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EatStreet : One of the Most Successful Startups Not From the Silicon Valley

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We can call it laziness or the extra money we have that we use to pay people to deliver things on our doorsteps. Today, a countless number of startups are providing the delivery services, and we just need to pay a small fee for that. But sometimes, these service providers charge an amount that is not justified, and we are only annoyed. This is the same case happened with the co-founders of EatStreet when they got the idea for their first and the most successful startup. Matt Howard, Eric Martell, and Alex Wyler, the students of the University of Wisconsin–Madison founded the company when they had to pay extra fee for food delivery despite being college students.

Eric Martell and Alex Wyler were computer science students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. One day during their internship, Martell felt hungry and ordered food through campusfood.com. As soon he placed the order, he received a call from the delivery guy telling him that it would have been way cheaper if he had simply ordered through the phone call. This made Martell frustrated as even he was a student, he paid extra money for the delivery.

Martell discussed the incident with Wyler and came to the conclusion that they should build a similar website, that would provide free deliveries. This way, there were high chances for their idea to work, and they would also get good points to add in their resume. They could make the website run by themselves, but they needed a marketer to reach out to the restaurants for promotions. So they decided to join Matt Howard in, who was studying economics and political science major at the university. He had also got some experience in selling cars. So he seemed to be the perfect fit for the promotions.

EatStreet Founders
Image Source: wisc.edu

Finally, the three founded EatStreet as BadgerBites on 1 February 2010. Initially, it became difficult for them to convince the restaurants, but slowly the business came on track. In fact, in nine months, the company was making 100-200 deliveries every day, through about 70-80 restaurants in the city. In 2011, BadgerBites won the G. Steven Burrill Business Plan Competition and got a $10,000 prize as well as free office space in 2011. It also won the third prize in the NEST competition, held at the university. Winning those competitions not only helped the co-founders to get money to support their business but also access to some good entrepreneurs who have been mentoring them to date.

The success of the service encouraged the three to expand it to other cities as well. They built different websites for different cities, expanding the service to the cities that had more colleges or had universities. After running around 15 different websites for BadgerBites, the three co-founders launched a single website with the name EatStreet, and combined the services of the fifteen into one, on 21 January 2013. This way, they started to expand the service nationwide. By now, all three had to focus entirely on the service leaving other works behind. Matt Howard became the CEO of the company, Eric Martell held the position of COO, and Alex Wyler was appointed as the CTO of EatStreet.

The same year, in February, EatStreet hosted a series A funding led by and raised a sum of $2.45 million. The company was also named as #2 “Food Delivery Startup to Watch” in the U.S. by StrategyEye. The next year, the company became a part of the National Restaurant Association, in order to promote the digitalisation in the food industry. The company even partnered with Yelp, such that users could make orders through Yelp directly.

In April 2014, EatStreet raised another $8.4 million in a Series B investment round, Cornerstone Opportunity Partners LLC, Independence Equity, Great Oaks VC, CSA Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, being the major investors.

The three co-founders won the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Award in the Midwest in 2015. By the C round of the funding, they were sure that the business is going to get real big, and they need to work on their data game.

In 2017, Howard and Wyler got featured in the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Consumer Technology list. Martell stepped down from the post of COO to focus on his passion to help people build businesses in the same year. By the series C funding, the company had raised a sum of around $26 million. And at the same time, 200 corporate employees, as well as 800 delivery guys, had joined the company. The company processed around orders from 1.7 million customers in the year of 2017.

Today, the company has expanded to over 15,000 restaurants in over 150 cities in the U.S. The company, today, operates the orders and deliveries through its app, website, Facebook page as well as through the restaurants’ custom websites. EatStreet intends to reach around 350 to 400 cities across the U.S. by 2020.

vianai

Vishal Sikka : Ex-CEO of Infosys and the Founder of AI-based Startup Vianai System

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Speaking of artificial intelligence, it is quite important to mention machine learning too, because both of these go hand in hand. Today, most of the huge software companies use the concept of ML and AI to build their software and products. In a nutshell, artificial intelligence is becoming the building block for the new tomorrow, with its past rooted to the core of science. It is kind of mandatory to learn about ML and AI for most of the programmers today. Because it opens a window of vast opportunities for one’s career as well as a scientific development.

A lot of companies have started adopting the concept of AI and ML to enhance their products and the approach of development. And, one of the most recent start-ups based on AI has been launched in this very year by Dr Vishal Sikka, Ex CEO of Infosys. After leaving Infosys in 2017, Dr Sikka decided to start his own business, and hence, launched it on 12th September 2019. With a sky-limit scope in the area of AI, Dr Sikka’s main motive is to harness its power and make every industry adopt this concept and implement it in every product.

Early life and education

Born into a Punjabi family in Madhya Pradesh, India, Vishal Sikka’s father was an officer in the Indian Railway and his mother was a teacher. At the age of six, the family moved to Vadodara, Gujarat from Shajapur, Madhya Pradesh. Since his father was an engineer and his mother a teacher, academics turned out to be his strength and engineering his love.

Vishal Sikka founder Vianai
Image Source: thehindu.com

He went to Kendriya Vidyalaya, Rajkot and completed his schooling from Rosary High School. Following his father’s foot trails, Sikka pursued his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. Though he was admitted to one of the renowned colleges in India, Vishal Sikka wasn’t satisfied with it. He left the college immediately after he got admission to Syracuse University, New York. He pursued a B.S degree in Computer Science and later, went to Stanford University to complete his PhD.

Early Career

After completing his PhD, he started working with Xerox’s research lab, and after working there for some time, he realized his dream, i.e., launching a start-up. He founded iBrain, his first start-up which was acquired by PatternRX, and his second start-up was Bodha.com, which was acquired by Peregrine Systems. At this time, Sikka joined Peregrine as the Vice-President for Platform Technologies. His main area of work was application development and technical designing.

One of the advantages in Vishal Sikka’s career was the time when he just started accelerating in his professional world. He came very close to Hasso Plattner, founder of SAP. This helped him a lot in landing a job in SAP. He joined SAP in 2002 as the head of strategic innovative projects. Eventually, he was promoted to Senior Vice President and ultimately, to the position of first-ever CTO in April 2007. After working for more than a decade in SAP, Sikka finally resigned from the company on 4th May 2014.

Once you reach a certain point in a career, you don’t have to turn back twice to question your decisions. And, this happened to Sikka the moment he joined SAP. Sikka decided to leave SAP for some personal reasons, and undoubtedly, a person of his calibre was on-demand in the tech market.

Soon after he left SAP, Vishal Sikka joined Infosys on 12th June 2014. The ex-CEO of SAP was named the new CEO and Managing Director of the second-largest IT industry of India. He was declared as the whole-time director of the board of Infosys on 14th June 2014. After serving in this company for three long years, Sikka stepped down from his position and set off his course towards establishing his own start-up.

Vianai Systems

In 12th September 2019, Sikka finally launched his own AI-based start-up Vianai systems with the dream that AI and ML have the full potential to change every industry. Sikka’s start-up received a seed funding of $50 million which is going to increase with rocket-speed shortly.

go-jek

Go-Jek : The Popular Ride-hailing Service and One of the First Unicorns of Indonesia

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Two decades ago, there were a few companies like eBay and Amazon that dreamt about the home-delivery and online shopping service. Later, people went to start ride-hailing through apps making our lives even easier. And today, we have got hundreds of such services, some really successful and some are still struggling for survival. One such service or we say platform, providing multiple such services, is Go-Jek. A company, despite running in only five countries, is a Unicorn, and in fact, is the first Unicorn company from Indonesia. The company is dedicated to providing three services in three categories, i.e., Go-Ride, Go-Send and Go-Mart, offering 18 app-based on-demand services.

Go-Jek was founded by Nadiem Makarim in 2010, as motorbike hailing service with a fleet of 20 motorcycles. The company ran a call centre to receive bookings for the motorbike rides and would send a notification to the drivers nearby for the pickup.

The Founder

Nadiem Makarim, a native Indonesian, was born on 4 April 1984 35 in Singapore to a lawyer father. Makarim completed his high school education from Jakarta, and later, joined the Brown University, from where he received a graduate degree in BA. He then went to Harvard University and pursued an MBA degree.

go-jek founder
Image Source: vulcanpost.com

After completing his education, he came back to Jakarta and started working at McKinsey & Company as a management consultant. He then left his job to start his entrepreneur journey, and to co-found an online fashion shop, named Zalora. But later, he had to leave the company and joined Kartuku a payments service provider, as the Chief Innovation Officer.

Founding Go-Jek

Makarim mostly used motorcycle taxis for transport. This was the cheapest and convenient method for daily travel. With time, he realised that there is a great opportunity in the business. So he went to co-found Go-Jek in 2010. The name was inspired by word Ojek that means motorcycle in Indonesia.

In the beginning, there was a lot of wait time for the drivers as there was no effective method to connect the driver and the passenger, such that the passenger took a lot of time to find the driver. This was a big issue, and Makarim wanted to solve it. Despite that, the company had joined in about 200 drivers by 2014. The next year, finally Makarim launched an app for the platform, such that it became really easy for the drivers and the passengers to track each other in time.

Becoming the Unicorn

The company raised a $1.5 billion in fundraising in 2014, becoming a unicorn within four years of its inception. In another round of funding, the company raised a $550 million in August 2016, and companies like, Google and Tencent, being among the prime investors. It also received a sum of investment from Indonesia’s biggest companies, Astra International and Blibli.com, the same year. The company was the most popular ride-hailing service provider in the country.

The same year, Go-Jek partnered with the renown Indonesian taxi company Blue Bird and expanded its service to taxis with the name Go-Car. It also launched an auto service, named Go-Auto, the same year. It also went to acquire two Indian companies, C42 Engineering and CodeIgnition. Other than that, Go-Jek also acquired India-based app development company named Leftshift and a healthcare startup Pianta. It also took over another Indonesian company that provided online ticket booking and event management service, named Loket.com.

In 2017, Go-Jek expanded its services into the fin-tech field through its Go-Pay virtual wallet and acquired companies named Kartuku, Midtrans, and Mapan. The users can use the wallet to pay in any retail shop, both online and offline. They can also withdraw money at the partner banks’ ATMs. The company also added the payments through QR scanning after getting a license from the central bank in the same year. Go-Jek has also partnered with Google for its GPS service and soon will be partnering with Amazon for its retail services.

The Expansion

In 2018, the company valued at $5 billion, exceeding the total market cap of all transportation companies in Indonesia Stock Exchange. Today, the company has its international offices in Singapore, India, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines.

Through its food delivery services, Go-Jek has partnered with about 250,000 merchants in Indonesia. The company has also established a food and beverage selling service through its Go-Food merchants. The company is hosting a fleet of 1,000,000 vehicles for its ride-hailing service alone in Indonesia. Along with that, the Go-Jek branches include Go-Ride, Go-Shop, Go-Mart, Go-Box, Go-Tix, Go-Clean, Go-Plus, Go-Bills, Go-Massage, Go-Play, Go-Studio, and more.

As of February 2019, the estimated value of the company is about US$10 billion.

kingston

Kingston : The Largest Memory Module Manufacturer Company in the World

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Change is the basic rule of life, and along with life, there are many things that go through changes with time. One of the main thing that has been changing with a high pace is technology. In the past decade, we have seen the most dramatic advancement in technology, and thus, we are introduced to many unusual things. Memory devices, being the most important part of the technology products, has seen a lot of good transformations, and for such innovative products, we can give the credit to the tech companies like Kingston.

Kingston Technology Corporation is a multinational computer technology company, and one of the most popular flash memory products manufacturers, based in California. David Sun a native of Taiwan, and John Tu from Chongqing, China, founded the company in 1987 in California. At the time, they were completely broke, the two spotted the opportunity in the shortage of 1Mbit surface-mount memory chips in the market and built Kingston.

About the Founders

David Sun is the COO of Kingston Technology, born in October 1951 in Taiwan. He graduated from Tatung University, and after completing his education, he moved to the U.S.

Founders Kingston
Image Source: moneyinc.com

On the other hand, John Tu had to go through some hardships to get the education. He was born in 1941 in Chungking, China, but had to move with his family to Shanghai in 1945. After around two years, as the Chinese civil war broke, his family moved to Taiwan. Lack of availability of good schools and college, Tu then moved to Germany to pursue a degree in electrical engineering. But again, as he did not know the language, it became difficult for him to choose the college and start studying.

After a lot of struggle, with the help of a priest, Tu joined a language school in Munich and started working at a shipbuilding factory for his apprenticeship. Finally, he got enrolled in the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt and received a graduate degree in electrical engineering. As soon he completed the degree, he got a job at Motorola in Wiesbaden, and after working for a year, he moved to California on the recommendation of his sister, who was already living the U.S.

Founding Kingston Technology Corporation

Coming out of a life full of struggles, John Tu had to start working, as soon as he reached the new country. He started a gift shop in Arizona, and later, invested in various other ventures. In 1982, Tu met Sun in California, and being from the same background, they became friends. The same year, they decided to start a computer hardware company named Camintonn Corporation. The company was then acquired by another company, and each of them received $1 million after the deal.

But due to some bad business decisions, in 1987, they were broke. They could do nothing but try their luck with another business. They started Kingston Technology Corporation focussed on manufacturing computer memory products to fulfil the demand in the market. Kingston started manufacturing memory devices for different PCs, as a result, started growing at a rapid rate. The company was the result of the biggest failure of the two co-founders, but still, it was their biggest success, too.

The Success

In 1990, the company expanded its manufacturing lineups to processor upgrades, networking and storage products. And, in two years, Kingston was ranked as the number one fastest-growing privately held company in America by Inc. The company received its ISO 9000 certificate in a single attempt in 1994. The next year, the company was a unicorn, with the sales exceeding $1.3 billion, and it had grown to 500 employees.

It was in 1996 when for the first time, a PC company (Toshiba) and a memory products manufacturing company (Kingston) collaborated to develop co-branded modules. The same year, the Softbank bought 80% of the company shares for $1.8 billion, but in 1999, the two co-founders bought the shares back for $450 million. The company expanded its branches to Europe, establishing its first office in London, United Kingdom, in 1996. The next year, the company had offices in Taiwan, Japan, Dublin, and a in few other locations.

In 2000, the company formed two spin-off companies named Validation Labs, Inc. and StorCase Technology, Inc. Kingston has featured in The 500 Largest Private Companies in the U.S, by Forbes over five times. It has also been named as the world’s number-one memory module manufacturer for the third-party memory market by iSuppli for 12 consecutive years. It was also named the world’s number-one memory module manufacturer for the third-party memory market by IHS multiple times.

Kingston has always believed in the motto of “be real good at what you do, or do nothing!”. It has been the symbol of reliability and quality since its inception. The story of Kingston inspires us to put the hard work in the right direction and persistence, such that success will be never un achievable.

eyeview

Oren Harnevo : The Founder of Eyeview, a Digital Marketing Company

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Advertisement plays a key role in proper marketing for any product, brand or service. And once the demand is created in the marketplace, the company gets anchored, if not for a lifetime, at least for a good period of time. Digital marketing is the face of every product today, starting from a small online service to a mammoth multinational company. If not for advertisement, proper marketing of brands would have seemed like a far-fetched goal today. And, pioneering in the pool of marketing, Oren Harnevo created his own video marketing company, Eyeview in January 2007. Once the internet started getting popular throughout the world, Harnevo was successfully able to channel its true power and expose it in the world of marketing. Today, his company serves some of the top premier brands of U.S like P&G, Honda and BMW.

Early life and early career of Harnevo

Harnevo, like most of the programmers, was into computer and coding from a very young age. He started coding from the age of 10 and never really stopped it.

Harnevo, after graduating from his high school, didn’t pursue any undergraduate program immediately. He served as a Sergeant of Special Forces in Israel Defense Forces for three years (1996-1999). After serving for the army of Israel, Harnevo went to Tel Aviv University, Israel in 1999. He pursued his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and graduated in 2003. Instead of pursuing his Master’s degree, Harnevo pursued another Bachelor’s degree from the same university in film, cinema and television.

Oren Harnevo Eyeview
Image Source: eyeview.com

Harnevo, not to mention, was very good with computers, or else, it wouldn’t have been possible for a guy with no knowledge in computer programming to create such a tech empire for himself. Right after he received his degree in computer science, he joined Teamworks Technology as a Web Developer in January 2000. By this time, he already mastered HTML, Java, Javascript, SQL and Cold Fusion. He worked there as a junior developer and left the company after a year.

While Harnevo was pursuing his degree in arts (film and cinema), he joined Redzebra ltd, as a product manager. He was in charge of product management and development of an online medical portal, LifeOnKey.

Now that Harnevo had received two degrees on diametrically opposite subjects, he was ready to storm his mind and bring out some excellent ideas, ideas to blend the power of computer programming with the right amount of entertainment through media and cook a perfect potion for video marketing. The ideal amalgamation of science and arts is what Harnevo specialized in all these years.

In May 2004, Harnevo joined 888.com as a Project & Product Manager and continued for almost three years.

Founding Eyeview

Working as a product manager and having experience on the platform of digital marketing for so many years, Harnevo definitely spotted a good potential in video marketing. Moreover, he studied about media which made him superior to only developers. His choice for academics might have seemed strange, but it did pay off well. Harnevo sets a perfect example of an entrepreneur who actually proved that at times, jack of all deeds and master of none plays the ace in your life.

In January 2007, Harnevo established Eyeview, a video marketing based startup in the city of New York. Eyeview mainly created personalized video ads for companies, brands and products. The company mainly emphasizes on delivering 1-to-1 outcome-based video marketing and seems like it has gathered quite a good audience in terms of both quality and quantity in the last twelve years. Eyeview was also as the ninth fastest-growing company in North America on Deloitte’s 2015 Technology Fast 500. The company has also successfully raised $80 million from top venture capitalists.

Harnevo has been the CEO of the company for more than twelve years. He stepped down from his position on June 2019 and became a member of the board.

Awards and Achievements

In 2008, Harnevo was awarded the Harvard Business School 2008 Best Start-up, followed by the award for best video advertisement technology in 2011 by Digiday.

Apart from being the recipient of some prestigious awards, Harnevo has also been featured on the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Ad Age.

cloudian

Success Story of Cloudian, a Data Storage Company, Co-founded by Hiroshi Ohta

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The advancement of technology is providing us with stairway to a new world. Every day, every second, our world is changing. New gadgets and new phenomenons are discovered daily. The path, that we have chosen for modernizing our world, depends vividly on data. Today, everything that we do, from launching a website to posting a picture on our Instagram account, data is needed. And, after a few decades, our world will reach a certain position where the development of every nation will be decided by the amount of data one can store or have access to.

And, speaking of data, as such an integral part of the modern sphere, it is definitely necessary to mention Hiroshi Ohta. Hiroshi Ohta, along with Michael Tso founded Cloudian, a company that brought innovation in the data storage system. Founded in 2011, the company has its headquarters based in San Mateo, California, United States.

The main product of Cloudian is object storage software that was built for big enterprises as with new software and applications from a huge number of companies made data storage really tough and complex. So, an easy to use data storage system was the cry of the hour.

The Idea Behind Cloudian

cloudian founder hiroshi ohta
Image Source: advertisingweek.com

Before Hiroshi Ohta came up with the idea of building his own company, he used to work at J-Phone. It is a telecom operator company, based in Japan, where Ohta was in charge of service development. During his time in this mobile company, he pioneered many skills and also provided the base for “Sha-Mail”, first mail in the world with pictorial advantage. Since he worked in the sector of communication, Ohta spotted a significant increase of users in the telecommunication world, and this resulted in the gathering of data in networks.

With an increase in the number of smartphones, laptops, and tablet in today’s world, the audience might likely run out of data and need to pay for storage. And, if such a situation arrives, where data becomes an integral part of our basic requirements, then it definitely has to be affordable. Thinking about this, Ohta decided to quit the company and built data storage product for the traffic insanely driving to the cloud world. He started working on Cloudian Hyperstore software (a software having Amazon S3 support).

Why Object Storage Technology?

The biggest advantage of this kind of storage software technology is that you can store and have access to data irrespective of your geographical location. Previously, the software that had been created by many companies only limited the scope of accessing data from nowhere, but the data centres. But, Ohta undoubtedly solved this problem through Cloudian software.

Another big problem that started arising was the cost of maintenance because some software programs were targeted to increase the data volume. This increased the cost of storage and got off track from one of the data storage’s biggest goal, that is being economical.

Cloudian’s products solve both the major problems, along with keeping the quality of products high. From media to medical school, every institution, company, organization, including a single user, need data storage facilities for various reasons. And, there is no scene of “market drop” in this area, at least, for half a century now.

Success of Cloudian

One year, after founding the company, Cloudian signed a deal with a Japanese telecommunication company to fuel its cloud object storage service. This was the big start after which Cloudian has entertained many lucrative clients, including Motorola, Element Fleet, Tyco and many more.

The company also has a very fancy list when it comes to investors. In 2014, the company raised $24 million from Intel Capital, Goldman Sachs, INCJ and Fidelity Growth Partners Japan. In 2016, four new investors were added to list including Lenovo, City National Bank, Epsilon Venture Partners and DVP Investment. Cloudian raised $41 million in the funding round of October 2016. After the new Series E funding round, the total worth of Cloudian hit an impressive figure of $173 million. The company has also established a partnership with Cisco, which triggered the list of investors, and basically, means more funding.

Future Aspects

One of the most important targets that Ohta talks about is the users should be very familiar and comfortable to use these products. Also, the applications that are being created with Cloudian’s storage technology as the backbone should be at best interest of the audience.