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Steve Case – The Founding CEO of AOL & One of the Most Accomplished American Entrepreneurs

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It is very difficult to find variety in the services in a single company, but there are possibilities for everything in the tech industry be it anything. Such possibility was put into effect by AOL (American Online) and is still doing the same, as it fulfils multi-tasks for its users. The company was not always doing this well. The man, who helped the company to rise through the ranks is Steve Case. The story of Case speaks that success is hard but not impossible to achieve.

American Online Inc. is an online service provider, headquartered in New York City. As of now, AOL is a division of Verizon Media, but it had started out all its own. It dates back to 1983 when the company started as Control Video Corporation (CVC). The company provided game consoles at a fixed cost, and after that started charging $1 per game to its users. Steve Case, initially, was hired as a part-time marketing consultant by Bill von Meister (the then CEO of the company) for Control Video and was recommended by his brother, Dan Case. At that time, the company was not in a good financial condition and was nearing bankruptcy. But then Jim Kimsey founded Quantum Computer Services from the remains of CVC.

steve case
Image Source: entrepreneur.com

Jim Kimsey hired Case as the Vice President of Marketing during the launch of Quantum Computer Services, and later, promoted him to the position of Executive Vice President. As the Executive Vice President, Steve changes the company’s strategy and introduced Quantum Link. This was an online service for Commodore 64 and 128 computers. Quantum Link, (Also known as Q-Link) was based on software licensed by PlayNet Inc. AOL had included the online games since the very beginning of its launch date. Quantum Computer Services grew in popularity during the 90s period as it became the leading internet service provider in the United States.

Kimsey saw the potential in Case and decided to appoint Case as the CEO of the company after he retires. Eventually, in 1991, when he retired from the services of the company, Kimsey appointed Case as the CEO of the company. Steve, in late 1991, renamed the company to American Online, and from then, the company began to touch new heights.

He began the journey with complete enthusiasm and with the decisions he was making for the company, it didn’t feel like he was a newly-appointed CEO. Steve made AOL pioneer in the social media concept. The instant messaging app that AOL rolled out was called out to be an absolute ‘killer’. He looked out into all the services to make them affordable, easy to use and fun for the consumers. AOL user base grew up to be as large as 26.7 million. By 2000, AOL’s worth was $125 Billion and was the nation’s biggest internet provider.

In that period, AOL was delivering a massive 11,616% return to its shareholders. It began to roll out more and more web services. Many services like e-mail, search engines, news, sports, weather etc. were introduced by AOL in the market.

Steve personally had many successful interactive online titles to his name. Quantum Space was one of the fully automated Play by email game. His other contributions were graphical chat environments, Habitat and Club Caribe. Alongside that, he induced the first Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) Neverwinter Nights.

It was 2001 when Steve negotiated the largest merger in the business history that has ever been done. Under his leadership, he managed to bring AOL and Time Warner together with AOL stockholders getting the majority stakes. The merger included more than $164 billion. The merger, however, failed as AOL – Time Warner fell into recession, followed by accounting scandals and much more. In January 2003, Steve resigned as the CEO of the company but still remained in the Board of Directors. “It took me 10 years to finally realize that the company was a success,” said Steve in an interview when asked about his time in AOL. In 2005, he resigned from AOL’s Board of Directors. AOL, in May 2015 was brought by Verizon in a deal valued at $4.4 billion.

Steve is a die-hard entrepreneur, and even after his stepping down as the CEO, he still continues to invest in upcoming entrepreneurs. He went on and became the founding chair of Startup America Partnership, which was launched by the White House to accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship through the nation. Alongside that, he was a member of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. In 2014, he was named Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship. Since then, he has been a leading voice in shaping government policies, like the passing of the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups). He is also the Chairman of Case Foundation, that has invested in more than a hundred organizations, initiatives and partnerships. Steve has pledged to donate his major wealth for the philanthropic causes.

Steve Case, who has the spirit of true entrepreneurship, gives us the clear message that passion is what drives a person to his ultimate goals. Steve is a living inspiration and is someone to learn from if you are looking to start up your own business.

Sebastian Knutsson : The Co-founder of ‘King’ & its Sagas

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It is inevitable that games are an enormously great way to pass the time and for the recreation of mind, be it offline (real-world) or online (virtual). But since the recent years, the ‘gaming’ (virtual) industry has been putting up a lot of effort to provide the best experience, and with the games that have been rolling out, it is hard to not let the spotlight fall on them. According to IAB (Trends -2016), mobile gaming will be the one to have more than 190+ million users which clearly tells the addictiveness of the games. One such creator of ‘addictive’ games is King.com (King) which is playing a major role in providing the world what it desires. The co-founder and the Chief Creative Officer of King, “Sebastian Knutsson” shares a story of his failures and successes, and how creativity can shake the world.

King.com was founded by Riccardo Zacconi, Toby Rowland, Sebastian Knutsson, Thomas Hartwig, Lars Markgren and Patrik Stymne, in 2003, in Sweden. Zacconi and Toby, after the selling of udate.com, joined four of the co-founders to start a new venture with the help of investments of Angel Investments which were provided by Melvyn Morris.

Sebastian-Knutsson
Image Source: svd.se

The company started with Morris as chairman, Zacconi and Rowland as co-CEOs, Sebastian Knutsson as CCO (Chief Creative Officer), CTO Thomas Hartwig, Managing Director Lars Markgren and Chief Systems Architect Patrik Stymne. All but Rowland are still with the company.

King, initially, focused on the production of web browser compatible games but the company nearly went bankrupt, as it generated no profit. A key investment that saved the company arrived just a day before the doom-day by Melvyn Morris. Within two years, the company started generating revenues with them, growing from $2.60 million in 2004 to $12.21 million in 2004. In 2005, Apax invested a massive $32.68 million with Index Ventures invested $5.65 million. “We became dominant in Europe” quoted Knutsson on the achievement of King.

Knutsson, in the company, is referred to as ‘the gamer guy’ and is the key man which designs games for King. He has been with the company since the very beginning with being at the CCO post, since June 2004. He also served as the Executive Product Developer from February 2003 to June 2004. He had done his BA from Stockholm School of Economics, which enables him to have a sharp business brain. He also co-founded ‘Spray’ which became the main link between Zacconi and him. Alongside Spray and King, he founded Fjord Network AB and Midasplayer.com Ltd. He currently is an investment committee member at Sweet Capital.

It was in 2009 when King again saw a downfall in its users’ count. It was because Facebook started to suck up their lot of users with the interactive games it brought up. “In 2009 and 2010, the growth was stagnant. We had this term when we were talking about our partners, as being ‘F by F’” said Sebastian, mocking their situation back in the day.

In October 2010, the company was revised and shook up the whole system within. The company wanted to integrate with Facebook. The web team was slashed in half, releasing coders to work on five new projects to crack Facebook.

Knutsson was the lead to all this. “We knew we had to manage the transition with improving the communication internally, managing that risk of trying to pivot and make sure the staff were part of that journey and understanding why we are doing it,” he added. Out of five games, one game was in vain, three did okay, and one did all the work that was required. These ‘saga’ games required very little of time investments, unlike the Zynga games. This, turned out to be very successful for the company, as the game ‘Bubble Witch Saga’ managed to gain more than 10 million players and became one of the most played games on Facebook. Their next release, which emerged from the Stockholm Studio of Knutsson, Candy Crush Saga topped the Charts, be it the Facebook or the play store. The game was all over, and this helped King in their IPO.

Knutsson refers to the ‘Saga’ concept as a very simple one. “It is the simplicity that is the strength, not its complexity.” “Candy Crush was our strongest game on Facebook; we knew we had to get it right.” Candy Crush and its Saga proved to be a gem for King as the game was played by more than 93 million people, more than a billion times daily in December.

As of now, King has 13 studios in different locations, is generating revenue of US $1.59 billion, net income of US $575 million (2014). Company’s valuation at IPO is 7.1 Billion. Sebastian owns more than 17 million shares of the company. (Third most in the company)

The life story of Sebastian Knutsson, the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of King.com, clearly shows that creativity never lets you down. He claims to have designed 10 out of the company’s 15 worst games ever but still leads the company to the best.

Linus Torvalds : The Creator & the Principal Developer of the Linux Kernel

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Necessity is the key to invention, and the story of Linus Torvalds is the greatest proof to that. A student and an enthusiast programmer from Helsinki University started working on his own Operating System when he was unable to buy a basic UNIX system that costed around US$5,000 at that time. Although it was a modest effort of improving the small clone of UNIX, his creativity and curiosity led him to build a whole new and free OS software, Linux, which accidentally became an alternative to the Microsoft monopoly.

Early Life

Linus Torvalds was born on 28 December 1969 in Helsinki, Finland. His father Nils Torvalds and mother Anna Torvalds, both worked as journalists. His parents named him after the Nobel Prize-winning American chemist, Linus Pauling. Torvalds was 11 years old when he got familiar with computers and the BASIC programming language. This was the time when he grew an interest in computers and coding. Soon, he was able to write codes for his own assembler and editor, as Finland was not a place where software were easily available. Later, he also developed a few games, including the clone of Pac Man, naming it the Cool Man.

linus-torvalds
Image Source: zdnet.com

Torvalds joined the University of Helsinki in 1988, where he studied Computer Science as his majors. But within the first year of his college, he joined the Finnish Army Uusimaa brigade and completed the 11-month officer training program, as the Second Lieutenant, under the mandatory military service of Finland.

After completing the military training, Torvalds came back to his home town, to resume his college. While in college, he got introduced to Unix for the first time. At the same time, he also started studying a book named ‘Operating Systems: Design and Implementation’, written by the computer science professor Andrew Tanenbaum, which described the educational stripped-down version of Unix, ‘MINIX’.

Founding Linux

In 1991, he bought the Intel 80386-based clone of IBM PC, having a 33MHz Intel 386 processor and a huge 4MB of memory. The system came with the MS-DOS operating system, that according to Torvalds did not do justice with the 386 Intel Processor. As he was already working on UNIX in the college, he was not much comfortable with working on MS-DOS but getting a UNIX copy too expensive. This led him to the other alternative for the OS, and he ordered a copy of MINIX for his system.

MINIX was faster than MS-DOS but still had some flaws. So he decided to make some changes to MINIX in order to improve the OS. To work on the idea, even before receiving his MINIX copy, he went into the depth of Unix and studied books covering all the aspects of the development phase. He started with writing a small piece of code that could improve MINIX. This also became the M.Sc. thesis project for Torvalds, and he titled the project as ‘Linux: A Portable Operating System.’

On Aug. 25, he posted to the internet’s Minix newsgroup, saying, “Hello everybody out there using MINIX – I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like GNU) for 386 (486) AT clones. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in MINIX, as my OS resembles it somewhat.”

Eventually, with great hard work, Torvalds managed to release the first version of the OS, i.e. 1.0, on September 17, followed by the second version, i.e. 2.0, on October 5, in the same year. The second version OS was a text-based user interface and was officially named as Linux. Torvalds put the 0.2 version over FTP and used Stallman’s GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) for his Linux kernel so that other developers could use it and modify it for further improvements.

Developers from across the world also became curious about Linux, started working on the same, resulting in rapid improvements to the platform. Even being a student at Helsinki University, Torvalds was doing really well. The college authorities appointed him as an instructor at the University, which helped him continue his development work for Linux.

By 1996, people started using Linux on their systems, and by 1997, Linux was installed on over three million computers. Organisations like NASA, Dell and IBM were also using Linux. At the same time, Red Hat started building software based on Linux, that boosted the popularity of Linux even more.

In 1999, when Red Hat went public, the company presented Torvalds with stock options in gratitude for his creation, making him an overnight millionaire. Also, when IBM started its research work on Linux in 2001, to support this free software, a few other companies also stepped in to do the same.

Today, Linux is serving those people, who need to use a computer, but cannot and does do not want to spend a huge amount on the other operating systems. According to Torvalds, he started working on Linux for fun, and it is also a fact that for almost a decade, he was working on it for free. Linux, certainly, is the result of his dedication and brilliance.

Personal Life

Torvalds is married to Tove Torvalds and has three daughters. In 2010, he obtained US citizenship. In 2000, he became interested in scuba diving and have received many certificates in the same. He also launched Subsurface, a software for logging and planning scuba dives, in 2011.

In 1998, Torvalds received an EFF Pioneer Award. He also shared the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Well-Being with Richard Stallman and Ken Sakamura. In August 2005, Torvalds received the Vollum Award from Reed College. He also received an honorary doctorate degree from Stockholm University.

Torvalds also founded the distributed version control system Git, in 2005. The system is widely used to track the changes in source code during software development.

Red Hat : The Biggest Linux Distributor & First $1B Open-source Software Company

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Founding Red Hat at the time when the market was changing rapidly, was quite a big step, as the co-founders of Red Hat, Marc Ewing and Bob Young followed their gut feeling and kept their ears opened to every good advice from the experts. While building a business model, obviously one should focus on the product that he/she will be building under the name of their business, but at the same time for long term sustainability, one has to be future ready and take the steps carefully.

Founders

Marc Ewing was born on 9 May 1969 and completed his graduate degree from Carnegie Mellon University, in 1992. Ewing was a bright student and was also involved in the 86open project in the mid-1990s in college. His grandfather had gifted him a red colour hat that he used to wear during his college days, and this way, he had become popular as the ‘red hat guy’ in the college.

bob young marc ewing
Image Source: irishtimes.com

The co-founder of Red Hat, Bob Young, was a native of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He completed his high school from Trinity College School in Port Hope and graduated as Bachelor of Arts from Victoria College at the University of Toronto.

Young, after completing his education, started a computer rental and leasing business and founded Vernon Computer Rentals, in 1984. But in 1990, he sold the company to Greyvest Capital and the money that came from the deal, made him an overnight millionaire. But the good time was not permanent, and he lost his millionaire status just in a few months as a result of some bad business moves from Greyvest Capital.

Young, still, was with Greyvest and to enhance his business he started attending the meetings, where programmers talked about the latest trends in the software program UNIX, running on the servers. He was an outsider but knew that those meetings were the key to his biggest business idea.

At the time Young was attending those meetings, he started a newsletter named New York Unix that had all information about the next meetings. In 1993, after losing his job at Greyvest, he incorporated the newsletter as his another business and founded ACC Corp Inc., which at the beginning was earning from the advertisements. At the same time, Linux was becoming a hot topic as it was free software and many of the companies were choosing Linux over Unix. Eventually, Young started selling Linux software, books and accessories.

Founding Red Hat

At the same time, Young was getting requests from the groups that were subscribed to his newsletter to write more about open source software and Linux. Young, too, was interested in writing about the same but had no idea about what an open-source software was.

He was struggling through the financial crisis, but the Linux based products that he was selling was the main source of his income. So he became more curious about finding more resellers for the Linux products. This led him to reach Marc Ewing, who had set up a little Linux shop in Durham, North Carolina, named as Red Hat.

The company, unmistakably, got its name from the same red hat that he used to wear in college. Marc was working on a Unix project and accidentally, built the first software under Red Hat, in 1994. The project he was working on was to run on a Unix system, but since it was too expensive, he developed the software for Linux.

The evolution of Linux also made Marc interested in the same, and as Linux was an open source software, he started working on fixing Linux.

Finally, on 29 July 1994, he released his first Linux distribution software that was easier to use version over the GPL version. The software became a hit overnight.

Young started officially distributing Red Hat’s software, and after discussing with many Linux experts, Young joined his hands with Ewing to incorporate Acc with Red Hat, and the two turned the co-founders of Red Hat Inc. with a partnership of fifty-fifty.

The two was working passionately for the company, without knowing the real worth of it. In 1999, the company went public, and for their surprise, the company achieved the eighth-biggest first-day gain in the history of Wall Street.

In the same year, Red Hat acquired Cygnus Solutions, followed by the acquisition of the other companies including WireSpeed, C2Net and Hell’s Kitchen Systems, Planning Technologies, Inc., in the later years. In the year 2000, the company won the “Operating System Product of the Year” award for Red Hat Linux 6.1. In 2002, Red Hat introduced Red Hat Linux Advanced Server.

In 2005, Red Hat stock became part of the NASDAQ-100 and, in 2006, Red Hat stock moved from to trading on the New York Stock Exchange (RHT).

In 2012, Red Hat became the first open source software company that entered into the one-billion-dollar group, and in 2015, it surpassed the two-billion-dollar milestone. Just in another three years, in 2018, the company recorded the annual revenue of three-billion-dollar.

On 28 October 2018, IBM announced that it is planning to acquire Red Hat for US$34 billion.

The company headquarter was moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S. from Durham in 2002. As per the 2018 records, the company has raised to 12,600 employees.

Bob Young served as Red Hat’s CEO until 1999, and left the company in 2002, to found his print-on-demand, self-publishing company, Lulu.com. Red Hat is one of the fastest growing companies and one of the pioneers in the open-source software industry.

The Story of Hatch Apps : The App To Build Apps

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There are rare cases when your honesty and realization of your fundamental duty would have paid you well. Yes, you might have received appreciation from people, but did it become the biggest business idea for you ever?

This is what happened to the Param Jaggi, who is the co-founder of Hatch App. Param Jaggi is of Indian descent, who dropped out of Vanderbilt University at the age of 19, to work for his own self. He was a brilliant student and even invented EcoTube when he was in school at the age of 16. The EcoTube was built under a science project, that used the algae photosynthesis to reduce carbon emissions from cars. The device worked well and Jaggi patented the device in his name. Jaggi’s father is an engineer and wanted him to become a doctor. But as Jaggi was already working for a better cause, i.e., saving the environment, his family never interfered. Jaggi also sold his innovative bio-fuel preparation method to a Fortune 500 company.

AmeliaParam
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During the same time, he also developed an interest in web development, and later, when he turned 19, he decided to work as a freelancer, as he was already developing web and mobile apps and was earning enough. At that time he was charging $10K to $30 to build simple apps and that too only in a time equal to a weekend. For Jaggi, it had become quite easy to copy paste the similar code in the background of each web app and finish the project within a week. This fact made him think that he was charging way too much for delivering the ‘almost same’ code to every other client. “What’s fundamentally wrong with the software development industry, especially custom development systems, is that they price out products based on your price elasticity”, said Jaggi in an interview.

On the other hand, the other co-founder of Hatch Apps, Amelia Friedman, was also an entrepreneur who started her own business when she was still in college. She was a student of Brown University and was running college-level programs in different languages. At the time she completed her graduate degree, her program had reached to 7 cities, with over 32 different programs.

Founding Hatch Apps

Jaggi was a 19-years old eco-innovator, and Friedman was a self-made entrepreneur. The two got a chance to attend the Halcyon Incubator in Washington, DC, where the two met each other, the very first time. The meeting included the discussion over many things including how Jaggi wanted to bring price stability to the app building industry. And the idea of Hatch Apps was formed.

Jaggi’s plan was clear. He wanted to create a platform, upon which people could build their own apps without paying extra money. In 2015, the two launched Hatch Apps and started working on the basic plan. At the same time, the need for extra funds arisen. So they developed the 2016 Election game in just three days and were able to raise $100,000 for Hatch Apps within a few weeks.

The Hatch Apps is one of its kind, where a user can build apps by just dragging and dropping the elements, without actually knowing the coding behind those elements. During the testing of the app, Jaggi built the first app on Hatch Apps, just in three days even having the deadline of five days.

In March 2017, this software company raised $1.3M in angel funding to launch their product. The company has a team of more than twenty people and charges only $1K a month for app development. For $2K to $5K, customers can implement specific customizations and add-ons.

Jaggi is working as the CEO of Hatch Apps, and Friedman holds the position of the COO of the company. Jaggi has also got his name listed twice in the Forbes “30 Under 30”.

The company is still managing its ways in the market and slowly is getting ahead to earn more consumers. For now, the idea is really innovative and one of its kind, so the future of the company looks quite bright.

Zipcar : The Success Story of One of the Oldest Car-rental Services

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Zipcar has a history even before the car-renting businesses were not even that common. Built by two moms, the idea at the time was unique, and it was their passion that made it successful in just a few months.

Zipcar is an almost 2 decades old company, founded in the year 2000, by Antje Danielson, a Harvard geochemist and Robin Chase, a stay-at-home mom and an MIT business school graduate. The two ladies met each other at their children’s kindergarten, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Both were struggling financially, as Chase had left her job due to the birth of her first child and Danielson was the only working member in her family.

zipcar
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But as the time was passing both of them wanted to make use of their studies, and as a business graduate, Chase has expressed her desire to start a business with Danielson. Danielson was on the same track and had studied about Switzerland’s Mobility Cooperative, and shared the idea of starting a similar technology based car-rental company, in the US, with Chase. Chase also liked the idea, but it was a big project that included a huge risk. So both talked to their husbands and got the approval for the business.

Finally, in January 2000, both started their car-rental business, Zipcar. Zipcar provided the automobile reservations to its members through charging them a monthly or annual fee. Before incorporating the company, the two had already raised investments for its launch of around $75,000 in startup financing. After they launched the startup, Chase held the position of the president of Zipcar and Danielson became the vice president of the company.

The first rental car from Zipcar went onto the roads in May 2000, and in just three-four months it registered over 600 customers for the service. The company was doing well, but the two co-founders were not going along too well. In 2001, Robin Chase fired Danielson, after Chase petitioned Zipcar’s board for the ability to make hiring and firing decisions without consulting them.

The fire of the co-founder did not impact the company much, and it kept on expanding in New York City and Washington DC. Even the company was expanding, it was unable to secure more funding, and as a result, the board of the company replaced Chase as the CEO of the company with Scott Griffith. Within two years the company was able to raise $10 million in funding led by Benchmark Capital. In the same year, a new office was opened in San Francisco, following by another office in Toronto in the next year. The establishment of Toronto led to the fastest growing market in Toronto for Zipcar.

In late 2006, the company reached London, and in 2007, Zipcar opened an office in Vancouver. In the same year, in the month of October, the company had a merger with Flexcar. After the merger, the company earned over 225,000 members, double the number of the member it had in the previous year.

In June 2009, the company launched its iPhone app, with the features like honking the horn and unlocking some Zipcars. In April 2010, Zipcar acquired the London-based car-sharing club Streetcar.

In 2013, Avis Budget Group acquired Zipcar. In 2014, the company opened its offices in Houston, Dallas TX regions, Greater Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario. In the same year, the company also extended to Paris, France and Madrid, Spain. Zipcar also launched its floating car-sharing service in Brussels, Belgium, in 2016.

Zipcar offers the car rental service for over fifty different car models, even including the luxury car models like Audi and BMW. The company headquarters still remains in Boston, Massachusetts and it has raised to over 500 employees.

The reason behind the success has been that it started through word-of-mouth promotion and had invested well in the technology. The business idea was simple and was based on customer feedback. So in the past two decades, it has grown in a phenomenal way. Even it has been more than a decade for the two co-founders left the company, Zipcar had its own success story. And, the success story of Zipcar shows us that keeping things simple and targeting customer satisfaction is the key to success.