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kingston

Kingston : The Largest Memory Module Manufacturer Company in the World

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Change is the basic rule of life, and along with life, there are many things that go through changes with time. One of the main thing that has been changing with a high pace is technology. In the past decade, we have seen the most dramatic advancement in technology, and thus, we are introduced to many unusual things. Memory devices, being the most important part of the technology products, has seen a lot of good transformations, and for such innovative products, we can give the credit to the tech companies like Kingston.

Kingston Technology Corporation is a multinational computer technology company, and one of the most popular flash memory products manufacturers, based in California. David Sun a native of Taiwan, and John Tu from Chongqing, China, founded the company in 1987 in California. At the time, they were completely broke, the two spotted the opportunity in the shortage of 1Mbit surface-mount memory chips in the market and built Kingston.

About the Founders

David Sun is the COO of Kingston Technology, born in October 1951 in Taiwan. He graduated from Tatung University, and after completing his education, he moved to the U.S.

Founders Kingston
Image Source: moneyinc.com

On the other hand, John Tu had to go through some hardships to get the education. He was born in 1941 in Chungking, China, but had to move with his family to Shanghai in 1945. After around two years, as the Chinese civil war broke, his family moved to Taiwan. Lack of availability of good schools and college, Tu then moved to Germany to pursue a degree in electrical engineering. But again, as he did not know the language, it became difficult for him to choose the college and start studying.

After a lot of struggle, with the help of a priest, Tu joined a language school in Munich and started working at a shipbuilding factory for his apprenticeship. Finally, he got enrolled in the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt and received a graduate degree in electrical engineering. As soon he completed the degree, he got a job at Motorola in Wiesbaden, and after working for a year, he moved to California on the recommendation of his sister, who was already living the U.S.

Founding Kingston Technology Corporation

Coming out of a life full of struggles, John Tu had to start working, as soon as he reached the new country. He started a gift shop in Arizona, and later, invested in various other ventures. In 1982, Tu met Sun in California, and being from the same background, they became friends. The same year, they decided to start a computer hardware company named Camintonn Corporation. The company was then acquired by another company, and each of them received $1 million after the deal.

But due to some bad business decisions, in 1987, they were broke. They could do nothing but try their luck with another business. They started Kingston Technology Corporation focussed on manufacturing computer memory products to fulfil the demand in the market. Kingston started manufacturing memory devices for different PCs, as a result, started growing at a rapid rate. The company was the result of the biggest failure of the two co-founders, but still, it was their biggest success, too.

The Success

In 1990, the company expanded its manufacturing lineups to processor upgrades, networking and storage products. And, in two years, Kingston was ranked as the number one fastest-growing privately held company in America by Inc. The company received its ISO 9000 certificate in a single attempt in 1994. The next year, the company was a unicorn, with the sales exceeding $1.3 billion, and it had grown to 500 employees.

It was in 1996 when for the first time, a PC company (Toshiba) and a memory products manufacturing company (Kingston) collaborated to develop co-branded modules. The same year, the Softbank bought 80% of the company shares for $1.8 billion, but in 1999, the two co-founders bought the shares back for $450 million. The company expanded its branches to Europe, establishing its first office in London, United Kingdom, in 1996. The next year, the company had offices in Taiwan, Japan, Dublin, and a in few other locations.

In 2000, the company formed two spin-off companies named Validation Labs, Inc. and StorCase Technology, Inc. Kingston has featured in The 500 Largest Private Companies in the U.S, by Forbes over five times. It has also been named as the world’s number-one memory module manufacturer for the third-party memory market by iSuppli for 12 consecutive years. It was also named the world’s number-one memory module manufacturer for the third-party memory market by IHS multiple times.

Kingston has always believed in the motto of “be real good at what you do, or do nothing!”. It has been the symbol of reliability and quality since its inception. The story of Kingston inspires us to put the hard work in the right direction and persistence, such that success will be never un achievable.

eyeview

Oren Harnevo : The Founder of Eyeview, a Digital Marketing Company

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Advertisement plays a key role in proper marketing for any product, brand or service. And once the demand is created in the marketplace, the company gets anchored, if not for a lifetime, at least for a good period of time. Digital marketing is the face of every product today, starting from a small online service to a mammoth multinational company. If not for advertisement, proper marketing of brands would have seemed like a far-fetched goal today. And, pioneering in the pool of marketing, Oren Harnevo created his own video marketing company, Eyeview in January 2007. Once the internet started getting popular throughout the world, Harnevo was successfully able to channel its true power and expose it in the world of marketing. Today, his company serves some of the top premier brands of U.S like P&G, Honda and BMW.

Early life and early career of Harnevo

Harnevo, like most of the programmers, was into computer and coding from a very young age. He started coding from the age of 10 and never really stopped it.

Harnevo, after graduating from his high school, didn’t pursue any undergraduate program immediately. He served as a Sergeant of Special Forces in Israel Defense Forces for three years (1996-1999). After serving for the army of Israel, Harnevo went to Tel Aviv University, Israel in 1999. He pursued his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and graduated in 2003. Instead of pursuing his Master’s degree, Harnevo pursued another Bachelor’s degree from the same university in film, cinema and television.

Oren Harnevo Eyeview
Image Source: eyeview.com

Harnevo, not to mention, was very good with computers, or else, it wouldn’t have been possible for a guy with no knowledge in computer programming to create such a tech empire for himself. Right after he received his degree in computer science, he joined Teamworks Technology as a Web Developer in January 2000. By this time, he already mastered HTML, Java, Javascript, SQL and Cold Fusion. He worked there as a junior developer and left the company after a year.

While Harnevo was pursuing his degree in arts (film and cinema), he joined Redzebra ltd, as a product manager. He was in charge of product management and development of an online medical portal, LifeOnKey.

Now that Harnevo had received two degrees on diametrically opposite subjects, he was ready to storm his mind and bring out some excellent ideas, ideas to blend the power of computer programming with the right amount of entertainment through media and cook a perfect potion for video marketing. The ideal amalgamation of science and arts is what Harnevo specialized in all these years.

In May 2004, Harnevo joined 888.com as a Project & Product Manager and continued for almost three years.

Founding Eyeview

Working as a product manager and having experience on the platform of digital marketing for so many years, Harnevo definitely spotted a good potential in video marketing. Moreover, he studied about media which made him superior to only developers. His choice for academics might have seemed strange, but it did pay off well. Harnevo sets a perfect example of an entrepreneur who actually proved that at times, jack of all deeds and master of none plays the ace in your life.

In January 2007, Harnevo established Eyeview, a video marketing based startup in the city of New York. Eyeview mainly created personalized video ads for companies, brands and products. The company mainly emphasizes on delivering 1-to-1 outcome-based video marketing and seems like it has gathered quite a good audience in terms of both quality and quantity in the last twelve years. Eyeview was also as the ninth fastest-growing company in North America on Deloitte’s 2015 Technology Fast 500. The company has also successfully raised $80 million from top venture capitalists.

Harnevo has been the CEO of the company for more than twelve years. He stepped down from his position on June 2019 and became a member of the board.

Awards and Achievements

In 2008, Harnevo was awarded the Harvard Business School 2008 Best Start-up, followed by the award for best video advertisement technology in 2011 by Digiday.

Apart from being the recipient of some prestigious awards, Harnevo has also been featured on the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Ad Age.

cloudian

Success Story of Cloudian, a Data Storage Company, Co-founded by Hiroshi Ohta

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The advancement of technology is providing us with stairway to a new world. Every day, every second, our world is changing. New gadgets and new phenomenons are discovered daily. The path, that we have chosen for modernizing our world, depends vividly on data. Today, everything that we do, from launching a website to posting a picture on our Instagram account, data is needed. And, after a few decades, our world will reach a certain position where the development of every nation will be decided by the amount of data one can store or have access to.

And, speaking of data, as such an integral part of the modern sphere, it is definitely necessary to mention Hiroshi Ohta. Hiroshi Ohta, along with Michael Tso founded Cloudian, a company that brought innovation in the data storage system. Founded in 2011, the company has its headquarters based in San Mateo, California, United States.

The main product of Cloudian is object storage software that was built for big enterprises as with new software and applications from a huge number of companies made data storage really tough and complex. So, an easy to use data storage system was the cry of the hour.

The Idea Behind Cloudian

cloudian founder hiroshi ohta
Image Source: advertisingweek.com

Before Hiroshi Ohta came up with the idea of building his own company, he used to work at J-Phone. It is a telecom operator company, based in Japan, where Ohta was in charge of service development. During his time in this mobile company, he pioneered many skills and also provided the base for “Sha-Mail”, first mail in the world with pictorial advantage. Since he worked in the sector of communication, Ohta spotted a significant increase of users in the telecommunication world, and this resulted in the gathering of data in networks.

With an increase in the number of smartphones, laptops, and tablet in today’s world, the audience might likely run out of data and need to pay for storage. And, if such a situation arrives, where data becomes an integral part of our basic requirements, then it definitely has to be affordable. Thinking about this, Ohta decided to quit the company and built data storage product for the traffic insanely driving to the cloud world. He started working on Cloudian Hyperstore software (a software having Amazon S3 support).

Why Object Storage Technology?

The biggest advantage of this kind of storage software technology is that you can store and have access to data irrespective of your geographical location. Previously, the software that had been created by many companies only limited the scope of accessing data from nowhere, but the data centres. But, Ohta undoubtedly solved this problem through Cloudian software.

Another big problem that started arising was the cost of maintenance because some software programs were targeted to increase the data volume. This increased the cost of storage and got off track from one of the data storage’s biggest goal, that is being economical.

Cloudian’s products solve both the major problems, along with keeping the quality of products high. From media to medical school, every institution, company, organization, including a single user, need data storage facilities for various reasons. And, there is no scene of “market drop” in this area, at least, for half a century now.

Success of Cloudian

One year, after founding the company, Cloudian signed a deal with a Japanese telecommunication company to fuel its cloud object storage service. This was the big start after which Cloudian has entertained many lucrative clients, including Motorola, Element Fleet, Tyco and many more.

The company also has a very fancy list when it comes to investors. In 2014, the company raised $24 million from Intel Capital, Goldman Sachs, INCJ and Fidelity Growth Partners Japan. In 2016, four new investors were added to list including Lenovo, City National Bank, Epsilon Venture Partners and DVP Investment. Cloudian raised $41 million in the funding round of October 2016. After the new Series E funding round, the total worth of Cloudian hit an impressive figure of $173 million. The company has also established a partnership with Cisco, which triggered the list of investors, and basically, means more funding.

Future Aspects

One of the most important targets that Ohta talks about is the users should be very familiar and comfortable to use these products. Also, the applications that are being created with Cloudian’s storage technology as the backbone should be at best interest of the audience.

Bell Curve

Julian Shapiro: The Founder of Bell Curve, Marketing Agency and the Mascot of Animation

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Have you ever discovered your interest in doing something because you were just bored? Well, that happens to many of us, but only a few make it their passion. And, a handful among the few can establish themselves successfully through it. For example, we love playing video games, but that doesn’t mean every one of us turns out to be a game developer, but a guy named Nitish Mittersain did, didn’t he? You should be highly passion driven if you want to live through what you love. And, Julian Shapiro proved to be one of them.

Julian Shapiro, the founder of the Bell Curve and many other online services, started to show interest in coding from an age of twelve. And, the reason he started tinkering with his computer was he got nothing to do after he moved to a new city. Eventually, he started exploring different aspects of computer, and the wonders, one can make if he/she has good coding skills and was undoubtedly carried away by its charm.

Shapiro started his coding journey with Visual Basic 6, and by the time he was fourteen, he was pretty good at what he was doing. He realized that his skills were in high demand, and he could easily make money out of it. So, he started developing websites for small companies, swooping into the entrepreneurial world.

A Great Start

Since Julian Shapiro started as a teenage entrepreneur, he gradually became one of those tech-savvies interested in learning something new every day. Shapiro was very much involved in domain names for startups and companies. But he noticed that most of the businesses have below-average quality names for their companies and decided to work on it. With the existing knowledge of web development, Shapiro started building tools that would analyze around 50,000 domains daily and among those domains which were likely to be worthwhile.

Julian Shapiro
Image: Julian Shapiro

He put a lot of efforts into like building an algorithm for making combinations of alphabets and sorting out the potential names and acquiring them for a few dollars. After working diligently for six months, Shapiro finally made an inventory of domain names, thus selling it to companies for a few thousand dollars each. He named this service NameLayer and released it in August 2011.

Accelerating as a Tech Entrepreneur

After selling NameLayer to Techstars in 2014, Julian Shapiro again went back to his most comfortable place of web development. While creating several projects, he noticed that web animation doesn’t receive much importance, and no such significant modification or improvement was done in that area. Thinking that this hinders the designs of professional web developers, he started working on it.

In September 2013, Shapiro created his own animation engine, Velocity, to improve the tooling of web development through motion animation. The launch of velocity was very effective as people, especially the front-end designers, started using it extensively because they really understood the impact of web animation on marketing. Famous companies like Microsoft and Uber also started using Velocity.

What About Bell Curve?

With Neal O’Grady and Asher King-Abramson as partners, Shapiro founded Bell Curve in April 2017. It is a San Francisco based startup that operates as a marketing agency and conducts growth training programs. Bell Curve, basically, runs advertisements for startups and businesses across the world. Leading companies like Envoy, Streak and Tovala hired Bell Curve to run their advertisement sector.

Today, Bell Curve comprises a team of 9 members, including Julian Shapiro. This new startup is making great progress, but most importantly, Shapiro at the end of the day strictly adhered to what he loves the most, that is, web development. He devoted his career to make unbound contributions in this area of development.

Moreover, the digital content of the Bell Curve is so powerful that the company gives growth talks at Google and Y Combinator.

Other Aspects of Shapiro’s Career

In November 2014, Shapiro joined Webflow, Inc as a Vice President of Marketing. The company was about web development for professionals, something that Shapiro can never turn down. He worked there for ten months.

Julian Shapiro also started his own blog, Julian.com from September 2015. And, he is the only owner of the website. Shapiro also writes in TechCrunch about growth marketing since March 2019.

Another project that Shapiro worked and is worth mentioning is Libscore. Shapiro created Libscore in partnership with Stripe and Digital Ocean to help people understand that at what rate their libraries are actually used by people after putting it on open source. It helps to gather the statistics, thus providing the developer with proper feedback.

Plaid

Plaid : Powering Innovation in Financial Sector by Connecting Apps to Banks

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There has been an explosion of multiple payment apps in the past couple of years, to be more precise, last two years. These apps have made it easy for all of us on how to manage our finances and bank accounts, making us able to send and receive money from and into our bank accounts in just a few taps on our smartphone. But is it that easy to do all of these processes? It looks like but is definitely not. These companies create an infrastructure to connect the banks with the app or use a ready-made API for the same. Plaid is one of the companies which creates those APIs for the app makers who then can connect the banks through their apps and provide financial services to their customers.

Plaid was founded by Zach Perret and William Hockey in 2012. Perret is a Duke University pass out with a bachelor’s degree in Science, and William has a degree in Computer Science from Emory University. The two worked at Bain & Company, Perret as a consultant and Hockey as an associate. The two met at work and gelled well due to their common interest, i.e. coding. While working at the company, they discussed ideas for a new startup and started working on some. And, in 2012 finally left their job to start their own business. They moved to New York and spent over eighteen months to conceive the right idea.

Like every other startup founders, it was not their first startup. Before Plaid they had tried their hands on various consumer-based products as well, but none of them worked. Once, they decided to create an app for connecting bank accounts and do the transaction. But it was again a failure.

Plaid founders
Image Source: wsj.com

So they decided to create an infrastructure for connecting the apps and the banks altogether, like a pipeline, moving their focus from consumer-based products. Following that, the two created personal financial management and tracking tool for consumers and named it Sliver. Later, the product was renamed as Rambler, which later won the $5,000 grand prize at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY Hackathon as a winner in 2013. It was the first time that a team made a full-scale financial services application live within 24 hours.

With Rambler, the two co-founded Plaid, an application programming interface, or API, that would do almost every type of banking work, like generating PDFs for the transaction and connecting the banks, just by using a bank customer’s online user name and password. The two moved to San Fransisco to set up an office and join more engineers to work on the product. Along with that, they started looking for investors and got rejected more than 50 times.

Finally, in July 2013, the company was able to raise a $2.9 million in a seed round led by Spark Capital. Later, the company raised a $60 million in Series A and Series B funding. Since then, the company has been growing in every which way. Within two years, the startup idea took the two co-founders of Plaid into the list of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2015.

According to Plaid, as of December 2018, 25 per cent of people in the United States having a bank account had connected to Plaid through an app. It was a fair increase of 13 per cent in 2017.

In 2019, the company raised a $250 million Series C investment and valued at a $2.65 billion. In total, the company has raised a $310 million investment from names like Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Goldman Sachs, NEA, Spark Capital, etc.

Today, more than 15,000 banks are connected through various apps with the Plaid infrastructure and extend to thousands of apps, including Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, Acorns and LendingClub.

box

Box : The Journey from A Class Project to Becoming a Unicorn

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File storage has become the biggest issue of the current time. With changing time, the need for storage capacity is also changing. In previous years, some KBs were sufficient, and now, even TBs are not able to fulfil the business requirements. But then, the introduction of the cloud has helped people to cop-up with their needs, such that they can buy as much online storage as they need to store their files on the cloud. This is a similar concept behind one of the successful startups, Box, which is a cloud content management and file sharing service. The founder of Box, Aaron Levie, started working on Box as a college project, which now is one of the Unicorn companies of the Silicon Valley.

Levie was born as Aaron Winsor Levie on 27 December 1985 in a Jewish family, settled in Mercer Island, Washington. He did his middle school from Islander Middle School in Mercer Island, Washington, where he met his best friend, and the future CFO of Box, Dylan Smith. Levie and Smith had always shown an interest in business as well as coding. In fact, when they were in high school, they had already built a few websites for people.

After completing his high school education, Levie joined the University of Southern California to pursue a degree in business and marketing, whereas Smith went to Duke University, and enrolled in a Bachelor’s course in economics.

Dylan Smith Aaron Levie Founders Box
Image Source: techrepublic.com

While at the University of Southern California, Levie constantly kept on working on new projects with his classmates. When he, with his other friends created code files, all of them created separate files on separate devices, so it was difficult for them to bring the code together and run. And this was the time when he realised that there has to be a single place to store files. It was the first pain point towards the development of Box.

At the same time, in one of their business studies class, a new project came up for their finals. Levie chose the same topic for his project that was a big issue for him and other businesses out there, centralised storage system. He wrote a paper for the project that represented the difficulties that the businesses were facing due to the lack of such systems.

While working on the project, Levie realised the scope of the project and decided to take the project more seriously. In 2004, he asked his friend Dylan to join him for help. Levie was working on the front end coding for the project, and then, brought his high school friends Sam Ghods and Jeff Queisser on board, too, to run the engineering work. Along with that, he hired some back-end developers on contract for the backend coding. The $20,000 seed funding for the project, and the company they founded, came from online poker earnings of Smith. They also invested the money that came from their previous projects in the company.

Levie knew the potential of his new project but was not sure what type of industry to target first. He, along with Smith, went to meet various business owners to clarify the same. Finally, they launched their company Box, and the service as Box.net in April 2005. At the end of 2005, the two went to Washington to work together on the project, and Levie took absence leave from his college. Soon, they moved their company to Berkeley, California.

Box received its first angel investment from Mark Cuban, a billionaire from Texas. During the beginning, the service was a consumer service, but the increased demand made Levie turn it into cloud storage and sell it to the businesses. In 2009, Box acquired Increo Solutions for its document collaboration and preview technology.

The company hosted a round of funding led by growth equity firm General Atlantic, where it raised a $125 million, in 2012. It also extended its operations to Europe and built its office in London, England. In 2013, the company in an F series round of funding raised a $100 million.

In 2014, 40% of Fortune 500 companies were using Box as their cloud storage and raised a $150 million in series G round of funding. Box also filed for an IPO at the New York Stock Exchange. The company became public in January 2015 and raised $175 million in the IPO. The IPO valued the company at around $1.6 billion, establishing it as a Unicorn company. In the same year, Box acquired another cloud management company named Airpost. The next year, the company built its headquarters in Redwood City, California. It even reached 44 million users around the world.

Box works in three types of offering, enterprise, business, and personal, IBM, Schneider Electric and Procter & Gamble, being its enterprise customers.