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Warby Parker : The Story of the Most Innovative Startup of America

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Buying goods online is the most convenient way to get things delivered to your doorstep. At present, there is almost nothing that you can’t buy online. Food, grocery, clothes and air tickets, you can get all these things just in a few clicks. Although almost ten years ago, there were limited things that you could order online, slowly the list got enhanced. One such thing that added to the list of the online available items was the customized eyewear, that was introduced by the famous Warby Parker.

The online merchandise was founded by Neil Blumenthal, Andrew Hunt, David Gilboa, and Jeffrey Raider, four students from Wharton, in 2010. The company was founded in Philadelphia and its headquarter is located in New York City.

Image Source: pinterest.com

It was the time when the four friends were sitting in their college lab and discussing how and why the eyewear was so expensive, and there came up the idea of launching a website to sell eyeglasses online. All four of them were convinced that it will be really convenient for people to buy eyewear online. They also discussed the idea with their teachers and got motivated when they too liked the idea.

At the same time, their college hosted an event, the Venture Initiation Program, that was organised to grant money to the new businesses. Luckily, the four got the grant. The grant was worth $2500 which played as the seed money for the launch of Warby Parker.

The four launched Warby Parker after they went through a one-month marketing training. The name for the company came from a journal by author Jack Kerouac.

At the time Warby Parker was launched, the eyewear industry was already dominated by other big company named Luxottica. Luxottica sold the most stylish eyewear at that time and had every brand available at its stores. The problem with the company was that it was selling every brand, but was putting a big price on it.

It was a golden opportunity for Warby Parker, as it was an online store and was letting customers try on five pairs at their homes. The products sold on the site was also affordable, with a starting range of $95.

According to co-founder of Warby Parker, Gilboa, “The idea was really based on two simple premises. One is that a pair of glasses should not cost more than an iPhone, and two, that eyeglasses could effectively be sold online.”

The idea was unique and was providing people with affordable eyewear sitting at their homes. Within a year of its launch, Vogue covered the story. This helped the company with its marketing.

Later, in 2011, the company earned its first round of funding of worth $2.5 million. In the month of September, in the same year, it raised a Series A round funding of $12.5 million, following by a $37 million Series B round funding in the next year. In 2013, American Express and Mickey Drexler invested a $4 million in Webly Parker.

In 2011, the company had sold over 10,000 pairs of eyeglasses, and the company grew to 60 employees.

Next business move that the company took was to launch a physical store. In 2013, Warby Parker launched its first pop-up shop with the name ‘Holiday Spectacle Bazaar’ in a garage in SoHo, New York. Going offline from online was considered a crazy move by many, but it only raised the popularity of the company. Later, they also opened another shop in a school bus, which functioned for a long 18 months.

Now, the company has its physical stores in over 15 different cities. In 2015, the company was valued at $1.2 billion.

Then in 2016, following the footstep of its rival Luxottica, Warby Parker announced to launch its own optical lab in Rockland County, New York, to have its own manufacturing, in order to bypass the middlemen expenses. The company also announced that it would invest $16 million, to build the 34,000-square-foot manufacturing unit, and will employ over 130 people.

In 2018, Warby Parker raised $75 million in Series E funding, making its total funding about $300 million.

The Warby Parker also contributes in the philanthropic works, as it donates a pair of glasses on every pair of glasses sold by the company, under the “buy one, give one” model. In June 2014, Warby Parker reported the donation of 1,000,000 pairs of eyeglasses. The company also claims to be 100% carbon neutral.

The success story of Warby Parker is no less than any other inspiring story. From the story, we learn the importance of people, as the reason behind the success of this company was that it focussed on its customers and their needs.

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

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Taking risks, is what most of the people are afraid of, especially, when they are running in their late 30s. At the time when people are earning enough money by working under someone else, it was Todd McKinnon, who wanted to pursue his childhood dream of becoming an entrepreneur. Even he was heading a team of more than a hundred employees in his last company and was earning an adequate amount of money to survive in a place like Silicon Valley, he decided to leave the job and just work for his dream. Having years of experience and a great vision, today, he is the founder of a billion dollars company, Okta.

Early Life

McKinnon was born in Southern California and grew up in its bay area. His father was a VP of HR, who worked for various different companies, and his mother was a homemaker.

He completed his under graduation from Brigham Young University, and later, went to the California Polytechnic State University, where he completed a degree in computer science.

Career

McKinnon finds himself lucky, to be born and brought up in the capital of technology. Being a native of Silicon Valley, since his childhood, he was convinced that he would work for an IT company in Silicon Valley.

ToddMcKinnon
Image Source: sbnonline.com

During his graduation, he got recruited by PeopleSoft, in the campus placement, in 1995. At the time, he was building a database application for the recreation department on campus. Co-incidently, the recruiter from PeopleSoft was also working on a similar project and liked Mckinnon’s work and recruited him.

McKinnon was hired as an engineer in the company and received multiple promotions in the span of eight years.

After working for eight long years in PeopleSoft, in 2003, McKinnon left the job and started working at SalesForce. In 2009, he left SalesForce to start his own company, i.e. Okta.

Founding Okta

Besides the dream of working in a Silicon Valley company, McKinnon was also fascinated with the idea of starting his own business. The reason he gives for not starting a business earlier is that he always had good jobs in hand, and those were helpful in gaining good business experience.

In SalesForce, he was managing over hundreds of employees, and he had got a good reputation. He decided that it was the right time to start a business, as he was financially and mentally capable of doing that at the time.

At the same time, people got introduced to the cloud, and not many were sure how long it is going to last. But McKinnon saw an opportunity in the same. He started off developing with a macro product, and when he went out to talk and sell the product to people, he realized there was much more to the cloud, and finally, started working on identity management on the cloud.

McKinnon pitched the idea in over 75 meetings in a span of four to five months. He also asked a former SalesForce colleague, Freddy Kerrest, to join him for the startup, and finally, after seven months of hard, work was able to raise a million dollars seed funding to start the business and founded Okta in 2009. Okta provides cloud software that helps companies manage their employees’ passwords, by providing a “single sign-on” experience.

The company earned its first paying client, in December 2009. In 2015, the company was valued at $1.2 billion and raised $75 million in venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital.

In 2017, the company went public, and in its IPO it raised $187 million. Okta has its offices in Bellevue, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Sydney, San Jose and Washington D.C., and its headquarter is located in San Fransisco. In January 2019, the company reported a number of 100 million registered users on Okta and the company valued at over $7 billion.

Personal Life

McKinnon is married and has two children. He lives with his family in San Francisco. He is a fitness freak, and in 2017, he was named as the 14th fittest man on earth in the age group of 45-to-49, in the annual CrossFit Games, held in Madison, Wisconsin. Currently, he serves as the CEO of Okta.

Daniel Borel : Swiss Entrepreneur & Co-founder of Logitech

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In any business, you must keep an eye on the upcoming opportunities and grab it as soon as it shows up. In business, the success comes to those, who keep the courage of doing the same thing in a different way. One of such business personality from Switzerland is Daniel Borel, who always knew that he wanted to do something big and that big thing resulted in a multimillion tech company, i.e. Logitech.

It was Borel’s capability to see in the future such that he was sure that starting a business of mice manufacturing, that was just arrived in the market and could be a risky one, surely will lead him to success. Today, Logitech is not only world’s largest mice manufacturing company, but it also supplies other products including remote controls, security cameras, keyboards, webcams, speakers, B2B video conferencing equipment, computer accessories, gaming products, etc. at a global level.

Early Life

Born, on 14 February 1950, Daniel Borel is a native of Switzerland. In 1973, he completed his graduation in Physics from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. Even being a physicist, he wanted to do something else, so he switched to computing and in 1977, did his masters in computer science from Stanford University.

Early Career & Founding Logitech

After his post-graduation, Borel moved to the Silicon Valley. It was a huge culture shock for him, as people were working on innovative ideas and the technology was changing at a rapid rate. This inspired him a lot, and he along with, Pierluigi Zappacosta, one of his friends from Stanford University, started working on word processing.

Borel Logitech
Image Source: itreseller.ch

The two were doing quite well in both software and hardware, and at the same time, they started Logitech. They started the company in a farm of Borel’s father-in-law in Apples, Vaud, Switzerland in 1981, along with a former Olivetti engineer, Giacomo Marini.

At the time, around the early 80s, the computer mouse had just arrived in the market along with the personal computer. Borel found an opportunity in the same, and as he was already in contact with big companies like Apple and HP, he decided to manufacture mice for those companies.

Borel, as already had made plans on manufacturing computer mice and its software interface, visited Taiwan and China, to look for companies that could help him manufacture them. At the time, Microsoft also had started using the mouse for its word processor.

Logitech was successful in developing mice for the personal computers, along with a software interface, and approached Microsoft in order to sell those mice to it. Microsoft also showed an interest, but the deal never happened. At last, Borel had to adopt another marketing technique. He published coupons along with an ad in the Byte magazine, where he offered a price as low as $100 for the Logitech mouse when others were selling the same at $170.

The marketing technique went quite well, and Logitech was showered with orders. Since then, the company is growing at a rapid rate and has developed many other products under its name.

In the year 2008, Logitech reported the manufacturing of over one billion mice since 1985. In the same year, the company acquired Ultimate Ears, a supplier of Bluetooth speakers and custom in-ear monitors for professional musicians. In 2011, it also acquired the mobile visual communications provider, Mirial and in 2017, it acquired Astro Gaming.

As of 2018, the reported revenue for the year was US$2.57 billion, and a number of its worldwide employees have grown to 7000 people since its inception. The the two of its headquarters are established in Lausanne, Switzerland and Newark, California, USA.

Personal Life

Borel worked as the chairman of the company between 1982 to 2008, and as the CEO of the company from 1982 to 1988 and 1992 to 1998. Currently, he serves on the board of directors of Logitech and Nestlé. He has also founded Defitech, a foundation to make computer technology for handicapped people, where he also serves on the board of the company.

William Tanuwijaya : The Founder of First Indonesian Unicorn Startup Tokopedia

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There are many rags to rich stories that have been inspiring us. The story of this Indonesian entrepreneur, William Tanuwijaya, is kind of similar to those stories, expect it was not entirely based on good luck, but included lots and lots of hard work. Being born in a middle-class family, and having faced many struggles in life, Tanujania wanted to achieve something better in life, and he knew that without hard work, achieving his goals was impossible.

Early Life

Tanuwijaya was born on 11 November 1981, in Pematang Siantar, North Sumatra. He belonged to a middle-class family. He completed his school education from a local public school.

For his further education, he applied in the Universitas Bina Nusantara (Binus) Jakarta and later, got accepted for the degree course in Informatics. As he belonged to a family with an average income, he decided to work as a part-timer to support his education. He even did a 9 pm to 9 am job, at Warnet, to earn extra money. He graduated from the University as a software engineer in 2003.

Career

William
Image Source: tokyo.slush.org

Being a software engineer, like any other IT graduate, Tanuwijaya also wanted to work with big companies like Google. But since there was no Google branch in Jakarta, he started off his career as a software developer with a medium scale software company in Jakarta. He worked in the same profile with companies like TelkomSigma and Sqiva Sistem.

Gained much experience as a software developer, he shifted his interest in video games development and started working with Bolehnet. Later, in 2006, he joined Indocom Mediatama as the IT and Business Development Manager.

Founding Tokopedia

With an experience of over four years, Tanuwijaya gained enough confidence to start a new business for himself. In 2007, he started working on Tokopedia and called up his friend Leontinus Alpha Edison to work on the same, who later, became the co-founder of the company. The concept behind the startup was to create a platform, where Indonesian buyers and sellers could connect for free.

The basic plan to build this eCommerce platform was ready, but there were no investors who could help the startup to be launched immediately. At the time there were no IT-specific investors in Jakarta. So Tanuwijaya started pitching his plan in front of local investors. At the same time, his father was diagnosed with Cancer, so his plan of launching the platform in 2007, got delayed coming next two years, as the sole responsibility of his family had come on to his shoulders.

The first person Tanuwijaya approached for the funding was his boss from his previous company. His boss liked the idea and helped him to approach more people. Since Tanuwijaya did not belong to a business family, many of the people doubted his ability to handle such a big idea.

It took him two years to raise the required funding to start his business, and finally, on February 6, 2009, he launched Tokopedia. Tokopedia received its initial seed funding worth IDR 2.5 billion from PT Indonusa Dwitama. In the following three years, the company was able to get funding from global venture capitals like East Ventures, CyberAgent Ventures, NetPrice, and SoftBank Ventures Korea, etc.

In 2014, Tokopedia became the first technology company to receive a US$100 million investment from Sequoia Capital and SoftBank, in Southeast Asia.

Tokopedia is Indonesia’s first company that has grown too fast. In 2015, the company reported having more than 4.9 million active product listings, and in 2018, it recorded over 80 million monthly active users and over 4 million merchants registered on the platform.

The company also received a USD $1.1 Billion in funding from Alibaba Group in 2017. In the same year, the company became a Unicorn startup having a valuation above 1 billion US dollars.

Personal Life

William got married to Felicia H.W. on November 28, 2015. Currently, Tanuwijaya is heading the company as the CEO. Establishing Tokopedia as the biggest marketplace in Indonesia, he has become one of the richest people of Indonesia, having an estimated worth of 130 million US Dollars.

Tim Norton : The Kiwi Serial Entrepreneur & Founder of 90 Seconds

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Startups these days have certainly become a trend. Several good ideas are revolving around the investors to get their initial fundings. Many of which are successful in receiving the same, but happens to the ones who are not able to get one and end up with failure? Surely owner of those idea gets disheartened and drop their plan of startup.

But when you are really talented and have helped many other companies with their businesses, you get the confidence to start your own a hundred times even if you have failed multiple times.

The New Zealander self-made entrepreneur, Tim Norton, is one such personality, who kept on working on his ideas and built multiple startups until he founded 90 Seconds.

Early Career

Tim Norton, the serial entrepreneur, is a native of New Zealand, often described as the Steve Jobs of New Zealand. He was born and brought up in Matamata, a town in New Zealand’s North Island. He completed his graduate degree in commerce from the University of Canterbury, in 1999.

Tim Norton
Image Source: Twitter

Soon after he graduated, Tim started working at Energy Intellect Ltd. as the Product & Growth Manager and led many projects there. With his leadership quality, Norton was able to raise $1 million revenue within first 12 months of his entry in the company. Later in the same company, he also handled the post of IT systems administrator and managed the development team. He also successfully raised capital funding for the company.

Beginning of Entrepreneurship

After working for three long years in Energy Intellect, Norton left the job in May 2003. Having gained much experience as a leader, he thought of starting his own business. In the same year, in the month of July, he started his consultant firm Little Ones, where he managed projects for web application development companies.

Although the company was doing really well, he wanted to try out other businesses too. After Little Ones, he started another venture, EvolutionOne, that hosted many open source business apps on the cloud, to provide the various organisations with a single platform, where they could manage their business online.

After these two startups, Norton went to found a few other startups, too, including Decisive Flow, StartupMedia, Airspace and Love to Ride.

Although, not all of his startups succeded, and he ended up borrowing up to a million dollars of debt.

Founding 90 Seconds

In 2010, Norton founded his most successful startup, 90 Seconds Limited, the Cloud Video Production Service. At the time, he was still under a huge debt. In the beginning, Norton shot small videos for free and posted on the platform. He knew that people do not like to watch ads in between the videos and also avoided watching longer videos, so he selected a 90 seconds’ time frame for the videos to be uploaded on the platform, and from here only he discovered the name for his startup.

At the same time, Norton started travelling to various other countries to shoot videos on different topics and to promote his startup in other countries too. In the early stage of the inception of the company, 90 Seconds opened an office in London.

The startup was a huge success, and within one year of its launch, Norton was able to pull off all his debt.

In 2015, the company reported the production of over 10,000 videos for more than 1,000 brands, in 80 countries. The recorded growth rate of the company had reached to 10% month on month, in the same year.

In 2016, 90 Seconds raised a $7.5million funding from Sequoia Capital. At the same time, it also got investment from 40 other investment firms. By Feb 2016, 90Seconds had established offices in five countries and seven cities.

The life story of this Kiwi entrepreneur is really inspiring in terms of the failure he faced in some of his startups, and even then he kept on experimenting to find the one business that would transform his career entirely.

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

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

Early Life

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

Founding GrabHouse

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

Pankhri Shrivastva with Prateek Shukla
Image Source: officechai.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Personal Life

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