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Jon Oringer : The Founder of No Less than Ten Startups, including Shutterstock

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Today no business promotion is complete without HD images. Relevant images are the most helpful in grabbing the attention of people for every type of business. Why only promotions? Images help create presentations, websites and fulfil many other purposes. But getting copyright-free images for a cheaper price is not easy. And no one wants to get hit by a copyright strike by just picking an image from the web either. Also hiring models and renting places for clicking those HD pictures is not pocket-friendly. So for these issues, websites like Shutterstock comes for the rescue, where you get lakhs of images for a cheap subscription fee. The website was developed by Jon Oringer in 2003, and since then it has been ruling the stock image industry.

Jon Oringer was born on 2 May 1974 in Scarsdale, New York. He got lucky to get to learn computer programming when he was studying in elementary school at the age of five. So he automatically became interested in programming. As a kid, he had already developed entrepreneurial skills, and when he went to high school, he developed photographs and taught guitar to make money. He completed his school education from the Scarsdale High School. As a teenager, he also repaired computers to earn some extra cash. With his programming skills, he was soon able to create small software and sold them to people.

In 1993, he joined the Stony Brook University to pursue a BS degree in computer science and mathematics. During this time, he built the world’s first pop-up blocker programme and sold over thousands of copies of the same. In 1997, he graduated with a bachelor’s degree and joined Columbia University, where he graduated with an MS in computer science. After the success of the pop-up blocker, he tried hands-on building a personal firewall, cookie blocker and other similar software and was sole owner and employee of about ten companies.

To promote his business, Jon Oringer chose e-mail marketing. But he found out that the mails with images had a better impact on people than without any. In the beginning, he bought stock photos for promotions, but later, it became quite expensive for him to buy images from the third party. So finally, he bought a camera and changed his hobby of photography to professional photography for his business. Later, he started posting the clicked and unused pictures online and invited people to use them. Eventually, it came out to be that he clicked around 100000 in just six months. So he decided to build a website, where he could put all the photographs for downloads.

Jon Oringer Shutterstock
Image Source: forbes.com

In 2003, he developed and launched Shutterstock, a website, where he put 30,000 images filtered from his vast collection. These pictures were based on different scenarios and were best of the 100000 pictures Jon Oringer had clicked. Seeing a good business opportunity in expanding the photo stock business, he took some of his savings and rented a 600-square-foot office in New York for the company. The website offered subscription-based services and cost $49 a month. Like his other startups, Oringer initially took all the responsibilities himself. With time, he started joining his friends for the photography and to ccarry out other operations in the company.

Soon, with the expansion of the company, he ended up hiring professional photographers and contributors to fulfil the demands. In 2006, the company became the largest subscription-based photo-stock company, offering over 570,000 images. From August 2008, the company also started providing videos through its new platform named Shutterstock Footage, and in 2009, it launched Shutterstock for iPad offering free images to the users. It also introduced a new marketplace like Spectrum and Offset for high-quality images and videos.

Oringer filed for an initial public offering for ShutterStock public on the New York Stock Exchange, in May 2012, and in October of the same year, the company went public. After the IPO, the stock value of the company increased drastically, and in 2013, Oringer was a billionaire with a net worth of USD$1.05 billion. The company revenues of the same year reached $2.5 billion, and it also launched an Android app.

Along with new tools and features, the company also started collaborating with different companies, like in 2013, Facebook integrated Shutterstock into its Ad Creator tool. The next year, Salesforce also included the ShutterStock library to its platform. The company also formed a partnership with companies like Penske Media Corporation and Associated Press for a free license for access to their archives.

Oringer, with his skills and experience, took the right opportunity at the right time. This intelligent entrepreneur has been a guest speaker at various educational institutions. He has also received numerous awards for his achievements. In 2013, Business Insider named Oringer the coolest person in all of New York technology. He was also named as the New York’s Technology Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young.

Echovme-logo

Sorav Jain : An Indian Entrepreneur Crusing Down the Bay of Digital Marketing

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The traditional ways of marketing have been outweighed by digitalized promotions as soon as we stepped into the era of digitalization. But, since the last few years, online marketing space has been overcrowded by people with low experience and claimed professionals. The presence of such freelancers, who have a very minimal idea about digital marketing and social media, creates confusion among the customers which reduces trust in the long run. So, the effectiveness of a good digital marketing company gradually loses its demanding position while people with basically no knowledge-creating havoc in the digital world.

And, to clear the mind of people and help them chose the best, Sorav Jain, a young Indian entrepreneur created some offbeat strategies for his digital marketing company, echoVME. He built the company out of pure passion, as he was ever really into studying biotechnology, though he pursued it. But, later he made his mind to create something of his own, like his father and uncles and went abroad to study marketing management.

Family Background and Early Life

Sorav Jain belonged to a family where creating your own ship cruise was appreciated more than working on a royal one. His father and uncles were established businessmen, so going the unconventional way and turning down tempting jobs were absolutely supported by his family members.socialsamosa.com

Sorav Jain
Image Source: digitalscholar.in

Sorav went to Loyola College and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biotechnology in 2007. While being an undergraduate student, he already mastered the art of SEO, and hence, joined Contempo Technologies as an SEO and Content Executive in January 2006. By this time, Sorav already chalked out his plan to start off his venture and explore the entrepreneurial endeavours. He went to the University of Leeds to complete his master’s degree in International Marketing Management and joined CMO Axis as a Digital Marketing Specialist after graduating. Working for CMO Axis, a global digital marketing firm fascinated him even more about the world of advertising.

Setting up echoVME

Sorav Jain still continued working at CMO Axis, while he was building his own empire. Quite a business mind!

An entire plan was set up, and Sorav started assembling the building blocks of the company from December 2009. The company became operational from March of the next year, a couple of months after leaving CMO Axis. So, like any other young entrepreneur, Sorav dived into his business with the utmost passion and energy to bring a significant change in digital marketing.

The company started with a team of 10 members operating from Mumbai and Chennai.

At People’s Best Interest

echoVME wasn’t established with the regular idea of going around, convincing people, taking in clients and earning money. Sorav really wanted to put some effort to make young minds, especially college students, learn about digital marketing so that the quality of freelancers available in the marketplace improves and more students get exposed to the light of digital marketing.

Since its establishment, a lot of training sessions and workshops are conducted by echoVME. Apart from covering major cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, echoVME has also spread its wings to Sri Lanka. It was a really smart strategy from the owner to conduct such workshops, as they received humungous positive feedbacks, even from CEOs, CMOs, and Executive Officers of many famous brands.

Within few months of founding the company, it made deals worth $10 million through corporate blogging strategy.

Obstacles and Competitors

For Sorav Jain the hardest challenge was time management and implementing every theoretical statement from the heavy books of business administration in real life. He said that when you set up a business, it is more than just the bookish definition of the business terminologies, as you have to deal with real people and real crisis. But, that’s how one learns, isn’t it?

Sorav gives very vague answers, every time it comes down to mentioning echoVME’s competitors. In an interview, he said that every company that is trying to reach a standard position in digital marketing, especially blogging-centric marketing, are the competitors.

Success of echoVME

Presently, echoVME has trained more than 2000 professionals and brands through their training programs and workshops. More than 100 workshops have been conducted echoVME in major cities of India till date. The training sector of echoVME, SOCIALME has gained unexpected popularity from the very first day.

What after echoVME?

Sorav founded Digital Scholar, an agency-based learning institute in July 2019. Apart from this, Sorav has also been a guest lecturer at many famous educational institutes, like IIT Madras and Leeds Metropolitan University.

stack overflow

Stack Overflow : A Programming Hotspot Created for the Coding Enthusiasts

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Some people might say that the job opportunities in the IT sectors are gradually reaching a saturation level, but is it really true? Today, while the world is getting consumed by the trove of technology, IT sectors play the most important role in functioning and developing of our world. Even, if you are launching a small product in the market, you need to create certain algorithms, a website, and definitely, a user interface, for which one needs to hire developers. In this 21st century, coders are on demand! Be it a pure competitive programmer or a developer, their contributions to the IT sector is certainly the need of the hour.

And, to help out the programmers out there be it an expert or a beginner, an online Q/A platform, Stack Overflow was created 11 years ago. Stack Overflow, the flagship site of the Stack Exchange Network was mainly created to answer the queries of the programmers based on any programming language, and the user can solve problems on the website as well.

The two finest minds who created this platform for every coding enthusiast out there are Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. They launched the site on 15th September 2008, eleven years from now, and today, the website witnesses over 50 million monthly visitors.

Stack Overflow Founders

About the Founders

Jeff Atwood is a software developer, who runs his own blogging site, Coding Horror, since 2004. Apart from co-founding Stack Overflow, he also launched his new company, Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., in 2013. He met Joel Spolsky after he started maintaining his programming blog.

Joel Spolsky is a software engineer and writer belonging to New Mexico. He maintains a blog called Joel on Software, and he is also the creator of Trello. Before founding Stack Overflow, he was a project manager of Microsoft Excel and also founded Fog Creek software.

Spolsky contacted Atwood on 2008 and together decided to set up a Q/A website related to coding.

The journey of Stack Overflow

Within months of the launch of Stack Overflow, it attracted a lot of coders from around the world, and even the beginners, who just wanted to learn something new. People helped each other by answering the doubts, learnt new things about any specific language, and even, if someone was showing off their coding skills, it worked out pretty well for the website.

Since both, the founders had their own personal blogs, they had enough number of subscribers. Atwood invited his subscribers to try the beta version of the newly released website, on 31st July 2008. And on 15 September 2008, the company announced the release of this beta version for public, where anyone could seek help and ask queries related to programming.

The website also incorporated a badge system for the users. For example, if you answered a question and your answer got upvoted you were given certain badges, that is, awards which upgraded your reputation. Thus, the more you answer, you are likely to gain certain incentives given that the quality didn’t drop.

But, it was noticed that a similar question was posted many times, giving rise to the same answers. Spolsky turned this drawback into a positive point, saying that if similar questions drove more traffic to the website, as it appeared on multiple search results, there is no harm in it after all.

The success of the website

In 2010, the company raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Union Square Ventures. In April 2009, the company added a feature called “timed suspension” which showed the user’s reputation at “1” because either they didn’t show enough interest to improve or engaged themselves in disruptive behaviour. After implementing this policy, 92% of the questions were answered within a few minutes.

In 2011, another $12 million was raised in Series B funding led by Index Ventures with the participation of Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Another $10 million was raised in Series C funding in 2013. Till now, the company has received around $70 million in funding.

Within five years of its launch, Stack Overflow answered 5 million questions related to coding, thus making the coding community even stronger. Around forty-four million visitors checked out the website every month by 2013.

Today, around 250 employees are working for Stack Overflow, with the majority working in head offices of New York, London and Munich. Around 14 million questions have been answered so far, and the site also partners with many big companies to help them recruit developers.

Majority of the queries that are posted on the website are regarding PHP, JavaScript, Java, Python, HTML, C#, jQuery and Android.

grammarly

Grammarly : The Founding Story of the Best Tool for Enhancing One’s Creative Writing

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With the increasing power of the internet to dominate mankind, digital contents have become quintessential parts of the online marketplace. We all know ‘a pen is mightier than the sword’ and in this era of modernization the true power of writing is revealed, given that it reaches out to more and more people worldwide.

So, when a person can influence the entire world through his writings, why not make it even better? A piece of writing can make significant changes if written in appropriate style and clarity with no grammatical errors. Moreover, the digital contents are supposed to be plagiarism free, a key rule that every writer must abide by. So, how about software that can provide all the essential tools for delivering a proper piece of writing?

With businesses flourishing through digital content writings, it is a pre-requisite for every blogger out there to have Grammarly. Grammarly is a software launched on 1st July 2009 to detect any kind of writing errors including grammatical flaws, spellings, punctuation, style mistakes, etc. Moreover, it not only detects the mistakes but corrects it by giving specific suggestions. The software is also a plagiarism checker. All you need is to drop the text, and then, it will do its job.

grammarly founders
Image Source: kamloopsmatters.com

The Birth of an Idea

The birth of the idea for Grammarly dates back to the time when Alex Shevchenko and Max Lytvyn went to International Christian University, Ukraine together. In 2000, when the internet just started getting popular, these two students noticed that almost everyone was downloading essays from the internet without anybody realizing it. Thus, the students were getting corrupted very easily, not harnessing the power of their own creativity.

Shevchenko started writing software to eradicate this tainted idea from the minds of students, and thus by 2004, he came up with a service called My Dropbox. He, along with Lytvyn and 15 other people, created a team and worked on this project. The prime utility of the software was to check plagiarism for essays. It was a charged service, and yet, 800 universities were using this product by 2007. My Dropbox was a huge success for the team because apart from this, there was only one company in the entire world doing business with the same technology. The very year, the product was sold to Blackboard, a renowned company for educational platforms.

Founding Grammarly

The conditions led by Blackboard while buying the company was that Lytvyn has to work for them for the next two years, and while working for the company, the other founder cannot work on a similar project. Lytvyn accepted the offer, but the very day the deal with Blackboard ended he fled to Toronto to work with Shevchenko. And, within a few days, they launched their new product, Grammarly.

Though at first, they decided to limit the use of Grammarly only for the educational institutions and students. But they did expand it and made it available to every the commoner as well. Today, anyone can buy the software and get access to all the tools and benefits of Grammarly.

To found Grammarly, Lytvyn and Shevchenko didn’t bring any investors in-house, rather they spent the money which was received from selling their first product.

Success of Grammarly

The best part of Grammarly is that it not only tracks the grammatical errors or punctuations but also points out an incorrectly formed sentence. It also suggests the user with some options to rectify their mistakes along with proper explanations where it went wrong.

One of the main problems with this kind of product is system imperfection. It’s the same reason for which Microsoft also oversees typos and some major errors. But, turning this into a strength Grammarly has set upvoting system for the changes it makes. So, the user defines which one is correct or more appropriate and not the system. Moreover, Grammarly uses machine learning and deep learning algorithms for its product to make it more efficient.

In 2012, the company made around $10 million, and by 2017, Grammarly had around 6.9 million active users. In 2017, the company also raised $110 million from General Catalyst, IVP and Spark Capital. This was the first-ever venture round of Grammarly, and the investors came around with utter interest. Everyone witnessed the profits of Grammarly, rising in geometric progression over the years.

Today, apart from browser extension Grammarly is also available as an application for both Android and iOS.

Superside

Fredrik Thomassen : The Founder of Superside, A Startup to Make Businesses Better and Time-efficient

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A proper presentation can work wonders when it comes to impressing your clients. One might have some strong strategies for the growth of the company, but presenting it accurately is also a very big deal. But, the employers of a company often spend way too much time making PowerPoint presentations, proofreading, etc. Now, hiring a freelancer for the creative furnishing of these tasks is always the priority, but what if you set a deadline?

Websites like Fiverr do offer services that are needed for business projects, but you cannot get things done every time, especially in the eleventh hour. So, Fredrik Thomassen created Superside, an online creative service which ensures both quality and delivery by time. For example, if one needs a project to be done within 24 hours, Superside makes a team according to the demand of projects and availability of the freelancers, so that the project is delivered on time, ensuring the excellence as well.

Fredrik Thomassen decided to create such a company, as he went through the troubles of spending hours on a project, designing, data entry, and much more when he worked at McKinsey & Company.

Education

Fredrik Thomassen
Image Source: forbes.com

Fredrik attended ESSEC Business School in 2009 and went to Norwegian School of Economics straight after that. He graduated from there in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in economics followed by graduating from London School of Economics and Political Science in 2011.

Career

After graduating with a master’s in Econometrics and Mathematical Engineering, Thomassen joined as a Journalist in Agderposten. He worked there for more than five years, and then, joined McKinsey & Company.

While working as an Associate in this company, Thomassen faced many problems related to the desk works, especially in creating project presentations in PowerPoint. According to him, it was time-consuming, and the “not-so-skilled-people” were trying their hands to give their projects a professional touch. So, instead of facing these troubles, why not hire a freelancer?

This was when the idea of creating Superside (formerly known as Konsus) started peeking in his mind. But, he already knew that platforms like Fiverr and Freelancer.com are already entertaining quite a robust number of both customers and freelancers. So, he needed to think outside the box to get his start-up running and successfully flourishing.

Founding Superside

According to the reports of Harvard Business Review, an average skilled office employee spends 40% of his time doing jobs like data entry and PowerPoint presentations. He can certainly put the efforts on core tasks, that is, for what he was actually hired, once these extra jobs get done by someone else.

Thus, to eliminate this problem for once and all, Fredrik Thomassen founded Superside in August 2015 in Oslo, Norway. Thomassen built Superside especially for the big firms whose workload gets doubled, as they needed to focus both on business and the creative presentations for clients. So, the company was built to ease the pressure for big corporations and also ensuring job security for the freelancers as well. After the company joined Y Combinator, the growth is increasing at 10% on a weekly basis.

Success of Superside

Superside has a very tough screening process to ensure the quality of work that is provided to the clients. Only a very handful of people, probably the experts at every field, are hired by Superside. So, there’s no need to worry about your project, once it has been assigned to a Superside team. Moreover, for the freelancers, it’s always a threat that they might be out of a job any time. Superside ensures a fixed number of jobs for certain freelancers who reach a given target, thus ensuring a constant source of income. Moreover, each freelancer gets paid around $15 to $20 for a single hour which is quite appealing for a freelancer.

By 2016, after joining Y Combinator, it really helped the company to reach its peak. Within a year of its launch, the company had clients from more than 500 companies coming from 60 different countries. There were over 200 vetted freelancers then, and most of them were from Eastern Europe. So, the biggest market for Superside was the U.S.

By early 2018, the company already raised $1.7 million from investors like Acequia Capital, Liquid2 Ventures and a few others.

Apart from Superside

Fredrik Thomassen has also served as the CEO and was the co-founder of Zalora Group, Zalora Indonesia. It is an e-commerce platform for fashion which is now a part of Global Fashion Group.

activision

David Crane : The Famous Videogame Guru and Co-founder of Activision

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Video games have introduced us to a new world, and every game lover might be familiar with the names like Hideo Kojima and Sid Meier. These are the video game designers who are none less than the Hollywood superstars. But at the beginning of the video games, despite developing the most famous games, the designers did not get the due credits. They were sitting behind the name of the company that launched the game and just kept working months of tedious and insomniac hours. But then, some of the designers took control in their hands, and it was the time for a change. One such video game designer is David Crane, the co-founder of Activision, who is a superstar designer and is widely known for the video game Pitfall!.

Crane is an American programmer and video game designer who was born in Nappanee, Indiana, the US in 1953. After completing his school education from a local high school, he went to the DeVry Institute of Technology in Phoenix, Arizona, where he completed a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering Technology degree. Soon after graduating as an engineer, he joined National Semiconductor as a hardware designer.

With time, he became interested in video game designing and development, so at the age of 29, he started working for Atari. He took the responsibility of developing games for Atari 2600. He also became the part of the team that was working on the Atari 800 computer operating system.

David Crane Activision
Image Source: ivghof.info

During the late 70s, the main game developers, including Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead, of the company were in talks with the company management to get the developers their due credit. At the time, the company was also under the acquisition of its new owner Warner Communications, and it has many unsolved issues as well. The company refused to give those developers any extra financial compensation or credits, as it was afraid that those developers could get better options elsewhere.

Based on a memo of the best-selling video games of the past few years, Crane had designed few of the best selling games of the company, yet he was not given any bonuses or even the credits for that. With 20 million sold copies of games developed by him, he only earned a $20,000 salary.

One fine day, during a Tennis match, Crane and Miller got into a serious discussion about how the companies were taking all the credit for the game development when it was all the hard work of the designer. Concluding to this, they planned to leave their jobs and start a new gaming company that would not only promote the company, but also the designer who designed the games.

In 1979, along with Miller, Kaplan and Whitehead, Crane left Atari to start their own company. But they had no idea from where to start, as at that time only the companies that manufactured the consoles published the games. To start a business, they needed the money and for that, they met another budding entrepreneur Jim Levy, who was already planning to start a business of manufacturing cassette tape drives. With the help of Levy, they managed to raise US$1 million in capital from Sutter Hill Ventures.

The five co-founders finally founded Activision on 1 October 1979. But they were hit by a lawsuit from Atari, claiming that the four developers from Atari had stolen the company secrets. So, despite the knowledge of Atari 2600 and its gaming development, they had to create Activision’s own version of games that differ from the Atari games visually.

But since all the four were experienced enough, the games that they built were way better and had credits for the developers along with the instruction manual.

In 1982, Crane developed the most successful game of his career, i.e., Pitfall!. Within one year of its launch, Activision sold 4 million copies of the game and became the second best-selling game of the year. It also made a total revenue of US$60 million in just one year for Activision. The game maintained its place in the Billboard charts for 64 weeks and was also awarded the game of the year in 1982. This was a game-changer for Crane, and he was famous in no time.

By 1983, the company has already hired around 60 employees. After working for seven years with Activision, Crane left the company in 1986 and co-founded Absolute Entertainment with Garry Kitchen. With Absolute, he developed two of the most famous games of his career, David Crane’s Amazing Tennis and A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia. In his entire career, he has developed over 30 video games.

Crane came with another venture in 1995, named as Skyworks Technologies and served the company as the CTO. His last known game as a game designer is March of the Penguins (2006). His estimated worth as reported in 2016 was $200 million. Currently, he is working as an independent video game developer and video game expert witness. The decision he, and his fellow programmers, to build a company that promoted the designers of the video games, not only made them celebrities, but the other designers in the world also started getting their deserved recognition.