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MobiGarage : The Online Garage to Get Your Smartphone Repaired

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The emergence of mobile, or we shall say, the Smartphones has added another luxury expense to our lives. Smartphones are no more just calling equipment, but it has become that one thing we can’t think of living without. The constant enhancement in the features of those smartphones is leading to an increase in its demand, and we are compelled to buy new phones to get those new features. Eventually, spending more money on the same thing.

But spending so much on Smartphones also make us sceptical about what if the phone or its software breaks down. How much will it cost to repair the phone, or will it recover the injuries? And, we often see, the same thing happening after the warranty period is over. In such cases, people often go buying new phones rather having repaired their broken phones, as it is difficult to find trusted repair person, and it is quite inconvenient as well as expensive, to go to the authorised service centres, where people barely understand the real problem and instead make you take rounds of the centre multiple times.

MobiGarage
Image Source: MobiGarage

This is where the mind of the founder of MobiGarage, Vaibhav Kapoor, hit the idea of launching a website (i.e. mobigarage.com) that would provide people with online and offline assistance, for reliable mobile repair and spare-part services at their doorsteps.

The Founders

Vaibhav Kapoor, the Director and CEO of MobiGarage, is an engineer having experience in working with Fortune 500 companies, including Accenture Strategy and ZS Associates, in India and abroad. At MobiGarage, he is responsible for creating the roadmap, business and go-to-market strategy and leads MobiGarage – B2C online mobile repair and spare unit of the company.

Kapoor started the company with other three co-founders Pulkit Kapoor (Director, Product and Services), Abhinav Mahajan (Director, Operations) and Ujjwal Sehgal (Director, Procurement/Supply Chain).

Like Vaibhav Kapoor, all three of them are engineering graduates. Before MobiGarage, Pulkit Kapoor worked as a manager at Reliance Industries Limited.

From the beginning of his career, Abhinav Mahajan had that thing about entrepreneurship, and after working with ZS Associates for a few years, he settled up his first start-up Helfis Technologies for Preventive Healthcare.

Founding MobiGarage

The four co-founders founded MobiGarage in 2017. The idea behind starting such a business was to help people with their mobile repair needs, at affordable prices and with most of the comfort. The company headquarter is situated in Delhi, India, and currently, it offers its services to 15,000 zip codes across India.

MobiGarage has seen a prominent increase in the revenues and the number of clients since its commencement. Currently, the company is fulfilling over 3000 orders in a month and has seen a 100x boost in its users, since its inception, including a 500% increase in its enterprise clients, from the last year. MobiGarage has projected its revenue to get 5 folds to 2.5Cr, in this fiscal year and a 400% growth compared to the last fiscal year.

Just in one year, the company has made its own place in the Smartphone repair industry, with a 100% growth rate for the Q3-2018, as compared to Q2-2018. For the past more than a year, it has been catering to most of the top repair and refurb companies as well as to more than 150+ brands.

MobiGarage is one of the fastest growing companies among its contemporaries and based on a unique concept, the company has got the reasons to be on the top.

Greg Tseng : The Co-Founder of Tagged, A Site Bringing People Together

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It has always been said that the human being is a social animal. And, that is because only humans are capable of interacting with its surroundings and other creatures around him. Humans are able to make friends, besides their families. But making new friends is something that is both challenging and difficult. But, there are many, who even have a problem in starting a conversation and find friends, with whom they are comfortable with. But, for making this challenging task simple enough, Greg Tseng built such a site, named ‘Tagged.com’, which allows you to see who’s around you.

Tagged.com can be defined as a social discovery site. A site where you can view, talk, share tags and also share virtual gifts with people around you. Tagged was launched in 2004, by Harvard masterminds Greg Tseng and Johann Scheiler-Smith, who were science class buddies since class 7th. They both wanted Tagged to be different from all other social networking sites out there, mainly from Facebook.

greg tseng
Image Source: gettyimages.com

To make their website stand out, apart from other, Greg and Johann targeted the audience of age group between 13 and 19. Hence, the site was set up for teens at first. The design and the concept were such that users could meet other people in a short period of time. In October 2006, Tagged expanded its user base. Now, the network was not just for teens only, it was open for all the age groups. The move went as it was planned. Tagged, eventually, saw an increase in the number of its user (at that time) by having more than 80 million users registered, and 7 billion views on the page per month.

But, Tagged also attracted some negative publicity towards itself. In 2009, Tagged was on the verge of getting sacked due to ‘deceptive email marketing and invasion of privacy’. In the same year, Time Magazine’s journalist Sean Gregory mentioned Tagged as the ‘The World’s Most Annoying Website!’ During that time period, Tagged paid an approximate of $1.4 million to settle down all the lawsuits that were against it, and soon after that, inherited new privacy policies.

After having a smooth sail for years, Tagged again started drawing criticisms from the users about the inappropriate content that was on the site. So, following the protocols, Tagged limited its services to users who were above 18, from February 2014.

Tagged has a simple sign-up process for a free account. A profile is built with all of the key features such as public profile and a display profile. Tagged shows you people around you in accordance with the similarity of interests which is surely a standout from Facebook which restricts you among the people you know. The site also has a gold membership which is VIP status with a monthly fee. The VIP membership, however, allows you to see who visited your profile.

The site also has games on it, which is Greg Tseng’s “hi5’s” work. He built this game studio during the development of the website. On the Tagged.com, people can collect pets (Other Users) and can share virtual gifts with each other.

Alongside this, Greg also developed flyingchickens.com and CrushLink. In 2015, he stepped down as the CEO of the company. “I initiated it and it’s happening the way I want”, he said, when asked about why he was leaving the post. Tagged has projected more than $45 million in revenues, and seek a $1 billion valuation IPO. The company also changed its name to If(we). Greg’s own net worth is around $25 million.

The story of Greg Tseng shows that to stand apart, you must have new ideas and also, that handing responsibilities to others after a certain period of time is required, so as to keep rolling new ideas and innovations. The ex-CEO of Tagged is someone to learn from.

Paul Forster : The Man On The Job To Provide You Jobs

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In this era, jobs are hard to find. Also, job hunting stands as a headache for a lot of working professionals, who want to change or start something new for the better. But every problem has its own solution, and when it comes to job hunting or searching, Indeed is there to find the ‘perfect job’ you seek.

Indeed is American employment search engine that works at a global level. In simpler words, you can refer to it as the ‘Google’ of job searching. Indeed was founded by Paul Forster and Rony Kahan, in November 2004, and Paul shares an interesting story about how he came forth with the idea of making the biggest job searching site of all time.

Paul Forster
Image Source: angel.co

Paul was born in Buckinghamshire, England. He did his M.Sc. from Oxford University, followed by an M.A. from Cambridge University, and an MBA from INSEAD. After completing his education, he started looking for a job and ended up working at many. It was his dream to start his own business and was not short of ideas, but wanted to work on something that troubled him the most. In 1988, he worked for International France Corporation, Washington, in the Human resources department. That’s when he realized that there was no job site that focused on providing jobs for the finance professionals.

He discussed this idea with his friend Rony Kahan. They both co-founded Jobsinthemoney.com. It did not take long when the site became a great hit because it, specifically, looked upon the ‘finance department’ of the industry. Jobsinthemoney was bought by eFinancialCareers which is a British Job site.

The next thing that Paul wanted to do was to start a new business. Soon after, with all the creative ideas and knowledge in his head, in November 2004, he launched ‘Indeed’, the first job search engine. In 2005, Indeed launched a beta version of pay-per-click job advertisement network which was similar to that of Google’s idea in 2004. Its working is also very much similar to Google’s. The site drew investments of only $5 million from Union Square Venture, The New York Times and Allen & Company. Indeed is headquartered in Austin (Texas) and Stamford (Connecticut).

Once again, Paul’s idea became a hit as the company became profitable in 2007. Indeed was selected by ‘Time Magazine’ as one of the top 10 websites in 2007 and one of the best 50 websites by ‘PC World’. It also won Weddle’s Users’ Choice Award in 2008 and was named the best job hunting site by Job-hunt.org.

The website’s working is done by aggregating job listings from thousands of websites, job boards, staffing firms, associations and company career pages. The site indexes your content for free but if an employer would want to come up on the searches on the site, Indeed takes a specific amount of payment. It also attracts more traffic to the company site which stands fruitful for both Indeed and the employer company.

Paul, when asked in an interview about “what tool Indeed is”, replied, “We want job seekers to find exactly the right jobs that fit their skills and interests. Our proprietary search algorithm is very effective at doing this with just a few keywords and the location of the job seeker. Users may refine their searches by job title, company name, location and other criteria; and more sophisticated users may conduct advanced queries. Job seekers can easily save their searches by email alert or RSS feed to receive new jobs matching their criteria. They can also set up a ‘My Indeed Account’ to track their job searches. This allows them to save jobs, add notes to jobs and manage their job alerts. These are great ways for both active and passive candidates to track and apply for jobs they are interested in.”

In 2012, the company who ran on just a $5 million funding was sold to Japan’s Recruit Co. Ltd., by the cost of nearly between $750 million to $1 billion, which came as a surprise. The company contributes more than 94% in GDP. The yearly revenues vary between $2 to $5 billion.

The site surpassed Monster.com in traffic job website. As of now, Indeed is the number 1 job site, with more than 250 million visits per month. The site is working in 60 countries and runs in 28 languages. There is a total of 120 million resumes and more than 100 million ratings in and about the site. An approximate of 10 jobs are added per second globally. Indeed has more than 7400 worldwide employees. The site holds the account for more than 500 million salaries which are the greatest number for any industry.

Paul stepped down from the position of CEO of the company in 2012, and at present, is a senior advisor in the company itself. He keeps on investing in technology products and startups that match the meet of the future.

The story of Indeed and Paul Forster is something that tells us that sometimes, the problem itself has the solution which can be easily found if one thinks with a calm and composed mind. Paul Forster, Founder of Indeed, indeed created a site that helps you in the biggest aspects of your life, i.e. job hunting, making it easier with the simplicity and transparency it holds.

Peter Beck : The Rocket Man from New Zealand

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There has always been a debate between people about the need of education to get successful in life. Some are who really stress over completing the education to achieve the goals, and some are who can’t wait to get to their dreams for so long so that they just skip the higher education. But in the success story of this Kiwi startup entrepreneur, Peter Beck, the case was a bit different.

Beck, who was a sharp student, had to quit education after high school, as there was no such curricular course that could lead him to his targets. This engineer from New Zealand is just not one of the best visionary rocket scientists but also a skilled businessman, who knows how to sell his idea to the right people.

Early Life

Beck was born and brought up in Invercargill, New Zealand, to a gemologist father and a teacher mother. As a teen, he became interested in machines and rockets, as his family was also in love with machines. While growing up, he decided that he wants to create rockets and satellite.

peter beck
Image Source: spaceflightnow.com

According to one of his interviews, one day the career counsellor from his high school administration called his parents up and told them that the school did not have any courses that could fit to help Beck achieve his dreams, rather his goals were “absurdly unachievable”.

Career

Since it was clear that there was no relevant educational course for Beck in school, just after finishing high school, Beck moved to East Tamaki, New Zealand, where he joined Fisher & Paykel for an apprenticeship, at the age of 17. He not only became familiar with the top of the line machinery and materials there but also kept on experimenting with his mini rockets at the workshops.

In 2001, he started working at the Industrial Research (now Callaghan Innovation). This was the place where he met one of the future investors of Rocket Lab, Stephen Tindall.

Founding Rocket Lab

His passion for rockets led him to work hard and found his start-up company Rocket Lab, in 2006. As the name suggests, the company was dedicated to building rockets and satellites. The company received its seed funding from New Zealander internet entrepreneur, Mark Rocket. Beck became the CEO and the CTO of the company and appointed Mark Rocket as its co-director.

It was in 2009 when Beck successfully launched the company’s first suborbital sounding rocket, named ?tea, becoming the first private company in the Southern Hemisphere to reach space.

In 2010, Rocket Lab received a contract from the U.S. government, under which, the company had to study a low-cost space launcher to place CubeSats into orbit. The contract was under NASA, meaning that the Rocket Lab could use all its resources as per the requirement.

In 2013, Beck entered the Silicon Valley, to raise funding for Rocket Lab’s next big project, a two-stage launch vehicle, the Electron. Beck had a time of three weeks, and he knew to whom pitch for the investment. Rather than going to every other venture capitalist, he focussed on the ones who had already invested in such projects and had known about it. Finally, he managed to secure A-round funding from Khosla Ventures, the venture capitalists, who have already invested in a few so projects.

The first commercial launch of Electron occurred on 11 November 2018, from Mahia Peninsula. It carried satellites for Spire Global, GeoOptics, a CubeSat built by high school students, and a prototype of a drag sail to the orbit.

The company has received funds worth $25m from the New Zealand government over the past few years. But still, the company has got more investments from the Silicon Valley companies including Khosla Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Data Collective, Promus Ventures, Lockheed Martin and Stephen Tindall’s K1W1, making it legally a U.S. company.

Personal Life

Beck is married and has two children. His wife is also an engineer.

Royal Aeronautical Society, awarded Beck the Meritorious Medal for service of an exceptional nature to New Zealand aviation and a Cooper Medal. In 2014, he was awarded the Innovation in Design and Engineering Award at the NZ Innovators Awards. In 2016, he was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year.

Avast : Largest Security Company in the World, Fighting the Cyber Attacks

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Having more than 435 million users worldwide, Avast Software is the biggest antivirus providers in the world. Headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic, the company was founded by two people who avoided opting for physics in college, to avoid entering into politics and joining Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The thirty years of history of this cybersecurity company once had started with a team of 40 people, and after thirty years, it has approximately 1,700 employees, across its 25 offices worldwide. The company not only have the largest number of global users, but it also had the biggest tech IPO of 2018.

The Founders

Two Czech software engineers Pavel Baudis and Eduard Kucera, founded Avast in 1988 almost 31 years ago, as Alwil.

Eduard-Kucera-Pavel-Baudis
Image Source: usatoday.com

Baudis was a graduate from the Prague University of Chemical Technology and majored in Information Technology. After graduating from the university, he started working as a Graphics Specialist at the Mathematical Research Institute. In 1986, the first computer virus came into being, and, after two years, in 1988, Baudis wrote the first antivirus program to remove it.

The other co-founder of Avast, Eduard Kucera was born in 1953 and was graduated from the Charles University.

Kucera also worked at the Research Institute for Mathematical Machines, where he met Baudis.

According to Forbes (2017), both Baudis and Kucera are the 8th wealthiest men in the Czech Republic.

Founding Avast

Working at RIMM, Pavel Baudis came across a virus named Vienna and developed the first program to remove it. The success of the program made him think of founding Alwil, a cooperative to develop antivirus, with Kucera.

In the 80’s it was prohibited to have private ownership, so the two co-founders left the Research Institute of Mathematical Machines, in order to found Alwil, under Socialist Union of Youth (the only legal private-owned business entity at that time). They developed the first software named Avast under Alwil.

In 1991, they turned the cooperative into a joint partnership, in the wake of the Velvet Revolution. Due to the Velvet Revolution, there was a huge change in the country’s economy. In 1995, the company released its first antivirus program for Windows 95, written by Alwil employee, Ondrej Vlcek . In the 90s the software became really popular, and Avast received an award from the IT security testing organization, at the Virus Bulletin.

The late 90s were not very good for the company, financially. So in 2001, the company launched a freemium program, in which the users could use its basic product, for free. By 2004, the number of free users grew to a million, and in just two years the number had multiplied twenty times.

In 2010, the company was rebranded as Avast, raising $100 million in venture capital investments. Till 2013, Avast had extended its services in 38 countries, in 43 languages and 200 million people using the software.

In 2014, Avast valued at $1 billion after CVC Capital bought an interest in Avast. The company also launched its mobile app in the same year. In 2015, it became the biggest antivirus company in the world, having the largest share in the market for antivirus software.

In 2016, Avast acquired AVG, for $1.3 billion, and in the following year, it acquired UK-based company Piriform. In May 2018, the company went public on the London Stock Exchange and valued at £2.4 billion. It was one of the biggest technology listings of UK.

Brian Armstrong : The Nerd Who Co-founded Coinbase; the Future “Google” of Crypto

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It is rare to find a single person with a technical background who also has a great sense of business. Such a person is capable of building a robust business model that will pay off really well and sustain in the changing technology and business needs. Brian Armstrong, a nerd from San Jose, who had been experimenting with various businesses, since his teens, and also had an immense interest in programming languages, ended up in building the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange; Coinbase.

Early Life

Armstrong was born on 25 January 1983 and was brought up in the San Jose, in California. He was still in school when he developed an interest in computer programming. He started learning Java and CSS, that led him to get work from local firms from San Jose when he was still in school and created websites for them. His neighbour’s garage was his first office.

Brian Armstrong
Image Source: techcrunch.com

In 2001, after completing his school, he went to Rice University, where he completed a graduate degree in Computer Science along with another graduate degree in Economics. He also received a master’s in Computer Science from the same university.

Early Career

During his bachelor’s in Computer Science, Armstrong had done a four months’ internship as the Team Lead at IBM San Jose. There he developed tools for Network Attached Storage devices based on Java. Later, when he completed his graduate degree in Computer Science, he started working as an Enterprise Risk Management Consultant at Deloitte and Touche.

In 2003, he co-founded UniversityTutor.com. The website helped people find personal tutors in their area. On 16 May 2011, Brian joined Airbnb as the software engineer and worked there for a year.

Founding Coinbase

Armstrong was always interested in starting some business and actively thought of many ideas for that. By the end of 2010, he came across to the concept of Bitcoin. Being a technical product, it was quite amusing for him. At the same time, he got familiar to the fact that there were not many marketplaces for the exchange of bitcoin.

Being a computer programmer and an economist, he was capable of conceiving a plan to create an exchange marketplace for Bitcoin. In July 2011, Brian came together with Fred Ehrsam, who worked at Goldman Sachs, to co-found Coinbase.

It was the time when a single Bitcoin priced at $10 and buying Bitcoins required serious tech chops. Coinbase was the alternative for such transactional platforms, where people could use the traditional bank accounts to purchase cryptocurrency, similar to using PayPal. The two founders got Coinbase to enter into Y Combinator startup incubator, in 2012, to raise funding for the company.

In October 2012, the two launched the company and started operations of buying and selling the cryptocurrency through bank transfers. In 2013, the company received funding worth US$5 million from the venture capital firm Union Square Ventures.

Due to the ease of use, by the year 2014, the company had a million users using its services. In the same year, the company acquired Kippt, the blockchain explorer service. It also launched the vault service for secure storage of bitcoin as well as added a feature to process Bitcoins to payment apps like Stripe, Braintree, and PayPal.

In 2015, the company launched the Coinbase Exchange, through which the professional traders could exchange the cryptocurrency. By 2016, the company had added Ethereum to its platform and also rebranded the exchange name to Global Digital Asset Exchange (GDAX). Currently, the exchange process the transaction of multiple cryptocurrencies, but has stopped the same for Ethereum, due to suspicion of the attack on the network.

The company is currently processing its wallet in 32 different companies.

Personal Life

In 2017, Armstrong was listed as Fortune 40 under 40, and later, recode under the 100 list. By the end of 2018, he was among the list of billionaires, and his net worth was estimated between $900 million and $1 billion. Currently, he serves as the CEO of Coinbase, the company having over 200 employees.