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zozotown

Yusaku Maezawa : Self-made Japanese Billionaire who Bought SpaceX’s First Ticket to Moon

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Though the 9 to 5 jobs are secure and have opportunities for growth, not many resemble the very idea. Despite that, there are only a few who take the step to make their lives different from that. It requires lots of courage to deal with what comes with the risk one takes to get an unusual but better life. One such person who never liked the idea of living the life of a salaryman is the Japanese entrepreneur and founder of Zozotown, Yusaku Maezawa.

Early Life

Yusaku Maezawa was born and brought up in Chiba City near Tokyo in Japan. While growing up, he got the opportunity to study at the Jitsugyo high school; a school affiliated from the prestigious Waseda University. Usually, it took him to reach the school around one and a half hour trough the train. While travelling on the train, Maezawa saw many salaried men around him, and he could never relate to them as well as the idea of 9 to 5 jobs. This was the time when he decided that he would never go for a salaried job but will do something more interesting and maybe something on his own.

While at school, Maezawa got introduced to a punk band named Switch Style, which later, he joined as a guitarist. Soon, he learnt to play other instruments as well and became the main drummer of the band. With the band, he got to travel to different cities and even countries. Once, when he went on a tour to New York with his band, he was quite amused by looking at how the new internet technology was developing there. Maezawa found out that the growth of the internet has also produced many opportunities for the people as well.

Starting Entrepreneurial Journey

Yusaku Maezawa
Image Source: observer.com

When back from the tour, Maezawa realised that even without knowing, he ultimately had caught into a salaried job. But he had no plans to continue. In 1998, to pursue his dream of starting his own business, he alongside his job in the band, started selling music CDs, under the company name Start Today. It was a mail-order business. Influenced by the rise of the internet, in 2000, he took his business online. Soon, Maezawa started stocking up clothes and fashion accessories on the platform. With the rise in demand and to focus entirely on his business, he quit his music career in 2001.

The company was rebranded as Zozotown, which in 2005, became solely a fashion eCommerce website, as Maezawa cut the Music CD selling business free the same year. Within two years, the company grew enough to go public in the Tokyo Mothers Market in 2007.

Interest in Art and Culture

Yusaku Maezawa, apart from being a former musician, has always been interested in art and culture and had dreamt of working in the same regard. So, in 2012, he founded Contemporary Art Foundation; a foundation that entirely focusses on art and promoting young artists through awards and grants. He also had the plans to establish an art museum in Chiba. So for his non-existing museum too, Maezawa was always looking for great art pieces that he now exhibits through his foundation every year.

In 2017, Zozotown integrated an online measurement system, named Zozosuit, and the same year, Zozotown became Zozo.

Maezawa has always had free-thinking and is known for his progressive management style. In fact, he started a 6-hour working day system in June 2012 to make his employees spend more time with their family. His company also offers extra housing allowance to the employees who live far from their homes to work in the company. He is also into charity works.

Accomplishments

In 2017 his estimated worth was 1.5 billion. According to 2018’s Forbe report, Maezawa is the 14th richest person in Japan with a net worth of $2.7 billion. His company has raised to over 2000 employees, and the online platform has got over 3 million registered users. Maezawa holds around 59% of shares in Zozo. Besides art and culture, he is also very interested in travelling, and 60% of his time, he is out of Japan, travelling.

Talking about travelling as his hobby, Maezawa is the first person who will be travelling to the moon with Elon Musk’s BFR rocket in 2023. He will also be inviting a few artists with him to travel. According to him, he has already made a down payment for the ticket for the moon mission to SpaceX.

naukri.com

Sanjeev Bikhchandani : The Man who Gave Hope to New India with Naukri.com

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India is pioneering in the business world not recently but from a long good time. Maybe the number of successful Indian start-ups has increased in recent times, but our country has many influential businessmen who have been changing the economic status of our country from time bygone. Employment is one of the key ways to improve the economic status of a nation and delving deeper into this mission, Sanjeev Bikhchandani founded Naukri.com in 1997. Naukri.com is an online job portal under Info Edge, which was also founded by this very person.

Bikhchandani came up from an economically “not-so-stable” family. So, because the circumstances of his upbringing, he had the vision to build something big for himself from a very young age.

No Business Background

sanjeev bikhchandani naukri.com
Image Source: forbesindia.com

It is a common perception in India that the People from Sindhi descent always belong to a lavish business background, but there are exceptions in every situation. Bikhchandani is also an exception when it comes to his family background, as he was raised by a government-employed father and a housewife mother. His father was a government doctor, but life was definitely not a bed of roses for Bikhchandani, as he grew up in a government colony with a middle-class lifestyle.

Born in 1963, he completed his schooling from St. Columbus’s School, Delhi in 1981 and pursued a bachelor’s degree in economics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. After he graduated in 1984, he went to IIM Ahmedabad to complete his MBA.

Bikhchandani was impressed and fascinated by the entrepreneurial side of the professional world, and hence, he decided to create his own business after getting a taste of corporate life.

Stepping into the Work-life

Before joining IIM Ahmedabad, he worked as an Account Executive at Lintas for three years. After post graduating with a Diploma in Management and Entrepreneurship, he started working for HMM Hindustan MilkFood Manufacturers), now known as GlaxoSmithKline. He worked there as a Product Executive and controlled the marketing of Horlicks.

While working at the company, Bikhchandani was paid Rs. 8000 per month, which was not at all an unsatisfactory amount in that period of time. But, he eventually got sick of the monotonous life given that he had bigger things on his mind from a very young age. Bikhchandani quit the job in 1990, and the next phase was definitely very difficult for him.

Starting the Entrepreneurial Journey

Since Bikhchandani was prepared for a long time to start his own business, he knew life was going to be rough. He is grateful to his wife for being supportive of him as after Bikhchandani left his job, the family completed relied on his wife. His wife, Surbhi, worked at Nestle, and this young couple was totally fine with the idea of being dependable, as they knew what it is going to take to become successful, and kudos they did it!

Bikhchandani founded two companies, Landmark and Info Edge in 1990, with another business partner. The former company dealt with the database of trademarks, while the latter dealt with salary surveys. After three years, with both the companies and a partner, they decided to split with each one getting to keep one company. So, in late 1993, Bikhchandani settled with Info Edge and started everything from scratch.

Founding Naukri.com

Since Bikhchandani needed to make a fresh start, he kept his expenses low for the next four years. The idea of Naukri.com burst in his mind after he attended an event of IT Asia Exhibition in Delhi. He planned to create a website and start executing what he had in his mind.

Since the internet just arrived in India then, all servers were US-based. It was not possible for him to create a website, and thus, he called up his brother, who was a professor in the US and hired a server. Bikhchandani also took capital from his brother to start the business, and that is how he founded Naukri.com. He provided his father with a 5% stake in the company.

The company was all about resumes, jobs and recruitment consultants, that lured both the unemployed and the employed in search of better jobs. Within a couple of years, Naukri.com made around INR 22 lakhs and gave 15% stake of the company to ICICI Ventures for INR 7.3 crores.The company was all about resumes, jobs and recruitment consultants, that lured both the unemployed and the employed in search of better jobs. Within a couple of years, Naukri.com made around INR 22 lakhs and gave 15% stake of the company to ICICI Ventures for INR 7.3 crores.

This was the turning point of the business, after which, the growth curve was never disappointing. In 2004, the company made Rs INR crores, and in 2006, it became country’s first Dot Com Company to make its place in the list of Bombay & National Stock Exchanges.

Apart from Naukri.com

The parent company of Naukri.com is Info Edge which also established Shiksha.com, Jeevansathi.com, 99acres.com, Quadrangle and many other websites as well. Bikhchandani’s Info Edge also holds stakes in Zomato, Meritnation, Policybazaar, Happilyunmarried, etc. Bikhchandani is also the recipient of the award Ernst and Young- Entrepreneur of the Year 2008.

fixcraft.in

Vivek Sharma : The Founder of Fixcraft.in who has Set the Indian Auto Sector on Fire

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Talking about fancy expensive car companies, we can name hundreds of them, isn’t it? But what after you purchase the car? Do you get proper servicing at an affordable rate, or is it like spending your month’s half salary to fix the car? Indeed, the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) workshops are not affordable for everyone, but currently, they are dominating the market. So do you have any names in mind that are up for the game, but at cheaper prices? Well, we have one. Fixcraft.in it is!

Yes, Fixcraft.in is a fresh start-up in the automobile industry, established to improve the Auto After Sales services in India. Vivek Sharma, the founder of Fixcraft.in, founded the company on 10th October 2018 to make significant growth in the automobile sector and especially, to remove the burden of expensive garage costs for all the car owners.

Education and Early Career of Vivek Sharma

Sharma went to Marine Engineering and Research Institute and graduated with a B.E. degree in 2006. After passing out as a marine engineer, in 2006 he joined Seaarland Shipping Management B.V. as an assistant to chief engineer. He worked there for three years, and during this period, he was also exposed to the work culture of foreign countries. He travelled across 26 different countries and trained a team on how to act at the time of various emergencies. His major works included managing, operating and maintaining the schedule of the engine room of the ship.

Vivek Sharma Fixcraft.in
Image Source: crunchbase.com

He left the company in 2009 and joined Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore in 2010 and graduated with a Post Graduate Diploma in Management, Strategy and Marketing, in 2012. During his time in IIM, Bangalore he did a summer internship from the Philips Electronics India Ltd. He learned about the cluster analysis, competition analysis; develop a market strategy with information and data making and estimating market potential.

After graduating from IIM, Bangalore, he was again back to Philips Electronics as a Deputy Manager (Lighting) and worked there for a year. His main job there was to manage B2B sales in Delhi.

In May 2013, he joined the Hyderabad branch of the company as ASM, Andhra Pradesh (Lighting) and became the sales head for B2B Lighting Division of Andhra Pradesh.

In the next year, his career met huge success, as he joined Snapdeal as Associate Director. He was the founding member of the Account Management Team, and also, the Head for Sales and Strategy for key categories. He left Snapdeal in November 2016.

The last company he joined before founding his own was Droom Technology, a start-up by Sandeep Aggarwal. He joined the company as Senior Director of Business Development as was promoted to Associate Vice President of the same department after 9 months. He left Droom just one month before founding his own company.

Fixcraft.in

By the time Sharma founded Fixcraft.in, he had already gathered more than enough experience and knowledge in the automobile sector. The main motive of Sharma was to bridge the gap between local garages and OEM workshops for After Sales Services. Moreover, the market for After Sales Services was expected to reach a value of 20 billion in the next five years. And, this section of the industry includes both old and new customers, which means there will be possibly no drop-in rate of consuming services in this sector.

Fixcraft.in is the first Indian full-stack cloud-based garage which provides service starting from parts replacement to car painting at a very fair price.

Sharma’s biggest challenge while founding Fixcraft.in was to build a strong team and get it to work together. But with time, he has built a good core team and now working on expanding his business. Since Sharma’s main goal was to provide quality services at an affordable price, he is operating on the Cost Plus model of pricing.

In this very year, Sharma’s business received an undisclosed amount of money in seed funding, which included some significant angel investors, like Ranjan Kant, Former Director at the Furniture Republic and CBO at Ofbusiness; Rahul Taneja, ex CBO at Jabong, and from the other existing investors. The company also has Rishab Malik in the advisory team, who worked with Droom and GSF India.

Future Plans

With less than a year of its establishment, Fixcraft.in is doing well in the automobile sector. With its business running only in Delhi NCR, they are planning to expand it to Pune and Bangalore, within next few months. By the end of 2020, Fixcraft.in plans to establish a business in the top 15 cities of India.

Docker

Solomon Hykes : The Founder of Enterprise Container Platform, ‘Docker’

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Open-source is one technology that has helped developers to improve their software and lead it to the next level with the help of other developers, without even knowing them. This technology not only helps the main developer but also the other developers to grow their skills. WordPress being one of the biggest examples of such successful startup that has emerged mostly because it is open source and the community behind it. Soloman Hykes, also known as a French founder in Silicon Valley, is another startup owner, who made use of the open-source technology and established one of the biggest open-source development and deployment container providers, Docker.

Solomon Hykes was born to an American father and a French-Canadian mother in New York. But his family flew to France when he was four years old. He was introduced to computers when he was seven and instantly, became interested in coding. Hykes joined the Epitech School in 2001, where he started learning to programme. Alongside his studies, he got a job at a nearby cyber cafe, where he practised coding and ran the cafe’s servers. During this time, he also spent six months at the University of California, San Diego, and even, worked for a French movie company in Los Angeles.

In 2006, he graduated as a computer engineer and bagged a job at a computer security company. But there was something else he wanted to do. Only two years after starting his first job, in 2008, Hykes resigned to start a company of his own, along with Sébastien Pahl, a fellow student from Epitech. The two named the company as dotCloud, with which the two started working on a software that would offer a platform for developers to code on Amazon’s cloud.

Solomon Hykes Docker
Image Source: techcrunch.com

The two co-founders took the startup to Y Combinator in summer 2010 but got rejected. They again applied for the startup program in the winter session of the same year. But yet again were not selected. But at the very last moment, Paul Graham from Y Combinator changed his mind and selected dotCloud on a condition. The condition was to make all the Y Combinator peers to signup for dotCloud’s software.

At the startup program, Hykes presented the idea of a common container for software development and deployment. He wanted to create a container that could be accessed from anywhere, such that many computers interconnected into a cluster. With the very idea, dotCloud raised a decent amount of seed funding and started developing the software.

In 2011, Hykes shifted the company to the Silicon Valley, and the company raised an $11 million in Series A in April in the same year, from names like Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital. At that time, the company was the only PaaS provider, and even, AWS was providing better support for the software. The company started to grow rapidly, and in 2013, the company dotCloud became Docker.

Though the company was going through a good time, there was still something that it was lacking. During the same time, Hykes got a decent offer for selling the company, but he decided not to and was tinkering around to make things right for the company.

So in the same year, Hykes made the company’s software an open-source platform, and RedHat was the one big company to step in to use the very software for its PaaS platform, OpenShift. In 2014, Microsoft announced that it will be integrating the Docker products into its Windows Server version in 2016. The same year, Google, Amazon and IBM also came in a partnership with the company. In 2014, the company raised a $40 million in the Series C funding led by Sequoia Capital. The company also acquired another startup named startup Orchard.

In 2015, the company became a unicorn company, after it valued $1 billion through a $95 million Series D fundraising led by Insight Venture Partners. By the end of the same year, the company again raised an $18 million in the Series D round. In the latest round of funding in 2018, the company has raised a $92 million.

In the beginning, Docker started with a single project, but now, it hosts projects like containers, LinuxKit, SwarmKit, and the Moby, etc, based on the Docker technology.

On 28 March 2018, Solomon Hykes stepped down as the CEO of the company, remaining on the board of the company valued $ 1.3 billion.

Kobo

Michael Serbinis : A Significant Entrepreneur who Founded Kobo

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There always doesn’t have to be a reason for reading. Reading has always been valuable as it only adds up to your knowledge. That is why the community of book lovers is expanding with every passing second. But, we do know that everyone can’t afford the highly expensive original editions of classic novels every time. So for such a crisis, the e-books become the true guardian angels in our life.

Kobo Inc. is a Canada-based platform that is famous for selling e-books and electronics. The company serves customers at a global level and has attracted more than 10 million readers by now. Its founder Michael Serbinis, who is an engineer, entrepreneur and an angel investor, is even more famous for founding more than just one company.

Where Michael Serbinis belongs?

Born on 28th October 1973, Michael Serbinis belongs to the land of maple syrup, i.e., Canada. His keen interest in science made him win gold at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, for which he designed a high-temperature superconductor propulsion system. So, his first big achievement happened when he was in high school, that led to big opportunities for working with NASA and Intel.

Michael Serbinis founder Kobo
Image Source: alejandrocremades.com

In 1996, Serbinis graduated from Queen’s University with a bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics, followed by graduating from the University of Toronto with a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering. While he was a student, he entered into the Ontario Engineering Competition, and his creation of motor, that ran on an advanced software coding, helped him fetch a summer job at Microsoft. He also conducted thorough research on neural networks and artificial intelligence.

The Journey in the Late 90s

Serbinis’s journey into the entrepreneurial world started while associating the Musk brothers. He received a call from the Musk brothers, who were his university classmates to help them build a business. And thus, Serbinis was one of the first ten employees of Zip2, the company that was established by Elon and Kimball Musk.

Since Serbinis was already a very efficient programmer, at the age of twenty-four, he built a cloud-based document storage service called DocSpace. After a couple of years, it was sold to a San-Francisco based company for $530 million.

In 2000, Michael Serbinis joined Critical Path as CTO and EVP Marketing. It was then one of the largest companies which ran one-third of the world’s emails through their software. After he moved back to Canada, Serbinis joined Indigo as CIO and EVP Online, and this is the point at the juncture, where Kobo spun out to become an independent business.

Founding Kobo

At first, a global e-reading platform called Shortcovers was released in February 2009, under the main company Indigo. But, once they gained board approval and funding, they cut out from Indigo and established as an independent company. In late 2009, the company was rebranded as Kobo, an e-reading platform for worldwide customers. This was just the beginning for Serbinis to do great things in his homeland.

The Success

Kobo received a very good response from all over the world, shortly after its release. Kobo, today, attracts over 18 million users from more than 190 countries. It has over more than 3 million magazines, eBooks, and even, newspapers. Thus, creating the largest e-readers catalogue in the history of the e-reading platform.

In January 2012, Kobo came under the acquisition of a Japanese e-commerce company called Rakuten for $315 million. The catalogue of Kobo has e-books on 77 different languages, helping readers connect to their native land.

After Kobo

Since it was only the beginning, Serbinis founded 3 Angels Capital in 2014, to invest in a disrupted market and create a better world. Serbinis has always been a determined and optimistic man for sure. He mostly invests in areas, like the internet of things, digital content, digital health, etc.

Michael Serbinis is also the board director of MaRS Discovery District, an innovation hub in Toronto. He serves as a board director in another institute called Vector Institute, a non-profit research institution in Toronto.

In November 2014, Serbinis founded League Inc., an online platform that connects worldwide users to provide health benefits and much more.

After developing so much on his homeland and contributing to science, Serbinis still lives in Toronto with his family.

PHP

Rasmus Lerdorf : An Insightful Programmer and the Creator of PHP

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The history of PHP programming language narrates the story of a programmer who prefers to be known as an engineer than a coder. Because according to this engineer, the end product is what matters the most and not the journey to it. Well, seems like his mind works more like a thermodynamic state function and less like a path-dependent parameter, isn’t it?

This remarkably excellent engineer is none other than world-famous programmer Rasmus Lerdorf. On one of his interviews, Lerdorf said that coding is quite boring and tedious, which is insignificant contrast to who he is and his occupation. So, let’s get to know more about this big guy and his ‘path’ to success.

Early Life

Rasmus Lerdorf
Image Source: staticflickr.com

Born into a family from Disko Island, Greenland, on 22nd November 1968, Rasmus Lerdorf moved to Denmark at an early age of three. At the age of fifteen, Lerdorf and his family moved to King City, Ontario. In 1988, Lerdorf graduated from King City Secondary School and pursued his higher studies from the University of Waterloo. He graduated from the university in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree of Applied Science in Systems Designing Engineering.

After he graduated, Lerdorf made significant contributions to the relational database management systems like Oracle Rdb.

Working With Programming Languages

When the programmers and the tech-savvies were working in the mid-90s with their main motive to make the internet more efficient and faster, he got hindered by languages like C and Perl. According to Rasmus Lerdorf, designing websites with these languages were too time consuming and needed to come up with a new one.

Lerdorf, along with some of the technical writers, assembled their ideas together and got them online as an HTML page. He wanted to take a step ahead, only when some companies asked for these documents or expand the idea and implement it in the practical world.

Creating PHP

He started working in CGI (common gateway interface), developed few libraries, wrote some programs in C, and finally, developed PHP, an entirely new language. Lerdorf created PHP (personal home page, now known as hypertext preprocessor) in 1994, and till now, many modified versions of the language has been released.

In a generalized way, PHP is a programming language that was designed for web development and can be used almost on every operating system. The most recent version of PHP is PHP 7.3 released on 6th December 2018.

After PHP became a very well known and useful language to big companies, Rasmus Lerdorf explained that he never intended to create a programming language, as he had no clue how to build one. He was making logical implementations to create something simpler than Perl, and one thing led to another. Finally, after forming a tech team to assist him with technical documentation, which followed beta testing, PHP/FI 2 was released in November 1997.

The Success

Today, PHP is a majorly used programming language, being used by websites like Etsy, Wikipedia, Tumblr, Yahoo, Flickr, Facebook, and many more.

Over the years, many features have been incorporated in PHP, but Lerdorf keeps telling one thing to every emerging engineer out there, that for a programmer, it is very important to understand C very well. Though he accepts that as compared to languages, like Python or C++, the user needs to put comparatively more effort using C, but it is the fundamental unit of learning for any programmer.

After releasing PHP, he worked with different big tech companies, and currently, he is working with Etsy.

Career of Lerdorf

In January 2000, Rasmus Lerdorf joined Linuxcare Inc. as a senior research engineer and continued for a year. In September 2002, he joined Yahoo! where he continued for seven years, as an Infrastructure Architecture Engineer. Lerdorf said that eventually, he became tired and kind of demoralized working in an ad centric web company, as it involves tricking your customers.

He joined Room 77 as an advisor in 2010, and then, it’s all about WePay and Etsy. It’s been eleven years, that he has been working in Etsy, first as an advisor, and then, as a distinguished engineer.

Lerdorf as every other enthusiastic programmer is very much interested in open source, and he attends the open-source conferences as a speaker throughout the world.