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Sean Parker : The Co-founder of Napster

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

In the advancement of the tech world, the college dropouts have made their different place with their vision and intelligence. Whether it’s the founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell from Dell Technologies or Microsoft’s Bill Gates, they have proven that one’s intelligence and talent cannot be judged with a mere degree. Sean Parker an American entrepreneur and philanthropist have also followed their lead and have discarded the worth of a physical degree by his knowledge.

Early Life

Sean Parker was born on 3 December 1979, to Bruce Parker and Diane Parker in Herndon, Virginia. His father was a U.S. government oceanographer and mother was a TV advertising broker. As a kid, Sean was an avid reader and started learning computer programming from his father on an Atari 800 at an early age of 7. The exposure to programming grew his interest in hacking and at the age of 15, he hacked into the network of a Fortune 500 company. His IP address got tracked by FBI and as a result, being an under-age, he was sentenced to community service.

Sean Parker
Image Source: wikimedia.org

Parker did his High School from Fairfax County, Virginia and Chantilly High School. During his school, he used to spend most of his time in the computer labs learning new programming skills. During his final year of high school, he got an internship at Zynga, Pincus’s Washington D.C. and later, got employed at CIA, while he was still a teen. Until the completion of his school, he was earning enough to be able to decide to become an entrepreneur.

Career

During his teenage, Parker met his future partner Shawn Fanning, and the two bonded with each other by their common interest- Hacking. After a few years, the two launched their startup as a free music file-sharing service Napster. At the time Parker was just 19 and he invested $50000 in their startup. Within the first year of its launch, Napster got millions of users, along with a few lawsuits by recording companies like Recording Industry Association of America. Even with the fastest growth of the company it got shut down in only two years.

In 2002, Sean founded Plaxo, a social networking tool that later got integrated into Microsoft Outlook. Plaxo also became viral in a short span of time, but this time Parker was driven out of his position in Plaxo by its investor over some argument.

Later, in 2004, Parker became familiar with a networking website The Facebook and managed to meet Mark Zuckerberg. After a few months of this meeting, he was appointed as the president of the 5-months old company. Sean played a pivotal role in creating the clean interface and the picture sharing features in Facebook. In 2005, he was arrested from a private party as the police founded cocaine in his rented house. After a few days, he was released from all the allegations, but, this brought a bad impact on the other investors and he had to resign from his post. Even after the resignation and the controversy, he has always been in touch with Mark Zuckerberg unofficially.

Being a music lover and after a bad experience with Napster, he got to know about Spotify and invested the US $15 million in it. Now he is serving as one of the board members of Spotify.

After investing in Spotify, he started a few new ventures like Airtime.com, Brigade and invested in other startups like Willcall, Quantcast, Path, and Knewton with its venture capital The Founders Fund based in San Francisco founded by Peter Thiel.

Donations and Charity

Sean Parker is associated with cancer research donations since 2005 and has created Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, in April 2016, with a grant of $250 million. He has donated $24 million to create the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research at Stanford and $5 million grant to Stand Up to Cancer and the Cancer Research Institute. His foundation focuses on three areas: Life Sciences, Global Public Health and Civic Engagement.

Parker has got an interest in the politics and has also funded both sides of US political parties and spoke in favour of rich people paying higher texas. He has also been a part of many political campaigns and has supported them financially.

Personal Life

Sean got engaged to Alexandra Lenas, a singer-songwriter and the two got married in 2013. Their wedding was based on lord of rings theme and created news as it cost more than $10 million. The two have a daughter named Winter Victoria Parker and a son named Zephyr Emerson Parker.

He was featured on the cover of the Forbes 400 issue in 2011 and was ranked number 722 in the Forbe’s list of the world’s billionaires in 2016.

Ed Fries : Lead Developer of the Gaming Console Xbox

Product, Story, Tech Story / By

From the invention of computers decades ago till today, when the technology has surpassed innovations, games have also been evolving tremendously. Starting from the 8-bit block type games to the high-end graphics almost life-like games, have made their way in the market. Companies, like Atari and Microsoft, brought some of the earliest games which became widely popular all over the world. Genius people have contributed their bit to the development of the gaming sector from years, and have set a landmark in the industry. One such figure is Ed Fries.

Early Life

Ed Fries, born on 1954, is an American video-game programmer and an entrepreneur. It was in the early 1980s when he fell in love with video games while playing the arcade games. His father worked at the Boeing an Aircraft manufacturing company and his mother was an engineer. His father loved the aeroplanes more than anything and Fries also found similar love with games. Fries got a B.S. in Computer Science from New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, in 1986.

Ed Fries
Image Source: eurogamer.net

Ed’s first program was a clone of Frogger that he developed for the Atari 8-bit family and was distributed using the bulletin board system. Developing this clone proved to be a lucky move for Fries, as someone from the gaming industry noticed his game and offered him a job. In 1982, Fries published his first game, which was named as The Princess and the Frog. The game was published by Romox. Fries wrote two more games for Romox, which were named as Ant-Eater and Sea Chase.

Career

Just after earning his BS degree, Fries went to the Seattle area, to join Microsoft. During his ten-years job with Microsoft, he worked on the productivity software like Excel and Word. He worked at Microsoft for ten years. During this time he also created Microsoft Game Studios.

Initially, he was handling the team of around fifty people and over the course of eight years, the team increased to above twelve hundred people. The team developed and published more than 100 games, among which a lot of games were sold to more than a dozen million customers.

It was in the late 1990s when Fries led a team which created the first version of the Xbox gaming console. The development of Xbox put Microsoft on the top list in the interactive entertainment business. Fries was the most important figure among the game development community and played a pivotal role in the acquisition of Bungie, Ensemble Studios, and Rare.

Career after Microsoft

Fries left Microsoft in January 2004 and, started consulting various startups. One of the companies he consulted was FireAnt which was later acquired by Sony Online Entertainment. Some other startups Fries was involved with were Ageia and Emotive Systems. Ageia, a company building an EEG based game controller, claims to bring the first “physics accelerator” chip for games and Emotive Systems.

Fries’ favourite game is World of Warcraft, and he is currently working on bringing the game into a three-dimensional life. This project is carried out by his own startup company Figure Prints. The company deals with making 3D models of a player’s characters, using Z Corporation printers.

Fries said in an interview that within just 12 hours of taking his company to live, more than 4000 people ordered a model. “It takes almost a week to complete one model”, he explained further. His another favourite game Halo got an updated version called Halo 2600, which was released as an Atari 2600. Currently, Fries serves as an advisor for Ouya, which is an Android-based game console and development program.

Morris Chang: The Father of Taiwan’s Chip Industry

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

China is known as the major manufacturer of electronics all over the globe. The reason is simple, it is blessed with leaders, who have worked hard to be ahead of everyone else and took the sole responsibility, to make their company as well as China, the leader of electronics manufacturers. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is the world’s first and biggest silicon foundry. The company became what it is today only because of the leader who served it for 30 years – Morris Chang.

Early Life

Born on 10th July 1931, in Ningbo, Chekiang, China, Morris Chang is the founder, former chairman and CEO of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. His father was an official in the Yin county government. Chang’s life’s ambition was to become a novelist or a journalist. But his father persuaded him to take up something else.

In 1948, Chang moved to Hong Kong at the age of 17, as it was the peak time of the Chinese Civil War. Just the next year the People’s Republic of China was established. In 1949, Chang moved to the United States to study at Harvard University. Later on, he transferred to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he completed his bachelors and master’s degree in mechanical engineering.

Career

In 1955, just after graduating, Chang landed his first job in the industry in Sylvania Semiconductor in the United States. After working for three years, in Sylvania Semiconductor he moved to Texas Instruments, in 1958. Chang spent the next 25 years of his life in this company. While working at TI, he learned everything about semiconductors and made advancements in it. He referred to these years as ‘youth of semiconductors’.

Morris Chang
Image Source: wikimedia.org

After his continuous hard work, Chang received a promotion in TI. He became the manager of the engineering section in 1961, i.e. just after three years of his joining the job at TI. Looking at his potential, Texas Instruments decided to invest a bit more in Chang and gave him the opportunity to obtain his PhD. He went to Stanford University and received his PhD in electrical engineering in 1964. He finally rose up to the rank of Vice President and took the responsibility of TI’s worldwide semiconductor business. During his time at TI, Chang worked on the four-transistor project, for which, IBM was handling the manufacturing unit. He also brought forward the idea of pricing semiconductors at low costs to gain larger profits in the long term.

Chang left Texas Instruments in 1983, and later, became the president and chief operating officer of General Instrument Corporation, from 1984-85. He left GIC and got a proposal from the government of the Republic of China for the post of chairman and president of Industrial Technology Research Institute. He accepted the proposal and set out to change the whole course of science and technology development in Taiwan.

Morris Chang was responsible to promote industrial and technological development in Taiwan. He used his decades of experience and founded TSMC, in 1987. This was the time when big companies considered outsourcing the manufacturing capabilities to Asia. Chang’s visionary aim became successful, as TSMC became the leading semiconductor foundry. It acquires 50% of the total global market share. Its major customers include Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Intel. TSMC became the profitable and biggest chip makers in the world.

Chang’s vision was clear and, that was not to pivot the direction of the company. It will always be a pure play foundry and will never compete with its customers. Chang retired from ITRI, in 1994 and took the position of chairman at Vanguard International Semiconductor Corporation the same year till 2003. He continued to serve as the chairman of TSMC. In 2005, Chang handed the CEO position to Rick Tsai, but, returned back again in June 2009.

Morris Chang announced his retirement from the company on June 5, 2018, but had already planned the future of the company. The new CEO of the company would be C.C.Wei and the chairman position would be filled in by Mark Liu.

Personal Life

Chang won many accolades due to his leadership quality and achieving great heights of success. Forbes magazine named Morris Chang as one of the most visionary leaders in the world. After retiring from his service, which took the electronics industry to next level, Chang wants to spend time with his family. He lives with his wife Sophie Chang and three children.

Caterina Fake : One of the Most Influential Women in Silicon Valley

Founder, start-up, Tech Story / By

In the past more than 15 years, Flickr has been the best Photo and Video hosting platform across the world. It allows you to share and host your pictures online, becoming the most favourite photo sharing website among all. At a time there was nothing like Flickr and then the idea of creating it hit two cleaver minds; Caterina Fake and her ex-husband Stewart Butterfield. Caterina is among the Time’s Magazine’s 2006’s list of 100 Most Influential People and was awarded the Silicon Valley Forum’s Visionary Award (2018).

Early Life

Caterina Fake was born on 13 June 1969, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. As a child, she had a keen interest in poetry and classical music and was not allowed to watch TV. She became familiar with computers and the internet through her friends.

She went to Choate Rosemary Hall to pursue her high school and attended Vassar College to do her B.A. In English. Meanwhile, she was also an alumnus at Smith College.

Career

Even being an Arts student, her interest in computers and programming, led her to grab a job as the lead designer at one of the first web development companies, named as Organic Online. She worked on the first online ventures of many famous companies including McDonald’s, Nike, Levi’s, etc.

Caterina fake
Image Source: wikimedia.org

Caterina also operated as a research staff member of ‘Interval Research and in 1990, served as the Art Director at Salon.com, where she played a key role in creating an online community, social software, etc. In 1997, Caterina started working at Netscape, managing its community forum.

Founding Flickr and Rise as an Entrepreneur

In 2002, Caterina, along with Stewart Butterfield and Jason Classon, founded a company and, named it Ludicrop. Together, they created a Game Neverending, that they somehow, could not launch. Later, she started working on a new project named as Flickr with Stewart and, launched it on 10 February 2004. Soon after its launch, it became a hit and Yahoo acquired it in 2005 along with Ludicorp, paying an amount of $25 million. Later, Yahoo! added more features to Flickr, like social media integration, community open APIs, tagging, etc to enhance its functionality. In the same year, Caterina also joined Yahoo! as the head of a Technology Development group, Hack Yahoo! along with Brickhouse.

After leaving the job at Yahoo, on 13 June 2008, Caterina started working on a new project named as Hunch, which she co-founded with an entrepreneur Chris Dixon, in June 2009. The website was acquired by eBay in 2011 paying $80 million. In 2012, Fake launched a website named Pinwheel later renamed to Findery, which is her latest venture.

Caterina won Business Week’s Best Leader of 2005, followed by Forbes 2005 eGang and Red Herring’s 20 Entrepreneurs under 35 awards (2005). In 2006, she appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine. She has also received two Doctorate degrees (Honors), one from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009 and another from The New School 2013.

Caterina was a member of the board of directors of Creative Commons and for a time period, also invested in and chaired the Board of Etsy.

Personal Life

Caterina Fake was married to Stewart Butterfield the co-founder of Flickr and her business partner, for 7 years (2001-2007) and the two have a daughter together. Currently, she is living in San Fransisco, with her boyfriend Jaiku the co-founder of Jyri Engeström and their three children.

Steve Chen – Co-Founder of YouTube

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

Young and enthusiastic minds always take their ideas to next level starting from scratch. Many of these revolutionary ideas have led to innovations that have changed the way our world is connected. Now you can be connected to any part of the world in just a few clicks. You are also able to see what’s happening in the world, on the largest video streaming network – YouTube. The idea for this video streaming service was born into one such young mind of Steve Chen.

Early Life

Born on August 18, 1978, in Taipei, Taiwan, Steve Chen and his family immigrated to the United States of America, in 1993 and, got settled in Prospect Heights, Illinois. Chen took his middle school education from River Trails Middle School, which is situated in Mount Prospect. Then for the first year of high school, he went to John Hersey in Arlington Heights. He spent the next three years of high school at Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora, Illinois. Finally, Chen went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to pursue a degree in Computer Science. and graduated in 2002.

Initial Career Stages

Just after graduating, Chen landed his first job with industry financial company PayPal. It was this company, where he met his future co-founders Jawed Karim and Chad Hurley. He also spent some time as an early employee at Facebook, but, left the company in few months to focus on his own venture.

Steve Chen
Image Source: wikimedia.org

He had a knack for innovative ideas and one such idea was lurking in his mind. It was to develop a video streaming platform, and Chen, along with Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, founded YouTube in 2005. Steve took the position of Chief Technical Officer in the company.

Just within few months, Chen announced that YouTube was receiving around 100 million views per day and around 65000 videos were being uploaded from different parts of the world each day. The popularity of YouTube skyrocketed and quickly came to the notice of Google. Next thing they knew was Google offering to acquire YouTube. The online video streaming site was ranked among the top 10 most popular websites.

Google acquired YouTube in 2006 for a mind-boggling $1.65 billion. From then on, YouTube has never looked back and is constantly achieving new heights of success. Chen received 625,366 shares in Google and extra 68,721 in trust as the part of the sale. These shares are valued at $729 million in 2018.

After YouTube

Steve Chen is an energetic person who does not prefer to stop at one success. The definition of success is to keep moving forward and achieve greater heights than the previous ones. The next venture Chen started was named AVOS Systems, Inc. He founded this venture along with Chad Hurley and Vijay Krishnamurthy. One of the services known as Mixbit, which is a video sharing service is quite well known. AVOS acquired Delicious from Yahoo! Inc. The founders sold AVOS Systems, Inc. to Science, Inc. in 2014.

Along with founding a couple of most successful companies, Chen is also well-known for his investments in promising start-ups and businesses. He has invested in HonestBee, Drama Fever, Spool, Wish, Road Hero and many more.

Personal Life

In 2009, Chen got married to the Google Korea product marketing manager, Park Ji-Hyun also known as Jamie Chen. The couple lives in San Francisco with their two sons. Chen is a huge art admirer and makes a humble contribution towards The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

In 2008, Chen along with his partner Chad Hurley was awarded Vanguard Award. The Magazine 2.0 nominated Chen as one of the ’50 people who matter now’ in business. The Asian Scientists Magazine listed Chen as one of the 15 Asian Scientists to Watch.

Paul Buchheit – Creator and Lead Developer of Gmail

Google, Product, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

There is no denying in the fact that each of us has used Gmail at least once in our lives and, that fact is proved by the current number of Gmail users, i.e., more than 900 million users. Gmail was launched in 2004, and the lead developer, behind this widely used email platform, is Paul Buchheit. Paul Buchheit is the 23rd employee of Google but, has played a pivotal role in the development of many Google products, in his few years of career with Google.

Paul Buchheit
Image Source: Facebook

Early Life

Paul Buchheit was born on 6 November 1976, in Webster, New York. He did his schooling from Webster Thomas High School. He was a brilliant student and always topped the class every year. Later, he entered Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio to pursue a degree in Science followed by a PhD (Honors) degree. During his college, he was in the rowing team of the college.

Career

As soon as Buchheit completed his education, he started his internship at Microsoft, in 1995. In 1998, he joined at Intel and after one year he became the 23rd employee at Google.

He worked with Google for nearly 7 years and, had become an influential part of Google’s numerous revolutionary programs, including Google Adsense. He also gave the suggestion of the motto, “Don’t Do Evil”, that was practised as the code of conduct within Google for many years.

In 2006, Paul Buchheit left the job at Google and launched a real-time social aggregator named FriendFeed which was a huge success. But later in 2009, it was acquired by Facebook through a private transaction. He also worked for Facebook for a few years and left the job in 2010, to start an investment company named Y Combinator.

Paul Buchheit always encourages startup companies saying that startups are more than simply a clever way to make money. Before Y Combinator, he had already invested in 83 startups through Angel Investment, and with Y Combinator he is supporting many budding companies with their startups.

Founding Gmail

Before Gmail was launched, the various email service providers, like Microsoft, had given a limited storage of 4 MB. According to Paul Buchheit, every email service was getting worse instead of getting better. And the lesser storage provided by every email platforms grabbed his attention. The planning of creating Gmail was started many years before it was announced. The development of Gmail started in 2001 and in 2004, Gmail was launched, with increased storage of 1000 MB of storage, fast dynamic interface, quick and accurate search including the concept of organised emails. Even Mr Doerr from Microsoft gave a statement that Gmail was like a wakeup call for them.

Personal Life

Paul married his girlfriend April Buchheit on 10 August 2002. Currently, he is living with his wife and two children in California.