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Andrew Mason – Founder of Groupon

Posted by ThompsonNS20

· Sunday, November 29th, 2020

· 2 Comments

Background:

Andrew was born on October 22, 1980 in Pittsburgh, PA. From a young age of 15, Mason had an entrepreneurial spirit as he started a weekend bagel-delivery service called Bagel Express.

Phantom Interview with Former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason

Later on in his life in 2003, Mason graduated from Northwestern University with a bachelor’s degree in music. Finding no work in that field, he took a job as a software developer at InnerWorkings, Inc., and met the company’s founder, Eric Lefkofsky.

Then in 2006, Mason earned a scholarship to attend the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy after creating Policy Tree, a visualization tool for policy debates.

The Beginning of Groupon:

Also in 2006, Mason created The Point which was an Internet-based program designed to organize grassroots action for a given cause.

In 2007 Mason searched for a way to make a profit from The Point by exploring the concept of collective buying. In 2008 he founded and opened Groupon with Lefkofsky and Mason became the company’s chief executive officer.

By negotiating deep discounts on vendors’ products and services, Groupon tried to link vendors with new customers through its signature “deal of the day” for a spotlighted product or service. Groupon profited from each sale by receiving up to 50 percent of the retail value of the product or service.

By 2012 Groupon had grown from a few dozen workers to over 12,000, and it was operating in more than 150 U.S. cities and more than 40 countries.

Groupon’s Success and Downfall:

In June 2011 Mason announced his plan to take the company public. In November the initial public offering allowed Groupon to raise $700 million, which raised Mason’s net worth to $1 billion and increased Groupon’s value to $12.7 billion. By August 2012, however, Groupon’s stock had plummeted 75 percent, and in February 2013 Mason was “forced” out of the CEO position. Groupon $25 (Email Delivery) : Target

Even though the company eventually failed, Mason still had a big success in this company and made a lot of money in the process. Before Groupon’s downfall, Google offered to buy the company for $6 billion, but Mason wanted the company to go public and he wanted to hold onto his creation. He wasn’t affraid of failure which is key to entrepreneurship.

2 Comments

Categories : App, Shopping

Spotify

Posted by martinnm18

· Sunday, November 29th, 2020

· 5 Comments

When I was in elementary school I ran 5ks and other races because my mom did. However, the only way I would do it was if I had my iPod Shuffle. The problem with the Shuffle was that I had to buy music and download it on to it. I think it cost $1.29 for each song, and when you are 7 years old that can really add up. Daniel Ek saw that problem and changed the music industry forever by creating Spotify in 2006. The problem initially was that Apple’s iTunes provided the music industry much more money with its pay-per-download model. Ek continued to push that over time the music service will generate substantial royalties while avoiding music piracy. In 2012, Spotify had 18 million songs and 20 million active users, though not all were paid subscribers. Only five years later the site has over 35 million songs with 160 million users where 70 million of them are monthly subscribers. The service has blown up and made music streaming the new norm.

This story is so interesting to me because it fixed a problem that was generally accepted and dealt with. Only after it was created did people really see the problem with downloading songs for so much money and piracy. It inspires me to look at the world around me and not always look for problems but ways to make generally accepted parts of life better for everyone around me.

5 Comments

Categories : App, Music, Smartphone

New Idea – New Oppurtunity

Posted by morrownx18

· Monday, November 23rd, 2020

· 1 Comment

Everyday, someone somewhere has a new idea they want to share. However, very few make it to market, or even make money for you. Getting your idea out there is hard, so hard in fact it is what separates entrepreneurs from dreamers.

Gerard Adams, CEO and founder of FOWNders social-impact accelerator in Newark, NJ to speak at TEDx September 28, 2016. (PRNewsFoto/FOWNders, Inc.)

It is hard. Ask Gerard Adams, an entrepreneur himself and founder of Elite Daily, how hard it is. He logged many hours into coming up and laying the ground work. He thought this would be the hardest, most time consuming part; however he was wrong, way wrong. His hardest part was taking that idea and publishing it and getting it noticed. It took time, time that he wishes went faster. So after a lot of thought, time, and energy put into one idea, he did what every entrepreneur does: threw it away and started all over. He had another idea, bigger, better, and one that benefits more than just him – Fownders.

Elite Daily founder created a place that is a safe for young entrepreneurs to go and publish their ideas and share what they want to start up and create themselves. Fownders takes your OWN, orginal idea and gets it out into the world for you. It serves as a place to bounce ideas off each other, connect, and expand on new or old ideas. The website has connected many entrepreneurs, some of which combined ideas and made it big in half the time as others, say Gerard Adams. It even offers ways to help many young individuals create new ideas, and start ups that go on to make millions. So if you have a good idea that you are struggling to share, get out there with it, try Fownders.

1 Comment

Categories : App, Great Ideas, Millennial Enrepreneuers, Social Entrepreneur, Youngest Entrepreneurs

No Room in the Inn

Posted by martinnm18

· Sunday, November 15th, 2020

· No Comments

Sometimes it is difficult to find rooms at hotels. It can be even more difficult to find cheap rooms that are still up to your standards. Brian Chesky saw this as a problem and did something about it. Chesky grew up playing hockey and lifting, however, he always had a love for art and design. While he attended the Rhode Island School of Design, he met Joe Gebbia who shared this same concern. After working some design jobs they moved to San Francisco, but they eventually ran out of cash and needed to do something about it. In October 2007 there was a design conference where the hotels in the area ran out of rooms. Gebbia and Chesky had the idea to rent out their space to those who had nowhere to stay. This is where Airbnb comes to fruition. They began to run with this idea while being joined by an engineer friend Nathan Blecharczyk. Since then the service has blown up and is offered in more than 191 countries worldwide. The company is now valued at $15 billion.

What I think is most cool about this idea is how unique and simple it is. They made an app that allows for people to rent out spaces they own. It is a wonderful idea and super cheap for them. Airbnb has no product, they just use the spaces people offer up for others to rent out for short or long term. This idea really gets me thinking that entrepreneurship does not have to be selling a physical product or making an invention, it can just be an idea that uses what is around you to make the lives of customers so much easier and potentially more comfortable.

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Categories : App, Business, Convenience

More Than Just a Quiz

Posted by WarrickCB20

· Friday, November 13th, 2020

· No Comments

Throughout school, memorization is a key theme for many classes. People use everything from flash cards to repetition methods to remember key terms from different courses. While these ways have worked for decades, there has always been a demand for universally accessible and easily creatable material concerning this subject. These two main ideals were instrumental when Andrew Sutherland created the online quiz platform called Quizlet. While this website is now a household name, at its creation in 2005, this idea was revolutionary. You could now easily create online flashcards that could be shared and viewed across the internet.

Sutherland originally created Quizlet to assist him with his French homework as a sophomore in high school. After receiving attention and popularity concerning his first site, Sutherland began to realize the potential of such an idea. Over the next 15 years, Andrew studied computer science at MIT and scaled his business incredibly. The site now has over 300 million quiz sets and over 30 million monthly participants. For many, Quizlet is a life saver for studying and memorizing. Sutherland found a pain in his own life and realized it was a universal need for students across the world.

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Categories : App, eCommerce, Technology

The Story of Shopify – Tobi Lutke

Posted by ThompsonNS20

· Thursday, November 12th, 2020

· No Comments

Background:

Tobi was born in 1981 in Germany. At a very young age, he found a love for technology. Just at the age of 11, he began rewriting the code of the games he played and modifying computer hardware as a hobby.

Just after tenth grade, Lutke dropped out of school and entered an apprenticeship program at the Koblenzer Carl-Benz-School to become a computer programmer.

The Birth of Shopify:

A few years after moving to Canada in 2004, Tobi and his partners, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake, launched Snowdevil, which was an online snowboard shop. Lutke built a new online business platform for the site, using Ruby on Rails. Then soon after, the Snowdevil founders shifted their focus from snowboards to e-commerce and launched Shopify in 2006.

Shopify is a Canadian multinational e-commerce company. It is an e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems.

Shopify Now:

The Globe and Mail named Lutke “CEO of the Year” in November 2014 and his company has been growing ever since. Sell Successfully on Shopify – Vdezi

Now, Shopify is worth over $1.8 billion and is very philanthropic. In 2019, Lutke donated over a million seedlings to Team Trees because as much as he loves technology, he also loves the environment.

Entrepreneurial Lessons:

It always amazes me when I hear stories of people dropping out of school to start businesses. I don’t think my parents would appreciate that too much and it sounds scary leaving your comfortable life to journey into the unknown at such a young age.

This is why Tobi Lutke was such a great entrepreneur, he wasn’t afraid of failure or the business world.

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Categories : App, eCommerce

CEO of Stripe – Patrick Collison

Posted by ThompsonNS20

· Sunday, November 1st, 2020

· No Comments

Background:

Patrick Collison was born September 9, 1988 in Ireland. He was the eldest of three boys and took his first computer course when he was eight years old at the University of Limerick and began learning computer programming at the age of ten.

Ever since he was young, he was interested in science and technology. In 2005 at the age of 16, Collison was the recipient of the 41^st Young Scientist of the Year for his work with Lisp. His brother and co-founder, John Collison, scored the highest-ever score received by a student for the Irish Leaving Certificate. Before Patrick’s last year of High School he left early to attend MIT.

During his first quarter of freshman year, Patrick founded Auctomatic and joined Y Combinator. Its path would not last long, however, because ten months after incorporating, the company was bought by Live Current Media for $5 million where Patrick became the Director of Product Engineering in 2008.

The Beginning of Stripe:

In early 2010, John and Patrick began working on Stripe together. Stripe came into existence when Patrick was working on several side projects and saw that it was difficult to accept payments on the web. They sought to solve the problem and see if it was possible to make online payments very simple and easy to use. For the next 6-months they played with it, showed it to friends, saw how people interacted with it, and made changes along the way.

Within 2-weeks of building the prototype they had their first transactions with a company called 280 North. Eventually its founder, Ross Boucher, would join Stripe as one of the first employees.

Some Trouble:

In the beginning they weren’t sure how big the market was or if they could provide the user experience that they wanted. They also didn’t have the answers to whether or not they could fully address issues like fraud, foreign payments, or credibility. They needed an investor to help give them the credibility they needed by investing in their company.

So that’s what happened. Their first funding came from Paul Graham who worked with Y Combinator that set them down a path of success.

Stripe’s Success:

After solving the technical issues with an online payment service, Stripe took off. Today they are receiving about $380.1 million a year and the company is valued at $36 billion.

I find it interesting that this company became so successful in the environment of a lot of competition. There were a lot of other online payment options before Stripe (like PayPal) but the Collison brothers found a way to make theirs easier to use and more appealing to the market.

This goes to show that if you are invested in your idea and willing to endure through the hardships, you will be successful.

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Categories : App, Online Companies, Uncategorized

Andrew Sutherland – Quizlet

Posted by logan wick

· Monday, October 12th, 2020

· 5 Comments

Learning tools & flashcards, for free | Quizlet

Andrew Sutherland created Quizlet which is a study tool that almost every student in high-school and college has used. Andrew saw an opportunity where students needed a better way to study and catalog information they need to look over. Andrew made Quizlet when he was in high-school, what’s really interesting is the fact that he made this business while he could’ve used his business. What makes his idea so interesting is that it is the perfect studying tool for students and it was made by a student.

Quizlet founder Andrew Sutherland talks about its origin story at AlligatorZone. - YouTube

Andrew clearly is able to recognize pains and come up with a new idea to solve that pain. Andrew is very innovating and is able to create a whole new way for students to study. The fact that someone could come up with a new innovating thing for students to use as a student is very inspiring and gives me hope that students like me can succeed as an entrepreneur. I have learned that even high-school kids can come up with almost essential products.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/author/andrew-sutherland

5 Comments

Categories : Academia, App

Behind Quizlet

Posted by hasseea20

· Friday, October 9th, 2020

· 6 Comments

During the school year, one website always rises hugely in popularity among students.
A popular study tool, Quizlet has provided quality studying help to all levels of students. A website and app that allows teachers and students to study through use of flashcards and study sessions, Quizlet has gotten many through midterms and finals. Designed by a young entrepreneur with personal insight to a need, Quizlet was founded in 2005 by high school sophomore Andrew Sutherland. He designed it at first to help him study for his French vocabulary and after acing his test, shared it with his friends.
Andrew applied a little bit of the 0 to 1 method to his project which has been part of making Quizlet so successful. It took until 2007 to be released to the public but has since come to be realized as one of the first steps into education gamification. When he saw the impact Quizlet was having on students everywhere, Sutherland dropped out of MIT where he was pursuing a computer science degree to give more attention to his project.
A personality trait of entrepreneurs is willingness to pursue risk and take opportunity when it shows. After having taken a break from Quizlet to work on his education, Andrew fully committed to growing his business. A student designing with students in mind, his approach was correct from the first.
His care for his users and their platform has continued to grow. In addition to the base platform’s effectiveness, Sutherland did not stop there. “The most important thing that I realized during this process was how to treat my users. They’re Quizlet’s biggest asset.” With a business mind and courteous personality, he decided that interaction between user and owner would be part of what made Quizlet exceptional. Andrew Sutherland replies personally to each message, furthering the positive impact his company has on the world.

6 Comments

Categories : App, Business, College, Education, Experience, Male Entrepreneurs, Uncategorized

Daniel Fine

Posted by matthewssm19

· Friday, October 9th, 2020

· No Comments

Daniel Fine shows that no age is too young to start a business as he created four different companies by the time that he was in college. As a senior in college, Fine has been recognized for his great entrepreneurship by many outlets, including Forbes, TIME Magazine, The New York Times, and even the President of the United States by earning the President’s Volunteer Service Award. While Daniel Fine has made many impressive accomplishments in his young career, he continues to give back to the community in a way that he enjoys.

Daniel Fine started his professional career at seven years old when his brother Jake was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Daniel realized that he could help to give back to the diabetes community by launching Team Brotherly Love, his first business. To this day, Team Brotherly Love has been very successful and has raised over two million dollars towards Type 1 diabetes research.

Fine later launched another company called Match Tutors in an attempt to provide innovation in the tutoring industry. He noticed that when a tutor and student had similar interest, the session usually yielded better results. He decided to create Match Tutors so that any student would be able to find their ideal tutor to “increase engagement and achieve greater results.”

Glass-U, one of Fine’s successful businesses, seeks to market fully foldable sunglasses in a unique way. Daniel Fine took a new perspective on the sunglass industry and created sunglasses that are fully foldable to be even more easily stored. Glass-U’s marketing technique is unique because it appeals to college students. Glass-U is licensed by many different colleges and universities and even extends to fraternities and sororities to make customized sunglasses. Glass-U has been featured in the Rose Bowl, Lalapalooza, and the FIFA World Cup.

Along with Team Brotherly Love, Daniel Fine also decided to give back to the diabetes community by creating his company Dosed. Dosed is a smartphone app that tracks the insulin dosage taken by a Type 1 diabetic. According to the Dosed website “Dosed improves patient compliance by providing direct access to data that can facilitate behavioral modification.”

Sources:

http://www.getdosed.com/

http://www.danielfine.com/

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/11/business/smallbusiness/daniel-fine-of-glass-u-decides-that-the-degree-matters.html

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Categories : App, Business, Great Ideas, Millennial Enrepreneuers, Technology

Tags : Entrepreneurship