S. government, under which, the company had to study a low-cost space launcher to place CubeSats into orbit. The contract was under NASA, meaning that the Rocket Lab could use all its resources as per the requirement.

In 2013, Beck entered the Silicon Valley, to raise funding for Rocket Lab’s next big project, a two-stage launch vehicle, the Electron. Beck had a time of three weeks, and he knew to whom pitch for the investment. Rather than going to every other venture capitalist, he focussed on the ones who had already invested in such projects and had known about it. Finally, he managed to secure A-round funding from Khosla Ventures, the venture capitalists, who have already invested in a few so projects.

The first commercial launch of Electron occurred on 11 November 2018, from Mahia Peninsula. It carried satellites for Spire Global, GeoOptics, a CubeSat built by high school students, and a prototype of a drag sail to the orbit.

The company has received funds worth $25m from the New Zealand government over the past few years. But still, the company has got more investments from the Silicon Valley companies including Khosla Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Data Collective, Promus Ventures, Lockheed Martin and Stephen Tindall’s K1W1, making it legally a U.S. company.

Personal Life

Beck is married and has two children. His wife is also an engineer.

Royal Aeronautical Society, awarded Beck the Meritorious Medal for service of an exceptional nature to New Zealand aviation and a Cooper Medal. In 2014, he was awarded the Innovation in Design and Engineering Award at the NZ Innovators Awards. In 2016, he was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year.