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Peter Beck : The Rocket Man from New Zealand

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There has always been a debate between people about the need of education to get successful in life. Some are who really stress over completing the education to achieve the goals, and some are who can’t wait to get to their dreams for so long so that they just skip the higher education. But in the success story of this Kiwi startup entrepreneur, Peter Beck, the case was a bit different.

Beck, who was a sharp student, had to quit education after high school, as there was no such curricular course that could lead him to his targets. This engineer from New Zealand is just not one of the best visionary rocket scientists but also a skilled businessman, who knows how to sell his idea to the right people.

Early Life

Beck was born and brought up in Invercargill, New Zealand, to a gemologist father and a teacher mother. As a teen, he became interested in machines and rockets, as his family was also in love with machines. While growing up, he decided that he wants to create rockets and satellite.

peter beck
Image Source: spaceflightnow.com

According to one of his interviews, one day the career counsellor from his high school administration called his parents up and told them that the school did not have any courses that could fit to help Beck achieve his dreams, rather his goals were “absurdly unachievable”.

Career

Since it was clear that there was no relevant educational course for Beck in school, just after finishing high school, Beck moved to East Tamaki, New Zealand, where he joined Fisher & Paykel for an apprenticeship, at the age of 17. He not only became familiar with the top of the line machinery and materials there but also kept on experimenting with his mini rockets at the workshops.

In 2001, he started working at the Industrial Research (now Callaghan Innovation). This was the place where he met one of the future investors of Rocket Lab, Stephen Tindall.

Founding Rocket Lab

His passion for rockets led him to work hard and found his start-up company Rocket Lab, in 2006. As the name suggests, the company was dedicated to building rockets and satellites. The company received its seed funding from New Zealander internet entrepreneur, Mark Rocket. Beck became the CEO and the CTO of the company and appointed Mark Rocket as its co-director.

It was in 2009 when Beck successfully launched the company’s first suborbital sounding rocket, named ?tea, becoming the first private company in the Southern Hemisphere to reach space.

In 2010, Rocket Lab received a contract from the U.S. government, under which, the company had to study a low-cost space launcher to place CubeSats into orbit. The contract was under NASA, meaning that the Rocket Lab could use all its resources as per the requirement.

In 2013, Beck entered the Silicon Valley, to raise funding for Rocket Lab’s next big project, a two-stage launch vehicle, the Electron. Beck had a time of three weeks, and he knew to whom pitch for the investment. Rather than going to every other venture capitalist, he focussed on the ones who had already invested in such projects and had known about it. Finally, he managed to secure A-round funding from Khosla Ventures, the venture capitalists, who have already invested in a few so projects.

The first commercial launch of Electron occurred on 11 November 2018, from Mahia Peninsula. It carried satellites for Spire Global, GeoOptics, a CubeSat built by high school students, and a prototype of a drag sail to the orbit.

The company has received funds worth $25m from the New Zealand government over the past few years. But still, the company has got more investments from the Silicon Valley companies including Khosla Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Data Collective, Promus Ventures, Lockheed Martin and Stephen Tindall’s K1W1, making it legally a U.S. company.

Personal Life

Beck is married and has two children. His wife is also an engineer.

Royal Aeronautical Society, awarded Beck the Meritorious Medal for service of an exceptional nature to New Zealand aviation and a Cooper Medal. In 2014, he was awarded the Innovation in Design and Engineering Award at the NZ Innovators Awards. In 2016, he was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year.

Brian Armstrong : The Nerd Who Co-founded Coinbase; the Future “Google” of Crypto

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It is rare to find a single person with a technical background who also has a great sense of business. Such a person is capable of building a robust business model that will pay off really well and sustain in the changing technology and business needs. Brian Armstrong, a nerd from San Jose, who had been experimenting with various businesses, since his teens, and also had an immense interest in programming languages, ended up in building the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange; Coinbase.

Early Life

Armstrong was born on 25 January 1983 and was brought up in the San Jose, in California. He was still in school when he developed an interest in computer programming. He started learning Java and CSS, that led him to get work from local firms from San Jose when he was still in school and created websites for them. His neighbour’s garage was his first office.

Brian Armstrong
Image Source: techcrunch.com

In 2001, after completing his school, he went to Rice University, where he completed a graduate degree in Computer Science along with another graduate degree in Economics. He also received a master’s in Computer Science from the same university.

Early Career

During his bachelor’s in Computer Science, Armstrong had done a four months’ internship as the Team Lead at IBM San Jose. There he developed tools for Network Attached Storage devices based on Java. Later, when he completed his graduate degree in Computer Science, he started working as an Enterprise Risk Management Consultant at Deloitte and Touche.

In 2003, he co-founded UniversityTutor.com. The website helped people find personal tutors in their area. On 16 May 2011, Brian joined Airbnb as the software engineer and worked there for a year.

Founding Coinbase

Armstrong was always interested in starting some business and actively thought of many ideas for that. By the end of 2010, he came across to the concept of Bitcoin. Being a technical product, it was quite amusing for him. At the same time, he got familiar to the fact that there were not many marketplaces for the exchange of bitcoin.

Being a computer programmer and an economist, he was capable of conceiving a plan to create an exchange marketplace for Bitcoin. In July 2011, Brian came together with Fred Ehrsam, who worked at Goldman Sachs, to co-found Coinbase.

It was the time when a single Bitcoin priced at $10 and buying Bitcoins required serious tech chops. Coinbase was the alternative for such transactional platforms, where people could use the traditional bank accounts to purchase cryptocurrency, similar to using PayPal. The two founders got Coinbase to enter into Y Combinator startup incubator, in 2012, to raise funding for the company.

In October 2012, the two launched the company and started operations of buying and selling the cryptocurrency through bank transfers. In 2013, the company received funding worth US$5 million from the venture capital firm Union Square Ventures.

Due to the ease of use, by the year 2014, the company had a million users using its services. In the same year, the company acquired Kippt, the blockchain explorer service. It also launched the vault service for secure storage of bitcoin as well as added a feature to process Bitcoins to payment apps like Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal.

In 2015, the company launched the Coinbase Exchange, through which the professional traders could exchange the cryptocurrency. By 2016, the company had added Ethereum to its platform and also rebranded the exchange name to Global Digital Asset Exchange (GDAX). Currently, the exchange process the transaction of multiple cryptocurrencies, but has stopped the same for Ethereum, due to suspicion of the attack on the network.

The company is currently processing its wallet in 32 different companies.

Personal Life

In 2017, Armstrong was listed as Fortune 40 under 40, and later, recode under the 100 list. By the end of 2018, he was among the list of billionaires, and his net worth was estimated between $900 million and $1 billion. Currently, he serves as the CEO of Coinbase, the company having over 200 employees.

Robert E. Kahn: American Computer Scientist & the Co-inventor of Internet

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What is the thing in this modern world you cannot live without? Well, without any guesses it would be internet and why? Because it’s simply irresistible! At present, no one can imagine a world without the internet because it has become an integrated part of our lives. Everything we tend to do, normally, at first we check about it on the internet, so that nothing goes wrong. The Internet has got the answer for literally everything! It is no more a thing for the business only, but it has also entered into the personal lives of people. From the brightest of the ideas to the darkest of things, from social media to entertainment, it is everywhere. The Internet carries information, business, entertainment, and what not. In today’s era, almost everyone has access to the internet.

But the internet was not always a posh thing. It had its own origin, and it was Robert Elliot Kahn, who defined its origin. He is the mastermind who made our lives easier by bringing the internet into our lives. The story of Robert though looks simple but is the most inspiring one, as it shows that the knowledge, when contained properly can help one change billions of lives, as he did.

Bob_Kahn
Image Source: Wikipedia

Robert Elliot Kahn was born on December 23, 1938, Brooklyn, New York, US. He was born in a Jewish family. He did a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from New York’s City College. For his higher studies, he went on to Princeton University and received a master’s degree, in 1962, and completed a PhD, in 1964.

Kahn started working in Bell Laboratories. He also gave service as an assistant professor in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for two years, from 1964 to 1966. Later, he joined Bolt Beranek & Newman (BB&N) as a senior scientist. BB&N was an engineering consulting firm. It was his joining of BB&N that where demonstrated the ARPANET by connecting 20 different computers at the International Computer Communication Conference.

ARPANET, the name derived from its sponsors DARPA was basically a different kind of project. ARPANET stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency. ARPANET is considered as the predecessor to the internet. It basically was a satellite packet network project. In BB&N, he was in the group that designed Interface Message Processor, which was mediate between the network and the host computers, of the institution. He further went on and organized an International Conference on Computer Communication. This also stood out as ARPANET’s public debut.

IIn 1972, Kahn left BB&N and joined DARPA’s IPTO (Information Processing Techniques Office). While working at DARPA, he faced and solved problems about the deployment of packet switching technology. However, the real problem was connecting the military network. That’s where ‘internet’ came into being and got its name, Internet- the network of networks.

In 1973, Kahn was joined by Vint Cerf, and the two started working together on the Internet’s Technical Protocol. The protocol is the basis of internet’s architect, or we can say, is the foundation of the internet. TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol) are the primary structures of the internet, which permits a computer to enter a certain network.

Alongside internet, he also contributed to the US government’s Strategic Computing Initiative and coined the term ‘National Information Infrastructure’.

In 1985, he left ITPO, and joined the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), a non-profit organization in Reston, Virginia, as the president, in 1986.

Robert was an achiever. He won many awards which included U.S. National Medal of technology presented by former President Bill Clinton, in Dec 1997, ACM Alan M. Tuning award in 2004 (biggest award in Computer Science) and Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005, presented by former President George Bush.

The Founder of the Internet, Robert E. Kahn’s (aka Bob Kahn) story shows us that success doesn’t come overnight and it takes patience and hard work. Your work is the baby steps to success. We should never constraint ourselves just because we don’t see results just after.

Robert is an inspiration to the whole world.

Adam Neumann : The CEO & Co-founder of WeWork

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Startups have become a trend these days. Every day we hear about several new innovative ideas, which are brought up in the market, with a pure desire to succeed. The masterminds see the industry as an empty canvas, on which, they want to paint with their own colours. They don’t want to work under some other person’s rules, but they aspire to make their own set of rules.

If you are also a startup genius, there are always 3 questions roaming around in your head. First, ‘Where to get the funding from?’, second, ‘Where to get the workforce from?’ and third, ‘If I get the workforce, from where to start working?’ Alongside, you also need the information and the contacts to get in the community of independent business. Well, the first question depends on your hard work, but when it comes to the second and the third questions, WeWork will get the job done, because Adam Neumann, the co-founder of the company, does everything to provide you with the best of everything.

Adam neumann
Image Source: Forbes

Adam Neumann, the CEO and co-founder of WeWork, was born in Israel, in 1979. He was seven when his parents’ relationship came to an end, and they got divorced. His mother specialised in medical science and moved to the U.S., in 1986. Adam and his sister Adi also moved with her to the United States. After 4 years, the family shifted back to Israel and settled in Kibbutz Nir Am. Adam joined the Israel Navy and served as an officer, for 5 years. As his sister was pursuing a career in modelling, in New York City, she became the reason for him to move to the city after his service in the Israel Navy.

He then graduated from Brauch College, New York. He met Miguel Mckelvy through a mutual friend, and that’s when things took a turn. They both had many similar thoughts about connecting companies to each other and to build a community.

In 2008, they both co-founded Greendesk, in Brooklyn. Greendesk still continues to operate and provides eco-friendly office spaces for any business need, no matter if you are a team or an individual. After Greendesk, Adam switched and started to run a business, which made baby overalls. In 2010, both Adam and Miguel came up with another idea, ‘WeWork’.

When asked about the basic need and the idea of WeWork, Adam said “The truth behind WeWork is that we never saw co-working spaces. I owned a baby clothing business, and there was an empty building. I talked to Miguel. We talked about different things we could do to make that building better. And when we actually got to talking about it, I said that this is my third business, it’s a very difficult thing to start a new business, and if we could create an environment, where entrepreneurs and small businesses can come in, have a space, share services, and help each other to be more successful, then it would be a great product.”

First network lab that WeWork set up was SoHo, New York, in 2011. Soon, the company grew. As of now, it has more than 10 million sq. ft of real estate! It has drawn some big money investments from ‘Goldman Sachs’ and ‘Softbank’. WeWork has more than 5000 employees. Working at WeWork means that you’ll get to play an arcade room and enjoy the free beer!

The company has established its offices in more than 77 cities, in 23 countries, like India, Germany, France, Spain, UK. It has helped more than 20,000 companies, including big names, like Microsoft, Spotify, Facebook, Starbucks, Pinterest etc. It has also given a push-start to startups like Meetup, Consumer, Hack Hands etc.

In January 2019, WeWork was rebranded as The We Company. The corporation is giving a tough competition to real-time Real Estate. It is the biggest property holder in Manhattan (5.3 million sq. ft). Neumann himself has a worth of $4.1 billion (Reported by Forbes) with his company valued at more than $20 billion.

Adam Neumann and his company exhibit the value, a community can hold. It gives a vivid message that a team is better than you standing alone. When problems are tackled by teams, it brings a sense of unity and a better understanding. By being in the community, you are surrounded by geniuses and masterminds, very much available to lend you help whenever you need. Adam, clearly brought a more than needed product into the market to make your offices a better place and ‘you’ a part of the community in easy ways.

Adobe : The Software Giant Transforming the Way You Look at the World

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Technology, today, has grown to such level that it has changed the way you look at the world. Not only the world, but it has changed the way you look at yourself! Shocking, isn’t it? There are many powerful tools available in the software market that people can use to make you believe in the things that can’t even exist. The creativity, the risks, the hard work, the growing power of multimedia, the inspirations and the motivations, when all were put together, the greatest software of all time, ‘Adobe’, became a reality. Great as it might seem, the story of the success of Adobe was not an easy one, but is the best one you can get inspiration from.

Adobe is an American Multinational computer software company. The headquarter of the company is located in San Jose, California, United States. The foundation of the company is purely based on creating software that enhances the creation of median and intensifies creativity.

adobe
Image Source: adobe.com

Adobe was founded by John Warnock and Charles Geschke, in December 1982. The company’s first office was the Warnock’s garage. It all started when both of the computer geniuses developed a programming language that was specially designed to describe position, shape and size of objects on a computer-generated page. The software was known as ‘Postscript’. But the company, Xerox, they were working in, refused to take the product to the market. Both John and Charles resigned and started working on their own on the same project.

‘Adobe’ name was inspired by Adobe Creek, Los Altos, California, a location near to their homes. The logo (A creative and stylized “A”) was designed by John’s wife, Marva Warnock.

The first product that Adobe launched in the market was a ‘PostScript’ software. It was a powerful computer language, the same that they had designed while working in Xerox. It described to a printer the whole layout of an electronic page. The product surprisingly made a breakthrough, and by 1985, Adobe had $1.9 million in sales. By 1986, the revenue that the company was generating was around $16 million, out of which, $4 million were income based.
Steve Jobs wanted to buy the company, but both of the creators refused. However, after giving second thoughts to the idea, and having words with their investors, John and Charles agreed to sell 19% of the company’s shares to him. For that, Jobs paid at least five times of their company’s value at that time. This deal made it the first company to gain such a profit in its first year only.

This was just a start for the company. Next, it launched a second product which was a type-1 interface. The interface provided digital type fonts that could be printed in any resolution. Subsequently, the company launched the marvellous ‘Adobe Illustrator’, which produced high-quality drawings that can be printed and published very easily. The product stood out brilliantly and generated approximately $85 million as revenues. This was a clear sign that with each product, Adobe was growing and that too on a rapid pace. The company, soon, became one of the best software manufacturers over the world. The quality of the work was very high which made the two founders of the company sit and relax, on the ‘top’.

Their next release, ‘Adobe Photoshop’, still stands best in the market. The software is a photo editor, which became the best seller in the market in no time. In the year 1990, the company had more than $170 million in revenue, including the $40 million total income. Within a period of 4 years, the revenue reached $670 million.

Every story has a point of downfall, and in 1998, such point arrived for Adobe, too. In 1998, Hewlett Packard (HP) made a similar PostScript software. Due to which, Adobe saw a reduction in sales by a massive 40 per cent. The company experienced a setback but was quick to react. Soon, it started rebuilding strategies, restructuring plans and started cutting down on employees.

In 1999, for a comeback, Adobe decided to launch a publishing tool, ‘InDesign’, with a risk of a similar tool already running in the market, sold by Quark. So, Adobe was not expecting much from it. However, when released, InDesign did the impossible. The product became a huge success, gaining Adobe more than $ 1 billion as revenues, over the time, reshaping and reviving the company.

Since then, Adobe has not looked back. Some of the software that they have in the market right now, are Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Flash player, Adobe Dreamweaver, Page maker, Adobe Scan, Adobe Premiere Clip, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Capture CC, Adobe creative cloud, Adobe connect and the ever-lasting Adobe Photoshop, which carries many more versions of it further.

Adobe has also been involved in social welfare activities. The company works to make its employees’ life more and more convenient by creating a healthy work environment. It has given cash grants and many contributions like volunteer support, software training, donated software to a non-profit organization. The company also supports the environmental stewardship.

As of now, Adobe is ranked number 10 by Forbes on the list of ‘Top 100 Digital Companies’. The company has more than $ 7.7 Billion sales in the market and a market cap of $ 119.1 Billion.

Adobe’s story gives us a glimpse of how something unique can create a spark among consumers. Also, that when you are walking on a path, where nothing goes right, it just requires a proper plan to get back on the track. One should never leave the creative ideas in their head, and the story of Adobe shows that and helps us get them out with the versatility of the software they offer.

Frank Wang : The Man Behind the Flight of Unmanned Drones

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Even the thought of flying gives us a sense of freedom. Flying means that we can see the world from another perspective, an open one, a wide one. But we cannot fly! Technology has been coping with everything we cannot do. The places where we lack, we take the help of technology to reach that potential. And so is the technology that DJI brings to you, to see the world from a perspective so different, the perspective of flying! And, the man behind the scenes of DJI, ‘Frank Wang’ shares a story so motivating.

SZ Da-Jiang Innovation, also known as DJI, is a drone manufacturing company. DJI manufactures unmanned, autonomous aerial vehicles, flight controllers, and the list goes on and on. At present, DJI is the largest drone-manufacturing company in the market, standing on top of the competition of drone companies.

Frank Wang
Image Source: Forbes

Frank Wang was born in 1980 as Wang Tao, in Hangzhou, China. His father was a small business owner and an engineer. During his childhood, Frank developed an interest in flying objects. He literally craved flying helicopters, and always begged his parents to buy him one. At 16, he finally received one, but the joy was short-lived because he crashed it in no time. He spent most of his youth reading about model aeroplanes and helicopters. His childhood dream was to build a flying robot that had a camera on it, and it could follow him anywhere he went. Over time, his interest in planes and helicopters kept growing.

Even having poor academic results, he was a genius when it came to helicopters and planes. He always intended to build a career in the flying field. But this setback of results landed him into East China Normal University, Shanghai, as top universities were out of range for him. In the university, he studied psychology. Further, he joined the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

It was the Hong Kong University, where his life took a turn, and things got interesting. During his senior year, he designed a ‘helicopter-flight control system’, which was the part of a college project. He was granted HK$18000 (US$2300) by the university, to conduct research and develop a ‘drone helicopter’. He built a helicopter with the help of one of his professors. For that, he skipped classes, worked and studied day in day out and without even having a good sleep! He knew the importance of his project and worked so hard that he managed to make an unmanned helicopter. Wang’s hard work paid off, and the drone made its first flight by nearly reaching the top of the Mount Everest.

In 2006, Wang started DJI from his dorm room, which today, stands as the largest drone company all over the world, with it owing almost 70% of all the drones industry. In 2017, he became Asia’s youngest tech billionaire. According to a report from Forbes, in 2018, his worth stood a huge amount of US $5.4 billion. Frank holds 40% of the shares of DJI.
DJI reportedly had more than US$2 billion as sales, and during the valuation of the company, in 2018, it came out that the company raised more than US$15 billion. The headquarter of the company is located in Shenzhen, China and has its operating divisions in China, Hong Kong, Japan, North America and Europe. The company which started with an employee count of 4 has now more than 4000 employees in different countries.

DJI is famous for its UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) and to be more precise, the ‘Phantom’ series. It manufactures devices like Camcorder, Camera stabilizers, flight platform gimbals, flight controls, etc.

The CEO and founder of SZ Da-Jiang Innovation (DJI), Frank Wang gives us the motivation that if we have the will, if we have the passion and the desire to work hard, we can achieve the dreams, even the ones that we saw as a child. Frank, achieved what he dreamt as a kid and puts an example in front of the whole world of what ‘true passion and hard work’ can do.