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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.

Nir Zuk : The Founder of Palo Alto Networks, the American Cybersecurity Company

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Another college drop-out and one of the most successful tech entrepreneur, Nir Zuk, always had a dream of starting his own business. It can be judged through his career graph that he likes to handle things on his own rather than following the order of some superior authority. This genius kid from Israel is a serial entrepreneur, who is really allergic to bureaucracy. The founder of Palo Alto Networks is happy in running a small business than working for a multimillion company.

Early Life

Zuk was born and brought up in Rehovot, Israel. He was in high school when he convinced his parents to buy him a Dragon 64 computer, as a few years ago, one of his friends has also got one. He started learning computer programming by reading books and was capable enough to write small codes, only in a year.

zuk_nir
Image Source: crn.com

When he was sixteen, he started writing commercial programs and earned enough money. At the same time, the first computer viruses very emerging, which caught Zuk’s attention immediately, and he became of the first persons who wrote one of the earliest virus programs.

According to the rule of the Israeli government, Zuk had to go through military training. But as he was a whiz kid, he got a job in the military’s IT department. Alongside his job in the military, he started going to college, where he took mathematics as his majors.

Career

Zuk spent a whole five years in the military, and before he could complete his degree, on the basis of his experience, he was recruited by Checkpoint, in 1994. Here he became the part of the team that was handling a major project and along with them, invented a technology called stateful inspection, which is the basis of network security technology today.

In 1997, Zuk moved to the US, to work at the U.S. head office of CheckPoint in Redwood City, California. After moving to the US, he worked with the same company for two more years and left the job.

Soon after leaving Checkpoint, Zuk went on to found his own startup company OneSecure, in 1999 and started working on the intrusion prevention system that sits behind the firewall, to make sure that the traffic passing the firewall is attack free. The system is the first of its kind.

In 2002, OneSecure was acquired by NetScreen. Even after the acquisition, Zuk retained his position of CTO in the company. Being in the company, Zuk had adviced NetScreen, to build their own firewall, such that it would be more profitable for them, but NetScreen was not ready to take the risk. Hence, after a year, Zuk left the company, to found his own company, and to build its own firewall.

Founding Palo Alto Networks

In 2005, Zuk, after teaming up with 25 of his colleagues from NetScreen, founded Palo Alto Networks. He had raised a total amount of $9.4 million for the startup. Within two years of the inception of the company, in 2007, it released its first firewall product, which was the world’s first “next-generation firewall”.

By 2011, Palo Alto Networks had become one of the most prominent cybersecurity firms and was listed as a leader on its enterprise firewall Magic Quadrant by Gartner. The company went public on the NYSE on July 20, 2012, having raised $260 million with its initial public offering.

In 2014, along with Fortinet, Mcafee, and Symantec, Palo Alto Networks founded the Cyber Threat Alliance, a not-for-profit organization for improving cybersecurity.

The revenue earned by the company in 2018, was estimated to be over US$2.27 billion. Currently, it is providing its service in the field of network security, cybersecurity, cloud computing. The company has got its headquarters situated in Santa Clara, California, U.S.

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.

MobiGarage : The Online Garage to Get Your Smartphone Repaired

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The emergence of mobile, or we shall say, the Smartphones has added another luxury expense to our lives. Smartphones are no more just calling equipment, but it has become that one thing we can’t think of living without. The constant enhancement in the features of those smartphones is leading to an increase in its demand, and we are compelled to buy new phones to get those new features. Eventually, spending more money on the same thing.

But spending so much on Smartphones also make us sceptical about what if the phone or its software breaks down. How much will it cost to repair the phone, or will it recover the injuries? And, we often see, the same thing happening after the warranty period is over. In such cases, people often go buying new phones rather having repaired their broken phones, as it is difficult to find trusted repair person, and it is quite inconvenient as well as expensive, to go to the authorised service centres, where people barely understand the real problem and instead make you take rounds of the centre multiple times.

MobiGarage
Image Source: MobiGarage

This is where the mind of the founder of MobiGarage, Vaibhav Kapoor, hit the idea of launching a website (i.e. mobigarage.com) that would provide people with online and offline assistance, for reliable mobile repair and spare-part services at their doorsteps.

The Founders

Vaibhav Kapoor, the Director and CEO of MobiGarage, is an engineer having experience in working with Fortune 500 companies, including Accenture Strategy and ZS Associates, in India and abroad. At MobiGarage, he is responsible for creating the roadmap, business and go-to-market strategy and leads MobiGarage – B2C online mobile repair and spare unit of the company.

Kapoor started the company with other three co-founders Pulkit Kapoor (Director, Product and Services), Abhinav Mahajan (Director, Operations) and Ujjwal Sehgal (Director, Procurement/Supply Chain).

Like Vaibhav Kapoor, all three of them are engineering graduates. Before MobiGarage, Pulkit Kapoor worked as a manager at Reliance Industries Limited.

From the beginning of his career, Abhinav Mahajan had that thing about entrepreneurship, and after working with ZS Associates for a few years, he settled up his first start-up Helfis Technologies for Preventive Healthcare.

Founding MobiGarage

The four co-founders founded MobiGarage in 2017. The idea behind starting such a business was to help people with their mobile repair needs, at affordable prices and with most of the comfort. The company headquarter is situated in Delhi, India, and currently, it offers its services to 15,000 zip codes across India.

MobiGarage has seen a prominent increase in the revenues and the number of clients since its commencement. Currently, the company is fulfilling over 3000 orders in a month and has seen a 100x boost in its users, since its inception, including a 500% increase in its enterprise clients, from the last year. MobiGarage has projected its revenue to get 5 folds to 2.5Cr, in this fiscal year and a 400% growth compared to the last fiscal year.

Just in one year, the company has made its own place in the Smartphone repair industry, with a 100% growth rate for the Q3-2018, as compared to Q2-2018. For the past more than a year, it has been catering to most of the top repair and refurb companies as well as to more than 150+ brands.

MobiGarage is one of the fastest growing companies among its contemporaries and based on a unique concept, the company has got the reasons to be on the top.

Greg Tseng : The Co-Founder of Tagged, A Site Bringing People Together

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It has always been said that the human being is a social animal. And, that is because only humans are capable of interacting with its surroundings and other creatures around him. Humans are able to make friends, besides their families. But making new friends is something that is both challenging and difficult. But, there are many, who even have a problem in starting a conversation and find friends, with whom they are comfortable with. But, for making this challenging task simple enough, Greg Tseng built such a site, named ‘Tagged.com’, which allows you to see who’s around you.

Tagged.com can be defined as a social discovery site. A site where you can view, talk, share tags and also share virtual gifts with people around you. Tagged was launched in 2004, by Harvard masterminds Greg Tseng and Johann Scheiler-Smith, who were science class buddies since class 7th. They both wanted Tagged to be different from all other social networking sites out there, mainly from Facebook.

greg tseng
Image Source: gettyimages.com

To make their website stand out, apart from other, Greg and Johann targeted the audience of age group between 13 and 19. Hence, the site was set up for teens at first. The design and the concept were such that users could meet other people in a short period of time. In October 2006, Tagged expanded its user base. Now, the network was not just for teens only, it was open for all the age groups. The move went as it was planned. Tagged, eventually, saw an increase in the number of its user (at that time) by having more than 80 million users registered, and 7 billion views on the page per month.

But, Tagged also attracted some negative publicity towards itself. In 2009, Tagged was on the verge of getting sacked due to ‘deceptive email marketing and invasion of privacy’. In the same year, Time Magazine’s journalist Sean Gregory mentioned Tagged as the ‘The World’s Most Annoying Website!’ During that time period, Tagged paid an approximate of $1.4 million to settle down all the lawsuits that were against it, and soon after that, inherited new privacy policies.

After having a smooth sail for years, Tagged again started drawing criticisms from the users about the inappropriate content that was on the site. So, following the protocols, Tagged limited its services to users who were above 18, from February 2014.

Tagged has a simple sign-up process for a free account. A profile is built with all of the key features such as public profile and a display profile. Tagged shows you people around you in accordance with the similarity of interests which is surely a standout from Facebook which restricts you among the people you know. The site also has a gold membership which is VIP status with a monthly fee. The VIP membership, however, allows you to see who visited your profile.

The site also has games on it, which is Greg Tseng’s “hi5’s” work. He built this game studio during the development of the website. On the Tagged.com, people can collect pets (Other Users) and can share virtual gifts with each other.

Alongside this, Greg also developed flyingchickens.com and CrushLink. In 2015, he stepped down as the CEO of the company. “I initiated it and it’s happening the way I want”, he said, when asked about why he was leaving the post. Tagged has projected more than $45 million in revenues, and seek a $1 billion valuation IPO. The company also changed its name to If(we). Greg’s own net worth is around $25 million.

The story of Greg Tseng shows that to stand apart, you must have new ideas and also, that handing responsibilities to others after a certain period of time is required, so as to keep rolling new ideas and innovations. The ex-CEO of Tagged is someone to learn from.