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Steve Case – The Founding CEO of AOL & One of the Most Accomplished American Entrepreneurs

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It is very difficult to find variety in the services in a single company, but there are possibilities for everything in the tech industry be it anything. Such possibility was put into effect by AOL (American Online) and is still doing the same, as it fulfils multi-tasks for its users. The company was not always doing this well. The man, who helped the company to rise through the ranks is Steve Case. The story of Case speaks that success is hard but not impossible to achieve.

American Online Inc. is an online service provider, headquartered in New York City. As of now, AOL is a division of Verizon Media, but it had started out all its own. It dates back to 1983 when the company started as Control Video Corporation (CVC). The company provided game consoles at a fixed cost, and after that started charging $1 per game to its users. Steve Case, initially, was hired as a part-time marketing consultant by Bill von Meister (the then CEO of the company) for Control Video and was recommended by his brother, Dan Case. At that time, the company was not in a good financial condition and was nearing bankruptcy. But then Jim Kimsey founded Quantum Computer Services from the remains of CVC.

steve case
Image Source: entrepreneur.com

Jim Kimsey hired Case as the Vice President of Marketing during the launch of Quantum Computer Services, and later, promoted him to the position of Executive Vice President. As the Executive Vice President, Steve changes the company’s strategy and introduced Quantum Link. This was an online service for Commodore 64 and 128 computers. Quantum Link, (Also known as Q-Link) was based on software licensed by PlayNet Inc. AOL had included the online games since the very beginning of its launch date. Quantum Computer Services grew in popularity during the 90s period as it became the leading internet service provider in the United States.

Kimsey saw the potential in Case and decided to appoint Case as the CEO of the company after he retires. Eventually, in 1991, when he retired from the services of the company, Kimsey appointed Case as the CEO of the company. Steve, in late 1991, renamed the company to American Online, and from then, the company began to touch new heights.

He began the journey with complete enthusiasm and with the decisions he was making for the company, it didn’t feel like he was a newly-appointed CEO. Steve made AOL pioneer in the social media concept. The instant messaging app that AOL rolled out was called out to be an absolute ‘killer’. He looked out into all the services to make them affordable, easy to use and fun for the consumers. AOL user base grew up to be as large as 26.7 million. By 2000, AOL’s worth was $125 Billion and was the nation’s biggest internet provider.

In that period, AOL was delivering a massive 11,616% return to its shareholders. It began to roll out more and more web services. Many services like e-mail, search engines, news, sports, weather etc. were introduced by AOL in the market.

Steve personally had many successful interactive online titles to his name. Quantum Space was one of the fully automated Play by email game. His other contributions were graphical chat environments, Habitat and Club Caribe. Alongside that, he induced the first Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) Neverwinter Nights.

It was 2001 when Steve negotiated the largest merger in the business history that has ever been done. Under his leadership, he managed to bring AOL and Time Warner together with AOL stockholders getting the majority stakes. The merger included more than $164 billion. The merger, however, failed as AOL – Time Warner fell into recession, followed by accounting scandals and much more. In January 2003, Steve resigned as the CEO of the company but still remained in the Board of Directors. “It took me 10 years to finally realize that the company was a success,” said Steve in an interview when asked about his time in AOL. In 2005, he resigned from AOL’s Board of Directors. AOL, in May 2015 was brought by Verizon in a deal valued at $4.4 billion.

Steve is a die-hard entrepreneur, and even after his stepping down as the CEO, he still continues to invest in upcoming entrepreneurs. He went on and became the founding chair of Startup America Partnership, which was launched by the White House to accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship through the nation. Alongside that, he was a member of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. In 2014, he was named Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship. Since then, he has been a leading voice in shaping government policies, like the passing of the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups). He is also the Chairman of Case Foundation, that has invested in more than a hundred organizations, initiatives and partnerships. Steve has pledged to donate his major wealth for the philanthropic causes.

Steve Case, who has the spirit of true entrepreneurship, gives us the clear message that passion is what drives a person to his ultimate goals. Steve is a living inspiration and is someone to learn from if you are looking to start up your own business.

Red Hat : The Biggest Linux Distributor & First $1B Open-source Software Company

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Founding Red Hat at the time when the market was changing rapidly, was quite a big step, as the co-founders of Red Hat, Marc Ewing and Bob Young followed their gut feeling and kept their ears opened to every good advice from the experts. While building a business model, obviously one should focus on the product that he/she will be building under the name of their business, but at the same time for long term sustainability, one has to be future ready and take the steps carefully.

Founders

Marc Ewing was born on 9 May 1969 and completed his graduate degree from Carnegie Mellon University, in 1992. Ewing was a bright student and was also involved in the 86open project in the mid-1990s in college. His grandfather had gifted him a red colour hat that he used to wear during his college days, and this way, he had become popular as the ‘red hat guy’ in the college.

bob young marc ewing
Image Source: irishtimes.com

The co-founder of Red Hat, Bob Young, was a native of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He completed his high school from Trinity College School in Port Hope and graduated as Bachelor of Arts from Victoria College at the University of Toronto.

Young, after completing his education, started a computer rental and leasing business and founded Vernon Computer Rentals, in 1984. But in 1990, he sold the company to Greyvest Capital and the money that came from the deal, made him an overnight millionaire. But the good time was not permanent, and he lost his millionaire status just in a few months as a result of some bad business moves from Greyvest Capital.

Young, still, was with Greyvest and to enhance his business he started attending the meetings, where programmers talked about the latest trends in the software program UNIX, running on the servers. He was an outsider but knew that those meetings were the key to his biggest business idea.

At the time Young was attending those meetings, he started a newsletter named New York Unix that had all information about the next meetings. In 1993, after losing his job at Greyvest, he incorporated the newsletter as his another business and founded ACC Corp Inc., which at the beginning was earning from the advertisements. At the same time, Linux was becoming a hot topic as it was free software and many of the companies were choosing Linux over Unix. Eventually, Young started selling Linux software, books and accessories.

Founding Red Hat

At the same time, Young was getting requests from the groups that were subscribed to his newsletter to write more about open source software and Linux. Young, too, was interested in writing about the same but had no idea about what an open-source software was.

He was struggling through the financial crisis, but the Linux based products that he was selling was the main source of his income. So he became more curious about finding more resellers for the Linux products. This led him to reach Marc Ewing, who had set up a little Linux shop in Durham, North Carolina, named as Red Hat.

The company, unmistakably, got its name from the same red hat that he used to wear in college. Marc was working on a Unix project and accidentally, built the first software under Red Hat, in 1994. The project he was working on was to run on a Unix system, but since it was too expensive, he developed the software for Linux.

The evolution of Linux also made Marc interested in the same, and as Linux was an open source software, he started working on fixing Linux.

Finally, on 29 July 1994, he released his first Linux distribution software that was easier to use version over the GPL version. The software became a hit overnight.

Young started officially distributing Red Hat’s software, and after discussing with many Linux experts, Young joined his hands with Ewing to incorporate Acc with Red Hat, and the two turned the co-founders of Red Hat Inc. with a partnership of fifty-fifty.

The two was working passionately for the company, without knowing the real worth of it. In 1999, the company went public, and for their surprise, the company achieved the eighth-biggest first-day gain in the history of Wall Street.

In the same year, Red Hat acquired Cygnus Solutions, followed by the acquisition of the other companies including WireSpeed, C2Net and Hell’s Kitchen Systems, Planning Technologies, Inc., in the later years. In the year 2000, the company won the “Operating System Product of the Year” award for Red Hat Linux 6.1. In 2002, Red Hat introduced Red Hat Linux Advanced Server.

In 2005, Red Hat stock became part of the NASDAQ-100 and, in 2006, Red Hat stock moved from to trading on the New York Stock Exchange (RHT).

In 2012, Red Hat became the first open source software company that entered into the one-billion-dollar group, and in 2015, it surpassed the two-billion-dollar milestone. Just in another three years, in 2018, the company recorded the annual revenue of three-billion-dollar.

On 28 October 2018, IBM announced that it is planning to acquire Red Hat for US$34 billion.

The company headquarter was moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S. from Durham in 2002. As per the 2018 records, the company has raised to 12,600 employees.

Bob Young served as Red Hat’s CEO until 1999, and left the company in 2002, to found his print-on-demand, self-publishing company, Lulu.com. Red Hat is one of the fastest growing companies and one of the pioneers in the open-source software industry.

The Story of Hatch Apps : The App To Build Apps

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There are rare cases when your honesty and realization of your fundamental duty would have paid you well. Yes, you might have received appreciation from people, but did it become the biggest business idea for you ever?

This is what happened to the Param Jaggi, who is the co-founder of Hatch App. Param Jaggi is of Indian descent, who dropped out of Vanderbilt University at the age of 19, to work for his own self. He was a brilliant student and even invented EcoTube when he was in school at the age of 16. The EcoTube was built under a science project, that used the algae photosynthesis to reduce carbon emissions from cars. The device worked well and Jaggi patented the device in his name. Jaggi’s father is an engineer and wanted him to become a doctor. But as Jaggi was already working for a better cause, i.e., saving the environment, his family never interfered. Jaggi also sold his innovative bio-fuel preparation method to a Fortune 500 company.

AmeliaParam
Image Source: thewholetruthbooth.com

During the same time, he also developed an interest in web development, and later, when he turned 19, he decided to work as a freelancer, as he was already developing web and mobile apps and was earning enough. At that time he was charging $10K to $30 to build simple apps and that too only in a time equal to a weekend. For Jaggi, it had become quite easy to copy paste the similar code in the background of each web app and finish the project within a week. This fact made him think that he was charging way too much for delivering the ‘almost same’ code to every other client. “What’s fundamentally wrong with the software development industry, especially custom development systems, is that they price out products based on your price elasticity”, said Jaggi in an interview.

On the other hand, the other co-founder of Hatch Apps, Amelia Friedman, was also an entrepreneur who started her own business when she was still in college. She was a student of Brown University and was running college-level programs in different languages. At the time she completed her graduate degree, her program had reached to 7 cities, with over 32 different programs.

Founding Hatch Apps

Jaggi was a 19-years old eco-innovator, and Friedman was a self-made entrepreneur. The two got a chance to attend the Halcyon Incubator in Washington, DC, where the two met each other, the very first time. The meeting included the discussion over many things including how Jaggi wanted to bring price stability to the app building industry. And the idea of Hatch Apps was formed.

Jaggi’s plan was clear. He wanted to create a platform, upon which people could build their own apps without paying extra money. In 2015, the two launched Hatch Apps and started working on the basic plan. At the same time, the need for extra funds arisen. So they developed the 2016 Election game in just three days and were able to raise $100,000 for Hatch Apps within a few weeks.

The Hatch Apps is one of its kind, where a user can build apps by just dragging and dropping the elements, without actually knowing the coding behind those elements. During the testing of the app, Jaggi built the first app on Hatch Apps, just in three days even having the deadline of five days.

In March 2017, this software company raised $1.3M in angel funding to launch their product. The company has a team of more than twenty people and charges only $1K a month for app development. For $2K to $5K, customers can implement specific customizations and add-ons.

Jaggi is working as the CEO of Hatch Apps, and Friedman holds the position of the COO of the company. Jaggi has also got his name listed twice in the Forbes “30 Under 30”.

The company is still managing its ways in the market and slowly is getting ahead to earn more consumers. For now, the idea is really innovative and one of its kind, so the future of the company looks quite bright.

Zipcar : The Success Story of One of the Oldest Car-rental Services

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Zipcar has a history even before the car-renting businesses were not even that common. Built by two moms, the idea at the time was unique, and it was their passion that made it successful in just a few months.

Zipcar is an almost 2 decades old company, founded in the year 2000, by Antje Danielson, a Harvard geochemist and Robin Chase, a stay-at-home mom and an MIT business school graduate. The two ladies met each other at their children’s kindergarten, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Both were struggling financially, as Chase had left her job due to the birth of her first child and Danielson was the only working member in her family.

zipcar
Image Source: wright.edu

But as the time was passing both of them wanted to make use of their studies, and as a business graduate, Chase has expressed her desire to start a business with Danielson. Danielson was on the same track and had studied about Switzerland’s Mobility Cooperative, and shared the idea of starting a similar technology based car-rental company, in the US, with Chase. Chase also liked the idea, but it was a big project that included a huge risk. So both talked to their husbands and got the approval for the business.

Finally, in January 2000, both started their car-rental business, Zipcar. Zipcar provided the automobile reservations to its members through charging them a monthly or annual fee. Before incorporating the company, the two had already raised investments for its launch of around $75,000 in startup financing. After they launched the startup, Chase held the position of the president of Zipcar and Danielson became the vice president of the company.

The first rental car from Zipcar went onto the roads in May 2000, and in just three-four months it registered over 600 customers for the service. The company was doing well, but the two co-founders were not going along too well. In 2001, Robin Chase fired Danielson, after Chase petitioned Zipcar’s board for the ability to make hiring and firing decisions without consulting them.

The fire of the co-founder did not impact the company much, and it kept on expanding in New York City and Washington DC. Even the company was expanding, it was unable to secure more funding, and as a result, the board of the company replaced Chase as the CEO of the company with Scott Griffith. Within two years the company was able to raise $10 million in funding led by Benchmark Capital. In the same year, a new office was opened in San Francisco, following by another office in Toronto in the next year. The establishment of Toronto led to the fastest growing market in Toronto for Zipcar.

In late 2006, the company reached London, and in 2007, Zipcar opened an office in Vancouver. In the same year, in the month of October, the company had a merger with Flexcar. After the merger, the company earned over 225,000 members, double the number of the member it had in the previous year.

In June 2009, the company launched its iPhone app, with the features like honking the horn and unlocking some Zipcars. In April 2010, Zipcar acquired the London-based car-sharing club Streetcar.

In 2013, Avis Budget Group acquired Zipcar. In 2014, the company opened its offices in Houston, Dallas TX regions, Greater Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario. In the same year, the company also extended to Paris, France and Madrid, Spain. Zipcar also launched its floating car-sharing service in Brussels, Belgium, in 2016.

Zipcar offers the car rental service for over fifty different car models, even including the luxury car models like Audi and BMW. The company headquarters still remains in Boston, Massachusetts and it has raised to over 500 employees.

The reason behind the success has been that it started through word-of-mouth promotion and had invested well in the technology. The business idea was simple and was based on customer feedback. So in the past two decades, it has grown in a phenomenal way. Even it has been more than a decade for the two co-founders left the company, Zipcar had its own success story. And, the success story of Zipcar shows us that keeping things simple and targeting customer satisfaction is the key to success.

Simon Nixon: The Founder of ‘MoneySuperMarket’

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Today’s market brings so much to its consumers. It’s hard to decide what to choose and why because there is a lot of companies out there selling their products and services. We get to see so many products with almost the same quality and the same prices, making it difficult what to choose. But with every problem comes a solution and for this problem, Moneysupermarket gives you ‘the’ proper solution, giving answers to all your questions. Simon Nixon, the man who gave birth to the company, has a story to be heard which says that following someone’s steps may not always be the right way to success.

Moneysupermarket.com stands out to be a British price comparison website. The work that the site does is that it helps you to compare prices. You can compare prices on a wide range of products be it an insurance or a loan. The company’s aim is to help households save money.

“This ambition is perfectly suited to the times in which we live, given the financial uncertainty that exists at home. We aim to help by shining a light on the best ways, households can take control of their finances. Our objective is to offer consistently competitive prices and deliver a great visitor experience, so that customers find what they want, and think of us first for their future needs”, itself, the site says.

simonnixon
Image Source: standard.co.uk

It all started back when Simon Nixon found his university education really boring. “I hated it. It was boring,” said Simon when asked why he dropped out of his university. He looked into the market the lacks and gaps, and where he could use his mind to fill them up. Eventually, he found out that there were no websites or journals to compare the prices of the products out in the market. He thought to himself, ‘If I didn’t do this, who else will?’ He started a journal-ish thing that had best-but tables in it. Initially, he lent them out for free but as the magazine gained popularity, he started charging 11 Pounds for a monthly subscription. His business became so efficient that only after two years, he started earning more than 10,000 pounds from that magazine only. Nixon named the group working with him as ‘Mortgage 2000.’

He, along with his friend Duncan Cameron, launched an internet site called ‘Moneysupermarket.com’ which updated itself according to the market daily. The site came out to be a huge success as the internet was blooming all over the world and the UK was no exception. Since then, the site only grew and never saw a backdrop. They kept on increasing their range of products that could be compared.

It was 2004 when Simon Nixon launched Travelsupermarket.com. The site was the same as the Moneysupermarket. The difference was that the users could now compare travel related products too. However, Duncan and Simon fell out as the attention diverted away from Mortgage 2000. In 2007, he (Duncan) sold his shares to Simon for 162 Million Pounds. All these years, Duncan stayed as a silent business partner.

Some of the major sales growth of the company was from 2000 to 2002, where the site jumped from 5.4 million to 13.6 million Pounds. The company was listed in London Stock Exchange, and the site was valued at a massive amount of 1 Billion Pounds, at the time of its Initial Public Offering!

In 2009, Simon stepped down from the position of CEO, with Peter Plumb becoming the new CEO. Simon is fond of luxuries. Also, he admits that he doesn’t like doing business for a long time. “I’m scared of doing nothing,” said Simon, during an interview. Simon has a worth of $1.1 Billion. Even after having so much wealth and businesses, Simon prefers to stay quiet when it comes to his personal life, and there are very little details known about it. Now, he invests in different businesses across the world, which gives him access to travel to different parts of the world too.

Simon Nixon, the founder of Moneysupermarket.com shows us that it only takes true passion to reach your goal. Sometimes, hard work may not count up as much as passion does. Also, it isn’t required that you follow a guided roadmap to success, instead, take your own route and make a path of success out of it.

Ubisoft : The Journey of the Leading Video Games Company; From a Small Village to a Global Market

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Video games have seen a great transformation since its commencement. It all started with old 3D tic-tac-toe and Moon Landing games, and now, we see visually rich mission games and numerous small scale Smartphone games, which are really good at their functionalities.

The rise of video games not only provided people with new means of entertainment but has also given the opportunity to many businesses and developers to head into new horizons. The founders of the company Ubisoft also founded their passion in the same field, and now they are the owner of the third biggest video game development company.

Origin

Five brothers, Christian, Claude, Gérard, Michel and Yves, from the Guillemot family of northwest France founded Ubisoft in 1986. In the beginning, the Guillemot brothers had joined their family business. They started working even before they started going to University and had gained enough experience to start their own business.

ubisoft
Image Source: sharkone

Before Ubisoft, the Guillemot brothers had tried their hands in many other businesses. As their family business was based on farming, there was a real less margin in the business. Soon, they realised that the farming industry was not paying much and was going through a decline. So, the first business they did out of farming was selling audio CDs, as these were the latest trend in the market. The business was good, and soon, they were able to deal in personal computers and established a small shop.

The trade was going well, and along with selling computers, they also sold things that were needed in farming. The Guillemot then stocked up video games in the shop and installed 20 machines to play video games at the shop. In 1980, they shifted from buying the video games from France market to the US’s, as it was much cheaper to buy those video games from the US. This led to a huge difference in the profits, and as a result, the five brothers started another new business. In 1984, they founded Guillemot Informatique and began the mail-order business around computers and software.

By the year 1985, they were earning good profits through video games and realised that they can have much more of that if they start developing video games by themselves.

Founding Ubisoft

Guillemot brothers founded Ubisoft in Carentoir, in Brittany, on 12 March 1986. Ubisoft is the acronym for Ubiquitous Software, and formally, it was named as Ubisoft Entertainment S.A. For the development purpose, they gathered a team of developers from their neighbouring places and set up their first office in a chateau in Carentoir.

For two years of the startup, the brothers continued operating their company from the chateau only, but it was way expensive to maintain the office. So many of their developers relocated to Paris. One of their first recruited staff, Michel Ancel, who also returned to his hometown in the same year, came back with another developer Frederic Houde with a prototype of a game with highly-animated features in 1994.

The prototype caught the immediate attention of Guillemot brothers, and in 1994, they started working on the same, making it the prime project of the company. They also set up an office in Montreuil and hired 100 developers to work on the project. Finally, in 1995, Ubisoft launched its first hit video game Rayman, which targeted the new line of fifth-generation consoles, like the Atari Jaguar and PlayStation. The instant success of the game made the company popular worldwide.

The game was a huge hit, and only in one year, Ubisoft went for its IPO, in 1996, and raised over US$80 million in funds. The company also expanded to other worldwide cities, including Annecy, Shanghai, Montreal, and Milan, in a span of four years from its inception.

With the expansion of the internet in 1999, the Guillemot brothers found another opportunity to widen the growth of Ubisoft in the US market, too. They, then founded Gameloft, an online game publisher, in 1999. In the year 2000, Ubisoft acquired an American video game development company Red Storm Entertainment, that too, helped Ubisoft to expand in the American market, bringing titles like Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six series.

The success in the US market led Ubisoft to work with companies like Microsoft, at the time, when no one was ready to develop games for Xbox. With Microsoft, Ubisoft brought games like Halo and Ghost Recon, etc.

As of 2017, the estimated valuation of the company was registered at $6.4 billion. Currently, the company owns several video game studios across the world. The company gets the credits of many popular games to its name, including Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Just Dance, Prince of Persia, Rayman, Raving Rabbids, and Tom Clancy’s.

As of March 2018, it is the fourth largest publicly-traded game company in America and Europe after Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, and Take-Two Interactive in terms of revenue and market capitalisation.