Your Tech Story

tech story

Tony Hsieh – Co-Founder of the Online Shoe and Clothing Company Zappos

Founder, start-up, Tech Story / By

For constant growth, one needs to take risks, from time to time. Getting into a new business, or changing a line of work, or anything that keeps your adrenaline rush at its peak as it will lead you to most fulfilling experiences. The success, of course, follows and, so does money. Entrepreneurs are known for their risk taking abilities and venturing into newer forays. Tony Hsieh, is one such figure, who has kept evolving his talent from time to time and has reached the topmost position in the corporate world.

Early Life

Tony Hsieh was born on 12 December 1973, in Illinois, US, to Richard and Judy Hsieh, who shifted from Taiwan to Illinois. He was brought up on the bay area of San Francisco with his two brothers, Andy Hsieh and Dave Hsieh.

He graduated in Computer Science from Harvard University, in 1995. While studying in Harvard, Tony managed the Quincy House Grille and, sold pizza to the students in his dorm. Here he met Alfred Lin, who was his best pizza customer and, a future colleague.

Career

Tony landed his first job with Oracle Corporation, soon after he graduated. But, just in half a year, he realized that the corporate environment was not meant for him and, left the job. Later he went on to set up LinkExchange – an advertising network – along with his college friend and ex-Oracle employee Sanjay Madan.

Tony Hsieh
Image Source: flickr.com

The central aim of LinkExchange was to advertise the sites of companies, interested in the company. Tony landed his first 30 clients, via e-mail and, just within three months, the site displayed ads of 20,000 web-pages. Members were allowed to advertise their site using banner ads on LinkExchange. The banner ads were displayed over 10 million times and, by 1998, the site registered 400,000 members and 5 million ad rotations daily. The company was sold to Microsoft for $265 million, in November 1998.

The next business Hsieh started was an incubator and investment firm, whose name was originated as a result of a dare. One of Tony’s friends said that she would invest everything, she has got, if they named the company ‘Venture Frogs’ and, thus, accepting the challenge, the company with the same name was born. Venture Frogs invested in several companies, like AskJeeves, OpenTable, and Zappos. The company did not witness huge profits but, led Tony to take interest in Zappos.

Founding Zappos

Nick Swinmurn, the person with the original idea of Zappos, approached Tony, in 1999, with the idea of selling shoes online. Hsieh wasn’t interested in the early days but, when Swinmurn mentioned that footwear business accounted to $40 billion in the US alone, of which 5% was sold by paper mail orders.

The figures struck Tony, and through Venture Frogs, he decided to invest in the business. He accepted the position of CEO of Zappos, investing $2 million, and in 1999 started ShoeSite.com. Tony enjoyed working in Zappos and set up an office in Venture Frogs premises itself. In 2000, the company received additional funding and generated about $1.6 million in revenue, and $8.6 million, in the next year.

In 2004, Sequoia Capital invested $35 million in Zappos as they saw the company made sales worth $184 million. In 2007, the company made sales worth $840 million and had expanded their products, in every sector, like kids, men’s, women shoes, etc. By this time, they had a dedicated headquarters situated in Henderson, Nevada.

The year 2009, was the most blooming for Zappos, as the company touched $1 billion in revenue. On July 22, 2009, Amazon acquired Zappos, for a whopping $1.2 billion, and Hsieh made about $214 million through this deal.

Later, Hsieh also joined JetSuite’s board in 2011 and closed a $7 million investment deal for the ‘very light’ jet project.

Personal Life

Tony Hsieh, apart from business, believes in sharing knowledge. Therefore, he wrote Delivering Happiness, which became an international bestseller. In the book, he explains the details of Zappos’ journey and achieving the feat of $1 billion, in less than a year. The book remained on top lists for 27 consecutive weeks.

Tony isn’t married and likes to party. He does not stay with his parents as they wanted him to be a doctor or a lawyer. Hsieh received Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2007. He lives in Downtown Las Vegas, Nevada, and also has a home in Southern Highlands.

Jack Dorsey – The Founder of Twitter

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

Today, every successful entrepreneur aims towards giving the world something which will make the lives of people easier. In order to achieve success, an entrepreneur must think of benefitting the people in any way possible. Therefore, with the help of technology, several apps are being launched which are bringing the world closer. One such entrepreneur is Jack Dorsey, who has made a tremendous contribution to bringing the world closer with his revolutionary ideas.

Early Life

Born on 19th November 1976 in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, Jack Dorsey was a computer lover from the early years of his life. His parents Tim and Marcia Dorsey continuously supported and encouraged his passion for computers. Tim worked as an engineer in a company manufacturing mass spectrometers, while Marcia was a housewife.

In his teenage years, Jack spent hours studying the early versions of IBM. His first ambitious idea was to build a live map of New York City, displaying small moving dots, which would represent ambulances, taxis, police vehicles, fire brigades, etc. After moving to a new place Jack would go on long late night walks in the city to get a visual idea for his map.

Jack Dorsey
Image Source: wikimedia.org

As a child, Jack faced a stuttering problem while speaking, so he used to keep quiet most of the time. But, taking control over this weakness was what made him a survivor and ready to face more difficult challenges and how to solve them. Therefore, he would sign up for various oratory competitions. After several failed attempts, he finally managed to speak normally.

Jack attended high school at Bishop DuBourg in St. Louis, Missouri. Then he further went to attend the University of Missouri of Science and Technology, but, soon transferred to New York University. He was an active member of computer club during his high school. Jack’s first computer programming experience was at the age of 14 when he wrote few programs for taxi dispatching and firefighting services. He made this programs using an open source platform and they are still used by some taxi companies even today.

Early Career

Jack initially applied for an internship at Mira Digital Publishing Company in the summer of 1991. And just within a few weeks, he was leading a team of programmers. This was quite a sight when a teenager was leading a team in their thirties. His second company was Dispatch Management Services Corp. Jack got a job at this company in an unusual way. He hacked the company’s website and contacted the manager explaining the loophole in their company’s software. He was immediately hired as a programmer and here’s where Jack was first introduced to an idea which would later become biggest social networking platform – Short Messaging Services (SMS). He also learned about a program through which a dispatcher could track the movements of couriers in real time.

This led him to move to Oakland and start his own company of dispatching taxis and emergency services, through the internet. However, the dot-com bubble left him jobless and for the next five years, he focused on freelancing.

Birth of Twitter

Later, with the idea of SMS, he was hired by ODEO, which specialized in Internet Startups. Here Jack met other talented programmers including Biz Stone. Jack discussed his idea of short messaging services with Stone, and they both went on to make the first prototype of Twitter. On March 21, 2006, Twitter took first entry into the microblogging service when Jack twitted the very first tweet, “just setting up my twttr”. The service was officially launched for the public in June 2006.

When ODEO ran into financial crises, it also caused a funding problem for Twitter. But, Fred Wilson soon showed interest in the company and offered Jack about a half-million dollars cheque. Later, Evan Williams and Noah Glass also came aboard Twitter. As per a recent survey, by SimilarWeb analytics tool, Twitter gets 2.2 billion visits per month.

Founder of Square

Jack did not stop at the success of Twitter but moved on to create some more exciting projects. His next successful venture was set up in 2010 called Square – a café POS system and mobile payment company. The unique feature of this product is its size. It is small square-sized hardware, which is inserted into the headphone jack. It has a magnetic reader to read credit/debit cards. Due to its small size and great potential Starbucks invested $25 million, on August 8th, 2012 in Square.

Jack Dorsey is counted as one of the most successful and genius people in the world. As of 2015, his net worth was calculated to be $2.3 billion. Today, Twitter is actively used by politicians, celebrities, and artists across the globe. And, Square is on the path to change the mobile payments industry.

Satya Nadella – CEO of Microsoft

Story, Tech Story / By

India is a land of talented people who are shining in the top positions of some of the top Tech companies. Microsoft, too, found a promising and energetic leader in Satya Nadella, when they were hunting for the replacement of its longtime CEO Steve Ballmer. After searching for about five months, Microsoft’s board members finalized Nadella as he had already showcased unbelievable progress in the other departments. When Microsoft was in crisis, facing stern competition from other top companies, like Apple and Samsung, Nadella sought a way out to keep Microsoft in business.

Early Life

Satya Nadella was born on 19th August 1967, to an IAS officer Nadella Yugandhar and was brought up in Ananthapur, Andhra Pradesh. He completed high school from the Hyderabad Public School and further went to Manipal Institute of Technology to pursue Electrical Engineering in 1988. His interests lied in Computer Science but Electrical Engineering was a promising branch at the university so he took the course and soon found his true passion.

After completing his degree, he moved to the US at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to pursue Masters in Computer Science, in the year 1990. Further, Nadella also pursued MBA from the University of Chicago and landed his first job at Sun Microsystems and, in 1992, joined Microsoft.

Journey within Microsoft

In his early period at Microsoft, Satya led crucial projects, related to cloud computing, and soon gained the name as a leader, with a potential to spread the technology and business, in transforming Microsoft’s products. He comprehensively worked on Windows NT, an operating system made primarily for business people.

Satya Nadella
Image Source: www.flickr.com

His vast, 22 years of experience, working in Microsoft has allowed him to know the company to its roots. He has served on about five different roles in the company and finally reached the highest position – Chief Executive Officer. In the year 1999, Nadella was promoted to Vice President of Microsoft bCentral and General Manager for Microsoft’s Commerce Platforms group.

Nadella was responsible to lead the growth of numerous Microsoft products like Microsoft Office Small Business, BizTalk Server, Commerce Server, and Dynamics and ERP servers too. Apart from these products, he has lead Microsoft to invest in the technologies like Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Interactive Television (ITV).

From 2000 to 2010, Nadella served on three different positions including Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Business Solutions, then in 2007 as Senior Vice President of R & D for Online Services Division, and then to President of Server and Tools business. Before being chosen for Microsoft’s CEO position Nadella served as the Executive Vice President of Cloud and Enterprise Group which supplied infrastructure to Microsoft’s search engine Bing, Xbox Live Broadband gaming network, and Office-365 services.

Microsoft’s transition from just software based company to cloud computing services helped it grow faster than ever. Nadella met with start-ups understanding their needs and simultaneously making Microsoft more flexible to fulfill those needs. Most of the clients today prefer rent-based applications rather than running software themselves. And that is what Microsoft next ventured into making a huge profit.

Why was Satya Nadella the Perfect Choice?

When it could have been anyone leading the company there is a strong reason that Microsoft’s board members chose to give Satya Nadella the baton. When in 2014, Steve Ballmer declared his retirement from Microsoft, the company was also in planning to shift from software giant to Devices and Services Company. Microsoft had already acquired Nokia and developed Surface Tablet. So, naturally, the company was on a lookout for the candidate who helmed the experience of both sides.

And when it came down to choices, Satya fitted the profile very well. As he had lead various projects including Windows Server, Windows Azure, System Center, SQL Server, etc. and the Software development tools. With such a vast portfolio and years of experience made him an ideal candidate to lead the company and take it out of the crisis, it was facing, due to the competitors like Apple and Google. Finally, on 4th February 2014, Satya Nadella was declared as the new CEO of Microsoft succeeding Steve Ballmer.

Personal Life

Satya Nadella is a big fan of cricket and grew up watching and playing the game in Andhra Pradesh. He mentions that the leadership and team management skill he possesses is the results of being part of his school cricket team.

In 2015, he was awarded ‘Champion of Change Award’ by then President Barack Obama. He currently lives in Bellevue, Washington with his wife Anupama and three children.