Your Tech Story

startup story

Kobo

Michael Serbinis : A Significant Entrepreneur who Founded Kobo

Leave a Comment / Founder, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

There always doesn’t have to be a reason for reading. Reading has always been valuable as it only adds up to your knowledge. That is why the community of book lovers is expanding with every passing second. But, we do know that everyone can’t afford the highly expensive original editions of classic novels every time. So for such a crisis, the e-books become the true guardian angels in our life.

Kobo Inc. is a Canada-based platform that is famous for selling e-books and electronics. The company serves customers at a global level and has attracted more than 10 million readers by now. Its founder Michael Serbinis, who is an engineer, entrepreneur and an angel investor, is even more famous for founding more than just one company.

Where Michael Serbinis belongs?

Born on 28th October 1973, Michael Serbinis belongs to the land of maple syrup, i.e., Canada. His keen interest in science made him win gold at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, for which he designed a high-temperature superconductor propulsion system. So, his first big achievement happened when he was in high school, that led to big opportunities for working with NASA and Intel.

Michael Serbinis founder Kobo
Image Source: alejandrocremades.com

In 1996, Serbinis graduated from Queen’s University with a bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics, followed by graduating from the University of Toronto with a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering. While he was a student, he entered into the Ontario Engineering Competition, and his creation of motor, that ran on an advanced software coding, helped him fetch a summer job at Microsoft. He also conducted thorough research on neural networks and artificial intelligence.

The Journey in the Late 90s

Serbinis’s journey into the entrepreneurial world started while associating the Musk brothers. He received a call from the Musk brothers, who were his university classmates to help them build a business. And thus, Serbinis was one of the first ten employees of Zip2, the company that was established by Elon and Kimball Musk.

Since Serbinis was already a very efficient programmer, at the age of twenty-four, he built a cloud-based document storage service called DocSpace. After a couple of years, it was sold to a San-Francisco based company for $530 million.

In 2000, Michael Serbinis joined Critical Path as CTO and EVP Marketing. It was then one of the largest companies which ran one-third of the world’s emails through their software. After he moved back to Canada, Serbinis joined Indigo as CIO and EVP Online, and this is the point at the juncture, where Kobo spun out to become an independent business.

Founding Kobo

At first, a global e-reading platform called Shortcovers was released in February 2009, under the main company Indigo. But, once they gained board approval and funding, they cut out from Indigo and established as an independent company. In late 2009, the company was rebranded as Kobo, an e-reading platform for worldwide customers. This was just the beginning for Serbinis to do great things in his homeland.

The Success

Kobo received a very good response from all over the world, shortly after its release. Kobo, today, attracts over 18 million users from more than 190 countries. It has over more than 3 million magazines, eBooks, and even, newspapers. Thus, creating the largest e-readers catalogue in the history of the e-reading platform.

In January 2012, Kobo came under the acquisition of a Japanese e-commerce company called Rakuten for $315 million. The catalogue of Kobo has e-books on 77 different languages, helping readers connect to their native land.

After Kobo

Since it was only the beginning, Serbinis founded 3 Angels Capital in 2014, to invest in a disrupted market and create a better world. Serbinis has always been a determined and optimistic man for sure. He mostly invests in areas, like the internet of things, digital content, digital health, etc.

Michael Serbinis is also the board director of MaRS Discovery District, an innovation hub in Toronto. He serves as a board director in another institute called Vector Institute, a non-profit research institution in Toronto.

In November 2014, Serbinis founded League Inc., an online platform that connects worldwide users to provide health benefits and much more.

After developing so much on his homeland and contributing to science, Serbinis still lives in Toronto with his family.

PHP

Rasmus Lerdorf : An Insightful Programmer and the Creator of PHP

Leave a Comment / Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

The history of PHP programming language narrates the story of a programmer who prefers to be known as an engineer than a coder. Because according to this engineer, the end product is what matters the most and not the journey to it. Well, seems like his mind works more like a thermodynamic state function and less like a path-dependent parameter, isn’t it?

This remarkably excellent engineer is none other than world-famous programmer Rasmus Lerdorf. On one of his interviews, Lerdorf said that coding is quite boring and tedious, which is insignificant contrast to who he is and his occupation. So, let’s get to know more about this big guy and his ‘path’ to success.

Early Life

Rasmus Lerdorf
Image Source: staticflickr.com

Born into a family from Disko Island, Greenland, on 22nd November 1968, Rasmus Lerdorf moved to Denmark at an early age of three. At the age of fifteen, Lerdorf and his family moved to King City, Ontario. In 1988, Lerdorf graduated from King City Secondary School and pursued his higher studies from the University of Waterloo. He graduated from the university in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree of Applied Science in Systems Designing Engineering.

After he graduated, Lerdorf made significant contributions to the relational database management systems like Oracle Rdb.

Working With Programming Languages

When the programmers and the tech-savvies were working in the mid-90s with their main motive to make the internet more efficient and faster, he got hindered by languages like C and Perl. According to Rasmus Lerdorf, designing websites with these languages were too time consuming and needed to come up with a new one.

Lerdorf, along with some of the technical writers, assembled their ideas together and got them online as an HTML page. He wanted to take a step ahead, only when some companies asked for these documents or expand the idea and implement it in the practical world.

Creating PHP

He started working in CGI (common gateway interface), developed few libraries, wrote some programs in C, and finally, developed PHP, an entirely new language. Lerdorf created PHP (personal home page, now known as hypertext preprocessor) in 1994, and till now, many modified versions of the language has been released.

In a generalized way, PHP is a programming language that was designed for web development and can be used almost on every operating system. The most recent version of PHP is PHP 7.3 released on 6th December 2018.

After PHP became a very well known and useful language to big companies, Rasmus Lerdorf explained that he never intended to create a programming language, as he had no clue how to build one. He was making logical implementations to create something simpler than Perl, and one thing led to another. Finally, after forming a tech team to assist him with technical documentation, which followed beta testing, PHP/FI 2 was released in November 1997.

The Success

Today, PHP is a majorly used programming language, being used by websites like Etsy, Wikipedia, Tumblr, Yahoo, Flickr, Facebook, and many more.

Over the years, many features have been incorporated in PHP, but Lerdorf keeps telling one thing to every emerging engineer out there, that for a programmer, it is very important to understand C very well. Though he accepts that as compared to languages, like Python or C++, the user needs to put comparatively more effort using C, but it is the fundamental unit of learning for any programmer.

After releasing PHP, he worked with different big tech companies, and currently, he is working with Etsy.

Career of Lerdorf

In January 2000, Rasmus Lerdorf joined Linuxcare Inc. as a senior research engineer and continued for a year. In September 2002, he joined Yahoo! where he continued for seven years, as an Infrastructure Architecture Engineer. Lerdorf said that eventually, he became tired and kind of demoralized working in an ad centric web company, as it involves tricking your customers.

He joined Room 77 as an advisor in 2010, and then, it’s all about WePay and Etsy. It’s been eleven years, that he has been working in Etsy, first as an advisor, and then, as a distinguished engineer.

Lerdorf as every other enthusiastic programmer is very much interested in open source, and he attends the open-source conferences as a speaker throughout the world.

logo vneda

Vneda : One-stop Solution for All Organizational Learning Needs

Leave a Comment / Founder, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

The market is evolving at a fast pace, and along with that, the need for skilled and well-educated employees is also increasing as everyone realizes the value of knowledge. Organizations are losing millions because they are unable to take care of their knowledge. According to a study published by the International Data Corporation (IDC), It’s estimated that poor knowledge-sharing practices cost the Fortune 500 companies a $31.5 billion annually. And therefore, organizations are looking for better options to enhance employees’ skills and knowledge, which eventually, helps them to increase their productivity. This Edu-tech startup named Vneda is one of resource providing company, which is on the mission to solve these problems by their services.

What is Vneda

Vneda is an Edu-tech startup that started on 8th March 2018. It provides a unified learning solution for skill development, knowledge management and knowledge sharing among organizations and their employees. It provides a hybrid approach for the corporate, NGOs and government organizations for the better utilization and administration of knowledge resources. Vneda allows users to manage their knowledge and enhance it through knowledge sharing with the use of smart tools.

Users can create and consume digital content such as podcasts, videos, articles, e-books, courses on the platform. They use Proprietary Algorithms for the curation and indexing of the content. Vneda helps users to manage and store their important data on a cloud-based server, and apart from this, it also provides doorstep delivery of physical books from approx 1.5 lac+ book library.

founders Vneda

Vneda works on employee recognition as well by rewarding the users for consuming and sharing knowledge, to cultivate a habit of knowledge-sharing in them.

Co-founders

Vneda is an idea of two colleagues, Aman Sharma, and Ritesh Kumar. Aman Sharma is a Computer Science graduate who had an interest in developing something new and innovative. He developed many B2B and B2C products in the last seven years. Ritesh Kumar is an IT graduate and is a technology expert (Full Stack Developer), who likes to work on both the front end as well as the back-end of the product’s website and application.

Founding Vneda

When Aman Sharma ventured into the corporate learning market, he researched and found this market, especially in India, was relatively new and yet to be explored. There was not much focus on knowledge management and knowledge sharing. And because of this lack of focus, they were losing big monies and resources. On the contrary, this market got its due importance and was flourishing in the developed nations. From this fact, he drew his assumption that the knowledge sharing and knowledge management market would find its due recognition in India as well.

What is unique about Vneda

There is no single platform that caters to all the learning needs of an organization. They have to manage and opt for different platforms for digital learning and development, knowledge sharing, knowledge management, corporate library, knowledge repositories, etc. Having multiple platforms leads to increased costs for the organization, it becomes problematic for employees to manage and use so many platforms. On the contrary, Venda is a single corporate learning solution that caters to a wide range of learning needs such as corporate learning and development, knowledge sharing, knowledge management and much more.

It also helps in uniting external knowledge to internal knowledge. Vneda is providing a platform where publishers can publish their content that can be consumed by the users.

Accomplishments

It’s never been an easy task for entrepreneurs from convincing investors to invest in their ideas to users for adopting their services. Vneda was started with the seed investment of its co-founders, and since then, they are bootstrapping. Yet the hard work pays, as the company is catering to 25,000+ users across 13 corporate, like Axis Bank, Honda 2 Wheelers, Volkswagen, Orient Electric are to name a few.

How it works

Vneda works on two pricing models; one is free where a user does not pay a single penny for using the knowledge sharing and management platform. And then the other where the organization is charged a subscription fee. Under this, the organization gets a subscription to the created and curated content, which includes third party premium content and physical book delivery.

The vision

Vneda was created with a vision to construct an ecosystem of shared knowledge. The team is working to achieve a larger goal to create the knowledge management & sharing culture in all communities. But at present, they are focusing on their ideal target audience and eyeing to close 100 corporate by the end of this year and become profitable. Vneda is now a team of 10 hard working fellows putting efforts to create a strong tech product that can be integrated with any other existing system to make the knowledge access experience easy and interesting.

TransferWise

TransferWise : A UK based Startup that Made Transfering Money Abroad Cheaper

Leave a Comment / Founder, Product, start-up, Story, Tech News, Tech Story / By

The people who live in a different country from their home for work would know the pain of paying the extra fee for sending money back to their home. Though with the rise of the internet and new fintech apps, the pain has been reduced to an extent. But, if we go a decade back, and even earlier, there were no such apps or any online platforms. People had to pay an extra fee, and mostly, in the currency which was the expensive one. This problem led two Estonian fellows, Taavet Hinrikus and Kristo Käärmann, to found TransferWise, a fintech platform for transferring money abroad without paying additional hidden fees.

Taavet Hinrikus and Kristo Kaarmann both belonged to Estonia and were working in London. In fact, Taavet Hinrikus was Skype’s first employee. The two had met a party and ultimately, became good friends.

The Problem

In 2008, Kaarmann was rewarded a Christmas bonus of £10,000 ($13,147) by his company, which he wanted to spend in something big. The only problem he faced was that he was paid in pounds, but he had a mortgage back in Estonia, that he had to pay in Euros. He used to regularly send money to his Estonian bank account. The transfer usually used to take 4-5 working days to complete, and the bank would charge a specific fee.

transferwise founders
Image Source: standard.co.uk

In general days, he had never sent such a big amount to his Estonian bank account. So the fee charged did not feel much for him. But when he had to send the earned bonus to that bank account, it shook him hard. Before sending the money, he looked at the exchange rates on Bloomberg and Reuters, that came out to be a £15 fee. But after he sent the money, he checked the balance and found out that the bank had charged him a £500. Here he realised that the banks were charging an extra fee other than the exchange rate and that too, in pounds.

The Solution

Kaarmann discussed the matter with Hinrikus, who was also suffering from the same problem. Living in London, Hinrikus had to pay bills in pounds, but his salary came in Euro. This led the two think of saving the exchange fee by transferring money to each other. The two built a private exchange system, in which, Kaarmann transferred Hinrikus money in pounds, whereas the latter sent money to Kaarmann in Euro and for free of cost.

For a few months, they followed the same method, and then they talked about the transfer system to some of their colleagues and friends, too. This way, they formed a small group for sending and receiving money without spending extra cash on exchange fees.

Launching TransferWise

Finally, in 2011, the two decided to launch a whole system for people, through which they could send and receive money across the border, without having to spend extra on exchange fee. They introduced the new online money transfer system, TransferWise, on TechCrunch through a simple blog post, and in no time, they started receiving emails regarding it.

In 2012, the platform got the approval from the UK financial regulator, and in the first year of its inception, it carried out transactions of worth €10 million. Though TransferWise was hitting off good, it was not able to reach more people. The investors were sceptical about the idea. But one person who was also the owner of a startup believed in the idea. It was PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. In 2013, Thiel led the Series A round funding for the company and raised over a $1.3 million.

In 2016, it was found out that TransferWise on an average was 83% cheaper than the bank transfers. Till now, the company has raised a $400 million in all rounds of funding collectively. According to TransferWise, it carries out over $1 billion transactions every month and has saved around a billion pounds of its customers on the transfers.

Today the company has got offices in London, Singapore, Tallinn, and New York, etc. In 2017, the company also launched borderless accounts for its users and also a multicurrency master card to handle borderless transactions. TransferWise offers a peer-to-peer money transfer for more than 175 different currencies.

Becoming the Unicorn

In May 2019, the company had another round of funding and raised $292 million. With the fundraiser, the company reached a total valuation of $3.5 billion. TransferWise got the investments from some of the reputed investors in the world, including Peter Thiel, Richard Branson, and Andreessen Horowitz. Other than that the capital ventures that invested in the company, include Global Investors, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, Japanese Mitsui & Co, and World Innovation Lab.

TransferWise has received several accolades to its names. The Guardian named it as one of “East London’s 20 hottest tech startups”. It also got named as Wired UK Start-Up of the Week. The company was at number 12 in Startups.co.uk’s list of the top 100 UK start-ups of 2012. TechCrunch also named TransferWise as one of five “start-ups to watch” at Seedcamp’s 2012 US Demo Day. In August 2015, the company was named a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer.

local motors

Jay Rogers : The Founder of Local Motors and Inventor of First 3D Printed Electric Car

Leave a Comment / Founder, Inspiration, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

There have been startups based on daily needs and also on the pain points people go through every day. But sometimes, it is the question of life and death, and the safety of people. There are many such examples of startups that are inspired by the people’s safety, and one such startup is Local Motors, that have a great story behind it.

Local Motors was founded by Jay Rogers in 2007 and have its headquarters situated at Phoenix, Arizona. Local Motors is a car manufacturing company that builds its autonomous cars with the help crowdsourcing.

Before starting up Local Motors, Rogers was a Marine in the US navy. But even before that, he was a confused young lad, who did not have any idea what would be the best career choice for him. He graduated from Princeton University with a degree in banking and was about to opt for an MBA for his post-graduation when he met a fellow from the same MBA batch, who had also been a marine.

Jay Rogers Local Motors
Image Source: zimbio.com

Influenced by that person, Rogers, in 1999, joined the U.S. Marine Corps. He served as a marine for seven long years and went through random experiences. He was posted in locations, including Iraq. In 2004, when he was appointed in Iraq, he lost one of his fellow officer and friend, Brent Morel while riding a Humvee. Rogers found it stupid to deploy a Humvee in Iraq as the vehicle have a heavy engine. Again in next couple of years, he lost his another friend due to the failed landing of a Boeing Vertol CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter.

These incidents hit Rogers hard, as he found out that these two vehicles were the best vehicles built in America. Still, these were not smart enough to save human lives. After seven years of his service as a marine, Rogers returned to complete a degree in business from the Harvard University, to give a direction to his new startup that was inspired by the sad incidents happened in his life. He wanted to start a company that would create smart vehicles to help people with their needs.

Rogers studied the business models of various car manufacturing companies, and what they all were doing was not customer-focused. He had a different approach, through which he wanted to build customer-oriented vehicles. So he thought of building a unique open-source micro-factory for rapid manufacturing.

But without investments, it was not possible to build a company, and then the products. So he approached the investors from the silicon valley, but for his disappointment people were more interested in investing their money in the already famous companies like Tesla. But without losing hope, Rogers raised a $10 million with the help of his family, friends and a few investors.

But the amount was not sufficient for both designing and developing the product. But Rogers again came with a unique solution. He opted for crowdsourcing the design concept for the company’s first product, offering $20,000 for the winner. An art student won the competition, and in 2009, based on the same design, Rogers launched the Rally Fighter, the first Local Motors product and a souped-up, fibreglass-chassis dune buggy made to run in the desert. The car was a massive success. A total of 20 units of this desert crawler was sold in the same year.

Since the launch of Rally Fighter, the basic business model of the company includes designing, engineering and manufacturing of automobiles open source, such that the designers are welcomed to submit their designs, and the community votes and selects the winners. Even though a single winner is chosen for the design, the community members can suggest improvements for the same. For Rally Fighter only, 35000 designs had been submitted by designers.

Rally Fighter was a giant desert truck, so now Rogers wanted something that would be suitable for the general public. On the arrival of the 3D printers in 2014, he opened a challenge for the Local Motors’ employees as well as for the community members to make the world’s first drivable 3D-printed automobile. 200 designers participated in the challenge, and Strati became the world’s first 3D printed electric car. The car was manufactured in 44 hours and in front of a live audience at the International Manufacturing Technology Show in McCormick Place, Chicago.

Though the car was not powerful enough, it set new technology standards. It gave Rogers the confidence of building something new. A few months later, Local Motors was invited to Berlin’s Urban Mobility Challenge, to build an emission-free minibus. Again Rogers notified all its 200,000 in the community for the designs for a $20,000 top prize. The design of a 24-year-old Colombian industrial engineer, Edgar Sarmiento, was finalised for the challenge and Olli was manufactured. The 8 to 12 seater minibus, Olli, was manufactured in the partnership with IBM.

Olli was demonstrated on Facebook Live of Berlin’s Urban Mobility Challenge. People were quite impressed with the design and the capabilities of the vehicle. So the company received $1 billion in financing from Florida-based Elite Transportation Services (ETS) for Olli. The company also received funding of $20 million from Texas-based Xcelerate.

The company is looking forward to embedding the autonomous driving and artificial intelligence to the new models of Olli. For bringing the new technologies to Local Motors, the company has partnered with International Business Machines Corp.’s Watson program for artificial intelligence and also with Robotic Research LLC.

Currently, Jay Rogers is serving the company as the CEO.

Weebly

The Founding Story of Weebly : The Website Hosting and Building Interface

Leave a Comment / Founder, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

There have been many cases when people created wondrous things without knowing its worth. Though they want to accomplish a goal, they don’t have the idea that of the impact of their end product. They just keep working to get the product, and at the end, when the product is ready, it transforms their whole lives. One appropriate example of the same is none other than Weebly. Three college students, Dave Rusenko, Chris Fanini, and Dan Veltri, founded Weebly as a college project in 2006, and now, it is one of the most popular website building platforms.

Rusenko and Fanini were friends and met Veltri at the Pennsylvania State University. The university required every student to maintain an online profile. So one of Rusensko’s friend, who was a non-computer student, asked him to help her out with building her website for the astronomy class. While he was helping her, he figured out that many people need a website, but don’t have the skill to build one. This incident led him to think of developing a software that would help people, who did not know how to code, build a whole website.

Rusensko wrote the first line of code for the software, Weebly, as his college project, and Fanini and Veltri also joined in. In 2006, they completed a basic product and represented the same in a tech gathering of 1000 people. But for their disappointment, the CEO who was leading the gathering called the software “the worst idea” over the mic. This was heartbreaking for the three, but they kept the belief in their product, as it was a fact that not many people were into coding and ultimately, needed a website.

After the successful release of the invitational beta of the software in January 2006, in six months, they launched the official private-beta of the software. The next year in January, they took the software to Y Combinator’s winter startup program in Silicon Valley, California. Even though they were the last to apply, their idea had the potential that they got the entry. After getting selected in for the program, the three started working full-time on the software. The next year, they included a new editing interface named “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” to the software. They also raised a US$650,000 funding the same year.

Weebly now was a company, and they had to monetise the software. For that, they introduced the Pro accounts for the users, and also, included AdSense to the platform. In 2009, they also added support for editing the HTML and CSS to Weebly software. In 2013, the company hosted the C series funding, which helped them raise another $35 million. Companies, like Sequoia Capital and Tencent Holdings Ltd., also became the investment partner of Weebly. Till the time, the company had joined 80 employees to its work fleet.

In 2016, the company started working to add support for building an eCommerce website to the software, including the support for online payments through PayPal, Stripe or Authorize.net. It also included features to help people promote their brand, like Facebook Ad creator, integrated email marketing, and lead capture, etc. The platform offers support for 15 different languages, including English, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, German, etc.

In 2018, Square acquired Weebly for a massive $365 million in cash and stock.

The website builder provides the users with multiple feature-rich options, such that they can create a multi-function website in minutes. Today, the very platform also provides hosting service where the users can get domain name including .weebly.com, .com, .net, .org, .co, .info, or .us. In the past 12 years, the company has earned over 45 million customers.

In 2007, Weebly was among the 50 Best Websites of 2007 by TIME Magazine. The CEO and co-founder of Weebly, David Rusenko, got a place in the Forbes’ list of “30 Under 30” in 2011.