Your Tech Story

startup story

Scott Lee – The Founder of the Startup Helping You Find Your Perfect GooRoo

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Learning is a never-ending process. Constant learning generates brilliant minds and indigenous futures. Learning, with technology, i.e. alongside the internet has made it easier, portable, ageless, and does not require one to go to an institution. Everyone is capable of learning anything at any time and any place, by just simply having a smart device near them. GooRoo is one such leading service in terms of education with technology. It is AI-powered tutoring and learning platform with a strong focus on personalization, and the man behind this educational startup is Scott Lee. The success story of Lee, speaks up that challenges and life experiences often paves the best ways to success for you.

Scott Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea. As a child, he travelled to the United States to study in the Connecticut Boarding School. The problem for him was that he didn’t know a single word of English. That being so, navigating his way around the school was a challenge for him. After schooling, he went on to do graduation in engineering from Columbia University. After his sophomore year, Lee returned to Korea to serve the army for two years, in order to keep hold of his Korean citizenship.

Scott Lee
Image Source: newlearningtimes.com

After returning from the army, Scott started his first startup, ‘PeerTutor’, which was inspired by his ordeal in childhood. PeerTutor was meant for Korean students who could not speak English. The service-connected impoverished high school students to English tutors. He returned to the U.S. for his college and ended up working at JP Morgan & Chase as a financial analyst. Since the time he had come back from the army, Lee was encouraged to start his life as an entrepreneur, and it didn’t take long for him to quit his job to do so.

In June 2015, Scott launched his 2nd startup, ‘GooRoo’. GooRoo is a monthly subscription learning platform that matches you with the perfect tutor, the best learning programs and the most helpful educational guidance according to your needs – all with the help of AI.

GooRoo reflects on everyone deserves a good education and has a mission to cater to every student’s unique needs while bringing the excitement of learning to the world. “We believe everyone can succeed to fulfil their desired goals with flying colours. Whether it’s looking for a new hobby, to ace the next test, or an extra push, we’ve got you covered,” says the official site.

GooRoo implies four simple steps to work out perfectly for every individual. The first step is to request a GooRoo which is followed by receiving personalized matches in the second step. The third step involves to book and have a first session proceeded by receiving feedback and actionable recommendations.

GooRoo is a partner of Books for Africa (an initiative that donates one textbook to a child in need for every session completed), NYC Department of Education, NYC Department of Aging, TAL, Related Reality and CBN. Now, more families have access to high-quality tutors at affordable prices. The company has provided more than 3,500 tutoring sessions and has grown to have more than 1,000 tutors in New York City. GooRoo is looking forward to expanding to Boston and San Francisco.

The company has had only two funding rounds, in which they have raised about $4.2 million. GooRoo promises to be transparent and fair in the pricing to ensure that every individual gets an honest education.

Lee recalls his time in the army and explains how the experience shaped him to be an entrepreneur. “My time in the army tested my patience, resilience, and ability to adjust to changing conditions,” he said. He also added that the army taught him leadership, teamwork and humility. “The army works much like a startup -you are part of a small team with huge tasks, and you have to work together to problem solve on a daily basis. Needless to say, it was a life-changing experience,” Scott explained on his life in the Korean army.

GooRoo is available on both Android and iOS and makes it easier to find a tutor. Scott Lee, who turned his childhood struggle into a company, makes sure that it has a strong dedication towards the education that extends even beyond its tutoring services. He hopes that GooRoo continues its work at its best. Scott is surely someone to learn from.

Decoding the Life of Ruzwana Bashir: A Woman of Substance

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Hailing from a tight-knit Pakistani community to co-founding PEEK—the story of Ruzwana Bashir is an inspiration to many. Life was not easy for her; she had a tough time growing up. She explained how freedom for women was dreaded upon in her community. It was until college when she started wearing western outfits. Before that, she was obtruded to wear Salwar Kameez and Burkha all the time. Wearing western outfits were not so popular in her family and forbidden in her community. Such inferior experience at a tender age changed her as a person.

Ruzwana Bashir
Image Source: purposegeneration.com

Ruzwana grew up in a small community in Skipton, outskirt of Rotherham. She enrolled in Skipton High School, North Yorkshire. Talking about her childhood, Ruzwana was a brilliant student. With assiduous commitment and sheer dedication, she managed to get into Oxford University. She took Philosophy, Economics and Politics as her major in college. She became second-ever Asian female president of the Oxford Union debating society and remained actively involved in numerous extracurricular activities. Because of her outgoing personality, she became a popular face inside the campus. According to Ruzwana, the turning part in her life came after she got the Fulbright Scholarship to pursue an MBA from Harvard University. There was no turning back after then. After finishing her professional degree, she started working as an investment banker intern at Goldman Sachs. She went on to work with Gilt Groupe and was the founding member of the team for Art.sy before starting with her own venture.

Found glory as an entrepreneur

Ruzwana entrepreneurship journey started in the year 2012. Her idea was to create a market space to connect travellers to local service providers offering booking services to holiday destinations. The ideas worked like a charm. She along with her fellow co-founder, Oskar Bruening, was able to attract investors like Eric Schmidt, Jack Dorsey, and David Bonderman for financial funding. By the end of 2013, Peek expanded exponentially by launching Peek Pro suite, an organized backend software to smooth tour related operations and at the same time launched a mobile application to maximize audience engagements.

In 2014, Peek received another $5 million round of funding. The success of Peek established Ruzwana as the most influential women in Silicon Valley alongside Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg. Apart from several corporate awards, the company emerged out as the top 10 most innovation website by Fast Company. TIME defined Peek to be the top 50 most creative website of 2014. The initial success made Ruzwana the superwomen of Silicon Valley, and later, awarded as the most prominent entrepreneur by Fortune. According to Ruzwana, smart work and vision to think differently is a magical potion to achieve success in life.

Spotlight and the Controversies

Bashir came into the spotlight on 29 August 2014, when she wrote an article in The Guardian, where she delineates her story of survival as a child. Her article on Rotherham’s Asian abuse camp misery gained nationwide attention. In addition, became a shred of prime evidence to initiate an investigation. Once the investigation authority started digging up, more victims came forward. The special team prepared combined testimony of several victims, and later, all perpetrators were sentenced guilty. The whole incident shocked the world. It became clear women suffered sexual abuse and exploitation in captivities. To make matter worse the victims were beaten to the extent that they refrain from registering their complaints. It was Ruzwana initiative that helped in solving several heinous cases.

According to Ruzwana, the struggles she had gone through her life really helped her out how to handle the extreme situation and remain composed. She utilised those experience on her journey to entrepreneurship. Her calm temperament shows her mental toughness, she is not just an amazing person but also a woman of a substance.

Dennis Crowley: Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Foursquare

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Passion and dream when mixed together, results in great combinations, and when you meet with people with similar interest, the resultant is a success story. Crowley Dennis got lucky when he met his partner Naveen Selvadurai and both co-founded Foursquare. Foursquare is a local search-and-discovery mobile app, which became popular in no time, due to some of its unique features like Tips and Tastes. It offers awards to its old users and calls them Superusers.

Crowley was born on 19 June 1976, in Medway, Massachusetts, where he attended the Xaverian Brothers High School. After completing his school education, he went to Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, where he received a B.A. degree, in 1998. As soon as Crowley graduated, he started working with Jupiter Communications, and later, in 2000, became the product developer at Vindigo a mobile app development company.

crowley dennis
Image Source: irishamerica.com

After working for two years with the company, Crowley left his job, in order to complete his higher education, and in 2004, he received an M.P.S. master’s degree from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. During his time at the NYU, he started working on his graduate thesis project, Dodgeball, along with one of his fellow student, named Alex Rainert, in 2003.

Dodgeball was a location-based social networking software, that enabled its users to enter their location and find out the locations of the friends as well as interesting venues nearby. The project later became Crowley’s first startup and earned popularity. In fact, only after two years of its inception, Google acquired Dodgeball in 2005, and Crowley started working with the company. But the company shut down all the operations of Dodgeball in 2007, and Crowley left Google.

In the same year, Crowley joined another tech company named, Area/Code. This was the place where he met his future business partner Naveen Selvadurai. Naveen belongs to the Indian descent and has got a master’s degree in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. After working with tech giants like Lucent, Sony, Nokia and Sun Microsystems, he was working with a startup company in the same office space as Crowley was.

The two met and shared a common interest, ‘location-based services’. Naveen had experience with iPhone stuff and was interested in hacking city apps. On the other hand, Crowley was working on mobile apps and has just sold his own location-based service to Google. After discussing ideas, the two came to the conclusion that they must build another location-based service similar to Dodgeball.

The two started working on the idea, Naveen working on the iPhone stuff, and Crowley handling all the website’s work. As a result, after working for a few months they developed FourSquare, in late 2008, and launched the service at the SXSW in 2009. The service was launched in 100 metro cities worldwide.

The service not only allowed to put the check-ins to find out nearby friends but also suggested the users of the nearby interesting places. The service provided a new feature a personalised list for the users titled To-dos.

In the span of 4 years, the company had registered over 7 million users, and by the mid of 2011, it was expected that the company would pass 750 million check-ins. In fact, the then President Barak Obama also registered to the service in 2011, in order to take tips from the White House staff from the locations he had visited.

The main reason behind the success of the app was the gamification it rendered. The gamification in the app helped it become more interesting and encouraged more user engagement. In the year of 2010, there were news making rounds that the major tech giants like Yahoo!, Facebook and Microsoft were rivalling to acquire Foursquare for a rumoured $100-150 million. The app offers services for both enterprises and consumers.

Crowley worked as the CEO of the company for a long period of 7 years, and later, became the Executive Chairman of the company.

Crowley was named in the list of Fortune Magazine’s “40 Under 40” for two consecutive years in 2010 and 2011, and further was named in the list of Vanity Fair’s “New Establishment” in 2011 and 2012. He was also named one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35 by MIT Technology Review TR35.

Tomas Gorny : The CEO and Founder of UnitedWeb, NextVita, IPOWER

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

There are times when people fail, but only the ones who don’t let their spirits fail, reach their goals. One such personality, who fought with all the ups and downs, is Tomas Gorny, who despite many challenges, never gave up on hard work, and even after, becoming bankrupt, did not lose hope and continued to work for his aims. Today, he is the CEO of a multi-million company, and all the strategies that he used to succeed have become the inspiration for other aspiring entrepreneurs.

Gorny was born in 1975, in Poland. He belonged to a relatively poor family. He had always heard that in the U.S. there is a better life, and you are paid on the basis of your hard work. This had ignited a desire in him to go to the U.S. But before that at the age of 7, he got the chance to visit Germany, which was a life-changing experience for him. In the next seven years, he was convincing his parents to move to Germany, so that he could go to a better school and they could have a better life.

TomasGorny
Image Source: nextiva.com

When he was 14 years old, he along with his family, moved to Germany. In Germany, he attended a business school, from where his interest in entrepreneurship started to grow. In the class, he was the second best student, and in three years, he was running a PC distribution service in Europe. Here as a 17 years old his smart work worked for him, and he was more successful than his other competitors. According to Gorny, this was the time, when he started believing in himself, and he developed great business skills. Despite all the success in Germany, he had never forgotten his dream of moving to the U.S., and after completing six years, in Germany, Gorny migrated to Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles, he started a web hosting company, named Internet Communications and became a part owner of that company. During his time ar Internet Communication, he struggled financially. He was 20, and he had to work in double shifts to bear with his daily expenditures. He also worked as a carpet cleaner and a valet and lived on $3 a day in terms of a food allowance. Only after two years at the company, it got acquired by another company, which made Gorny a millionaire. Gorny was a 22 years millionaire.

Gorny knew that nothing is forever, so, he started investing in various other ventures to utilize his newly earned money and increase the profits. But there came the famous dot-com crash, followed by the 9/11 mishappening, bringing him back to the start, wiping off all his wealth. He was left with his car and a $6000 in his bank account.

But as is always said, hard work will pay you off. Gorny had gained enough experience with his hard work. The asset of his experience encouraged him to start his business once again, such that even after his bankruptcy, he kept on experimenting and launched and sold two companies. Later, by the end of 2001, he launched another hosting service under the company name IPOWER with his $6000.

The company had a new strategy. Other companies were selling everything at different prices as separate products, whereas IPOWER had a single package that included all from domain to hosting, that too for $7.95. Also, the company offered one-click installation and control panels for web hosting. The formula worked, and within six years, IPOWER was the second big hosting company after GoDaddy. In 2007, the company hit the million user spot, and that was the time when it had a merger with a company called Endurance, Gorny remaining the CEO. In 2011, the company was sold to Goldman-Sachs for a billion dollars, and Gorny left the company, remaining a member of the board.

In 2008, Gorny started United Web, as the parent company for his next venture, named Nextiva. He had started working on Nextvita in 2006, Nextvita was the result of a lack of innovation in the telecom industry. Gorny founded an opportunity in the same and took phone system and brought it to the cloud. After six years of its inception, the company became the third largest privately-held business cloud communication provider in Arizona. The company is headquartered in Scottsdale, United States and has over 700 employees (as of 2017).

In the beginning, when Gorny was working in Germany, his accent was considered the biggest flaw in him. But in the years passed by, he made it his biggest asset. He says, “Your obstacles are your strength. Your biggest strength is going to be sometimes your biggest weakness.”

Sonos : The Pioneer in Wireless Smart Speakers

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Handsfree, smart speaker, music streaming services, so much has been changed in the past more than a decade. To be precise, there were no such technologies over 17 years ago, and people were happy detangling the mesh of cables for music. But there was a group of visionaries, that wanted to bring the change and free people from the trap of cables to provide them with the best sound experience.

The American consumer electronics company, Sonos, was founded by four business partners John MacFarlane, Craig Shelburne, Tom Cullen, and Trung Mai, in 2002. Except for John, all the other three co-founders belonged to Santa Barbara, and John moved to the city to pursue a PhD degree from California-Santa Barbara in 1990.

sonos
Image Source: digitalmusicnews.com

At the same time, the Internet was at its initial stage and was not as popular as it is today. At that time, only fewer than 16 million U.S. households had high-speed dial-up broadband, and America Online was the top internet provider in the U.S. Like other technical persons, John was also sure about the future success and scope of the internet. This way, along with Craig Shelburne, Tom Cullen, and Trung Mai, John decided to start Software.com, and after running it for a decade, they sold the company to Phone.com.

After selling the company, the next thing the visionaries had to do was to think of a new business idea. For a few months of brainstorming, John presented a plan to start a business of building devices which would enable local-area networks for aeroplanes. But the other three partners were not convinced. Again four of them started looking for that out-of-the-box idea, that would be innovative and unique.

At last, the four coincided on a single topic, i.e. music. Today, music streaming services, as well as wireless speakers and headphones, are quite common, but at that time, the concept of the wireless system had not even born. In fact, the music systems came with a mesh of cables, and when anyone wanted to connect the speakers in the different rooms, through a same music system, there was no choice other than drilling their walls to pass the wires through it.

So this was it. The idea was to create a music system, that could play the same music in different rooms without connecting any wires using the internet. But since there was no such existing technology at that time, despite being a unique idea, it did not seem feasible, too. Still, since all the four partners liked the idea, they all started working on the same.

Since the four had been successful entrepreneurs in the past, they had connections and the skills to draw the investments. They also started employing some skilled people for the manufacturing of their dream project. Initially, they opened an office above a restaurant called El Paseo in Santa Barbara and started Sonos in 2002.

The focus of the team was to create a system that was easy to install and would be able to work through cross-technology integration, but this increased the complexity for the designers and the developers. They chose Linux as the basic platform, but the operating system needed drivers for audio, wireless and others, to work with the new music system. So the founders decided to create those drivers.

Finally, in 2003, the company was ready with the design and prototype of its first product. John MacFarlane demonstrated the prototype at the Consumer Electronics Show, in 2004, where it won the “Best of Audio” award. It was the first wireless music system. The company launched the system, naming its Digital Music System, in 2005. It was the combination of smart speakers and a remote. People welcomed the system with open arms, and they loved it. The reviews for the system gave positive points to its design, reliability, and great sound.

It is clear that MacFarlane thought ahead of time, and this way, he created the systems capable of receiving the new upgrades. The same year, Sonos launched the Digital Music System, it introduced a new amplifier, i.e. ZP100 amplifier, for it. The company also announced to make those music systems available for the U.K. citizens too.

With the launch of the iPhone, in 2007, the company launched its app, that enabled the iPhone to become the controller for its Digital Music System. In 2011, the company launched another app for Android users.

In 2009, the company released its much cheaper, 400 dollars, PLAY:5, all-in-one smart speaker. The continuous updates and improvements in the music systems made the company one of the leaders in the market, and its products popular worldwide. In 2011, the company added Sirius XM and Spotify to its catalogue. In 2012, the company upgraded its speakers with Amazon Cloud Player compatibility, following a collaboration with Tencent, through which it added the QQ Music to its catalogue. Currently, the music systems from Sonos support Apple Music as well as music from other popular streaming services including Spotify.

Since its inception, Sonos has been introducing the world with the innovative music products and is the pioneer in the wireless music streaming technology. The company and its story has been an inspiration for every aspiring entrepreneur, which not only tells them to be successful, but also tell them to prioritize quality for long-term success.

goPuff : The Story of a Millenial Delivery Service, to the Millenials and by the Millenials

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Having a necessary education or experience to run a business has become a myth, and most of the successful college dropouts, including Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg are the biggest example of the same. Now there is no limitation on the age or the background of a person, in order to start a business. Like the co-founders of goPuff, Yakir Gola and Rafael Ilishayev, who started the company without having any experience in entrepreneurship, both running 20 and were the students of Drexel University.

Though Gola had a bit of experience of business earned through his parents’ small jewellery business, Ilishayev was a newbie for their startup. Gola’s parents had migrated from Israel, and Ilishayev’s family belonged to the Russian descent. The two met each other at the University, and since they shared the common language, they became good friends in no time.

rafael ilishayev and yakir gola
Image Source: bizjournals.com

goPuff was not their first business, as, before goPuff, they sold office furniture to people and had saved a sufficient amount of money. While in college, it was Gola who had a car among all their friends, and always went out to bring small daily need things. Sometimes, the two would go to multiple stores at different locations to buy different things. The process was quite time-consuming and tiring.

Since it was not much long ago, companies like Amazon and some food delivery services were already providing home-deliveries, but there was nothing that could help with the late night cravings or emergency needs. It was an eye opener for the two, and they founded an opportunity in the same.

Gola and Ilishayev were convinced that they need to start a service, which could help people get things on their doorsteps, within a few minutes. The two started working on their business model and concluded 50 items, which they could deliver easily in a particular area. Since they did not have much of the money, and initially, it was just an experiment, they picked cheaper things to deliver. The two founded this very delivery service in their University campus and named it goPuff.

The first hurdle that came into their way was convincing the store owners. After that, they started finding investors for their business and invested $60,000 of the earnings from their furniture business. They worked seven days a week and 16 hours a day, as initially, they did not have the money to hire other people for the delivery. In fact, it was only Gola and Ilishayev, who delivered for the first six months.

The driving force for the two was the challenges and the targets they gave each other. Soon, the service became popular, and they started delivering in other Universities in Philadelphia, and then, in the other cities. After working hard for four months, they were able to get a small warehouse for their supplies, and later, they added more things to their delivery list. In 2015, Gola left college to concentrate completely on the venture, and on the other hand, Ilishayev graduated in legal studies from the University in the same year.

The company became popular and started doing really well. In December 2015, the two started another delivery service to specially deliver beer, naming it goBeer, and in the following year, in the month of May, they launched an alcohol delivery service called goBooze.

Soon, the service extended to the Universities based in cities like Boston, Washington, D.C. and Austin, Texas. By the end of the first year of its inception, the company had hired 60 full-time employees, and 2017, it had 200 employees. In the same year, the company closed an $8.25 million Series A funding round from Anthos Capital, and the two partners were named “2017 30 Under 30: Retail and E-Commerce” by Forbes. They also won the 2017 Target Marketer of the Year Award.

The credit for the success of goPuff entirely goes to the uniqueness of the concept behind it, and the sacrifices the two co-founders made to work for it. For those past years, both Gola and Ilishayev have been ditching holidays as well as other plans with their family and friends to work for goPuff. goPuff, in a few cities, provides its services 24/7, and in other cities, the service is open until 4:30 a.m. The company is serving to the millennials, so the method of customer support is also millennial. The company is always active on Twitter to answer the queries of its customer. The company provides the fastest delivery, 23 minutes being the fastest delivery time.