Author Archive for warricknj18

Patrick and John Collison – Stripe

Posted by warricknj18 
· Monday, December 10th, 2018 
· 1 Comment

How did two brothers who grew up in rural Ireland come to be some of the youngest self-made billionaires and have what could be one of the most important internet companies in the world? Patrick and John Collison were very smart from a young age. They learned to code by age ten, and loved reading. They started a few businesses early on, including one called Auctomatic, which helped sellers on eBay. It ended up selling for $5 million in 2008, when Patrick and John were 19 and 17 respectively. They both attended prestigious universities, Patrick went to MIT and John went to Harvard, but they both ended up dropping out of college and had the idea for Stripe in 2009.

Before this time, there was not really an easy way for money to be transferred over the internet. PayPal was around, but the process still had a large amount of improvement to be made. Patrick and John saw an opportunity for a better payment transaction system on the web. Stripe gives businesses seven lines of code to paste into their website, then they are able to accept payments easily.

Soon after starting Stripe in San Francisco, they ironically received investment money from PayPal founders Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, as well as Sequoia Capital and other investors. They also received money and guidance early on from Y Combinator – a famous startup accelerator in San Francisco, as well as CapitalG – Alphabet, or Google’s investment company later on. In 2016, Stripe received a $9.2 billion valuation making the brothers both billionaires, and in September 2018 they received a $20 billion valuation. They still have a lot of work to do before reaching that valuation, but it shows the large potential of the company.

Stripe has also connected with some huge clients. Companies like Facebook, Lyft, Shopify, Spotify, and SquareSpace all use Stripe to process their payments. They even have started working with Amazon on some of their transactions. Stripe now has millions of businesses using its platform, and handles billions of dollars in transactions per year. Chances are that half of the transactions a person makes online are through Stripe, whether they know it or not.

Patrick and John are constantly thinking about how to improve the lives of people around the world. In 2016 they started a platform called Atlas that helped international startups with incorporating in United States. They also love to read and be outside. Runs and other activities with their Stripe team members happen often.

Stripe is impacting millions of people and businesses in how money is transferred over the internet, and in many other ways. It will be exciting to watch the company as they grow in the future and impact millions more.

1 Comment
Categories : App, Business, Droupout, eCommerce, Technology

Jake Nickell – Threadless

Posted by warricknj18 
· Friday, December 7th, 2018 
· 2 Comments

In 2000, Jake Nickell started a thread on the forum website Dreamless, where artists could submit t-shirt designs to share with the rest of the thread. The best few designs were then chosen, and Jake printed them out and sold them. The artists who won received a few free shirts for their contribution. All of the money Jake made from shirt sales was put directly back into printing new shirts. His reason for this project was not making money, it was his passion for design and the art community. He did not even really think about it becoming a real business at first. After this first round, Jake built a website to sell the shirts on, and eventually moved everything to the site when he saw a possibility for a business. He called it Threadless, a spin-off of the name Dreamless. The basic structure was, and still is, that artists submit designs, and each week they are voted upon by the site users. Then the best are printed out and sold. Artists receive money and a Threadless gift card for winning.

Soon after, Jake dropped out of art school to focus on Threadless. During the first few years, Jake was constantly designing new websites and rolling them out to get feedback on them. They would sometimes totally change the Threadless website four times a year. Jake is an artist and a coder, so he had fun working on this, and still does to this day. In 2004, Threadless made $1.5 million in profit, and in 2006 they hit $6.5 million. Then in 2008, Inc. estimated $30 million in sales at a 30% profit ($9 million in profit), and also named Threadless as The Most Innovative Company in America and placed them on the front cover of their magazine.

Threadless utilizes two big tools with their business model – crowdsourcing and co-creation. This means that the customers create and promote the products being sold, which is part of the reason they are so successful. It gets artists involved in what they love to do. They also have a chance to make money from it, so they will go promote it to their friends, which keeps growing the business. Threadless was actually around before the term crowdsourcing came into being, but it was quickly connected with the company.

Threadless also does very well at connecting with their customers and artists. Employees sometimes text the artists, and constantly communicate with them and ask about their experience.

Threadless is truly an innovative company that has become very successful. What has made them successful is their (at the time) unique business model, and their passion, especially Jake’s passion, for the artist community.

2 Comments
Categories : Apparel/Accessories, Clothing, Creating, eCommerce, Online Companies

Andrew Mason – Groupon and More

Posted by warricknj18 
· Tuesday, November 6th, 2018 
· 2 Comments

Andrew Mason is most well known for founding Groupon, the coupon program, but that was not his first business, nor his last. Andrew grew up in a suburb of Pittsburgh called Mount Lebanon, PA. At age 15 he started Bagel Express, a Saturday morning delivery service. After college and a few jobs, he started The Point, a company that helped groups connect about issues they cared about. He decided that The Point was too complex, so it was then boiled down Groupon. Eric Lefkofsky, Andrew’s former employer, gave him $1 million in seed money to help get the idea going, and it became a huge success. In 2011, Groupon projected that they were on track to make $1 billion faster than any company ever. Unfortunately for Andrew, the company was not doing as well as investors thought it should, so he was ousted from the CEO position, and from the company in 2013.
It was not long before Andrew had another business idea, called Detour. It is a company that makes smartphone audio tours. They raised $11 million in investments, and the company is still around today, even though Andrew had another business idea and moved on from that company. Through Detour, they had to edit large amounts of audio, and it took a lots of time. To make the process go easier and take less time, Andrew developed a business and program called Descript. The program transcribes audio files and matches up the word with the place it appears in the file, making it much easier to edit. His goal is to make it as easy to edit audio as it is to edit photos and videos on a smartphone app.
From these examples, we can see that Andrew did not just end up running forever with his first idea. It changed over time to fit the needs of people. The Point developed into Groupon, and Detour developed into Descript. This is a good example for us all – to keep looking for new opportunities or better ways to help people, and to form our ideas around that.

2 Comments
Categories : App, Business

Gerard Adams – The Millionaire Mentor

Posted by warricknj18 
· Monday, October 15th, 2018 
· 2 Comments

According to Inc.com, Gerard Adams was the second most influential millennial entrepreneur to watch in 2017, only behind Mark Zuckerberg. Adams has started and invested in a number of businesses, many of which have become huge successes. He spent one semester at Caldwell University before dropping out and going off on his own. His father worked at Prudential Financial which grew Adams’ interest in the stock market. He started several companies in the financial industry. One of these was called StockSpot, which he says grew to a revenue of $10 million before the 2008 stock market crash. In recent years, Adams has invested in or started nine companies, all of which have made over a million dollars.
The business Adams is most well known for is Elite Daily, a news platform for millennials. The site reached over 80 million monthly visitors. In 2015, Adams and his two co-founders sold the company to Daily Mail for $50 million.
Adams calls himself The Millionaire Mentor. His goal is to inspire millennials in their passions. He does this through a few avenues. The first is his website (GerardAdams.com). On this he has blogs, videos, and other information to help entrepreneurs. He also has a business called Fownders, which has classes, articles, and other things that encourage social entrepreneurs.
Gerard Adams is very passionate about helping entrepreneurs, especially millennial ones, in pursuing their passions. It is great to see a successful person using their gifts to help other people who are starting out just like he did at one point.

2 Comments
Categories : App, Bootstrap Business, Building, Business, Celebrities, Droupout, Social Entrepreneur, Technology

Christopher Gray – Scholly – Scholarships

Posted by warricknj18 
· Tuesday, October 2nd, 2018 
· 4 Comments

Christopher Gray grew up in poverty in Birmingham, Alabama. He had a single mom, and two younger siblings. None of his family had ever gone to college, but he was hoping to be the first. He did not really have anyone to help him pay for college, since his mom had lost her job during the recession in 2008. He was determined to find out how to get to and pay for college, so he started looking for scholarships. He did not have a computer at home, so he used the library computers where usage time was limited. He would also write his application essays on paper at home, then type them into the application on his phone. All of his hard work paid off, though. In the end, his total was $1.3 million in scholarships that he had earned.
Christopher could have stopped there and been satisfied with just going to college and living his own life, but he did not. He knew that there were thousands of other people just like him who wanted or needed scholarships, but there was not a good process out there for finding them. He also learned that about $100 million in scholarships go unclaimed each year.
So, he started Scholly, an online program to match students with scholarships. He developed a patent-pending algorithm to select the scholarships that fit each student, based on information about them. His major breakthrough came when he appeared on Shark Tank in November, 2015. Within the first few hours after the show was aired, Scholly received 80,000 requests. Scholly now has almost two million users. It has also connected students with over $100 million in scholarships to further their education.
Christopher Gray is an excellent example of someone who saw and experienced a problem, and figured out how to fix it. He has made the lives of many future college students much easier, and he looks forward to continuing to do that with further innovations to the program.

4 Comments
Categories : App, Business, College, Education, Social Entrepreneur, Technology

Garrett Gee – Scan

Posted by warricknj18 
· Monday, September 17th, 2018 
· 3 Comments

In 2011, Garrett Gee saw a need for a simple QR code scanning app. Many of the ones available at the time were clunky and hard to use. The iPad 2 was being introduced in February, and he thought there might be a blog that showed the top ten apps for the new tablet. He wanted to be the first one with an easy-to-use QR code scanner for the iPad 2. A few days after the release of the device, Garrett launched Scan. It found a place in the blog like he was hoping, and gained a large amount of traction. Three months later, there had been over one million downloads of the app, and 25 million downloads by the end of 2012. The app and website were updated often with new features, including the ability to scan different types of codes and make QR codes to link to your Instagram account.

Scan was able to acquire $1.7 million in investments by 2013, including money from Google Ventures. Garrett also presented on Shark Tank in 2013, but did not secure any investments. Their revenue came mostly from advertisements on the app and website, and in May, 2012, their advertising revenue had risen to over $1,000 each day.

Scan was sold to Snapchat in the fall of 2014 for $54 million. Once this happened, Garrett and his wife Jessica decided to take their (at the time) two kids and travel the world, but they also said that they would not spend any of the money made from the Scan transaction. They put the money away, and pretty much started from scratch again. In the fall of 2015, they sold almost all of their belongings, which totaled to $51,500. They were going to live off of that money from August to December, then figure out what to do from there.

At the end of the time period, they decided to keep traveling, but only if they could find a way to have it be self-sustaining or profitable. From the beginning, Garrett had been working on creating a brand for the family (The Bucket List Family) with things like their blog, YouTube videos, and Instagram. They worked hard to find companies to work with who would support them in exchange for promotion. At the beginning, they had trouble breaking even since they were small, but eventually they started making a good amount of money. Now they get paid anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 for a sponsored YouTube video, and $5,000 to $8,000 for an Instagram post. Companies they have worked with include hotels, clothing brands, Airbnb, and GoPro. They have been able to have some amazing experiences on their travels.

The Gee family, specifically Garrett, put in lots of time and effort to become successful. He did it with Scan, then started all over with a new idea to support their family passion for traveling. There is much that can be learned from him and his family.

3 Comments
Categories : App, Business, Online Companies, Shark Tank, Social Media, Travel