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Sonos : The Pioneer in Wireless Smart Speakers

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Handsfree, smart speaker, music streaming services, so much has been changed in the past more than a decade. To be precise, there were no such technologies over 17 years ago, and people were happy detangling the mesh of cables for music. But there was a group of visionaries, that wanted to bring the change and free people from the trap of cables to provide them with the best sound experience.

The American consumer electronics company, Sonos, was founded by four business partners John MacFarlane, Craig Shelburne, Tom Cullen, and Trung Mai, in 2002. Except for John, all the other three co-founders belonged to Santa Barbara, and John moved to the city to pursue a PhD degree from California-Santa Barbara in 1990.

sonos
Image Source: digitalmusicnews.com

At the same time, the Internet was at its initial stage and was not as popular as it is today. At that time, only fewer than 16 million U.S. households had high-speed dial-up broadband, and America Online was the top internet provider in the U.S. Like other technical persons, John was also sure about the future success and scope of the internet. This way, along with Craig Shelburne, Tom Cullen, and Trung Mai, John decided to start Software.com, and after running it for a decade, they sold the company to Phone.com.

After selling the company, the next thing the visionaries had to do was to think of a new business idea. For a few months of brainstorming, John presented a plan to start a business of building devices which would enable local-area networks for aeroplanes. But the other three partners were not convinced. Again four of them started looking for that out-of-the-box idea, that would be innovative and unique.

At last, the four coincided on a single topic, i.e. music. Today, music streaming services, as well as wireless speakers and headphones, are quite common, but at that time, the concept of the wireless system had not even born. In fact, the music systems came with a mesh of cables, and when anyone wanted to connect the speakers in the different rooms, through a same music system, there was no choice other than drilling their walls to pass the wires through it.

So this was it. The idea was to create a music system, that could play the same music in different rooms without connecting any wires using the internet. But since there was no such existing technology at that time, despite being a unique idea, it did not seem feasible, too. Still, since all the four partners liked the idea, they all started working on the same.

Since the four had been successful entrepreneurs in the past, they had connections and the skills to draw the investments. They also started employing some skilled people for the manufacturing of their dream project. Initially, they opened an office above a restaurant called El Paseo in Santa Barbara and started Sonos in 2002.

The focus of the team was to create a system that was easy to install and would be able to work through cross-technology integration, but this increased the complexity for the designers and the developers. They chose Linux as the basic platform, but the operating system needed drivers for audio, wireless and others, to work with the new music system. So the founders decided to create those drivers.

Finally, in 2003, the company was ready with the design and prototype of its first product. John MacFarlane demonstrated the prototype at the Consumer Electronics Show, in 2004, where it won the “Best of Audio” award. It was the first wireless music system. The company launched the system, naming its Digital Music System, in 2005. It was the combination of smart speakers and a remote. People welcomed the system with open arms, and they loved it. The reviews for the system gave positive points to its design, reliability, and great sound.

It is clear that MacFarlane thought ahead of time, and this way, he created the systems capable of receiving the new upgrades. The same year, Sonos launched the Digital Music System, it introduced a new amplifier, i.e. ZP100 amplifier, for it. The company also announced to make those music systems available for the U.K. citizens too.

With the launch of the iPhone, in 2007, the company launched its app, that enabled the iPhone to become the controller for its Digital Music System. In 2011, the company launched another app for Android users.

In 2009, the company released its much cheaper, 400 dollars, PLAY:5, all-in-one smart speaker. The continuous updates and improvements in the music systems made the company one of the leaders in the market, and its products popular worldwide. In 2011, the company added Sirius XM and Spotify to its catalogue. In 2012, the company upgraded its speakers with Amazon Cloud Player compatibility, following a collaboration with Tencent, through which it added the QQ Music to its catalogue. Currently, the music systems from Sonos support Apple Music as well as music from other popular streaming services including Spotify.

Since its inception, Sonos has been introducing the world with the innovative music products and is the pioneer in the wireless music streaming technology. The company and its story has been an inspiration for every aspiring entrepreneur, which not only tells them to be successful, but also tell them to prioritize quality for long-term success.

goPuff : The Story of a Millenial Delivery Service, to the Millenials and by the Millenials

Founder, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Having a necessary education or experience to run a business has become a myth, and most of the successful college dropouts, including Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg are the biggest example of the same. Now there is no limitation on the age or the background of a person, in order to start a business. Like the co-founders of goPuff, Yakir Gola and Rafael Ilishayev, who started the company without having any experience in entrepreneurship, both running 20 and were the students of Drexel University.

Though Gola had a bit of experience of business earned through his parents’ small jewellery business, Ilishayev was a newbie for their startup. Gola’s parents had migrated from Israel, and Ilishayev’s family belonged to the Russian descent. The two met each other at the University, and since they shared the common language, they became good friends in no time.

rafael ilishayev and yakir gola
Image Source: bizjournals.com

goPuff was not their first business, as, before goPuff, they sold office furniture to people and had saved a sufficient amount of money. While in college, it was Gola who had a car among all their friends, and always went out to bring small daily need things. Sometimes, the two would go to multiple stores at different locations to buy different things. The process was quite time-consuming and tiring.

Since it was not much long ago, companies like Amazon and some food delivery services were already providing home-deliveries, but there was nothing that could help with the late night cravings or emergency needs. It was an eye opener for the two, and they founded an opportunity in the same.

Gola and Ilishayev were convinced that they need to start a service, which could help people get things on their doorsteps, within a few minutes. The two started working on their business model and concluded 50 items, which they could deliver easily in a particular area. Since they did not have much of the money, and initially, it was just an experiment, they picked cheaper things to deliver. The two founded this very delivery service in their University campus and named it goPuff.

The first hurdle that came into their way was convincing the store owners. After that, they started finding investors for their business and invested $60,000 of the earnings from their furniture business. They worked seven days a week and 16 hours a day, as initially, they did not have the money to hire other people for the delivery. In fact, it was only Gola and Ilishayev, who delivered for the first six months.

The driving force for the two was the challenges and the targets they gave each other. Soon, the service became popular, and they started delivering in other Universities in Philadelphia, and then, in the other cities. After working hard for four months, they were able to get a small warehouse for their supplies, and later, they added more things to their delivery list. In 2015, Gola left college to concentrate completely on the venture, and on the other hand, Ilishayev graduated in legal studies from the University in the same year.

The company became popular and started doing really well. In December 2015, the two started another delivery service to specially deliver beer, naming it goBeer, and in the following year, in the month of May, they launched an alcohol delivery service called goBooze.

Soon, the service extended to the Universities based in cities like Boston, Washington, D.C. and Austin, Texas. By the end of the first year of its inception, the company had hired 60 full-time employees, and 2017, it had 200 employees. In the same year, the company closed an $8.25 million Series A funding round from Anthos Capital, and the two partners were named “2017 30 Under 30: Retail and E-Commerce” by Forbes. They also won the 2017 Target Marketer of the Year Award.

The credit for the success of goPuff entirely goes to the uniqueness of the concept behind it, and the sacrifices the two co-founders made to work for it. For those past years, both Gola and Ilishayev have been ditching holidays as well as other plans with their family and friends to work for goPuff. goPuff, in a few cities, provides its services 24/7, and in other cities, the service is open until 4:30 a.m. The company is serving to the millennials, so the method of customer support is also millennial. The company is always active on Twitter to answer the queries of its customer. The company provides the fastest delivery, 23 minutes being the fastest delivery time.

MailChimp – The Success Story of the Ultimate E-mail Marketing Tool

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Advertising is the key to success in business. It plays a significant role in the business’ growth. Advertising mainly due to the budget has been a hardball to crack and needs lavish spendings to spread a business out wide. But, to this advertising problem, MailChimp brings every business, solutions to make marketing easier and cheaper. MailChimp is an e-mail marketing service, which was started in 2001 in order to help small businesses grow and has since come a long way to become the world’s leading e-mail marketing platform. The success story of MailChimp shows that knowing the problem well will lead you to a more effective solution.

Ben Chestnut, the founder of the company, in early 2001 was working on a web designing business with his partner. Within their business, their customers started to question them about how to send e-mails. Ben, eventually dug up an old code which he wrote for a greeting card business and that code embarked the journey of MailChimp.

Ben Chestnut
Image Source: nytimes.com

MailChimp’s potential was never realized by Ben, and it remained as a side business to the web designing business until 2007. In 2007, both the founders discovered that their passion lies in helping small businesses, rather than in the business of web designing they were doing at that time. So, they decided to shut down their former business to focus on MailChimp.

The service started off badly. Initially, the emails sent through their channel were mostly delivered to the spam folders. The receivers of those emails were annoyed by the increasing count of spam in their mailbox. Having a tough competition with better-funded companies added to their problems.

But, there was something that gave MailChimp the upper hand. Being a small business itself, the founders knew better what their fellow businesses wanted i.e. they knew the problem better than their competitors. They were aware of what exactly their customers were expecting. Their offerings were cheaper, added features more frequently and allowed more and more customizations to fit the customers’ needs. Their product was more efficient as they were closer to their customers.

The company’s mascot, named Freddie, has a significant contribution to it. The Marketing Director of Mailchimp, Mark DiCristina, explained that it is the honest representation of the company. It depicts making work fun, creative and independent.

Within the process, you will find the product witty as the cool GIFs displayed by the MailChimp make it so. The company has always managed to make the process of email marketing a fun experience.

The Freemium model of the company, announced in 2009, has also brought a lot to the company. The company was successful before the move came on, but still, it offered a lot. With the freemium version, the users could sign up with 500 subscribers and send 3000 emails a month. It included all the salient features of the service. The only condition was to have subscribers less than 500. To add more to the blazing fire, MailChimp announced this version as a ‘Forever Free’ plan. After this announcement, MailChimp started growing rapidly.

In September 2009, the company had only 85,000 users, and with the introduction of the freemium model, its user base increased nearly 5 times (1.2 million). 30,000 new free users, alongside 4,000 new paying customers started to sign up, each following month, increasing the company’s profit to a massive 650%. In February 2012, the platform was adding 5000 new users each day.

MailChimp is also known for sending out gifts to their customers. MailChimp is a standout when it comes to its ‘Weird Swag’. For the company, sending gifts out is more important than the cost. Maintaining a relationship with the customer takes them further apart than the other companies in their competition.

The company posted $525 million revenue in 2017 and is growing by more than $120 million every year. MailChimp was Inc.’s Company for the year 2017. More surprisingly, it is still owned by its co-founders. This makes the company as suggested by Chestnut, “A Startup to a Grown-up.”

MailChimp, in a fun and interactive way, gives you the ultimate option to boost up your marketing using the most powerful of tools it offers. Have a business? Boost up yours using MailChimp.

Craig Newmark : American Internet Entrepreneur and the Founder of Craigslist

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Great ideas are the result of curiosity, and when you have gained enough experience, it might be easier to visualise those ideas and its scope too. Craig Newmark, an American entrepreneur, who first struggled in life due to bad financial conditions, as a result of his hard work, got the opportunity to work with major tech giants of the industry. It was with those big companies he was able to understand the technology well and get to work on his own project, which later became Craigslist, a web communication company that makes the annual profits more than US$700 million.

Early Life

Craig Newmark was born on 6 December 1952, in Morristown, New Jersey, where he lived with his parents, Joyce and Lee Newmark, and his brother Jeff Newmark. His father was an insurance salesman who died when Craig was only 13.

Craig Newmark
Image Source: zimbio.com

After the death of his father, the family went through major financial issues, so his mother brought him and his brother to an apartment in Jacob Ford Village. Craig joined the Morristown High School where he completed his high school education. Despite the difficulties, he was doing good at the studies and won a scholarship. He joined the Case Western Reserve University from where he completed his graduation in Science in 1975, followed by a master’s degree in the same subject in 1977.

Founding Craigslist

As soon as he completed his education, he joined IBM as a programmer and worked for a long 17 years, in the same company. In 1993, he quit his job at IBM to join Charles Schwab & Co. At the same time, the internet was a hot new topic, and the people were trying to discover more about it. They were becoming familiar with the same by helping each other.

Craig, too, came to know more about the internet in his new company and liked how people were helping each other. This incident made him think of creating a new distribution list to friends. Craig posted about the events happening around San Francisco Bay Area, that attracted the interest of the software and Internet developers, living and working around the same area. The mailing list also included feedback feature in it.

Soon, the platform became popular and started featuring job-related queries on it. People had started looking for skilled people on the very platform, and it wasn’t an event-only platform anymore. This led Craig to add more categories to the platform including alongside ‘Jobs’.

In 1996, Craig launched the official website for Craigslist with the domain name ‘craigslist.org’. In 1999, the company started functioning as a private firm. At the same time, Craig decided to leave his job in order to completely concentrate on Craigslist.

By the year 2000, Craig had employed nine people to work on Craigslist. The platform was featuring discussion forums, flagging system, self-posting process, homepage design, personals categories, and best-of-Craigslist feature. In fact, it had its own search engine. The platform started expanding, and in the same year, it was functioning in more than nine U.S. cities.

In 2004, the company started charging its users for posting in the Job category, in the New York and Los Angeles pages, but at the same time, launched a new category, ‘Gigs’ where the users could post vacancies for free. The paid job section is the main income source for the company.

The website has become more of an advertising platform and serves over 49.4 million unique monthly visitors, in the U.S. alone.

Personal Life

In December 2012, Newmark married Eileen Whelpley.

Alongside being a successful entrepreneur, Craig is also an active philanthropist. He has been donating to various non-profit organisations for many years now. In 2006, he donated $20,000 to NewAssignment and founded craigconnects in 2011, in order to support other non-profit organisations. In 2017, Newmark donated $500,000 to Wikipedia to help the platform to fight with harassment and vandalism on it. He also donated a $1 billion to Mother Jones magazine to help reduce the spread of fake news. Newmark also supports military families, voter registration efforts, and women in technology, through his private charitable foundation.

According to a report from Forbes, Newmark had a net worth of at least $1.3 billion in 2017. But Newmark said in an interview, “By monetizing Craigslist the way I did in 1999, I probably gave away already 90 per cent or more of my potential net worth.” So according to him, “no one should be a billionaire”, and he does not possess assets more than he requires according to his needs.

Mark Jonathan Pincus – The Pinnacle of Social Gaming and Entrepreneurship

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Online games are interesting as you do not have to download them or build a separate setup for it. A few clicks on the computer, and you are ready to play. Not only, the availability of the internet makes them better, but also, playing with friends increases the fun. Zynga, one of the best social video gaming services, provides the best in-game experience when it comes to social gaming. The mind behind Zynga, Mark Pincus Jonathan, is a spirit of pure passion for entrepreneurship, and his story shows that innovation can make anything happen.

Mark was born on February 13, 1966, in Chicago, Illinois. He studied from Francis W. Parker School, till his 12th grade. He has two Ivy League degrees. In 1984, he graduated from Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he pursued a B.S. in economics. After graduating, he worked in venture capital and financial services, for 6 years. He then joined the New Media Group at Lazard Freres & Co. Later, Mark moved to Hong Kong to serve as the Vice President of Asian Capital partners, but returned to the USA, only after two years, to complete an MBA degree from the Harvard Business School. Alongside, he continued to work in the industry with Tele-Communications (AT&T Cable) and Columbia Capital.

mark pincus
Image Source: usatoday.com

He took an overview of the startups at Columbia Capital, where he invested in New media and software startups. In 1995, he started his entrepreneurship career with ‘Freeloader’. The company received investments from Fred Wilson and Softbank. The startup was a web-based push technology. Within seven months of its launch, Individual Inc. acquired the company for $38 million.

After Freeloader, in 1997, Mark started another startup named ‘Support.com’. The product of the company was a help desk automation software. He ensured that his startup left no stone unturned and made the company as the leading provider of its services. The public valuation of the company was $1.5 billion. Later, the startup was renamed as SupportSoft Inc.

In 2003, Mark and Reid Hoffman purchased Six degrees patent for $700,000 from the extinct Sixdegrees.com. The patent has never been used to date. Both the purchasers state that the purpose of the purchase was to protect the innovation in social networking.

Tribe.net was his next milestone. His third startup was funded by The Washington Post, Knight Ridder Digital, Mayfield Fund and Guy Spier. The startup was about social networking. Cisco Systems, in 2007, acquired the company to develop a more comprehensive social networking platform for its digital media services group.

Alongside starting his own startups, he also invested in other ones out in the market. He made early investments in Facebook and Twitter. Napster, Snapchat, Friendster, Xiaomi, JD.com, Brightmail, Buddy Media. He invested in several other ventures like HVMN and Wealthfront.

Zynga Inc., his fourth company, was started in July 2007. Zynga is named after Pincus’ late dog, Zinga, an American Bulldog. The company’s red and white logo is a rendering of the bulldog. Zynga provides the best social gaming experience and has developed games for Facebook, Myspace and Bebo. Zynga states its mission as ‘connecting the world through games.’ The first game was Texas Hold’Em Poker (now Zynga Poker). In April 2009, Zynga became the developer with most active users on Facebook (reportedly 40 million). In the same year, Zynga released ‘Farmville’ which turned out to be an absolute blockbuster. It was Facebook’s first game to surpass 10 million active users per day. In December 2010, CityVille surpassed Farmville, as the company’s most popular game, with over 16 million active users per day. At its public offering, the company was valued at $1 Billion. Zynga, since then, has released games like Farmville 2, Words with Friends, CSR Racing 2, Mafia Wars, etc., which are played all under ‘Zynga with Friends’ Network.

Pincus served as the company CEO from 2007 to 2013. He made headlines when he sold around 16.5 Million shares of Zynga. He remained the Chairman of the Board of Directors and the Chief Product Officer of the company. He stepped down as the CPO in April 2014. In April 2015, the company announced Mark as the CEO of the company following his step down on March 7, 2016. He ceded his voting rights from 70% to 10% in order to vote of confidence in Zynga’s current leadership.

He has been involved in community service, too. He started Zynga.org committed to transforming the world through virtual social goods. The service raised more than $20 million and has donated it to several international non-profit.

Mark Jonathan Pincus, the founder of Zynga, has provided one of the best games the world ever witnessed. He made social gaming possible through ‘Zynga with Friends’ campaign. He has a real-time net worth of $1.2 Billion. He was named ‘Founder of the Year’ in 2009 and in the following year, by the Crunchies Technology Awards. He is a pinnacle of online gaming and entrepreneurship promoting innovation all the way.

Charles Wang: The Software’s Tough Guy and the Co-founder of CA Technologies

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Some people are born with leadership qualities, and some grow them with experience. For the founder of CA Technologies, Charles B. Wang, the case might be both. Despite many controversies, he stands out to be a strong leader, who led his company to new horizons. This visionary was not only a great entrepreneur but also guided many for mastering technology with the books he wrote, i.e. Techno Vision and Techno Vision II.

Wang was born on 19 August 1944, in Shanghai, China, to Kenneth Wang and Mary Wang. His father was a judge at the Supreme Court in the Republic of China. Wang was eight when his parents brought him and his two brothers, Anthony W. Wang and Francis Wang, to Queens, New York.

Charles Wang
Image Source: wsj.com

After coming to the U.S., Wang joined the Brooklyn Technical High School in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. And after completing his high school, he entered Queens College to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in Science. Later, Wang joined the Columbia University’s Riverside Research Institute, after answering a help-wanted job ad for a computer programmer. Though he had never studied programming and coding, for the job, he self-taught himself the programming languages.

In the 1960s, while working at the Columbia University, Wang became familiar to a fellow colleague, Russell M. Artzt. Russell was working at the Electronic Laboratories of the University. The two shared a common interest, i.e. computers and became good friends. Later, the two joined the same company to work in, i.e. Standard Data.

In 1989, when IBM separated its hardware sales division from its software division, the other companies got the chance to launch their products in the market. At the same time, Wang and Russell both saw an opportunity in the same and started building software products to sell in the market.

After gaining much experience in the field, the two co-founded Computer Associates International, in 1976. For the venture, the two partnered with Sam Goodner and Max Sevcik of Swiss Company Computer Associates and got the North American distribution rights for CA-Sort. Wang became the CEO of the company, whereas Russell served as the co-president of the company.

The venture was established with the credit card money, but soon, Wang’s leadership took the company to the new heights of success. Soon the company became the first enterprise software company to provide multi-platform products and one of the largest independent software vendors.

The credits for the success of the company is given to the strict methodology Wang used for hiring the candidates for the Computer Associates International. He would look for the capabilities of the candidate and depending upon the performance he would promote or demote the employees. The good employee’s got early promotions whereas the employees with performance below average got fired at once.

In 1989, Computer Associates was the second software-only company that generated $1billion annual revenue. In the late 90s, the company started working towards improving its own products and their compatibility with the products of the other companies.

In the years 1994 to 1998, Wang was the highest paid CEO in the U.S., with having earned a $700 million stock in1998. During the same time, the company was heading towards acquisitions, starting with ASK Group in 1994. By the year 2000, Computer Associates had acquired over 200 companies. In the same year, Wang resigned from the post of CEO in Computer Associates remaining the member of the board of the company till 2002.

Along with being the co-founder of CA Technologies, Wang is also known as a philanthropist and the majority owner of the New York Islanders hockey franchise. Initially, Wang had a minority share in the Islanders, and in 2000, he became the part-owner of the hockey franchise. From 2001 to 2016 he was the majority owner of Islanders.

In 2004, he acquired the original Iowa Barnstormers Arena Football League franchise and for some superstitious reasons, renamed it to New York Dragons.

In 1999, Wang founded the Charles B. Wang Foundation, a charitable organisation dedicated to bettering the lives of children and the disenfranchised. Along with his own foundation, he has worked with the World Childhood Foundation and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. He also donated to the Chinatown Health Clinic, which was later renamed as Charles B. Wang Community Health Center.

Till his death on October 21, 2018, at the age of 74, he lived in his Cove Neck mansion, on the Gold Coast of Long Island. Wang was suffering from lung cancer, which became the cause of his death.