Your Tech Story

success story

Simon Nixon: The Founder of ‘MoneySuperMarket’

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

Today’s market brings so much to its consumers. It’s hard to decide what to choose and why because there is a lot of companies out there selling their products and services. We get to see so many products with almost the same quality and the same prices, making it difficult what to choose. But with every problem comes a solution and for this problem, Moneysupermarket gives you ‘the’ proper solution, giving answers to all your questions. Simon Nixon, the man who gave birth to the company, has a story to be heard which says that following someone’s steps may not always be the right way to success.

Moneysupermarket.com stands out to be a British price comparison website. The work that the site does is that it helps you to compare prices. You can compare prices on a wide range of products be it an insurance or a loan. The company’s aim is to help households save money.

“This ambition is perfectly suited to the times in which we live, given the financial uncertainty that exists at home. We aim to help by shining a light on the best ways, households can take control of their finances. Our objective is to offer consistently competitive prices and deliver a great visitor experience, so that customers find what they want, and think of us first for their future needs”, itself, the site says.

simonnixon
Image Source: standard.co.uk

It all started back when Simon Nixon found his university education really boring. “I hated it. It was boring,” said Simon when asked why he dropped out of his university. He looked into the market the lacks and gaps, and where he could use his mind to fill them up. Eventually, he found out that there were no websites or journals to compare the prices of the products out in the market. He thought to himself, ‘If I didn’t do this, who else will?’ He started a journal-ish thing that had best-but tables in it. Initially, he lent them out for free but as the magazine gained popularity, he started charging 11 Pounds for a monthly subscription. His business became so efficient that only after two years, he started earning more than 10,000 pounds from that magazine only. Nixon named the group working with him as ‘Mortgage 2000.’

He, along with his friend Duncan Cameron, launched an internet site called ‘Moneysupermarket.com’ which updated itself according to the market daily. The site came out to be a huge success as the internet was blooming all over the world and the UK was no exception. Since then, the site only grew and never saw a backdrop. They kept on increasing their range of products that could be compared.

It was 2004 when Simon Nixon launched Travelsupermarket.com. The site was the same as the Moneysupermarket. The difference was that the users could now compare travel related products too. However, Duncan and Simon fell out as the attention diverted away from Mortgage 2000. In 2007, he (Duncan) sold his shares to Simon for 162 Million Pounds. All these years, Duncan stayed as a silent business partner.

Some of the major sales growth of the company was from 2000 to 2002, where the site jumped from 5.4 million to 13.6 million Pounds. The company was listed in London Stock Exchange, and the site was valued at a massive amount of 1 Billion Pounds, at the time of its Initial Public Offering!

In 2009, Simon stepped down from the position of CEO, with Peter Plumb becoming the new CEO. Simon is fond of luxuries. Also, he admits that he doesn’t like doing business for a long time. “I’m scared of doing nothing,” said Simon, during an interview. Simon has a worth of $1.1 Billion. Even after having so much wealth and businesses, Simon prefers to stay quiet when it comes to his personal life, and there are very little details known about it. Now, he invests in different businesses across the world, which gives him access to travel to different parts of the world too.

Simon Nixon, the founder of Moneysupermarket.com shows us that it only takes true passion to reach your goal. Sometimes, hard work may not count up as much as passion does. Also, it isn’t required that you follow a guided roadmap to success, instead, take your own route and make a path of success out of it.

Brendan Eich : The Founder Of JavaScript; A Buggy but Irreplaceable Programming Language

Founder, Story, Tech Story / By

The websites, the web pages, the web applications are most common things that we see today, and they might not seem that fascinating to us, as much it could a decade ago. Also, it might seem a bit easy to create them, but the amount of work that is done behind the scenes is something that people from the non-technical field may hardly understand. These dynamic websites and web applications are the results of JavaScript, which is a high-level interpreted programming language. JavaScript was invented by Brendan Eich who shares a story about hard work and creativity. Brendan developed JavaScript in just over 10 days which clearly represents his hard work and passion to do so.

Brendan grew up in Palo Alto. He graduated from Ellwood P. Cubberley High School and received a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Santa Clara University. He then pursued his master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. After completing his education, he started working at Silicon Graphics. He worked there for 7 years on Operating Systems and Network Codes.

Brendan Eich
Image Source: cnet.com

Brendan, soon, joined Netscape Communication Corporation, in April 1995. Netscape was a visionary company and wanted to put out something different in their internet browsers. All the existing technologies at that time, like HTML, stood out as deficient when it came to their vision. Due to this, Brendon was tasked to create a whole new language for Netscape. All that he got was 10 days to complete the task. “Back then, the pace of Web innovation was furious, with Microsoft suddenly making the Internet the focus of its Windows 95 operating system release in response to Netscape’s emerging browser and server products,” said Brendon in an interview. After 10 days, completing a nearly impossible task, Brendon came up with ‘JavaScript’. The language was used in Netscape’s Navigator 2.0 Beta version. The browser was named as Mocha, later renamed to LiveScript and then JavaScript.

“When I joined Netscape, I knew that either it will die, and Microsoft will completely replace it, or it will stay for 24 years or longer. Eventually, people think about Pcs and Operating software, like Windows on them, and they think that we will die every 10 years or so, and it doesn’t”, said Brendon in a talk (Source: “Brief History of JavaScript”). “Eich has unique language writing skills and they were unique,” said Jim Clark who was the founder of Silicon Graphics. The language that he created now is the most extensively used programming language in the world and is one of the three core technologies of the World Wide Web.

The creator of JavaScript was already familiar with writing creative programming languages. During his student times, he built new languages that were used to experiment with syntaxes. At Silicon Graphics too, he worked on new and innovative network monitoring tools.

However, Brendan openly admits that the language still has bugs, and he has been constantly working on it. “It was also an incredible rush job, so there were mistakes in it.” “But the point is that it is really hard to replace. There’s something like successful DNA about JavaScript. Once it’s in there, you’re going to have a hard time getting rid of it,” said Brendon.

Alongside JavaScript, he co-founded ‘Mozilla’ project which was a site that handled open source contribution to the Netscape source code. He served as the CTO of Mozilla Corporation. He passed on the ownership of the Mozilla SpiderMonkey module, in 2011. Mozilla Firefox is one of the great browsers that world today has, in which Brendon holds a large amount of contribution. As of now, Brendan Eich is the CEO of Brave software, which is an open-source web browser. There are many things which makes Brave, a unique browser. It is designed to block ads and trackers to protect users’ data, and it boosts browsing speed up to 8 times that of the original ones.

Brave even has its own currency: a blockchain-based token called the Basic Attention Token (BAT). The BAT token was launched via a record-breaking initial coin offering (ICO) on May 31st, 2017. The company raised $35 million by selling out 1.5 billion BAT tokens in just 30 seconds — the fastest ICO on record. All it does is that it offers the Brave users to experience more features of Brave, that is an ad-free experience. Brave is unlike all the tech giants and provides no breaching of data of consumers. Brendan Eich, the founder of JavaScript, co-founder of Mozilla Foundation and the CEO of Brave software shares a story that shows true passion and hard work. Brendan is certainly an inspiration to all the technology geeks out there.

BlaBlaCar : A Successful Startup that Simplified the Long-distance Journeys

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


Travelling, for some people is not just moving from one place to the other, but is something which includes emotions. Whether it be homecoming or a trip to one’s dream place, it brings emotion with itself. But the thing is, when it comes to travelling, the fare and the comfort don’t come on the same page. If you need affordable rates, then comfort is something that you need to compromise with, and that goes the other way round when you need high comfort.

But, according to the famous saying, where there’s a will, there’s a way, people have found their way to comfort and affordable travelling through BlaBlaCar. Carpooling, certainly, is a way that gives you the comfort and the affordable rates at the same time. When it comes to carpools, BlaBlaCar is a name that arises from within.

BlaBlaCar is a platform for long distance carpooling. Its app and website connect drivers to passengers who are willing to travel long distances. The benefits of the carpooling service are that the cost of the journey comes into sharing that means you get to experience comfort at an affordable price. Also, the drivers with empty seats get filled in. As of now, BlaBlaCar reaches more than 10 million rides per quarter year. The success story of BlaBlaCar is certainly is the one that inspires depicting that a small picture can be changed into a bigger one.

The idea of the startup came up to the current CEO and the co-founder of the BlaBlaCar, Fredric Mazzella, who in the winter of 2003, decided to visit his home on Christmas. But eventually, he found himself left with no options to travel, as all the trains in France were booked due to the holiday season. He didn’t have a car either, so he was stuck. Luckily, his sister offered him a ride home and during that particular trip, he noticed that most of the cars that were around them, had empty seats. That’s when the idea clicked. He thought, “If I put all those cars with empty seats, in a search engine, such that people can search the available seats in those cars, just like they do while booking a train.” The idea in his mind was something that was unique, and soon after realizing it, he started to work on the same, with his friends Francis Nappez and Nicolas Brusson.

blablacar-founders
Image Source: indexventures.com

However, the journey to build this platform did not start smoothly. The problem that arose was in the implementation of the idea. Precisely, the implementation of a business model was the issue that the co-founders were facing.

In 2006, when the service was launched, it was the ‘Premium Model’ of the platform, that was released first. This model was free to use, but users could pay a monthly or annual fee to get their service higher on the search engine. But the model was discarded, as soon as the company realized that money won’t benefit in the long run and also, that the model could be unfair to many of the users.

Then, BlaBlaCar jumped to ‘Monthly Fee’ plan, but it too was eliminated. Then, they picked up an advertising model, but keeping users’ privacy at stake was unacceptable.

Then the company induced ‘Phone Bridge Model’ into their system. In this model, users could choose to hide their contact numbers while remaining reachable via a pay telephone bridge. But the catch here was that if the company wanted to go global, then the telephone operators all over the world were different. So, this effort also went in vain.

Once during this phase, Fredric asked his M.B.A. professor at INSEAD that whether it’s possible to run a business, without a business model, to which, he replied, “You need a business model or you’ll die!” Those words gave Fredric so much motivation that he ended up on the idea to take risks and learn. As a result, it took 5 years for the company to restructure itself.

Soon, the company saw that there were other companies, like Carrefour, IKEA, that wanted to give services of BlaBlaCar to their employees. After that, there was no stopping, as 200 more companies bought the BlaBlaCar service for their employees. But in 2012, this business model was again put to an end, as each company’s each employee had different requirements which made it difficult to give a collective solution.

But with today’s business model that BlaBlaCar has put into effect has helped them reduce their cancellation from 35% to around 2.5%.

The company has a motto of FAIL. LEARN. SUCCEED. As a result of its past experiences, the company is open to failures and openly says about them. But they ensure that once a mistake is committed, it won’t be repeated. BlaBlaCar has grown all over Europe, and Asia too. For now, the company serves in more than 22 countries, including India, the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany etc. BlaBlaCar, currently, is also in talks with France’s National Railway company SNCF for its bus division, so that the platform can provide bus services, too.

The startup that started as a minor one has gained more than $1.5 as funding. The company itself generates revenue of around $91 million. It’s worth, too, is $1.5 billion, which makes it the mater on its own.

The success story shows that personal needs can also be turned into a million-euro idea. It gives us the glimpse that how much innovative ideas our surroundings hold for us. Who knew that the startup which was such a unicorn sized, would grow up to such an extent that it will serve more than 22 countries. The success story of BlaBlaCar is certainly a one filled with eternal inspiration.

Warby Parker : The Story of the Most Innovative Startup of America

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

Buying goods online is the most convenient way to get things delivered to your doorstep. At present, there is almost nothing that you can’t buy online. Food, grocery, clothes and air tickets, you can get all these things just in a few clicks. Although almost ten years ago, there were limited things that you could order online, slowly the list got enhanced. One such thing that added to the list of the online available items was the customized eyewear, that was introduced by the famous Warby Parker.

The online merchandise was founded by Neil Blumenthal, Andrew Hunt, David Gilboa, and Jeffrey Raider, four students from Wharton, in 2010. The company was founded in Philadelphia and its headquarter is located in New York City.

Image Source: pinterest.com

It was the time when the four friends were sitting in their college lab and discussing how and why the eyewear was so expensive, and there came up the idea of launching a website to sell eyeglasses online. All four of them were convinced that it will be really convenient for people to buy eyewear online. They also discussed the idea with their teachers and got motivated when they too liked the idea.

At the same time, their college hosted an event, the Venture Initiation Program, that was organised to grant money to the new businesses. Luckily, the four got the grant. The grant was worth $2500 which played as the seed money for the launch of Warby Parker.

The four launched Warby Parker after they went through a one-month marketing training. The name for the company came from a journal by author Jack Kerouac.

At the time Warby Parker was launched, the eyewear industry was already dominated by other big company named Luxottica. Luxottica sold the most stylish eyewear at that time and had every brand available at its stores. The problem with the company was that it was selling every brand, but was putting a big price on it.

It was a golden opportunity for Warby Parker, as it was an online store and was letting customers try on five pairs at their homes. The products sold on the site was also affordable, with a starting range of $95.

According to co-founder of Warby Parker, Gilboa, “The idea was really based on two simple premises. One is that a pair of glasses should not cost more than an iPhone, and two, that eyeglasses could effectively be sold online.”

The idea was unique and was providing people with affordable eyewear sitting at their homes. Within a year of its launch, Vogue covered the story. This helped the company with its marketing.

Later, in 2011, the company earned its first round of funding of worth $2.5 million. In the month of September, in the same year, it raised a Series A round funding of $12.5 million, following by a $37 million Series B round funding in the next year. In 2013, American Express and Mickey Drexler invested a $4 million in Webly Parker.

In 2011, the company had sold over 10,000 pairs of eyeglasses, and the company grew to 60 employees.

Next business move that the company took was to launch a physical store. In 2013, Warby Parker launched its first pop-up shop with the name ‘Holiday Spectacle Bazaar’ in a garage in SoHo, New York. Going offline from online was considered a crazy move by many, but it only raised the popularity of the company. Later, they also opened another shop in a school bus, which functioned for a long 18 months.

Now, the company has its physical stores in over 15 different cities. In 2015, the company was valued at $1.2 billion.

Then in 2016, following the footstep of its rival Luxottica, Warby Parker announced to launch its own optical lab in Rockland County, New York, to have its own manufacturing, in order to bypass the middlemen expenses. The company also announced that it would invest $16 million, to build the 34,000-square-foot manufacturing unit, and will employ over 130 people.

In 2018, Warby Parker raised $75 million in Series E funding, making its total funding about $300 million.

The Warby Parker also contributes in the philanthropic works, as it donates a pair of glasses on every pair of glasses sold by the company, under the “buy one, give one” model. In June 2014, Warby Parker reported the donation of 1,000,000 pairs of eyeglasses. The company also claims to be 100% carbon neutral.

The success story of Warby Parker is no less than any other inspiring story. From the story, we learn the importance of people, as the reason behind the success of this company was that it focussed on its customers and their needs.

Todd McKinnon : The Founder of Okta, a Company that Specializes in Enterprise Security

start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Taking risks, is what most of the people are afraid of, especially, when they are running in their late 30s. At the time when people are earning enough money by working under someone else, it was Todd McKinnon, who wanted to pursue his childhood dream of becoming an entrepreneur. Even he was heading a team of more than a hundred employees in his last company and was earning an adequate amount of money to survive in a place like Silicon Valley, he decided to leave the job and just work for his dream. Having years of experience and a great vision, today, he is the founder of a billion dollars company, Okta.

Early Life

McKinnon was born in Southern California and grew up in its bay area. His father was a VP of HR, who worked for various different companies, and his mother was a homemaker.

He completed his under graduation from Brigham Young University, and later, went to the California Polytechnic State University, where he completed a degree in computer science.

Career

McKinnon finds himself lucky, to be born and brought up in the capital of technology. Being a native of Silicon Valley, since his childhood, he was convinced that he would work for an IT company in Silicon Valley.

ToddMcKinnon
Image Source: sbnonline.com

During his graduation, he got recruited by PeopleSoft, in the campus placement, in 1995. At the time, he was building a database application for the recreation department on campus. Co-incidently, the recruiter from PeopleSoft was also working on a similar project and liked Mckinnon’s work and recruited him.

McKinnon was hired as an engineer in the company and received multiple promotions in the span of eight years.

After working for eight long years in PeopleSoft, in 2003, McKinnon left the job and started working at SalesForce. In 2009, he left SalesForce to start his own company, i.e. Okta.

Founding Okta

Besides the dream of working in a Silicon Valley company, McKinnon was also fascinated with the idea of starting his own business. The reason he gives for not starting a business earlier is that he always had good jobs in hand, and those were helpful in gaining good business experience.

In SalesForce, he was managing over hundreds of employees, and he had got a good reputation. He decided that it was the right time to start a business, as he was financially and mentally capable of doing that at the time.

At the same time, people got introduced to the cloud, and not many were sure how long it is going to last. But McKinnon saw an opportunity in the same. He started off developing with a macro product, and when he went out to talk and sell the product to people, he realized there was much more to the cloud, and finally, started working on identity management on the cloud.

McKinnon pitched the idea in over 75 meetings in a span of four to five months. He also asked a former SalesForce colleague, Freddy Kerrest, to join him for the startup, and finally, after seven months of hard, work was able to raise a million dollars seed funding to start the business and founded Okta in 2009. Okta provides cloud software that helps companies manage their employees’ passwords, by providing a “single sign-on” experience.

The company earned its first paying client, in December 2009. In 2015, the company was valued at $1.2 billion and raised $75 million in venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital.

In 2017, the company went public, and in its IPO it raised $187 million. Okta has its offices in Bellevue, Toronto, London, Amsterdam, Sydney, San Jose and Washington D.C., and its headquarter is located in San Fransisco. In January 2019, the company reported a number of 100 million registered users on Okta and the company valued at over $7 billion.

Personal Life

McKinnon is married and has two children. He lives with his family in San Francisco. He is a fitness freak, and in 2017, he was named as the 14th fittest man on earth in the age group of 45-to-49, in the annual CrossFit Games, held in Madison, Wisconsin. Currently, he serves as the CEO of Okta.

Daniel Borel : Swiss Entrepreneur & Co-founder of Logitech

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

In any business, you must keep an eye on the upcoming opportunities and grab it as soon as it shows up. In business, the success comes to those, who keep the courage of doing the same thing in a different way. One of such business personality from Switzerland is Daniel Borel, who always knew that he wanted to do something big and that big thing resulted in a multimillion tech company, i.e. Logitech.

It was Borel’s capability to see in the future such that he was sure that starting a business of mice manufacturing, that was just arrived in the market and could be a risky one, surely will lead him to success. Today, Logitech is not only world’s largest mice manufacturing company, but it also supplies other products including remote controls, security cameras, keyboards, webcams, speakers, B2B video conferencing equipment, computer accessories, gaming products, etc. at a global level.

Early Life

Born, on 14 February 1950, Daniel Borel is a native of Switzerland. In 1973, he completed his graduation in Physics from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. Even being a physicist, he wanted to do something else, so he switched to computing and in 1977, did his masters in computer science from Stanford University.

Early Career & Founding Logitech

After his post-graduation, Borel moved to the Silicon Valley. It was a huge culture shock for him, as people were working on innovative ideas and the technology was changing at a rapid rate. This inspired him a lot, and he along with, Pierluigi Zappacosta, one of his friends from Stanford University, started working on word processing.

Borel Logitech
Image Source: itreseller.ch

The two were doing quite well in both software and hardware, and at the same time, they started Logitech. They started the company in a farm of Borel’s father-in-law in Apples, Vaud, Switzerland in 1981, along with a former Olivetti engineer, Giacomo Marini.

At the time, around the early 80s, the computer mouse had just arrived in the market along with the personal computer. Borel found an opportunity in the same, and as he was already in contact with big companies like Apple and HP, he decided to manufacture mice for those companies.

Borel, as already had made plans on manufacturing computer mice and its software interface, visited Taiwan and China, to look for companies that could help him manufacture them. At the time, Microsoft also had started using the mouse for its word processor.

Logitech was successful in developing mice for the personal computers, along with a software interface, and approached Microsoft in order to sell those mice to it. Microsoft also showed an interest, but the deal never happened. At last, Borel had to adopt another marketing technique. He published coupons along with an ad in the Byte magazine, where he offered a price as low as $100 for the Logitech mouse when others were selling the same at $170.

The marketing technique went quite well, and Logitech was showered with orders. Since then, the company is growing at a rapid rate and has developed many other products under its name.

In the year 2008, Logitech reported the manufacturing of over one billion mice since 1985. In the same year, the company acquired Ultimate Ears, a supplier of Bluetooth speakers and custom in-ear monitors for professional musicians. In 2011, it also acquired the mobile visual communications provider, Mirial and in 2017, it acquired Astro Gaming.

As of 2018, the reported revenue for the year was US$2.57 billion, and a number of its worldwide employees have grown to 7000 people since its inception. The the two of its headquarters are established in Lausanne, Switzerland and Newark, California, USA.

Personal Life

Borel worked as the chairman of the company between 1982 to 2008, and as the CEO of the company from 1982 to 1988 and 1992 to 1998. Currently, he serves on the board of directors of Logitech and Nestlé. He has also founded Defitech, a foundation to make computer technology for handicapped people, where he also serves on the board of the company.