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Craig Newmark : American Internet Entrepreneur and the Founder of Craigslist

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Great ideas are the result of curiosity, and when you have gained enough experience, it might be easier to visualise those ideas and its scope too. Craig Newmark, an American entrepreneur, who first struggled in life due to bad financial conditions, as a result of his hard work, got the opportunity to work with major tech giants of the industry. It was with those big companies he was able to understand the technology well and get to work on his own project, which later became Craigslist, a web communication company that makes the annual profits more than US$700 million.

Early Life

Craig Newmark was born on 6 December 1952, in Morristown, New Jersey, where he lived with his parents, Joyce and Lee Newmark, and his brother Jeff Newmark. His father was an insurance salesman who died when Craig was only 13.

Craig Newmark
Image Source: zimbio.com

After the death of his father, the family went through major financial issues, so his mother brought him and his brother to an apartment in Jacob Ford Village. Craig joined the Morristown High School where he completed his high school education. Despite the difficulties, he was doing good at the studies and won a scholarship. He joined the Case Western Reserve University from where he completed his graduation in Science in 1975, followed by a master’s degree in the same subject in 1977.

Founding Craigslist

As soon as he completed his education, he joined IBM as a programmer and worked for a long 17 years, in the same company. In 1993, he quit his job at IBM to join Charles Schwab & Co. At the same time, the internet was a hot new topic, and the people were trying to discover more about it. They were becoming familiar with the same by helping each other.

Craig, too, came to know more about the internet in his new company and liked how people were helping each other. This incident made him think of creating a new distribution list to friends. Craig posted about the events happening around San Francisco Bay Area, that attracted the interest of the software and Internet developers, living and working around the same area. The mailing list also included feedback feature in it.

Soon, the platform became popular and started featuring job-related queries on it. People had started looking for skilled people on the very platform, and it wasn’t an event-only platform anymore. This led Craig to add more categories to the platform including alongside ‘Jobs’.

In 1996, Craig launched the official website for Craigslist with the domain name ‘craigslist.org’. In 1999, the company started functioning as a private firm. At the same time, Craig decided to leave his job in order to completely concentrate on Craigslist.

By the year 2000, Craig had employed nine people to work on Craigslist. The platform was featuring discussion forums, flagging system, self-posting process, homepage design, personals categories, and best-of-Craigslist feature. In fact, it had its own search engine. The platform started expanding, and in the same year, it was functioning in more than nine U.S. cities.

In 2004, the company started charging its users for posting in the Job category, in the New York and Los Angeles pages, but at the same time, launched a new category, ‘Gigs’ where the users could post vacancies for free. The paid job section is the main income source for the company.

The website has become more of an advertising platform and serves over 49.4 million unique monthly visitors, in the U.S. alone.

Personal Life

In December 2012, Newmark married Eileen Whelpley.

Alongside being a successful entrepreneur, Craig is also an active philanthropist. He has been donating to various non-profit organisations for many years now. In 2006, he donated $20,000 to NewAssignment and founded craigconnects in 2011, in order to support other non-profit organisations. In 2017, Newmark donated $500,000 to Wikipedia to help the platform to fight with harassment and vandalism on it. He also donated a $1 billion to Mother Jones magazine to help reduce the spread of fake news. Newmark also supports military families, voter registration efforts, and women in technology, through his private charitable foundation.

According to a report from Forbes, Newmark had a net worth of at least $1.3 billion in 2017. But Newmark said in an interview, “By monetizing Craigslist the way I did in 1999, I probably gave away already 90 per cent or more of my potential net worth.” So according to him, “no one should be a billionaire”, and he does not possess assets more than he requires according to his needs.

Charles Wang: The Software’s Tough Guy and the Co-founder of CA Technologies

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Some people are born with leadership qualities, and some grow them with experience. For the founder of CA Technologies, Charles B. Wang, the case might be both. Despite many controversies, he stands out to be a strong leader, who led his company to new horizons. This visionary was not only a great entrepreneur but also guided many for mastering technology with the books he wrote, i.e. Techno Vision and Techno Vision II.

Wang was born on 19 August 1944, in Shanghai, China, to Kenneth Wang and Mary Wang. His father was a judge at the Supreme Court in the Republic of China. Wang was eight when his parents brought him and his two brothers, Anthony W. Wang and Francis Wang, to Queens, New York.

Charles Wang
Image Source: wsj.com

After coming to the U.S., Wang joined the Brooklyn Technical High School in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. And after completing his high school, he entered Queens College to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in Science. Later, Wang joined the Columbia University’s Riverside Research Institute, after answering a help-wanted job ad for a computer programmer. Though he had never studied programming and coding, for the job, he self-taught himself the programming languages.

In the 1960s, while working at the Columbia University, Wang became familiar to a fellow colleague, Russell M. Artzt. Russell was working at the Electronic Laboratories of the University. The two shared a common interest, i.e. computers and became good friends. Later, the two joined the same company to work in, i.e. Standard Data.

In 1989, when IBM separated its hardware sales division from its software division, the other companies got the chance to launch their products in the market. At the same time, Wang and Russell both saw an opportunity in the same and started building software products to sell in the market.

After gaining much experience in the field, the two co-founded Computer Associates International, in 1976. For the venture, the two partnered with Sam Goodner and Max Sevcik of Swiss Company Computer Associates and got the North American distribution rights for CA-Sort. Wang became the CEO of the company, whereas Russell served as the co-president of the company.

The venture was established with the credit card money, but soon, Wang’s leadership took the company to the new heights of success. Soon the company became the first enterprise software company to provide multi-platform products and one of the largest independent software vendors.

The credits for the success of the company is given to the strict methodology Wang used for hiring the candidates for the Computer Associates International. He would look for the capabilities of the candidate and depending upon the performance he would promote or demote the employees. The good employee’s got early promotions whereas the employees with performance below average got fired at once.

In 1989, Computer Associates was the second software-only company that generated $1billion annual revenue. In the late 90s, the company started working towards improving its own products and their compatibility with the products of the other companies.

In the years 1994 to 1998, Wang was the highest paid CEO in the U.S., with having earned a $700 million stock in1998. During the same time, the company was heading towards acquisitions, starting with ASK Group in 1994. By the year 2000, Computer Associates had acquired over 200 companies. In the same year, Wang resigned from the post of CEO in Computer Associates remaining the member of the board of the company till 2002.

Along with being the co-founder of CA Technologies, Wang is also known as a philanthropist and the majority owner of the New York Islanders hockey franchise. Initially, Wang had a minority share in the Islanders, and in 2000, he became the part-owner of the hockey franchise. From 2001 to 2016 he was the majority owner of Islanders.

In 2004, he acquired the original Iowa Barnstormers Arena Football League franchise and for some superstitious reasons, renamed it to New York Dragons.

In 1999, Wang founded the Charles B. Wang Foundation, a charitable organisation dedicated to bettering the lives of children and the disenfranchised. Along with his own foundation, he has worked with the World Childhood Foundation and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. He also donated to the Chinatown Health Clinic, which was later renamed as Charles B. Wang Community Health Center.

Till his death on October 21, 2018, at the age of 74, he lived in his Cove Neck mansion, on the Gold Coast of Long Island. Wang was suffering from lung cancer, which became the cause of his death.

Justin Kan : The Serial Entrepreneur Who Founded the Lifecasting Platform Twitch

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Sometimes, the little thing we do can make a lot of difference in how we pursue our career, and moreover, our life. The founder of Justin.tv and Twitch.tv, Justin Kan shares a similar course of events, where he says that all the credit for is success goes to his mother, and the way, she used to assigned chores to him and his brothers when they were little kids. According to him, the methods they opted for carrying out those daily chores, has helped him learn the art of leadership and build a $1 billion empire for him. Kan is one of the youngest entrepreneurs who has started their career in the early 20s, and with their innovation have left their mark on the respective industries.

Justin Kan
Image Source: flickr.com

Kan was born on 16 July 1983, to Chinese immigrant parents. He has two siblings, Daniel Kan and Damien Kan. Daniel is also a young entrepreneur who has found another $1 billion company Cruise. Kan’s youngest brother Damiem is a software engineer at Alto Pharmacy.

Kan is a graduate from the Yale University, where he received a double major degree in physics and philosophy in 2005.

Founding Twitch

Initially, Justin launched Justin.tv, where he started broadcasting every moment of his daily life live, with a video camera tied to his cap. The platform live-streamed of what he did on a daily basis. This way, a new word ‘lifecasting’ was invented. Within less than a month of him lifecasting, his idea became famous, and he was invited to a few interviews by the leading media of the country, to know more about lifecasting as well as his platform, Justin.tv.

Later, Kan realised the potential of this platform and relaunched Justin.tv along with his friends Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel and Kyle Vogt, in 2007, as an internet startup, in San Francisco, California. The newly launched platform allowed people to add their own channels to it, and live stream. The company raised a seed funding from Y Combinator as well as a Series A funding with Alsop Louie Partners and Draper Associates.

Justin.tv became a similar platform like YouTube but allowed the users to broadcast for free. By the mid of 2007, the platform had 60 registered channels, and by the month of August 2007, it started registering international users, including from Australia, Brazil, UK, France, Netherlands and Sweden, etc. Within a year from the inception of Justin.tv, the platform had registered over 30,000 broadcasting accounts.

In March 2008, the platform added various different categories, including gaming, which later, became the most popular category having earned most of the active users. This led Justin to build another platform dedicated to gaming live streaming and inspired by the term twitch gameplay, Justin founded Twitch.tv, on 6 June 2011.

In the following two years, Twitch was registering 35 million unique visitors every month, and by the end of 2013, the company had hired over 100 employees.

The increased popularity of Twitch.tv led to the rebranding of Justin.tv, Inc., the parent company for both Justin.tv and Twitch.tv, to Twitch Interactive, on 10 February 2014. In the same month, the recorded number of views on Twitch.tv reached over 6.5 million.

In May 2014, news of Google planning to acquire Twitch started making rounds, and Twitch discontinued its services with Justin.tv in August 2014, to solely focus on Twitch.tv.

On 25 August 2014, Amazon acquired Twitch Interactive for an amount worth US$970 million.

Other Ventures

On 7 March 2011, Kan launched another video social media platform, named Socialcam, that allowed its users to record and share videos, using their mobile phones. This startup was acquired by Autodesk on 17 July 2012 for $60M. On 29 February 2012, Kan founded a service out-sourcing platform, that let the freelance service providers charge $25 per hour for any type of service. Later, the startup was bought by Handybook.

In early 2015, Kan launched another startup along with his college friend, Ranidu Lankage, naming it ‘The Drop’, which is a music discovery platform.

In March 2014, Kan joined Y Combinator as a partner, guiding the new startups with their investments. After working for three years with Y Combinator, Kan left the company to found his own investment firm named Zero-F, in March 2017.

In 2017, Kan founded a full-service corporate law firm for high-growth companies, named Atrium, where he works as the CEO.

William Wang : The Founder and Chairman of Vizio

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Keep trying is the basic mantra for success, and if one keeps on trying without expecting much in return, it becomes easier to achieve the goals. The life of the founder of Vizio, William Wang, is a great example of the fact that giving up is never an option, but keeping the faith alive and trying, again and again, will definitely land you to a better place. And, for Wang, it is not good, but the best, his hard work could pay him.

Early Life

William Wang was born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan. He was 14 when his parents brought him to California, USA. After moving to the USA, Wang faced a lot of difficulties in adjusting to the new environment, mainly due to linguistic issues.

After completing high school education from a local school, he joined the University of Southern California, where he pursued a degree in Electrical Engineering and graduated from the college in 1986. Though he aspired to become an architect, since architecture was not a well-paying job, he dropped the idea and pursued Electrical Engineering.

Career

As soon as he completed his graduate degree, he joined a Chinese company as tech support. The company sold computer monitors, and his job included answering the clients’ calls. The job was paying well, so he continued working at the company for four years.

Being an electrical engineer and having worked with a company selling computer monitors, he was exposed to a new market. With the experience, he was convinced that he could build better computer monitors than the IBM computer standards.

So, in 1999, along with his own savings, he borrowed money from his parents, former boss, and a shareholder from Asia, and raised an initial capital of worth $350,000, to start his own company.

Wang founded MAG, employing two or three people, and started manufacturing computer monitors. At the time, the computer industry was booming really fast, and the company grew to $600 million in six years. But since the technology was changing, the challenges started coming in front of him. The revenues for the company lowered down to $470 million, in only two years, and eventually, Wnag had to sell the company to its manufacturers.

Later, to recover from the losses, Wang tried his hands in other businesses, including founding a computer monitor company called Princeton Graphic Systems, and an R&D facility in Asia. But nothing worked and were a waste of time and money. But still, Wang kept on looking for that big idea, which could help him grow as a successful entrepreneur.

The Turning Point

In November 2000, while coming back to Los Angeles from a meeting in Singapore, his plane Singapore Airlines Flight 006, got crashed as it took the wrong runway and bumped into a construction site. Half of the passengers and the crew died in the crash, and Wang was one of the survivors.

Wang did not have any physical injuries but suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning. According to him, when he was in the hospital, all the business related worries faded away, and he was only thinking about his family.

It was a tough time, and it took two years for him to recover from the incident.

In 2001, one of his old MAG clients, the then chairman of Gateway, Ted Waitt, asked him to build a plan for launching new age TVs for his company. Wang shared a close bond with Ted and assumed him as his mentor. Gateway sold the personal computers, and at its retail store, Ted wanted to sell other products too.

Together, Wang and Ted brought a $2,999, 42-inch plasma TV in the market, which was way cheaper than the other plasma TVs in the market and an instant hit.

Founding Vizio

The partnership between Wang and Ted as well as the success of plasma TV, motivated Wang to start another new company. Within a year of his partnership with Gateway, Wang founded a firm named ‘V Inc.’ in 2002, along with Laynie Newsome and Ken Lowe with a capital worth $6,00,000. For the money, he turned to his parents, friends, and even mortgaged his house.

The company was founded with the intention to gain most of the customer satisfaction by providing them with high-quality products at reasonable prices. The idea worked for him, and within four years the company reached an annual revenue worth $700 million. In 2007, the revenue was estimated to be $2 billion. At the same time, Wang renamed the company from V Inc. to Vizio Inc., as many people found it difficult to pronounce V Inc.

Wang had started the company with only three employees, and by 2012, the company had hired over 400 employees, half of the workers dedicated to customer service. On 31 December 2014, in order to expand the services of its smart TV, the company acquired Advanced Media Research Group, Inc.

Till now, along with the smart TVs the company has released its Tablets, Ultrabook, Mobile phones, Soundbars as well as Google TV. The company has grown to become the largest LCD HDTVs manufacturer and seller in North America.

Amar Bose : A Researcher, Educator and the Founder of Bose Corporation

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There will be rarely any person who is not aware of Bose Corporation. Bose has been a leading brand in the field of audio equipment development for past more than 50 years. The company was never founded to earn profits, but to provide better user experience for the consumers. And the man behind this revolutionary company was Amar Bose. Almost sixty years ago, Amar Bose became dissatisfied of the sound quality of an expensive and high tech speaker of that time. And today, his dissatisfaction had led to one of the best audio equipment manufacturers in the world, Bose Corporation.

Early Life

Amar Bose was born on 2 November 1929 as Amar Gopal Bose, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Noni Gopal Bose, was a Bengali Hindu, and his mother, Charlotte, belonged to a French-German decent. Noni Gopal Bose was an Indian freedom fighter, and Charlotte was a school teacher.

While growing up, Bose developed an interest in electronics and during World War II, started a small business of repairing model trains and home radios, at the age of 13. He completed his high school education from Abington Senior High School in Abington, Pennsylvania.

Amar Bose
Image Source: patch.com

After receiving a high school degree, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he first pursued a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, and later, completed a PhD from the same institute in Electrical Engineering. The topic for his PhD thesis was non-linear systems.

Bose had become quite active in researches starting from the time of his graduation and even spent a year in Eindhoven, the Netherlands for the research work at the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium. In the following year, he spent another year in Delhi, India as a Fulbright research student.

Career

After completing his bachelor’s, he got the opportunity to work at MIT, as an assistant professor. While working at MIT, in 1956, he bought an expensive high-end speaker but was disappointed with the performance. Despite having great technology of that time, the speakers could not retain the live audio experience. This, later, became the inspiration for his future business venture.

Acoustics became the prime research subject for Bose, and he started working towards achieving that live experience of a concert hall, for the high-end speakers.

Founding Bose Corporation

After extensive research on the speakers, in 1964, Bose was ready to start his own company. He pitched to the angel capitalists for the funding. He also took the help of his PhD thesis guide professor, Y. W. Lee. The loudspeaker model that the company produced was the model 2201, designed to set up in the corner of a room, reflecting the sound from the walls of the room.

The next research program that the company carried out focused on the dominance of the reflected sound arriving at the head of the listener, to provide the listeners with the live audio experience.

In 1968, the company launched its first commercially successful loudspeakers, Model 901. The model was such a huge success that the company produced it for almost 50 years, and discontinued it only in 2017. This loudspeaker is the longest running product of the company.

In the past more than fifty years, the company has been researching in the field of psychoacoustics and has been improving on its product quality. In fact, “Better Sound Through Research”, is the official slogan of the company, which was a statement given by Bose in an interview.

Bose continued working at MIT, even after founding Bose corporation, as he wanted to support the research work for Bose Corporation. He retired from MIT in 2001. Bose has been one of the best professors at MIT. In fact, many of his students have credited him for helping them in gaining life skills and problem-solving skills. He was awarded the Baker Teaching Award in 1964. For his contribution in the field of electronics and to the development of MIT, MIT established the Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching (1989), and the Junior Bose Award (1995) to honour him.

Bose has got two patents in the field of loudspeaker design and non-linear, two-state modulated, Class-D power processing. In 1994, he received an honorary doctorate in Music from Berklee College of Music. In 2008, his name was registered at the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

In 2007, Bose was listed at number 271 in the Forbes list of richest persons Forbes 400. In 2011, his recorded net worth was $1.0 billion. Bose donated the majority of company shares (non-voting) to MIT, to continue the research work for Bose Corporation.

Bose will be remembered for his outstanding contributions to consumer electronics, his great teachings, and for his leadership qualities.

Tony Fadell : The Co-founder of Nest Labs, Who Revolutionalised the Ugly Thermostats

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iPod has been one of the most innovative products from Apple, and it was not just Steve Jobs that brought out this innovative product, but another brilliant mind that worked behind it was Tony Fadell. Tony Fadell is one of some rare innovators who has contributed to many major development projects in major companies, like Apple and Philips. Tony Fadell is also the founder of Nest Labs, a company that builds smart home products, especially the thermostats.

Early Life

Tony Fadell was born on 22 March 1969, as Anthony Michael Tony Fadell. His father is a Lebanese, and his mother belongs to Polish ethnicity. He completed his high school education from Grosse Pointe South High School, Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan. In 1991, he received a graduate degree in Science from the University of Michigan. He was still in college when he worked as the CEO of Constructive Instruments.

Career

After completing his graduation, Fadell got the opportunity to work with Apple, on Apple’s spinoff General Magic project, where he worked for three years, first as a diagnostics engineer, and then as a systems architect. During this time, he contributed to some major Magic Cap projects including the Sony Magic Link and Motorola Envoy.

Tony Fadell
Image Source: telegraph

In 1995, he joined Philips and became the CEO and the Director of Engineering of the Mobile Computing Group, after he co-founded it along with Philips. While in Philips, he played the major role in the development of a few Windows CE-based hand-held services.

Later in 1999, he got inspired to found his own company, named Fuse, that sold the small hard disk-based music players. The company failed to put an impact on the investors and got shut within a year of its inception.

In February 2001, Fadell joined Apple Inc., as a contractor designer and was employed to work on Apple’s new project, iPod. Within two months of his joining at Apple Inc., he was appointed to assemble and run its iPod & Special Projects group, and in 2006, he became the Senior Vice President of the iPod Division. He played a significant role in the designing and development of the iPod and is also referred to as ‘one of the fathers of the iPod’. In 2008, Fadell left Apple.

Founding Nest Labs

In late 2009, Fadell was busy building a green home for himself, where he was looking for alternates for everything that could help save energy. Here he found out that the thermostats are really helpful in saving and controlling over 50 to 60 per cent of money on the energy consumption every year, but people are unaware of how to do that with those ugly looking thermostat.

So finally, he conceived the idea of launching a thermostat that could automatically help people save more energy. Being known as one of 0the fathers of iPod, many raised questions on his decision of building thermostats and even tried to stop him, including Fadell’s wife. In the very beginning, even the co-founder of Nest Labs, Matt Rogers, doubted his plan, but Fadell was convinced that his decision could bring some revolutionary changes.

Matt Rogers was one of the iPod development team members. In 2010, the two founded Nest Labs and released new revolutionalised and awesome looking thermostats, enabled with wi-fi that worked using sensors and machine learning. The Nest Labs thermostats were able to adapt the user behaviour and work accordingly.

Even though thermostats had been there for many years, Fadell found out that there had been no alteration in those thermostats, not even in its design. So when he built the new smart thermostats, even Google became interested in investing in the company. Shasta Ventures and KPCB became the first investors in the company, and on 13 January 2014, Google revealed that it was planning to acquire Nest Labs for $3.2 billion in cash and on the very next day the tech giant acquired Nest Labs.

Fadell worked with Google and Nest Labs till 2016 and resigned from Nest Labs on June 3, 2016.

Fadell is one of the greatest inventors and engineers who has contributed to many famous and innovative developments. He has also received several awards and recognitions, including Alva Award for ‘The Next Great Serial Inventor’ in 2012 and was named among the ‘CNBC Top 50 Disruptors’ in 2013. He was also listed among the ‘Trailblazers: 11 people changing the business’ by Fortune in 2013, ‘The World’s Top 25 Eco-Innovators’ by Fortune in 2014 and in the list of ‘100 Most Influential People in the World’ by TIME Magazine in 2014. He has also authored over 300 patents in his 20 years long career.