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Bell Curve

Julian Shapiro: The Founder of Bell Curve, Marketing Agency and the Mascot of Animation

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Have you ever discovered your interest in doing something because you were just bored? Well, that happens to many of us, but only a few make it their passion. And, a handful among the few can establish themselves successfully through it. For example, we love playing video games, but that doesn’t mean every one of us turns out to be a game developer, but a guy named Nitish Mittersain did, didn’t he? You should be highly passion driven if you want to live through what you love. And, Julian Shapiro proved to be one of them.

Julian Shapiro, the founder of the Bell Curve and many other online services, started to show interest in coding from an age of twelve. And, the reason he started tinkering with his computer was he got nothing to do after he moved to a new city. Eventually, he started exploring different aspects of computer, and the wonders, one can make if he/she has good coding skills and was undoubtedly carried away by its charm.

Shapiro started his coding journey with Visual Basic 6, and by the time he was fourteen, he was pretty good at what he was doing. He realized that his skills were in high demand, and he could easily make money out of it. So, he started developing websites for small companies, swooping into the entrepreneurial world.

A Great Start

Since Julian Shapiro started as a teenage entrepreneur, he gradually became one of those tech-savvies interested in learning something new every day. Shapiro was very much involved in domain names for startups and companies. But he noticed that most of the businesses have below-average quality names for their companies and decided to work on it. With the existing knowledge of web development, Shapiro started building tools that would analyze around 50,000 domains daily and among those domains which were likely to be worthwhile.

Julian Shapiro
Image: Julian Shapiro

He put a lot of efforts into like building an algorithm for making combinations of alphabets and sorting out the potential names and acquiring them for a few dollars. After working diligently for six months, Shapiro finally made an inventory of domain names, thus selling it to companies for a few thousand dollars each. He named this service NameLayer and released it in August 2011.

Accelerating as a Tech Entrepreneur

After selling NameLayer to Techstars in 2014, Julian Shapiro again went back to his most comfortable place of web development. While creating several projects, he noticed that web animation doesn’t receive much importance, and no such significant modification or improvement was done in that area. Thinking that this hinders the designs of professional web developers, he started working on it.

In September 2013, Shapiro created his own animation engine, Velocity, to improve the tooling of web development through motion animation. The launch of velocity was very effective as people, especially the front-end designers, started using it extensively because they really understood the impact of web animation on marketing. Famous companies like Microsoft and Uber also started using Velocity.

What About Bell Curve?

With Neal O’Grady and Asher King-Abramson as partners, Shapiro founded Bell Curve in April 2017. It is a San Francisco based startup that operates as a marketing agency and conducts growth training programs. Bell Curve, basically, runs advertisements for startups and businesses across the world. Leading companies like Envoy, Streak and Tovala hired Bell Curve to run their advertisement sector.

Today, Bell Curve comprises a team of 9 members, including Julian Shapiro. This new startup is making great progress, but most importantly, Shapiro at the end of the day strictly adhered to what he loves the most, that is, web development. He devoted his career to make unbound contributions in this area of development.

Moreover, the digital content of the Bell Curve is so powerful that the company gives growth talks at Google and Y Combinator.

Other Aspects of Shapiro’s Career

In November 2014, Shapiro joined Webflow, Inc as a Vice President of Marketing. The company was about web development for professionals, something that Shapiro can never turn down. He worked there for ten months.

Julian Shapiro also started his own blog, Julian.com from September 2015. And, he is the only owner of the website. Shapiro also writes in TechCrunch about growth marketing since March 2019.

Another project that Shapiro worked and is worth mentioning is Libscore. Shapiro created Libscore in partnership with Stripe and Digital Ocean to help people understand that at what rate their libraries are actually used by people after putting it on open source. It helps to gather the statistics, thus providing the developer with proper feedback.

Plaid

Plaid : Powering Innovation in Financial Sector by Connecting Apps to Banks

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There has been an explosion of multiple payment apps in the past couple of years, to be more precise, last two years. These apps have made it easy for all of us on how to manage our finances and bank accounts, making us able to send and receive money from and into our bank accounts in just a few taps on our smartphone. But is it that easy to do all of these processes? It looks like but is definitely not. These companies create an infrastructure to connect the banks with the app or use a ready-made API for the same. Plaid is one of the companies which creates those APIs for the app makers who then can connect the banks through their apps and provide financial services to their customers.

Plaid was founded by Zach Perret and William Hockey in 2012. Perret is a Duke University pass out with a bachelor’s degree in Science, and William has a degree in Computer Science from Emory University. The two worked at Bain & Company, Perret as a consultant and Hockey as an associate. The two met at work and gelled well due to their common interest, i.e. coding. While working at the company, they discussed ideas for a new startup and started working on some. And, in 2012 finally left their job to start their own business. They moved to New York and spent over eighteen months to conceive the right idea.

Like every other startup founders, it was not their first startup. Before Plaid they had tried their hands on various consumer-based products as well, but none of them worked. Once, they decided to create an app for connecting bank accounts and do the transaction. But it was again a failure.

Plaid founders
Image Source: wsj.com

So they decided to create an infrastructure for connecting the apps and the banks altogether, like a pipeline, moving their focus from consumer-based products. Following that, the two created personal financial management and tracking tool for consumers and named it Sliver. Later, the product was renamed as Rambler, which later won the $5,000 grand prize at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon as a winner in 2013. It was the first time that a team made a full-scale financial services application live within 24 hours.

With Rambler, the two co-founded Plaid, an application programming interface, or API, that would do almost every type of banking work, like generating PDFs for the transaction and connecting the banks, just by using a bank customer’s online user name and password. The two moved to San Fransisco to set up an office and join more engineers to work on the product. Along with that, they started looking for investors and got rejected more than 50 times.

Finally, in July 2013, the company was able to raise a $2.9 million in a seed round led by Spark Capital. Later, the company raised a $60 million in Series A and Series B funding. Since then, the company has been growing in every which way. Within two years, the startup idea took the two co-founders of Plaid into the list of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2015.

According to Plaid, as of December 2018, 25 per cent of people in the United States having a bank account had connected to Plaid through an app. It was a fair increase of 13 per cent in 2017.

In 2019, the company raised a $250 million Series C investment and valued at a $2.65 billion. In total, the company has raised a $310 million investment from names like Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Goldman Sachs, NEA, Spark Capital, etc.

Today, more than 15,000 banks are connected through various apps with the Plaid infrastructure and extend to thousands of apps, including Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, Acorns and LendingClub.

box

Box : The Journey from A Class Project to Becoming a Unicorn

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File storage has become the biggest issue of the current time. With changing time, the need for storage capacity is also changing. In previous years, some KBs were sufficient, and now, even TBs are not able to fulfil the business requirements. But then, the introduction of the cloud has helped people to cop-up with their needs, such that they can buy as much online storage as they need to store their files on the cloud. This is a similar concept behind one of the successful startups, Box, which is a cloud content management and file sharing service. The founder of Box, Aaron Levie, started working on Box as a college project, which now is one of the Unicorn companies of the Silicon Valley.

Levie was born as Aaron Winsor Levie on 27 December 1985 in a Jewish family, settled in Mercer Island, Washington. He did his middle school from Islander Middle School in Mercer Island, Washington, where he met his best friend, and the future CFO of Box, Dylan Smith. Levie and Smith had always shown an interest in business as well as coding. In fact, when they were in high school, they had already built a few websites for people.

After completing his high school education, Levie joined the University of Southern California to pursue a degree in business and marketing, whereas Smith went to Duke University, and enrolled in a Bachelor’s course in economics.

Dylan Smith Aaron Levie Founders Box
Image Source: techrepublic.com

While at the University of Southern California, Levie constantly kept on working on new projects with his classmates. When he, with his other friends created code files, all of them created separate files on separate devices, so it was difficult for them to bring the code together and run. And this was the time when he realised that there has to be a single place to store files. It was the first pain point towards the development of Box.

At the same time, in one of their business studies class, a new project came up for their finals. Levie chose the same topic for his project that was a big issue for him and other businesses out there, centralised storage system. He wrote a paper for the project that represented the difficulties that the businesses were facing due to the lack of such systems.

While working on the project, Levie realised the scope of the project and decided to take the project more seriously. In 2004, he asked his friend Dylan to join him for help. Levie was working on the front end coding for the project, and then, brought his high school friends Sam Ghods and Jeff Queisser on board, too, to run the engineering work. Along with that, he hired some back-end developers on contract for the backend coding. The $20,000 seed funding for the project, and the company they founded, came from online poker earnings of Smith. They also invested the money that came from their previous projects in the company.

Levie knew the potential of his new project but was not sure what type of industry to target first. He, along with Smith, went to meet various business owners to clarify the same. Finally, they launched their company Box, and the service as Box.net in April 2005. At the end of 2005, the two went to Washington to work together on the project, and Levie took absence leave from his college. Soon, they moved their company to Berkeley, California.

Box received its first angel investment from Mark Cuban, a billionaire from Texas. During the beginning, the service was a consumer service, but the increased demand made Levie turn it into cloud storage and sell it to the businesses. In 2009, Box acquired Increo Solutions for its document collaboration and preview technology.

The company hosted a round of funding led by growth equity firm General Atlantic, where it raised a $125 million, in 2012. It also extended its operations to Europe and built its office in London, England. In 2013, the company in an F series round of funding raised a $100 million.

In 2014, 40% of Fortune 500 companies were using Box as their cloud storage and raised a $150 million in series G round of funding. Box also filed for an IPO at the New York Stock Exchange. The company became public in January 2015 and raised $175 million in the IPO. The IPO valued the company at around $1.6 billion, establishing it as a Unicorn company. In the same year, Box acquired another cloud management company named Airpost. The next year, the company built its headquarters in Redwood City, California. It even reached 44 million users around the world.

Box works in three types of offering, enterprise, business, and personal, IBM, Schneider Electric and Procter & Gamble, being its enterprise customers.

shutterstock

Jon Oringer : The Founder of No Less than Ten Startups, including Shutterstock

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Today no business promotion is complete without HD images. Relevant images are the most helpful in grabbing the attention of people for every type of business. Why only promotions? Images help create presentations, websites and fulfil many other purposes. But getting copyright-free images for a cheaper price is not easy. And no one wants to get hit by a copyright strike by just picking an image from the web either. Also hiring models and renting places for clicking those HD pictures is not pocket-friendly. So for these issues, websites like Shutterstock comes for the rescue, where you get lakhs of images for a cheap subscription fee. The website was developed by Jon Oringer in 2003, and since then it has been ruling the stock image industry.

Jon Oringer was born on 2 May 1974 in Scarsdale, New York. He got lucky to get to learn computer programming when he was studying in elementary school at the age of five. So he automatically became interested in programming. As a kid, he had already developed entrepreneurial skills, and when he went to high school, he developed photographs and taught guitar to make money. He completed his school education from the Scarsdale High School. As a teenager, he also repaired computers to earn some extra cash. With his programming skills, he was soon able to create small software and sold them to people.

In 1993, he joined the Stony Brook University to pursue a BS degree in computer science and mathematics. During this time, he built the world’s first pop-up blocker programme and sold over thousands of copies of the same. In 1997, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree and joined Columbia University, where he graduated with an MS in computer science. After the success of the pop-up blocker, he tried hands-on building a personal firewall, cookie blocker and other similar software and was sole owner and employee of about ten companies.

To promote his business, Jon Oringer chose e-mail marketing. But he found out that the mails with images had a better impact on people than without any. In the beginning, he bought stock photos for promotions, but later, it became quite expensive for him to buy images from the third party. So finally, he bought a camera and changed his hobby of photography to professional photography for his business. Later, he started posting the clicked and unused pictures online and invited people to use them. Eventually, it came out to be that he clicked around 100000 in just six months. So he decided to build a website, where he could put all the photographs for downloads.

Jon Oringer Shutterstock
Image Source: forbes.com

In 2003, he developed and launched Shutterstock, a website, where he put 30,000 images filtered from his vast collection. These pictures were based on different scenarios and were best of the 100000 pictures Jon Oringer had clicked. Seeing a good business opportunity in expanding the photo stock business, he took some of his savings and rented a 600-square-foot office in New York for the company. The website offered subscription-based services and cost $49 a month. Like his other startups, Oringer initially took all the responsibilities himself. With time, he started joining his friends for the photography and to ccarry out other operations in the company.

Soon, with the expansion of the company, he ended up hiring professional photographers and contributors to fulfil the demands. In 2006, the company became the largest subscription-based photo-stock company, offering over 570,000 images. From August 2008, the company also started providing videos through its new platform named Shutterstock Footage, and in 2009, it launched Shutterstock for iPad offering free images to the users. It also introduced a new marketplace like Spectrum and Offset for high-quality images and videos.

Oringer filed for an initial public offering for ShutterStock public on the New York Stock Exchange, in May 2012, and in October of the same year, the company went public. After the IPO, the stock value of the company increased drastically, and in 2013, Oringer was a billionaire with a net worth of USD$1.05 billion. The company revenues of the same year reached $2.5 billion, and it also launched an Android app.

Along with new tools and features, the company also started collaborating with different companies, like in 2013, Facebook integrated Shutterstock into its Ad Creator tool. The next year, Salesforce also included the ShutterStock library to its platform. The company also formed a partnership with companies like Penske Media Corporation and Associated Press for a free license for access to their archives.

Oringer, with his skills and experience, took the right opportunity at the right time. This intelligent entrepreneur has been a guest speaker at various educational institutions. He has also received numerous awards for his achievements. In 2013, Business Insider named Oringer the coolest person in all of New York technology. He was also named as the New York’s Technology Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young.

Echovme-logo

Sorav Jain : An Indian Entrepreneur Crusing Down the Bay of Digital Marketing

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The traditional ways of marketing have been outweighed by digitalized promotions as soon as we stepped into the era of digitalization. But, since the last few years, online marketing space has been overcrowded by people with low experience and claimed professionals. The presence of such freelancers, who have a very minimal idea about digital marketing and social media, creates confusion among the customers which reduces trust in the long run. So, the effectiveness of a good digital marketing company gradually loses its demanding position while people with basically no knowledge-creating havoc in the digital world.

And, to clear the mind of people and help them chose the best, Sorav Jain, a young Indian entrepreneur created some offbeat strategies for his digital marketing company, echoVME. He built the company out of pure passion, as he was ever really into studying biotechnology, though he pursued it. But, later he made his mind to create something of his own, like his father and uncles and went abroad to study marketing management.

Family Background and Early Life

Sorav Jain belonged to a family where creating your own ship cruise was appreciated more than working on a royal one. His father and uncles were established businessmen, so going the unconventional way and turning down tempting jobs were absolutely supported by his family members.socialsamosa.com

Sorav Jain
Image Source: digitalscholar.in

Sorav went to Loyola College and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biotechnology in 2007. While being an undergraduate student, he already mastered the art of SEO, and hence, joined Contempo Technologies as an SEO and Content Executive in January 2006. By this time, Sorav already chalked out his plan to start off his venture and explore the entrepreneurial endeavours. He went to the University of Leeds to complete his master’s degree in International Marketing Management and joined CMO Axis as a Digital Marketing Specialist after graduating. Working for CMO Axis, a global digital marketing firm fascinated him even more about the world of advertising.

Setting up echoVME

Sorav Jain still continued working at CMO Axis, while he was building his own empire. Quite a business mind!

An entire plan was set up, and Sorav started assembling the building blocks of the company from December 2009. The company became operational from March of the next year, a couple of months after leaving CMO Axis. So, like any other young entrepreneur, Sorav dived into his business with the utmost passion and energy to bring a significant change in digital marketing.

The company started with a team of 10 members operating from Mumbai and Chennai.

At People’s Best Interest

echoVME wasn’t established with the regular idea of going around, convincing people, taking in clients and earning money. Sorav really wanted to put some effort to make young minds, especially college students, learn about digital marketing so that the quality of freelancers available in the marketplace improves and more students get exposed to the light of digital marketing.

Since its establishment, a lot of training sessions and workshops are conducted by echoVME. Apart from covering major cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, echoVME has also spread its wings to Sri Lanka. It was a really smart strategy from the owner to conduct such workshops, as they received humungous positive feedbacks, even from CEOs, CMOs, and Executive Officers of many famous brands.

Within few months of founding the company, it made deals worth $10 million through corporate blogging strategy.

Obstacles and Competitors

For Sorav Jain the hardest challenge was time management and implementing every theoretical statement from the heavy books of business administration in real life. He said that when you set up a business, it is more than just the bookish definition of the business terminologies, as you have to deal with real people and real crisis. But, that’s how one learns, isn’t it?

Sorav gives very vague answers, every time it comes down to mentioning echoVME’s competitors. In an interview, he said that every company that is trying to reach a standard position in digital marketing, especially blogging-centric marketing, are the competitors.

Success of echoVME

Presently, echoVME has trained more than 2000 professionals and brands through their training programs and workshops. More than 100 workshops have been conducted echoVME in major cities of India till date. The training sector of echoVME, SOCIALME has gained unexpected popularity from the very first day.

What after echoVME?

Sorav founded Digital Scholar, an agency-based learning institute in July 2019. Apart from this, Sorav has also been a guest lecturer at many famous educational institutes, like IIT Madras and Leeds Metropolitan University.

stack overflow

Stack Overflow : A Programming Hotspot Created for the Coding Enthusiasts

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Some people might say that the job opportunities in the IT sectors are gradually reaching a saturation level, but is it really true? Today, while the world is getting consumed by the trove of technology, IT sectors play the most important role in functioning and developing of our world. Even, if you are launching a small product in the market, you need to create certain algorithms, a website, and definitely, a user interface, for which one needs to hire developers. In this 21st century, coders are on demand! Be it a pure competitive programmer or a developer, their contributions to the IT sector is certainly the need of the hour.

And, to help out the programmers out there be it an expert or a beginner, an online Q/A platform, Stack Overflow was created 11 years ago. Stack Overflow, the flagship site of the Stack Exchange Network was mainly created to answer the queries of the programmers based on any programming language, and the user can solve problems on the website as well.

The two finest minds who created this platform for every coding enthusiast out there are Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. They launched the site on 15th September 2008, eleven years from now, and today, the website witnesses over 50 million monthly visitors.

Stack Overflow Founders

About the Founders

Jeff Atwood is a software developer, who runs his own blogging site, Coding Horror, since 2004. Apart from co-founding Stack Overflow, he also launched his new company, Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., in 2013. He met Joel Spolsky after he started maintaining his programming blog.

Joel Spolsky is a software engineer and writer belonging to New Mexico. He maintains a blog called Joel on Software, and he is also the creator of Trello. Before founding Stack Overflow, he was a project manager of Microsoft Excel and also founded Fog Creek software.

Spolsky contacted Atwood on 2008 and together decided to set up a Q/A website related to coding.

The journey of Stack Overflow

Within months of the launch of Stack Overflow, it attracted a lot of coders from around the world, and even the beginners, who just wanted to learn something new. People helped each other by answering the doubts, learnt new things about any specific language, and even, if someone was showing off their coding skills, it worked out pretty well for the website.

Since both, the founders had their own personal blogs, they had enough number of subscribers. Atwood invited his subscribers to try the beta version of the newly released website, on 31st July 2008. And on 15 September 2008, the company announced the release of this beta version for public, where anyone could seek help and ask queries related to programming.

The website also incorporated a badge system for the users. For example, if you answered a question and your answer got upvoted you were given certain badges, that is, awards which upgraded your reputation. Thus, the more you answer, you are likely to gain certain incentives given that the quality didn’t drop.

But, it was noticed that a similar question was posted many times, giving rise to the same answers. Spolsky turned this drawback into a positive point, saying that if similar questions drove more traffic to the website, as it appeared on multiple search results, there is no harm in it after all.

The success of the website

In 2010, the company raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Union Square Ventures. In April 2009, the company added a feature called “timed suspension” which showed the user’s reputation at “1” because either they didn’t show enough interest to improve or engaged themselves in disruptive behaviour. After implementing this policy, 92% of the questions were answered within a few minutes.

In 2011, another $12 million was raised in Series B funding led by Index Ventures with the participation of Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Another $10 million was raised in Series C funding in 2013. Till now, the company has received around $70 million in funding.

Within five years of its launch, Stack Overflow answered 5 million questions related to coding, thus making the coding community even stronger. Around forty-four million visitors checked out the website every month by 2013.

Today, around 250 employees are working for Stack Overflow, with the majority working in head offices of New York, London and Munich. Around 14 million questions have been answered so far, and the site also partners with many big companies to help them recruit developers.

Majority of the queries that are posted on the website are regarding PHP, JavaScript, Java, Python, HTML, C#, jQuery and Android.