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Drew Houston : The Co-founder & the CEO of Dropbox

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Drew Houston is an American Internet billionaire entrepreneur, who co-founded the multi-billion company Dropbox at the mere age of 24. Once just an idea, now has more than 500 worldwide users subscribed to it. Houston a computer enthusiast, gives the credit of his success to his partner and co-founder of Dropbox, Arash Ferdowsi, and the education he received at MIT. In one of his speeches at MIT, he said that people should surround themselves with inspiring people. He said, “Surrounding yourself with inspiring people is now just as important as being talented or working hard.”

Drew Houston
Image Source: nytimes.com

Early Life

Houston was born on 4 March 1983, in Acton, Massachusetts. His father was an electrical engineer. Houston was a student at the Acton-Boxborough Regional High School. Initially, he was influenced by video games and had decided that he would become a video game tester. But as soon his father introduced him with programming, his focus diverted towards the computers. At the age of 14, while playing a video game, on his father’s Pcjr computer, he found a bug in the game and reported to the video game company, upon which he was offered a job at the same company. In 1990, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from where he earned a graduate degree in Computer Science.

Career & Founding Dropbox

Along with an offer for a job at the early age of 14, he had also been a part of many startups including Bit9, Accolade and Hubspot. Houston was still in college when he thought of developing Dropbox. He wrote the first line of code for Dropbox, while he was travelling on a bus, as he had forgotten his USB drive. At the time he was frustrated with his habit of forgetting and losing those USB flash drives all the time. So he conceived the idea of creating a cloud-based system for keeping the files in it. At first, he started working on the project for his personal use, but then he realised that the product could benefit other people too.

Houston released a video regarding the idea, his college mate Arash Ferdowsi being one of the viewers of it. Ferdowsi was really impressed by the idea and contacted Houston for partnership. From here the two started working on the project together.

In May 2007, Houston founded the parent company to Dropbox, Evenflow, Inc. In the same year, the company was able to get a seed funding from venture capitalists like Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Y Combinator. In 2008, the company launched Dropbox at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. Within one year, Dropbox had more than 3 million registered users. By 2011, the number of users reached 50 million, and in March 2016, it had 500 million users.

During the evolution of the company, it also went through some successful acquisitions including TapEngage, Audiogalaxy, Snapjoy in 2012, Bubbli in 2014, CloudOn in 2015, etc. In 2011, the total revenue earned by the company was over $240 million. Dropbox is considered as one of the twenty best startups of Silicon Valley.

In February 2018, Dropbox filed an IPO to be listed on the Nasdaq.

Personal Life

Houston is a huge video game lover. He also likes to sing, and during the college, he was a part of ’90s cover band. Business Week named Houston as one of the most promising players aged 30 and under. He was also named among the top 30 under-30 entrepreneurs by inc.com.

Dave Winer : American Software Developer & the Fore-father of Blogging

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Publishing is what Winer was always interested in. An MS in Computer Science, he detested computers and the engineering culture at the school level and became familiar with computers only when he went to the college. Winer is a New York-based American software developer and entrepreneur, who is best known for his writing and his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web services. For his writing, he has earned titles like “protoblogger” and is counted among “most influential web voices” of Silicon Valley.

Early Life

Dave Winer was born on 2 May 1955, in Brooklyn, New York City. His father Eve Winer was a PhD and a school psychologist. His mother Leon Winer was also a Ph.D., and a former professor of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. In 1972, he completed his high school from the Bronx High School of Science. In high school, he started an underground newspaper. Later, he joined the Tulane University in New Orleans and graduated in Mathematics in the year 1976. He then completed an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in 1978.

Early Career

After completing his education, Winer started working in the computer time-sharing business, in the Empire State Building on the thirty-ninth floor. Later, he moved to Silicon Valley and joined a leading software company at the time, Personal Software, Inc., as the lead developer. The company worked on a software product VisiCalc, and he began to work on his own product idea named VisiText. While in the company, he came to the conclusion that the company did not ship what it produced. At the same time, the company started working on a commercial product around an “expand and collapse” outline display, an outliner software product.

winer
Image Source: Wikipedia

In 1981, he left Personal Software and founded his own company named Living Videotext, where he further worked on the outliner. In 1983, he released ThinkTank for Apple II, which was based on VisiText, followed by the release of ThinkTank for IBM PC and Macintosh, etc.

In 1987, Winer sold Living Videotext to Symantec. The deal paid him a fortune, and he worked with the newly formed Symantec’s Living Videotext division for the next six months.

UserLand

The next year, in1988, Winer founded another company named UserLand Software and was appointed the CEO of the company. Under the name of the company, he released a system-level, outliner-based scripting language, Frontier, for Mac. In the mid-90s, Winer became interested in online publishing while helping automate the production process of the strikers’ online newspaper. He started working towards online publishing and developed a website for himself the ‘Scripting News’, in February 1997. Scripting News is described as “one of the web’s oldest blogs.”

In the same year, he started Frontier’s NewsPage, supporting Scripting News. Later, he, along with Microsoft, developed the XML-RPC protocol, resulting in the formation of SOAP, that he co-authored jointly with Microsoft’s Don Box, Bob Atkinson, and Mohsen Al-Ghosein. In the same year, he developed an XML syndication format for his Scripting News weblog in order to provide his readers with much more timely information.

During the same time, RSS was created for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal, preceded by several trials at web syndication that did not obtain much popularity. In July 1999, Dan Libby produced a new version of RSS, RSS 0.91 incorporating elements from Dave Winer’s news syndication format. In April 2001, Netscape dropped RSS support from My.Netscape.Com and Winer, along with RSS-DEV Working Group, published a modified version of the RSS 0.91 specification on the UserLand website. With a set of changes, Winer also released RSS 0.92 in December 2000 and RSS 2.0 in September 2002.

By 1999, Winer had become the leader in blogging tools and a leading evangelist of weblogs. The InfoWorld named him one of the “Top Ten Technology Innovators” in February 2000.

DaveNet

In November 1994, Winer originated DaveNet, to replace the standard news channels of the software business. DaveNet distributed newsletters over email and stored the goofy and informational web archives on it. Few of his newsletters included complaints against Apple’s management. The HotWired also published his censored columns from DaveNet, between June 1995 and May 1996. DaveNet won the Cool Site of the Day award in March 1995 but was discontinued in 2004.

Podcasting

Winer was receiving more requests for audio blogging features in the RSS from his readers and other bloggers, upon which he decided to include a new functionality in RSS 0.92, named the enclosure, that would transfer the address of a media file to the RSS aggregator. On January 2001, he first demonstrated this new feature in his Scripting News weblog, by enclosing the song Grateful Dead in it. With a built-in aggregator for both “send” and “receive” components in Userland’s weblogging product, Radio Userland, many of its users started doing audio blogging on it. In February 2004, Ben Hammersley suggested the word ‘Podcasting’ for ‘Audioblogging’.

Along with UserLand, Scripting News and Podcast, Winer also shares the credits for BloggerCon and Weblogs.com followed by some web authoring tools, including OPML Editor, River2 aggregator, Fargo, Dropbox-based outliner, etc.

Personal Life

Currently, Winer is living in New York. In June 2002, Winer underwent life-saving bypass surgery and had to step down as CEO of UserLand. He has been working as a successful writer in Silicon Valley and is referred to as one of the most prolific content generators in the web history. In 2003, he worked as a fellow at Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School and was the visiting scholar at NYU School of Journalism between 2010-12.

In 2002, he was named among the ‘InfoWorld Top Ten Technology Innovator’. In 2001, he was awarded the ‘Chosen Tech Renegade’ by Wired for work on SOAP with Microsoft.

Nintendo : From a Small Card Company to World’s Largest Video Game Maker

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There might merely be a person, who has not heard of Mario. The magical mission game that engaged every single child with entertainment and amusement was not just famous among the children, but, was also the first choice of every teenager, and adult. It is also one of the best-selling video games in history.

Everybody is familiar with this amazing video game, but not every person would have heard of the name of the company that produced it. Nintendo is a name that started with the production of playing cards and ended up in becoming one of the biggest producers of video games in the world. Nintendo not only have Mario to its credits but have introduced multiple entertaining games and gaming consoles to the world.

Nintendo a Playing Card Company

Nintendo was founded by a Japanese entrepreneur, Fusajiro Yamauchi, as a playing card company in Kyoto, Japan, on 23 September 1889. At the time, the foreign card games were banned in Japan, and not from twenty or thirty years, but since 1633, almost 250 years. Many people had tried making different card games, but eventually, all of them were banned too.

nintendo
Image Source: nintendolife.com

Meanwhile, a playing card game Hanafuda was developed. The game was played with handmade cards, which instead of numbers had illustrations on it. The game escaped the ban and became popular in no time. Nintendo started making good profits with the production of those cards, and Yamauchi had to employ assistants to lower down the workload.

In 1949, the company was renamed as Nintendo Karuta Co., Ltd., and started operating outside Japan, as The Nintendo Playing Card Co. By the time, Yamauchi’s grandson had also joined the company, and in 1956, he flew to the USA, to expand the business overseas. He found out that the playing card market in the USA had quite limited potential, so he decided to take advantage of this opportunity and got the license from Disney, to print Disney cartoon characters on the playing cards.

Till 1963, the company had experimented with various other businesses as well, including taxi service, a love hotel chain, a TV network, a food company, etc. At the same time, the playing card game was also facing a drop in its popularity.

In 1966, the company entered into the toy business and with the help of maintenance engineer of the company, Gunpei Yokoi, developed the Ultra Hand, an extendable toy arm. The company produced many other toys, but it was taking a little longer for Nintendo to establish itself as one of the leading toy maker company.

In 1973, the company started developing family entertainment venues with the Laser Clay Shooting System, in which the participants used a light gun for shooting. The idea was a hit, but the company had to shut it down soon, maintaining it was way too expensive.

Success in Video Games

In 1974, Nintendo managed to get the rights to distribute the commercial home video game console, Magnavox Odyssey, in Japan. By 1977, the company started the manufacturing of Color TV-Game home video game consoles. It also produced arcade games with EVR Race.

In 1981, with the release of Donkey Kong, Nintendo experienced real success. The next release from Nintendo was a handheld video game, that was also an immediate hit.

In 1985, Nintendo launched a platform video game named the Super Mario Bros., a successor to the 1983 arcade game, Mario Bros., for the Famicom, and in North America and Europe for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Along with Super Mario Bros., Nintendo holds the credit of many other famous games including NES, Game Boy, SNES, Nintendo 64, and Game Boy Advance SP.

In 1995, Nintendo announced that it had sold one billion game cartridges worldwide. At the same time, Nintendo bought 25% shares in another video game development company Rare and developed a CGI game through this partnership. The game was an instant success and became the second best-selling game in the SNES library.

Next big release from Nintendo was the Nintendo DS and Wii, between which, the Wii console became the best seller and was released in 2006. Among the handheld video games, the Nintendo DS Lite is the best-selling handheld console of all time.

Barry Lam : Founder & Chairman of World’s Largest Maker of Laptop Computers

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Success is with those, who work hard towards their goals. The time, the personal computers were just introduced, the Taiwan based visionary entrepreneur, Berry Lam, saw the future scope of the notebook Pcs. He worked hard and used his more than 15 years of experience, in the manufacturing industry, to convert his vision into a successfully running business, and now, he is leading the number one laptop manufacturing company of Taiwan.

Early Life

Barry Lam was born in 1949 in Shanghai, China. His father worked as an accountant for the Hong Kong Club, so he spent his childhood in Hong Kong. He went to Taiwan, to pursue a degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University. He also received the master’s degree in the same field, from the same university.

barry-lam
Image Source: forbes

Career

Soon after Lam completed his master’s degree, along with his former classmates, in 1973, he founded a manufacturing business of the handheld calculators, naming the company Kinpo Electronics. Lam was appointed as the president of the company, and in his leadership, the company emerged as one of the largest contract manufacturers of calculators.

Founding Quanta Computer

In the early 80s, with the increasing popularity of personal computers, Lam founded scope in notebook computer manufacturing and became interested in the same field. In 1988, he left Kinpo to found Quanta Computer, along with one of his colleagues, C. C. Leung, with a capital of less than US$900,000.

In the beginning, it had two production lines that were handled by 60 employees at its office in Shilin Street, Hong Kong. Lam, the visionary entrepreneur wanted to become more than just a supplier. With Quanta, he offered combinations of features for its every product, which the client could choose from. Through Quanta he produced functional and powerful, yet lightweight products.

With the success of the company, Lam established its headquarter in Taiwan and also established the Quanta Research and Development Center there. The Center is focused on creating next-generation innovative products and works in collaboration with institutions such as MIT, National Taiwan University and Academia Sinica.

In 2001, Quanta Computer was recognised as the largest notebook manufacturer worldwide and had a 50% increase in the production. In 2002, the company established its plant in China. Under the One Child One Laptop project, in 2007, Quanta took orders for one million laptops and became the original design manufacturer for the OLPC XO-1.

In 2008, Quanta was named as Taiwan’s second largest private manufacturing enterprise, with an annual turnover of NT$777 billion reported in 2007. In the same year, the share of Quanta in the worldwide market was estimated to be 31%. The major clients of Quanta Computer include Apple Inc., Dell, HP, Amazon, Cisco, Lenovo, LG, BlackBerry, Sony, Sun Microsystems, Toshiba, and Verizon Wireless, etc.

Currently, there are 70,000 employees working for Quanta Computer worldwide, and it has expanded its businesses into network systems, mobile communication, automotive electronics, etc.

Personal Life

Currently, Barry Lam is serving as the chairman of the company. He was named the Entrepreneur of the Year 2005 by Ernst and Young. In 2006, he was awarded the Second Class Bright Star Medal’ by the Taiwan Government. He was listed as the 296th richest person in the world and 5th richest in Taiwan with a net worth of US$4.2 billion, in 2012. In the same year, he received an Honorary Doctorate, from the National Tsing Hua University.

Melanie Perkins : One of The Youngest Female CEOs of Tech World

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“Persistence is what makes an idea to happen,“ the answer given by the CEO and co-founder of Canva when asked about the secret of her success at such a young age. A teenager, who was disturbed with the complexity of the designing software including Photoshop and InDesign, had never thought that she would find a $1b opportunity in this complexity. One of the youngest female CEOs, and that too of two multi-million companies, Melanie Perkins’s hard work and struggle taught her a lot about leadership and running a business.

The Career Timeline & Founding Canva Inc.

Perkins was born and brought up in Perth, Australia and was a student of commerce and communications at the University of Western Australia. At the age of 19, she started teaching graphic designing to University students. With the time, she realised, that it was way too difficult to teach those students how to use those heavy software rather the designing itself. She was frustrated with the fact that it takes almost 22 clicks to export a high-quality PDF.

MelaniePerkins
Image Source: snappystreet.com

Those difficulties, that her students were facing, made her think of developing an easy to use platform for them. She decided to convert her idea into a functional website at a small level to test its potential at a smaller scale. She raised a sum of money, that she borrowed from her relatives, to pay the software designers to build the platform.

In 2007, she along with boyfriend Cliff Obrecht, founded Fusion Books, an online platform on which various schools could design their yearbooks. Only in a few years, Fusion Books became the largest Year Book publisher of Australia. Perkins even had to drop out from the University to completely focus on the website. The website soon became widespread in France and New Zealand, too.

Perkins knew that the scope of designing is unlimited, and it would be better for her if she focuses on using the same idea on a larger scale. In 2010, she decided to raise funding for her next big idea Canva and flew to California to pitch the idea in front of the major investors of Silicon Valley.

The very first investor whom she met was the San Francisco based investor and founder of MaiTai, Bill Tai. Although she wasn’t successful in getting funding from him, her idea was convincing enough to make Mr Tai help her meet other investors. But, it took three years for her to receive the first round of funding of $3 million for Canva and finally, in 2013, she launched it with the help of Cameron Adams, third co-founder of Canva and a hardcore Googler, who now serves as the Chief Product Officer of Canva. Cameron Adams is also among the first investors of Canva along with Lars Rasmussen and Matrix Partners.

The three years of her struggle taught her how to sell, how to recruit, and how to build a business. And her hard work turned out to be most fruitful for her. Just after one year of the launch of Canva, it had 750,000 users, and in April 2014, the company welcomed Social-media and technology expert Guy Kawasaki as its chief evangelist.

In 2015, Canva was launched for the businesses as Canva Work, a professional tool for designing. In 2017, the company reported its revenue to be four times, i.e. $AU 23.5m. Currently, over 200 people are working for Canva, and it has 10 million users across 179 countries. It has its headquarters in Sydney and Manila, and an office in San Francisco. In 2018, the company was valued at $1 billion, and Perkins became one of tech’s youngest female CEOs.

Currently, Perkins serves as the Chief Executive Officer and Director of Canva, Inc.

Martin Dougiamas : The Man Behind the Open-source LMS Moodle

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Martin Dougiamas is the Australia based educator and computer scientist, who founded one of the world’s biggest learning management system. Dougiamas has always been a keen learner, and despite lack of facilities, he was able to fulfil his desire for learning. A voracious reader and a lover of speculative fiction, he is a believer of sharing knowledge. Brent Simpson described him as “one of the rare instances in Open Source software development, where the right person with the right personality appears at exactly the right time; Martin Dougiamas is the Linus Torvalds of the LMS world and his software is the Linux of this software.”

Early Life

Dougiamas was born on 20 August 1969, in Perth, Australia. He spent most of his childhood in a deserted area in Western Australia, where, there was no facility for even basic education. He received his primary education at his home and studied from the material dropped from the aeroplane. He then joined the Kalgoorlie School of the Air, under distance education. As it was a distance learning school, he visited the school only a few times; sometimes for the school projects and a few times for the exams. He always missed being in a classroom with his classmates. At the age of ten, he became interested in wireless and internet technologies and studied books based on them.

Martin Dougiamas
Image Source: Flickr

After a few years, his family moved back to Perth, where Dougiamas joined West Balcatta Primary School and Balcatta Senior High School. He received a master’s degree and PhD from the Curtin University, Australia.

Career

At the age of 17, Dougiamas started working at Curtin University, where he taught the staff about the usage of various web applications. The internet and computers were the latest technologies that were emerging at that time, and he realized that it is not an easy task to teach people about those technologies and utilize them for teaching and learning.

The university installed the newly built learning management WebCT, one of the first learning management systems of that time, at its campus. Dougiamas was asked to improve its functionalities. But, his experience with the software was not a pleasant one, due to the restriction and software’s intellectual property rights.

Founding Moodle

Soon, Dougiamas joined the university as a student and started working on the development of a set of online tools for distance education, as the part of his PhD thesis, “The use of Open Source software to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry”. The tools he was developing for online education were soon adopted at a bigger level, and he had to eliminate them from his PhD thesis.

The first site developed on Moodle was of Peter Taylor from Curtin University, in 2001. By the end of the year, Moodle was available for downloads on CVS. In 2003, Moodle became a community-based software, with its first contributed module released on Moodle.org, a community arm for Moodle.com. People, across the world, were translating it in different languages and were developing themes for it.

In 2015, Moodle became the most used learning management system in the world, with 70,136 registered sites, in 222 territories worldwide, and in 2017, it had over 100 million registered users. Moodle Pty Ltd. HQ has over 45 employees, and it has its branches located in Australia, Spain, Canada, and the UK. The company is financed by a partners network that consists of over 80 certified companies around the world.

Personal Life

Currently, Dougiamas serves as the CEO of Moodle, Pty Ltd. He is the winner of Google-O’Reilly Open Source Award in the Education Enabler category (2008) and was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Vic – the Central University of Catalonia “for his contribution to open-source software through his leadership of the Moodle platform”, in 2016. He also received another honorary doctorate at the Université Catholique de Louvain, in 2018.