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Enzo Ferrari : The Founder of Ferrari Automotive Comapny

Founder, Inspiration, Product, Product Management, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

When we see through the life journey of the successful people, most of them did not have an easy life. The hurdles and struggles, they faced, made them strong and they kept working towards their dream. One such personality, Enzo Ferrari was the man who brought himself out of all the problems and controversies. He created history by putting his share in the world of car racing and manufacturing some of the fastest luxury sports cars.

Early Life

Enzo Ferrari was born as Enzo Anselmo Ferrari, to Alfredo and Adalgisa Ferrari, in Modena, Italy. He was born on 18 February 1898, but his birth certificate has recorded his birthday as on 20 May, since his father got stuck in a heavy snowstorm and the registration got delayed for two days. His father operated a workshop fabricating metal parts. He had an older brother named Alfredo Junior. In 1916, he lost his father and brother, due to a viral Italian flu. The death of his father and brother shattered him completely and he became responsible for his household.

During the world war 1, he joined the Italian Army and in 1917 and shoed mules for the 3rd Alpine Artillery Division. But, after suffering himself too with a flu pandemic in 1918, he was discharged from his service.

Racing Career

When Enzo was just 10 years old, his father took him and his elder brother to Bologna, to watch a race, where he was introduced to Felice Nazzaro. After watching a few races, he was certain that in future he will become a car racer. But, the death of his father and brother, made him leave his studies and focus on earning money for his family.

After his exit from his job, in the Italian Army, the struggle, for him, started again. He even went for a job interview at Fiat, but there too, he was rejected. Finally, he joined another smaller car making company named as Costruzioni Meccaniche Nazionali, in Milan. He was appointed as the test driver. After working for some time, he was promoted as a car race driver and he was back on the track to achieve his childhood dream.

Ferrari debuted as a car race driver in 1919 Parma-Poggio di Berceto Hillclimb race, followed by the Targa Florio in the same year. In 1920, he joined Alfa Romeo and won his first car race, in 1924, the Coppa Acerbo at Pescara. He was promoted and was offered many other prestigious races. But, after the death of a fellow racer, Antonio Ascari, in 1925, he lost his confidence and until 1927, he did not participate in any other car race.

enzo-ferrari
Image Source: motor24

In 1929, he founded a race team named as Scuderia Ferrari, that included the superstar drivers Giuseppe Campari and Tazio Nuvolari. In 1932, Ferrari decided to retire as a car race driver, influenced by the birth of his baby boy Alfredo. He now wanted to focus on the management of his racing team. His Scuderia Ferrari was shut down in 1937 and he resigned from Alfa Romeo in September 1939. The company relieved him from his job, after signing an agreement that stopped him from using the name Ferrari in any of his racing or car ventures for next four years.

Founding Ferrari

In the same year, he left Alfa Romeo and started his own company Auto Avio Costruzioni, in his hometown, Modena. In 1940, he manufactured two cars, that he used in the Mille Miglia, and driven by Alberto Ascari and Lotario Rangoni. Due to the effect of the world war 2, he had to move his venture from Modena to Maranello, in the same year.

After the end of the agreement with Alfa Romeo, in 1947, he founded Ferrari S.p.A. He mainly manufactured the racing cars, and in1948 formed his own racing team that debuted in the Turin. The team’s major victory was in the 1949 24 Hours of Le Mans, with a Ferrari 166M.

Since the beginning of his company till his death, Ferrari made several racing cars and participated in many races with his team. He saw many accidents leading the deaths of his drivers and faced controversies related to them. But, his team always supported him saying that the deaths were never caused due to any mechanical failure in the vehicle. By the year 1952-53, he also started manufacturing cars for roads.

There is another incident that is an important part of Enzo Ferrari’s life timeline. Known as the Great Walk Out, the incident took place when many of Ferrari’s engineers, managers, sales managers and other key figures left the company because of Ferrari’s stubborn behaviour. Although, many of them regretted their decision later.

In 1969, Fiat bought the 50% shares in Ferrari. However, Ferrari had the 100% control over the racing activities. The deal also included the lifetime subsidy for Enzo.

The Logo

Ferrari has been using the prancing horse emblem as its logo since he started manufacturing cars. The emblem was created by his close friend and the famous Italian fighter plane pilot Francesco Baracca. It is said that Baracca gave a necklace with the prancing horse to Ferrari, just before his last flight, in which he was shot dead by an Australian fighter plane in 1918. In the remembrance of his friend, Ferrari used the prancing horse emblem as the logo of his company.

Personal Life

Ferrari was married to Laura Dominica Garello and had a son with her. He named his son after his father’s name Alfredo. Unfortunately, Alfredo also died after suffering from ill-health in 1956. His another son Piero, from his mistress, is serving as the vice-president of the Ferrari and owns 10% shares of the company.

Ferrari died at the age of 90, in 1988. Before dying, he witnessed the launch of one of the greatest road cars of that time, the Ferrari F40. The news of his death was disclosed after two days, as requested by Ferrari himself, as a compensation of the late registration of his birth.

Ronaldo Mouchawar : The Biggest Online Retailer in the Middle East

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

Starting a business is itself a huge challenge and starting in a sector dominated by giants just makes the challenge double-fold. Amazon, undoubtedly, is one of the leading e-commerce company today. It has expanded to almost every part of the world and has become the top e-commerce company.

With a fierce competition already present in the market, a man decides to start his own e-commerce venture, in the middle-east, and just within a year, reaches maximum people in the country. The website was named Souq.com and co-founded by Ronaldo Mouchawar. How he became the most successful self-made businessman? Let’s get to know more about him.

Early Life

Ronaldo was born in Aleppo, Syria, to a merchant father. His father’s business became an inspiration for him to name his e-commerce site. Mouchawar went to Northwestern University in Boston to earn a Master’s degree in digital communications and a Bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Massachusetts in the United States. Initially, Mouchawar took a job at the Boston engineering firm. He also worked as a technical and systems consultant in the technology and business management sector at the Electronic Data System (EDS).

Entering into Start-Ups

After completing his education, Mouchawar joined Maktoob, the first successful web portal in the Middle East. He was not quite fluent in English and Maktoob was not looking for the fluent ones. As the web portal was gaining attention and becoming popular in the country, Mouchawar realized the potential of e-commerce business and wanted to create a separate commerce-only website.

Then, in 2006, he started a website called Souq.com. The word means ‘market’ in Arabic and Mouchawar’s hometown, i.e. Aleppo was famous for its souqs. The company was set up in Dubai as UAE had a larger population of young people and could prove a very profitable marketplace for an e-commerce website.

ronaldo mouchawar
Image Source: webit.org

Initially, Souq was launched as an auction website which later was diversified into an automobile and real estate. The business grew pretty quickly and was getting popular. Mouchawar expanded the business to Saudi Arabia and, by the end of 2009, Souq became independent of Maktoob. At that time the website was witnessing 3 million UAE dirhams worth of auctions i.e. the US $1 million.

There was also a time when smartphones were entering the market and more and more people were shifting from their laptop to smartphones. As Souq was available only for the desktops and there was no app developed for it, further growth of the business seemed to be limited. Mouchawar took a smart decision and quickly adapted to the changing technological era. And in 2012, Souq launched its first app. Today, more than 70% of purchases are done using smartphones.

Next big change was introduced in 2010. With Wisam Daoud joining as CTO, Mouchawar decided that Souq would no longer run auctions and classifieds. The company, at that time, had 80% business from the auction and 20% from fixed price. But in May 2010, they closed the auction site. Initially, the company lost most of their transaction but they made for it in around six months and also doubled its revenue each quarter.

Mouchawar, in 2014, launched ‘White Friday’ sales which coincide with the ‘Black Friday’ sale in the US. He explained that ‘Black Friday’ does not make cultural sense in Arab as Friday is the traditional day of prayer. The sale received a thunderous response and raised more than $275 million. At the time of its next White Friday Souq had doubled its sales and witnessed 13 million visitors and around 600,000 products sold during 25th-28th November.

In March 2017, Amazon acquired Souq by paying $580 million in cash.

Personal Life

Ronaldo Mouchawar has received a number of accolades including Gulf Business Industry Awards CEO of the year in 2013 and Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2015. He currently lives in Dubai, UAE.

Reid Hoffman : The Mind Behind the Largest Corporate Social Network

Founder, Inspiration, Social media, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Sometimes, it takes a long process for a person to understand and choose the right way that leads to his goals. Only a few can dream to help others achieve their dreams and bring out a positive change in the world. But if one truly wants to accomplish his dreams, he will find out a way. Same is the story of the infamous American internet entrepreneur and the venture capitalist- Reid Hoffman, who had initially dreamt about changing the world through his motivational speeches and eventually, reached out to a bigger platform and definitely have brought out his share of change.

Early Life

Reid Hoffman was born to William Parker Hoffman Jr. and Deanna Ruth, on 5 August 1967. He was born in Palo Alto, California and spent most of his childhood in Berkeley. He did his high school from The Putney School and earned his Bachelor Science degree in Symbolic Systems & Cognitive Science, from Stanford University. He was awarded a Marshall Scholarship and hence went to the Wolfson College, Oxford University to pursue a Master in Studies in Philosophy in 1993. He had also received a Dinkelspiel Award in his graduation from Stanford University.

Career

As a child, he always loved playing the tabletop roleplaying games. So in 1982, when he was just 12, he got his first job as an editor at a game developing company named as Chaosium. His work at the company was quite impressive, and in 1984, with the release of Chaosium’s ‘Borderlands’, a role-playing game, he got his name featured on its box, at the time he was just 14. He always wanted to become an influential person so that he can bring a change in the world. He had thought of becoming a professor. But soon he realised that writing books and reaching people can be a long way. So he diverted his mind towards entrepreneurship.

Reid Hoffman
Image Source: twimg.com

After graduating, he went to do an internship at Inglenook, a winery, followed by a job at Apple Computer. In Apple, he worked on a social network named as eWorld. After working for some time in Apple, he took a job at Fujitsu and in 1997, found his first company named as SocialNet.com. Soon after, setting up SocialNet.com, he joined PayPal as the COO, in 2000. His boss at PayPal, Peter Thiel says about Hoffman that he was a firefighter-in-chief at PayPal. At Paypal, he was responsible for most of the high-level jobs like payment infrastructure, government, legal issues, etc., that he handled efficiently under a great pressure.

Founding of LinkedIn

After eBay acquired Paypal, in 2002, Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, a professional social media network, with his old colleagues from SocialNet.com and Fujitsu. He also received some investment from his colleagues from Paypal, Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois. LinkedIn became a huge success and Hoffman became its founding CEO. Today, Hoffman holds a share worth $2.34 billion in Linked in and he serves as the Executive Chairman of the company. By 2014, LinkedIn had spread in more than 200 countries, with over 332 million members. In June 2016, Microsoft offered him an amount of $26.2 billion in cash for the acquisition of LinkedIn.

Investment, Writing & Motivational Speeches

LinkedIn was a huge success, after which, Hoffman found his interest in investment. He is one of the Angel investors, who are happily ready to invest in potential startups. It is said that Hoffman was the one who arranged the $500,000 angel investment meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel. Along with Peter, he had also invested in Facebook initially.

Reid Hoffman always wanted to become a positive influence the for its betterment. His desire of becoming a motivational speaker and writing books was always alive. He started writing from local blogs, followed by his ‘LinkedIn’s Series B Pitch to Greylock: Pitch Advice for Entrepreneurs’ and ‘LinkedinInfluencr’ blogs on LinkedIn. In February 2012, he released his first book ‘The Start-Up of You’ with co-author Ben Casnocha, that became the bestseller in New York and was critically acclaimed. In July 2014, he came with another release, ‘The Alliance’ with Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh.

Hoffman also started a podcast named as ‘Masters of Scale’ on 5 May 2017, where he discusses various counterintuitive business theories with successful entrepreneurs.

Personal Life

Hoffman got married to Michelle Yee, in 2004, and the two live in Palo Alto, California. Hoffman is also in Philanthropy and is a member of many NGOs. In 2016, he donated $20 million to a charity Biohub.

Matt Mullenweg : The Founder and CEO of WordPress

Founder, start-up, Tech Story / By

Breaking the stereotype, many common people coming from nowhere, have become the most important and influential leaders of the tech industry. Few names like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc., pop up in each person’s mind as their innovations are playing an so important role in our lives. These innovations have also introduced new trends. One such trend is blogging. And when we hear the word ‘blog’ how can anyone forget the name of WordPress?

WordPress is an open source platform for creating websites, preferably used by most of the bloggers, small businesses, etc. It is one of the best CMS available, which does not require much knowledge of coding language to set up one’s own website. Introduction of WordPress revolutionized the whole internet and today 30% of the internet sites work on the WordPress. That’s a huge achievement. And all the credit goes to the man behind the idea – Matt Mullenweg.

Early Life

Born on 11th January 1984, in Houston, Texas, US, Matt went to High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. He studied jazz saxophone in his school. Further, he went to the University of Houston to pursue the degree in Political Science. But, soon he dropped out in 2004 and accepted a job at CNET Networks. He worked at CNET for two years then quit to start his own venture Automattic.

Matt was never into computer programming. When he was just 18, he used to post blogs on b2/cafelog, an open-source blogging platform. But, after some time, he came to know that the lead developer of this platform had quit and the company had stopped developing it any further. This is when Matt decided to develop the b2 codebase blogging platform according to the web standards of that time. He posted this information on his own blog and soon was joined by his fellow coder Mike Little. They made some key improvements and added some more features to the platform, and this is how the revolutionary WordPress was born, in January 2003.

Rise of Career

Soon after, Matt and Mike were joined by the original b2 developer Michel Valdrighi in the development of WordPress. Matt was just a newbie in his college at that time, and he had already co-founded his another venture Global Multimedia Protocols Group, in March 2004. Next, Matt launched a hub, where one could get notifications about blog updates called Ping-O-Matic.

Matt Mullenweg
Image Souce: wikimedia.org

WordPress was still seeking a huge audience to get on the global level. In May 2004, a strong competitor of WordPress, called Movable Type, made some changes in their prices, which led thousands of people looking out for an alternate platform. Fortunately, WordPress was available and caught everyone’s attention.

Now that WordPress was receiving a good response, CNET offered to recruit Matt to work on WordPress for them. He grabbed the opportunity and dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco. A couple of months later, came the big announcement of bbPress. And, in February 2005, Matt along with the WordPress team released WordPress 1.5 ‘Strayhorn’. It introduced several top features like themes, moderation features, and redesign of front and back end.

Matt left CNET, in October of the same year to focus completely on WordPress. Just within a few days, he announced Akismet – an effort to stop comment and trackback spam. Later, in December, there came another venture called Automattic, the original company behind all his other ventures. Matt under Automattic, recruited all the people who had contributed to the development of WordPress.

In January 2006, Toni Schneider was appointed as the new CEO of Automattic. Exactly two years later, the company raised about $29.5 million from Polaris Venture Partners, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and New York Times Company. This was due to the increasing popularity of WordPress among the bloggers and various other funding offers from investors. By that time WordPress had a team of 18 people working.

In early 2009, WordPress was growing faster than anyone had ever imagined and was witnessing 10% growth each month. The platform was hosting around 15,000 new blogs daily. The growth kept increasing each year, tremendously. In April 2012, it was reported that WordPress empowered more than 70 million sites and made a revenue of $45 million that year.

Matt took the CEO position in Automattic, in 2014, and raised $160 million to take the company’s value to a billion dollars.

Personal Life

Matt has won several awards due to his achievements. Business Insider named him among the top 10 most influential people for changing the face of the internet. In February 2011 he was listed in the Forbes 30 Under 30 for the impact, he has made on the blogging world.

Matt supports a number of non-profit organizations and philanthropic organizations like Archive.org, Innocence Project, Charity: Water foundation, and many more. He is currently living in San Francisco.

Tom Preston-Werner : Co-founder of GitHub

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

Almost every developer in the world has submitted at least one line of code or checked out for coding solutions on the social coding platform GitHub. GitHub is the largest online community of developers where they share programming code with other programmers to help them or seek help from them, to create better software. GitHub is among the fastest growing startups with having over 28 million users and 57 million repositories. It was founded by Tom Preston-Werner, a software developer, inventor and entrepreneur from America.

Early Life

Tom was born on 28 October 1979, in Dubuque, Iowa, US. He lost his father at an early age. His mother was a teacher and his step-father was an engineer. He did his schooling from Dubuque Senior High School and went to Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, to pursue his higher education. During his college, he realised that he is more interested in computer programming than the subjects he was pursuing at college. So after studying for two years in the college, he decided to drop out of the course and focus on learning programming languages.

Career

After leaving the college, Tom started with many small coding projects, one of which was based on flash replacement technique. At that time the websites had a limited set of fonts available for the users. His flash replacement project allowed the users to use any font on any website.

Tom Preston-Werner
Image Source: flickr.com

Later in 2004, he came with a new project named as Gravatar. The concept behind it was to maintain a single avatar for dozens of other services. The project was a success, but, without a business model, it was not paying the way it was supposed to. Finally, in 2007, a company named Automattic acquired Gravatar.

In 2005, Tom moved to San Francisco and started working with Powerset. Eventually, Microsoft acquired Powerset in 2008, and, offered Preston-Werner a $300,000 bonus and stock options in the company. But he had already started working on GitHub project, so he declined the offer to focus on it.

Founding GitHub

Tom was always in the favour of documenting the software codes so that other developers can easily understand how the codes exactly work. Being an active contributor to the open-source developer and hacker culture he came across with the idea of an open-source development community. Also, with the bad experience of the business with Gravatar, this time he was ready with a better business architecture for his new project. In 2008, he founded GitHub with his co-founders Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett and Scott Chacon. He had met Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett on one of the developer meet-up in San Francisco. GitHub was a commercial success and gained over 46,000 public repositories, in the initial year of its being online. Tom was appointed as the CEO of the company.

In 2014, Tom resigned from the company after he and his wife were accused of harassment by GitHub programmer Julie Ann Horvath.

After resigning from GitHub, Tom co-founded Chatterbug and Codestarter. Codestarter is a non-profit organization that donates computers to kid coders. He works as the advisor at Codestarter.

Personal Life

Preston-Werner is married to Theresa Preston-Werner, an anthropologist, known for her involvement in much historical research and social subjects.

Andy Bechtolsheim : German Electrical Engineer & a self-made Billionaire

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

Being a successful entrepreneur depends highly on an individual’s decision making and risk taking capability. Higher the risk, greater the reward. This has been said and written, over and over. If you read about businessmen, who are highly successful today, you will find the huge array of risks, these people have taken to reach where they are. Out of these risks, emerges many successful companies. A company that produces valuable products and employs thousands of people. One such risk taker, and now a billionaire, is Andy Bechtolsheim.

Early Life and Education

Andy was born on 30th September 1955, in Bavaria, Germany and was the second of the four children in the family. He spent the most of the time of his childhood between the electronics devices, as there was no television or children in the neighbour to play with. So he chose to keep himself busy and entertained with electronics.

At the age of 16, Andy designed an industrial controller that worked on Intel 8080. He programmed it in binary code as he didn’t have any access to assemblers. He made this controller primarily for a nearby company, who then further paid him royalties for the product. These royalties paid for Andy’s most of the education.

Andy Bechtolsheim
Image Source: forbesimg.com

When Andy was attending the Technical University of Munich to pursue engineering, he entered the Jugend forscht contest that was organised for the young researchers. He kept participating in the contest for three years and finally, in the third year i.e. in 1974, he won the physics prize.

Andy, further, went to Carnegie Mellon University in the USA, after he received the Fulbright Award, in 1975. In 1976, at the same university, he received his master’s degree in Computer Engineering. Later, he went to the Stanford University to earn his PhD in electrical engineering, in 1977.

Early Career

While his time at Stanford, Andy came across the Xerox Alto computer, developed at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Inspired by this computer, he designed a powerful workstation, which had a built-in networking, named as SUN workstation (taken from the initials of Stanford University Networking). This workstation gained him free access to the researches at Xerox Palo Alto. During the same time, Lynn Conway was developing Very Large Scale Integration circuits (VLSI).

Birth of Sun Microsystems

The VLSI was developed on the workstation made by Andy. One such company called Daisy systems was also into building computers for the VLSI design. A man named Vinod Khosla worked at Daisy systems, who would soon partner with Andy. Khosla graduated from Stanford Graduate School of Business just a couple years earlier than Andy. He was good friends with his classmate Scott McNealy who was the manager of manufacturing at Onyx Systems. These three people came together and developed a business plan for their first company. They also received funding in no time from the venture capitalists in 1982.

Andy with three others was joined by Bill Joy as the fourth member responsible for the development of BSD series of Unix OS. In the earlier days, Andy and Joy shared an apartment in Palo Alto. Sun Microsystems launched their first product named Sun-1. It included Stanford CPU board design with expanded memory and a protective metal sheet casing. The company went public in 1986 and reached $1 billion in sales by 1988. Andy also launched a cheaper desktop computer for educational market under his project SPARCstation. The computer was known as Campus.
Changing Companies.

He left Sun Microsystems in 1995, after working there for almost a decade. The same year he founded Granite Systems. A startup working to develop high-speed network switches. In 1966, when Andy owned about 60% of the company, Cisco acquired it for $220 million. After this deal, he also acquired the position of Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s Gigabit Systems Business Unit.

After working for 8 years at Cisco, he left the job in 2003 and took the head position in Kealia, Inc. This was the company that Andy had founded back in 2001 along with a Stanford Professor named David Cheriton, also a partner in Granite Systems. Kealia worked on developing advanced server technologies using the Opteron processor from Advanced Micro Devices.

Andy was soon going to go back to where he started from. In the February of 2004, Sun Microsystems acquired Kealia, Inc., and Andy took the position of Vice President and Chief Architect in the company. He founded yet another company named Arastra which was renamed as Arista in 2005. The company was focused on developing high-speed networking. He left Sun and took Chairman and Chief Development Officer in Arista in October 2008.

Investment in Google

In the September of 1998, Andy and Cheriton decided to invest in the emerging search engine company Google. Both invested around $100,000 even before the company was founded and legally incorporated. His investment is now worth $1.6 billion.

Andy is known as the most successful investors in the electronics sector. He also invested in Magma Design Automation. His stake is valued at $60 million. He has invested in a number of startups and has been successful every time.

Achievements

Andy received the Smithsonian Leadership Award for Innovation in 1999. He also received Stanford Entrepreneur Company of the Year award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Personal Life

Andy is not married and has not taken US citizenship. He continues to be a German and does not intend to change it. He lives in Palo Alto, California, US.