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Tony Hsieh – Co-Founder of the Online Shoe and Clothing Company Zappos

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For constant growth, one needs to take risks, from time to time. Getting into a new business, or changing a line of work, or anything that keeps your adrenaline rush at its peak as it will lead you to most fulfilling experiences. The success, of course, follows and, so does money. Entrepreneurs are known for their risk taking abilities and venturing into newer forays. Tony Hsieh, is one such figure, who has kept evolving his talent from time to time and has reached the topmost position in the corporate world.

Early Life

Tony Hsieh was born on 12 December 1973, in Illinois, US, to Richard and Judy Hsieh, who shifted from Taiwan to Illinois. He was brought up on the bay area of San Francisco with his two brothers, Andy Hsieh and Dave Hsieh.

He graduated in Computer Science from Harvard University, in 1995. While studying in Harvard, Tony managed the Quincy House Grille and, sold pizza to the students in his dorm. Here he met Alfred Lin, who was his best pizza customer and, a future colleague.

Career

Tony landed his first job with Oracle Corporation, soon after he graduated. But, just in half a year, he realized that the corporate environment was not meant for him and, left the job. Later he went on to set up LinkExchange – an advertising network – along with his college friend and ex-Oracle employee Sanjay Madan.

Tony Hsieh
Image Source: flickr.com

The central aim of LinkExchange was to advertise the sites of companies, interested in the company. Tony landed his first 30 clients, via e-mail and, just within three months, the site displayed ads of 20,000 web-pages. Members were allowed to advertise their site using banner ads on LinkExchange. The banner ads were displayed over 10 million times and, by 1998, the site registered 400,000 members and 5 million ad rotations daily. The company was sold to Microsoft for $265 million, in November 1998.

The next business Hsieh started was an incubator and investment firm, whose name was originated as a result of a dare. One of Tony’s friends said that she would invest everything, she has got, if they named the company ‘Venture Frogs’ and, thus, accepting the challenge, the company with the same name was born. Venture Frogs invested in several companies, like AskJeeves, OpenTable, and Zappos. The company did not witness huge profits but, led Tony to take interest in Zappos.

Founding Zappos

Nick Swinmurn, the person with the original idea of Zappos, approached Tony, in 1999, with the idea of selling shoes online. Hsieh wasn’t interested in the early days but, when Swinmurn mentioned that footwear business accounted to $40 billion in the US alone, of which 5% was sold by paper mail orders.

The figures struck Tony, and through Venture Frogs, he decided to invest in the business. He accepted the position of CEO of Zappos, investing $2 million, and in 1999 started ShoeSite.com. Tony enjoyed working in Zappos and set up an office in Venture Frogs premises itself. In 2000, the company received additional funding and generated about $1.6 million in revenue, and $8.6 million, in the next year.

In 2004, Sequoia Capital invested $35 million in Zappos as they saw the company made sales worth $184 million. In 2007, the company made sales worth $840 million and had expanded their products, in every sector, like kids, men’s, women shoes, etc. By this time, they had a dedicated headquarters situated in Henderson, Nevada.

The year 2009, was the most blooming for Zappos, as the company touched $1 billion in revenue. On July 22, 2009, Amazon acquired Zappos, for a whopping $1.2 billion, and Hsieh made about $214 million through this deal.

Later, Hsieh also joined JetSuite’s board in 2011 and closed a $7 million investment deal for the ‘very light’ jet project.

Personal Life

Tony Hsieh, apart from business, believes in sharing knowledge. Therefore, he wrote Delivering Happiness, which became an international bestseller. In the book, he explains the details of Zappos’ journey and achieving the feat of $1 billion, in less than a year. The book remained on top lists for 27 consecutive weeks.

Tony isn’t married and likes to party. He does not stay with his parents as they wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer. Hsieh received Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2007. He lives in Downtown Las Vegas, Nevada, and also has a home in Southern Highlands.

How an IIT dropout became the ‘Bad Boy’ of Indian Startups

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Every idea is not meant to be successful in long run but what matters is your intention and focus. The story of the founder of Housing.com, Rahul Yadav speaks the same. Like most of the youngsters who belong to a middle class family, Yadav too had a target to settle down with a decent college and then a good job. But life had different plans for Yadav and this is why even after joining IIT Bombay in the year 2007 he could not fit in there.

Love for Programming

Although Yadav enrolled himself to study metallurgy but he figured out that this department was not his final destination. He carried on with his thirst for the right place unless he found the well of computers and programming to quench it. While in college he built an online question bank with the name Exambaba.com, for the students of engineering which provided them with the old question papers of IIT Bombay. His interest towards computers led him to drop his college and enter into the world of entrepreneurship. Life changing ideas always involve sincere effort, risk and out of the box thinking and Rahul Yadav was all game for it.

Rahul Yadav
Image Credit: Wikipedia

Foundation of Housing.com

The biggest problem faced by anyone  coming to a metropolitan city is of finding a proper accommodation. Rahul Yadav after coming to Bombay dealt with the same issue and this left a deep imprint on his mind. Therefore, after dropping out from college to start a venture the first and foremost thought that came to his mind was of creating an online market from where people can easily look out for houses to rent or buy. This startup was founded by Yadav with 11 of his classmates and was launched in 2012 with Yadav holding the responsibility of CEO of the company. The company started off well and acquired much attention both from the investors and the public. Many renowned and well-known investors like Haresh Chawla, Nexus Venture Partners, Softbank Cpital and Qualcomm Ventures came forward to invest in the company. Housing.com amassed the funding more than $150 million in the year 2014 and set itself as one of the established firm in the market.

Falling off the position

The first 2 years of the company turned out to be splendid ones with a good amount of funding as well as popularity among the mass. With the great success of the company more and more members began adding up to maintain the pace of company’s progress. Everything seemed to be at its place and it seemed as if the graph of their success would continue to grow. But the wheel of time never waits for anyone to turn its direction.

Right from the beginning of 2015 things turned out to grow worse in the business and within no time the company’s graph faced a steep downfall. It is believed that this was the outcome of Yadav’s rash and impulsive actions. His indulgence in controversies seemed to be more than his focus on the business. He was very vocal  against his competitors than taking his own company and plans forward. And as a result of his consistent involvement in controversies he was fired from the company in June 2015.

Rahul Yadav came into the spotlight for a number of controversial statements he made against his competitors including the founder of Zomato, the CEO of Infosys and the founder of Ola. Also his bold announcement of distributing his company shares worth $30 million among the employees created a tumult in the business world. He also sent some controversial mails to the company’s investors which resulted in further soaring his relationship with the board.

With all these controversies, the board of directors of the Housing.com made a unanimous decision of firing Rahul Yadav for he was too straightforward to do the business.

His New Venture: The return of Rahul Yadav

Yadav was never among those who would be thrashed by a failure or a defeat. He had much experience in standing again on his legs even after falling down 100 times. In about 2 and half months, Yadav again made a sensational entry in the market with his new venture, Intelligent Interfaces in September 2015. This start-up is all about data analysis and visualization in e-commerce. The company reportedly was said to have acquired funding from Paytm, YouWeCan, Flipkart and Micromax. However, so far there is no news of of his new venture except rumors of its failure and shutting down in months. It seems that Industry has to wait for “the return of Rahul Yadav”.

 

From spending nights on the stairs of Masjid to CEO of $60 million company

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Success does not always need to get along with grey hair; some people change the stereotypes. Among few such people, Ritesh Agarwal possesses a remarkable position. No doubt he has shown wonders in the world of entrepreneurship and made all the competitors to gape their mouth wide open. As it is said that everyone sees dreams but only few can turn them into reality; Ritesh Agarwal’s dedication and immense talent made his dream come true. The path chosen by him was not better than a jigsaw but his incessant efforts made it possible to overcome all odds and build a successful empire.

Imprints of talent right from childhood

Agarwal was drawn towards coding and computers since he was 8 years old. Pursuing his desire to become a self-made man, he undertook a project at the age of 13, when kids hardly are aware about career and jobs. The project gave him a life time experience and set a milestone in his career. During the project he traveled a lot and analyzed how the hotel system works. You can that see his relation with hotels had been established at that age only.

However, his love for computers enchanted him towards technical line and at the age of 16, he was selected in the Asian Science Camp at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. His resolution to follow science led him to Kota for the preparation of one of the most reputed technical entrances in India. Meanwhile at Kota he authored the book ‘The Encyclopaedia of Indian Engineering Colleges’. But he could not locate his real aim there as well. Exploring the motive of his life he moved to Delhi in 2011 where sprouted his first business idea.

Image Credit- oyorooms.com

A journey full of risks and struggle

Passion to start off something on his own had always been there in him. Ritesh’s decision to drop out his formal education and step into the business world proved to be a life changing one. At the age of 17 he laid the foundation of a company named Worth Growth Partners and became India’s youngest CEO. However, the company couldn’t take him to a higher ladder of success and the very year he was hard struck by financial crisis. He had no money to pay the rent and henceforth spent several nights on the stairs of Masjid in Delhi.

But all these hurdles could not budge Ritesh from his aim and the next year he founded another company, Oravel. This business could be called as an Indian version of the site Airbnb, dealing with bed and breakfast hotels. The idea grew fast within a short span and he received a funding of Rs.30 Lakhs from VentureNursery. The efficiency of his efforts and skills made him the only Indian to get the Thiel Fellowship where he was granted an amount of $100,000.  Ritesh had a thing for learning from always and this led him to acquire more knowledge about the entrepreneurial world from all the possible sources.

Renaming the company to OYO

Ritesh’s itch of seeking better responses from a larger section of society took him to the idea of OYO stays. He could see that Oravel targeted limited number of customers who could spare a large amount from their pickets. Therefore, he himself visited and stayed at several budget hotels to have a closer understanding of the needs of customers. After this he used most of the grant from Thiel to build the OYO chain to provide the best stay in the branded budget hotels.

The journey wasn’t a smooth one there as well as he started the journey with a single hotel in Gurgaon where he handled the duties of CEO, housekeeping and sales single-handedly. However the company soon geared up and received a funding of  $650,000 from Lightspeed Venture Partners and DSG consumer Partners. OYO rooms and Ritesh Agarwal didn’t turn back then and progressed with more investors getting along with them. In just 10 months it received $6 million from Sequoia Capital and LSVP at a pre-money valuation of $60 million.

When Controversies surrounded Ritesh Agarwal

The success story of Ritesh attracted a number of haters and criticizers who could not swallow the fact that a man as young as 22 could build such a huge business. People questioned his skills of coding and called him a liar and fake. He was also accused of blurring the funding records of company. His former relations with NCrypted Technologies also came in the limelight when the latter accused Ritesh of stealing their idea. However there were no real evidences found against Ritesh.

People are always ready to grab the opportunity to pull you back but the story of Ritesh Agarwal, who fought against all odds and established himself as a successful person will always inspire youngsters.

InMobi, a company that ran out of money to $2bn acquisition speculations

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Every startup goes through ups and downs. It’s the critical business decisions, tough calls, hard work, persistence that makes startups survive and successful in long run.  InMobi was started  in 2006 as SMS based search platform, mKhoj, that later pivoted to become a mobile advertising platform. Founded by  Naveen Tiwari, Abhay Singhal, Mohit Saxena, and Amit Gupta, InMobi which today clocks  138 Billion monthly ad impressions and has 17 offices worldwide once barely had enough money to survive and was on the verge of possible shutdown.

Since than InMobi has come a long way. Today, company competes with Google’s AdMob, Apples’ iAd and there are speculations that Microsoft is going to acquire InMobi for $2 billion.

How team that built InMobi hopped in together
Four friends came together to build next-gen mobile ad platform. They built the first version mKhoj working out from a rented apartment in Mumbai.  In 2007 when company ran out of money, management ran the company for two months on 14 credit cards without paying bills before they hit a funding of $7 million.

Big leap & the funding
In initial days Mohit and Abhay were themselves doing cold calls to get the business. In 2007 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures invested $7M in InMobi. In 2008 company took a call to go global but decided not to go in a crowded market like US but  in markets like southeast Asia & Africa.

Company growth and culture
From the initials days itself company believed in long term strategy to invest in technology and people. InMobi has built a great culture. Most people in the company has stock options since the founders believe that when company tastes the success, employees too should get rewarded enough for the risk, passion and commitment to stand together in every thick and thin of the company. Unlike conventional HR standards, the company has no standard performance monitoring system, no raking and ratings and believes in employee growth and empowerment.

InMobi’s is a story of passion, a story of commitment, a story of  an Indian company that dared to go global.

Video credit: InMobi YouTube, Nasscom