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Ben Silbermann : The Co-founder of World’s Largest Professional Community

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A believer of persistence and continuous hard work, Ben Silbermann, is an American billionaire Internet entrepreneur and one of the three co-founders of Pinterest. Silbermann would have never thought that his childhood habit of collecting things, like bugs, postal stamps and baseball cards, will make him a billionaire one day. The photo sharing and pinning them onto a pinning board, on Pinterest, isn’t different from his old hobby of collecting things. And now, Pinterest has become one of the most used social media platforms that boast over 20 million users worldwide.

Early Life

Silbermann was born on 14 July 1982. He was a native of Des Moines, living with his parents Jane Wang and Neil Silbermann, both of whom were ophthalmologists. He did his schooling from Des Moines Central Academy and attended the Research Science Institute at MIT. When he was in school, he also went through a heart transplant surgery. In 2003, he received a graduate degree in political science from the Yale University.

Ben Silbermann
Image Source: Flickr

Career

After graduating, Silbermann got a chance to work with Google, as a member of the online advertising group. At the time, he became more interested in programming and conceived an idea of a startup. He discussed the matter with his friend and the future co-founder of Pinterest, Paul Sciarra, and quit his job. Sciarra started teaching Silbermann the basic programming, and both started working on an iOS app, Tote. Tote was a fail, and the two started thinking of a new idea that could help them with their startup.

Founding Pinterest

The two thought of creating an app that could help the people for keeping the necessary records in the phone, and see the things they wanted to see. The idea was great for the people who wanted to avoid filling up of their email accounts, with unnecessary catalogues. But, the timing of the idea was not that good, as at the same time the financial crisis had occurred, and nobody was ready to invest in technology startups.

Ben and Paul had meetings with many of the capitalists, but everybody was happy investing their money in gold. At last, Silbermann found out about a competition happening in NYU, which had a huge cash prize for the winners. Though the two won the second prize with no money, they were able to meet a few investors., one of whom was convinced to fund the half of the round, only if they could get the other half of the round.

Finally, they managed to arrange the money and started working on their startup project. Silbermann had met his third partner Evan Sharp, through a common friend, when Sharp was studying at the NYU. Evan and Silbermann shared a common interest of collecting things and wanted to create something related to it for their themselves.

In the startup project, Evan also joined hands with Silbermann, and in 2009, they started developing Pinterest. In March 2010, they launched the site as a closed beta, soon followed by the launch of an invitation-only open beta. Just within nine months of its launch, Pinterest had 10000 users, and in March 2011, the company launched an iPhone app. Silbermann contacted 5000 of Pinterest users, through letters, and even met a few of them in person, to receive feedback from them. Until the summer of 2011, the three founders of the company were operating the company from a small apartment.

In late October 2013, the website was valued at $3.8 billion. By October 2016, it had 150 million monthly active users, and in June 2017, Pinterest raised $150 million of funding from its investors.

Personal Life

Silbermann lives in San Francisco, California, with his wife Divya Bhaskaran and two children. Forbes estimated his net worth at $1.6 billion as of 2018. He was listed 12 among America’s Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40 (2016) and also got featured with Mark Zuckerberg on Fortune’s 40 Under 40 (2014).

Drew Houston : The Co-founder & the CEO of Dropbox

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Drew Houston is an American Internet billionaire entrepreneur, who co-founded the multi-billion company Dropbox at the mere age of 24. Once just an idea, now has more than 500 worldwide users subscribed to it. Houston a computer enthusiast, gives the credit of his success to his partner and co-founder of Dropbox, Arash Ferdowsi, and the education he received at MIT. In one of his speeches at MIT, he said that people should surround themselves with inspiring people. He said, “Surrounding yourself with inspiring people is now just as important as being talented or working hard.”

Drew Houston
Image Source: nytimes.com

Early Life

Houston was born on 4 March 1983, in Acton, Massachusetts. His father was an electrical engineer. Houston was a student at the Acton-Boxborough Regional High School. Initially, he was influenced by video games and had decided that he would become a video game tester. But as soon his father introduced him with programming, his focus diverted towards the computers. At the age of 14, while playing a video game, on his father’s Pcjr computer, he found a bug in the game and reported to the video game company, upon which he was offered a job at the same company. In 1990, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from where he earned a graduate degree in Computer Science.

Career & Founding Dropbox

Along with an offer for a job at the early age of 14, he had also been a part of many startups including Bit9, Accolade and Hubspot. Houston was still in college when he thought of developing Dropbox. He wrote the first line of code for Dropbox, while he was travelling on a bus, as he had forgotten his USB drive. At the time he was frustrated with his habit of forgetting and losing those USB flash drives all the time. So he conceived the idea of creating a cloud-based system for keeping the files in it. At first, he started working on the project for his personal use, but then he realised that the product could benefit other people too.

Houston released a video regarding the idea, his college mate Arash Ferdowsi being one of the viewers of it. Ferdowsi was really impressed by the idea and contacted Houston for partnership. From here the two started working on the project together.

In May 2007, Houston founded the parent company to Dropbox, Evenflow, Inc. In the same year, the company was able to get a seed funding from venture capitalists like Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Y Combinator. In 2008, the company launched Dropbox at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. Within one year, Dropbox had more than 3 million registered users. By 2011, the number of users reached 50 million, and in March 2016, it had 500 million users.

During the evolution of the company, it also went through some successful acquisitions including TapEngage, Audiogalaxy, Snapjoy in 2012, Bubbli in 2014, CloudOn in 2015, etc. In 2011, the total revenue earned by the company was over $240 million. Dropbox is considered as one of the twenty best startups of Silicon Valley.

In February 2018, Dropbox filed an IPO to be listed on the Nasdaq.

Personal Life

Houston is a huge video game lover. He also likes to sing, and during the college, he was a part of ’90s cover band. Business Week named Houston as one of the most promising players aged 30 and under. He was also named among the top 30 under-30 entrepreneurs by inc.com.

Leonard Bosack : Pioneer of the Commercialization of Routing Technology

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The ousted co-founder of Cisco Systems, who is known for pioneering the widespread commercialization of local area network (LAN) technology, is an American computer scientist, who linked 5,000 computers across a 16-square-mile (41 km2) campus area, at the time when it even connecting the computers of two different buildings was an unheard thing.

Early Life

Bosack was born in 1952, in Pennsylvania. He completed his school education from La Salle College High School in 1969 and joined the Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania to get a bachelor’s degree. After graduating, Bosack joined DEC as a hardware engineer. But, as he had applied in the Stanford University for higher education, he left his job, to join the university to pursue computer science, as soon he got accepted in the university.

Leonard Bosack
Image Source: therichestimages.com

In 1981, while studying at the Standford University, he was appointed as the support engineer for a project to connect all of Stanford’s mainframes, minis, LISP machines and Altos. At the university, he met his future wife and partner, Sandy Lerner. Lerner was working as the director of computer facilities for the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. The two started dating, and the couple got married in 1980.

Founding Cisco

While working as the support engineer for Standford University, Bosack, along with his wife, started experimenting on the same, secretly at his home using Stanford’s network. The two worked as partners and invented an Advanced Gateway Server; the revised version of the Stanford router built by William Yeager and Andy Bechtolsheim. To commercialise the router, they founded Cisco Systems and received the license for selling the router. The company was named on after the city San Francisco.

The router was able to effectively connect different hardware, like an Apple Macintosh, Unix workstation as well as an IBM mainframe, supporting multiple protocols. According to the legends, the Bosack and Lerner had invented the first such router to connect the computers of two different buildings of Stanford University, that used different networks, so that they could share emails through it.

For the first two years of the company, Bosack operated it from the garage of his house, and the medium of marketing was word of mouth. Despite, he was able to get contracts worth $200,000, only in the first month of starting the company. As the company was growing, Bosack appointed Greg Satz and Richard Troiano, for programming and for sales for the company, respectively.

In the year 1988, venture capitalist Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital invested $2 million in the start-up, and the company focused on the bigger commercial market. In 1990, the company went public, generating $70 million annual revenue. Sequoia Capital, having a share in the company, appointed John Morgridge as the new CEO of the company. The step was taken to increase the company growth. The joining of the new CEO also made Bosack and Lerner quit the company. At the time they left the company, they had two-thirds of the stakes in Cisco, which they sold for about $170 million dollars.

Personal Life

Bosack and Lerner got divorced in 1990. Currently, Bosack is retired and living in his home state of Pennsylvania. For his contribution to the field of computer science, he won the Computer Entrepreneur Award in 2009. For a long period of time, he held a significant position in the companies like AT&T Bell Labs and Digital Equipment Corporation. He also played a key role in the development of emerging network technology driven by the U.S. Department of Defense. He also gets the credits for creating new in-line fibre optic amplification systems, capable of obtaining unprecedented data transmission latency speeds of 6.071 milliseconds over 1231 kilometres of fibre.

Bosack along with his ex-wife Lerner, founded a charitable organisation, with the 70% of the money they received after selling their Cisco stocks. The foundation works towards animal welfare and finances various science projects.

Dave Winer : American Software Developer & the Fore-father of Blogging

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Publishing is what Winer was always interested in. An MS in Computer Science, he detested computers and the engineering culture at the school level and became familiar with computers only when he went to the college. Winer is a New York-based American software developer and entrepreneur, who is best known for his writing and his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web services. For his writing, he has earned titles like “protoblogger” and is counted among “most influential web voices” of Silicon Valley.

Early Life

Dave Winer was born on 2 May 1955, in Brooklyn, New York City. His father Eve Winer was a PhD and a school psychologist. His mother Leon Winer was also a Ph.D., and a former professor of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. In 1972, he completed his high school from the Bronx High School of Science. In high school, he started an underground newspaper. Later, he joined the Tulane University in New Orleans and graduated in Mathematics in the year 1976. He then completed an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in 1978.

Early Career

After completing his education, Winer started working in the computer time-sharing business, in the Empire State Building on the thirty-ninth floor. Later, he moved to Silicon Valley and joined a leading software company at the time, Personal Software, Inc., as the lead developer. The company worked on a software product VisiCalc, and he began to work on his own product idea named VisiText. While in the company, he came to the conclusion that the company did not ship what it produced. At the same time, the company started working on a commercial product around an “expand and collapse” outline display, an outliner software product.

winer
Image Source: Wikipedia

In 1981, he left Personal Software and founded his own company named Living Videotext, where he further worked on the outliner. In 1983, he released ThinkTank for Apple II, which was based on VisiText, followed by the release of ThinkTank for IBM PC and Macintosh, etc.

In 1987, Winer sold Living Videotext to Symantec. The deal paid him a fortune, and he worked with the newly formed Symantec’s Living Videotext division for the next six months.

UserLand

The next year, in1988, Winer founded another company named UserLand Software and was appointed the CEO of the company. Under the name of the company, he released a system-level, outliner-based scripting language, Frontier, for Mac. In the mid-90s, Winer became interested in online publishing while helping automate the production process of the strikers’ online newspaper. He started working towards online publishing and developed a website for himself the ‘Scripting News’, in February 1997. Scripting News is described as “one of the web’s oldest blogs.”

In the same year, he started Frontier’s NewsPage, supporting Scripting News. Later, he, along with Microsoft, developed the XML-RPC protocol, resulting in the formation of SOAP, that he co-authored jointly with Microsoft’s Don Box, Bob Atkinson, and Mohsen Al-Ghosein. In the same year, he developed an XML syndication format for his Scripting News weblog in order to provide his readers with much more timely information.

During the same time, RSS was created for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal, preceded by several trials at web syndication that did not obtain much popularity. In July 1999, Dan Libby produced a new version of RSS, RSS 0.91 incorporating elements from Dave Winer’s news syndication format. In April 2001, Netscape dropped RSS support from My.Netscape.Com and Winer, along with RSS-DEV Working Group, published a modified version of the RSS 0.91 specification on the UserLand website. With a set of changes, Winer also released RSS 0.92 in December 2000 and RSS 2.0 in September 2002.

By 1999, Winer had become the leader in blogging tools and a leading evangelist of weblogs. The InfoWorld named him one of the “Top Ten Technology Innovators” in February 2000.

DaveNet

In November 1994, Winer originated DaveNet, to replace the standard news channels of the software business. DaveNet distributed newsletters over email and stored the goofy and informational web archives on it. Few of his newsletters included complaints against Apple’s management. The HotWired also published his censored columns from DaveNet, between June 1995 and May 1996. DaveNet won the Cool Site of the Day award in March 1995 but was discontinued in 2004.

Podcasting

Winer was receiving more requests for audio blogging features in the RSS from his readers and other bloggers, upon which he decided to include a new functionality in RSS 0.92, named the enclosure, that would transfer the address of a media file to the RSS aggregator. On January 2001, he first demonstrated this new feature in his Scripting News weblog, by enclosing the song Grateful Dead in it. With a built-in aggregator for both “send” and “receive” components in Userland’s weblogging product, Radio Userland, many of its users started doing audio blogging on it. In February 2004, Ben Hammersley suggested the word ‘Podcasting’ for ‘Audioblogging’.

Along with UserLand, Scripting News and Podcast, Winer also shares the credits for BloggerCon and Weblogs.com followed by some web authoring tools, including OPML Editor, River2 aggregator, Fargo, Dropbox-based outliner, etc.

Personal Life

Currently, Winer is living in New York. In June 2002, Winer underwent life-saving bypass surgery and had to step down as CEO of UserLand. He has been working as a successful writer in Silicon Valley and is referred to as one of the most prolific content generators in the web history. In 2003, he worked as a fellow at Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School and was the visiting scholar at NYU School of Journalism between 2010-12.

In 2002, he was named among the ‘InfoWorld Top Ten Technology Innovator’. In 2001, he was awarded the ‘Chosen Tech Renegade’ by Wired for work on SOAP with Microsoft.

Logan Green & John Zimmer; The Nice Guys of Ride-sharing

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“Follow your instinct,” you might have heard it several times from the mouths of the most successful entrepreneur across the world, but how many times it happened that you really did? Logan Green and John Zimmer, two young tech professionals, are among the ones, who went along with their gut feeling of starting an unusual business of sharing a car with strangers for the money. In the beginning, they were warned by many, that the business has higher chances of failing. But after almost ten years, the two are operating the same business, backed by biggest venture capitalists and making revenue in billions every coming year.

Logan Green was a native of California, where he attended the New Roads High School in Santa Monica. He received a bachelor’s degree in Business Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. At the college, he founded The Green Initiative Fund and was the youngest director for the Santa Barbara Metropolitan Transit District.

As a child, Green used to ride with his parents in their car, and whenever he saw outside the car, he found more cars, with most of the times, only a single person riding it. The time he had to join the college, he left his car back at home, to try the other conventional means of transportation. At the same time, his girlfriend Eva was also transferred to a college in Los Angeles.

lyftfounders
Image source: riverfronttimes.com

In the time of three years of her college, Green continued to visit Eva on every weekend riding different transportations. He even asked Zipcar, a car-sharing program, to implant their cars at UCSB, but could not convince them. Finally, he himself bought four cars and started the car-sharing program at the campus. Under the program, the users could unlock cars with radio-frequency identification.

On the other hand, Greenwich, Connecticut brought up John Zimmer, was also interested in the car-sharing concept. Zimmer, a graduate from Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, was influenced with the fact that he could fill the empty seats of his car while going back to home in the college breaks but had no idea from where to begin. After graduating from college, Zimmer started working as an analyst in real estate finance at Lehman Brothers in New York City, keeping a journal about carpooling ideas, side-by-side.

After completing the college education, Green went on a trip to Zimbabwe, where he was introduced to the crowdsourced carpool networks. The idea led him to build a platform named Zimride, using the Facebook API, upon which users could find and plan carpools.

Eventually, at the same time, he was introduced to Zimmer on Facebook via a common friend. Zimmer came to know about Zimride, and both coincided on the same idea of the development of a carsharing platform. As the two shared the similar interest, it took no time for Green to fly to New York and meet Zimmer.

In late 2006, together Green and Zimmer launched the first version of Zimride in the Cornell University and later, in 2007, in the UCSB campuses. Over 20 per cent of students registered for the service, but still, they used it only a few times in a year. During the very time, Uber was also providing its car-renting service, but the service included the rental of brand new luxury cars. The idea of Zimmer and Green was way too different from that.

Green and Zimmer moved to Silicon Valley, to work on the growth of the company and shared an apartment that served as both apartment and office. After working hard on Zimride for five years, they expanded the company to thousands of users and over 50 universities.

The main mission, the two were working towards, was to provide an alternative to car ownership. In 2013, they sold Zimride to Enterprise Holdings and turned there focus towards Lyft, their newly founded company, providing carpooling in local areas.

The next thing they figured out was that having an app for the smartphones can get them more users as well as more frequent rides for localities. So, they hired two engineers to develop an app for Lyft, and within three weeks the app was ready.

In 2017, Green and Zimmer raised $4.1 billion dollars for Lyft, valuing the company at $11.5 billion. Currently, Lyft is providing its services in 50 United States and has grown to 1,000 employees.

In 2009, Zimmer and Logan Green were named finalists in Business Week’s list of America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs and in 2014, the two were named “35 Under 35 list of Inc. Magazine.

Patrick Collison : Co-founder of Stripe & the Youngest Self-made Billionaire

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Learning has nothing to do with the age, whether you are 8 or 80, if you are learning some good stuff, it is going to pay you off in some unusual way. Like Patrick Collision’s interest in computer programming, that he grew at a tender age, led him to become the youngest self-made billionaire. He established one of the leading software companies, at an age when most of the people are still in high school or attending the college.

Early Life

Patrick Collison was born on 9 September 1988, to Lily and Denis Collison, in Dromineer, County Tipperary. He is the eldest of his two brothers John Collison and Tommy Collison. He was just eight when he started learning computers at the University of Limerick. His interest in computers, later, led him to study programming languages at the age of ten.

pattrick collison
Image Source: businessinsider.com

At the age of fifteen, Collison took part in the 40th Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, where he won the runner-up’s trophy for his project on artificial intelligence named after his idol Issac Newton. The very next year, on 14 January 2005, he again participated in the same competition and won the first prize, for a project on a LISP-type programming language. He was awarded a €3,000 cheque and a trophy of Waterford Crystal presented by President Mary McAleese.

Collison completed his high school education from Gaelscoil Aonach Urmhumhan, Tipperary, Ireland. Later, he joined the Castletroy College in Castletroy, County Limerick.

Career

After graduating from Castletroy College, Collison entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from where he soon dropped out to co-found a software company named ‘Shuppa’, with his younger brother John. As they could not raise funding for the company in Ireland, the two approached a few investors from the Silicon Valley and moved to California after Y Combinator showed interest in the start-up.

The two joined hands with other two Oxford graduates, Harjeet and Kulveer Taggar, and merged the company into Automatic.

In March 2008, at the age of 19, Collison sold the company to a Canadian company named Live Current Media, and both the brothers became millionaires overnight. In the month of May, in the same year, Collison accepted the position of director of engineering in the company’s Vancouver branch.

Founding Stripe

While in high school, Collison and his brother started building iOS apps. During this time Collision discovered that it is much easier to earn money through those apps, rather charge for things online and get the payment. This brought an idea of the development of a payment app into Collison’s mind, and after getting inspired by the working model of virtual hosting provider Slicehost, he built a prototype of his payment app.

In 2010, the Collison brothers built and released the first version of the app named as dev/payments, which later was renamed to Stripe. Initially, they tested the app with their friends and collected the feedback from them. Soon, people started talking about the app and Collison had a long waiting list for the app users. In the same year, the Stripe managed to receive a seed funding from Y Combinator. In the following year, it also received funding from venture capitalists Peter Thiel, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz, worth $2 million. Again in 2012, Stripe was funded with an $18 million Series A investment led by Sequoia Capital at a $100 million valuation.

Till September 2011, Stripe was running on an extensive beta. At the time the company became public and received a $20 million Series B investment.

Personal Life

Currently, Collison is working as the CEO of Stripe and lives in San Francisco, California. In November 2016, the Collison brothers became the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. The two were also featured on a young Irish person’s rich list aired on an RTÉ television in the Christmass edition 2008.