Archive for Technology – Page 5

Shreyansh Gupta- Youngest Entrepreneur in India

Shreyansh Gupta- Digital Marketing Expert

Shreyansh Gupta became an astonishing entrepreneur by the ripe age of 14 and growing up he loved the idea of being his own boss and running his own business, but he wasn’t sure of how to make that possible. He gained a strong motive to learn, and he sought information on social media, online promotions, and web design. He started his own blog post and website based on the knowledge he gained from personal research. From there, he saw a need in digital marketing and focused his studies there.

Soon enough, the digital marketing field expanded, and it became a need in the workforce. Often times, Shreynash saw that brands would prefer digital marketing over traditional marketing. He started DevelopXmedia and expanded his business both nationally and internationally. Shreyansh Gupta became a “digital marketing expert” along with the youngest entrepreneur in India at that time. He is an inspiration to young entrepreneurs all around, that no matter your age, if you see a need in the community, pursue it. During an interview Shreyansh gives very insightful advice to up and rising entrepreneurs, “don’t wait for anything to happen as it is only you who has the potential to create and change a life.” What he means by this is that, if you have an idea, don’t wait for someone else to make the change, be the change yourself. Don’t procrastinate your projects and innovations, “I would suggest starting today” he says.

Shreyansh is a prime example of having the correct mindset. He did not start his business for the sole purpose of money, he started it because of an interest he had. This interest fueled his motivation and success in his business. He had many setbacks on the way and he says that those setbacks are what helped him to push forward and learn from his failure. “Success will definitely knock on your doorstep if you work with honesty,” he encourages to stray away from shortcuts that lead to quick and unlasting success; trust the process and do it right, then you will succeed.

Shreyansh Gupta (itsshreyansh.com)

Digital Entrepreneur Shreyansh Gupta: One of the Youngest Social Media Marketers | 711web

Josh Feinsilber Founder of Gimkit

Josh Feinsilber was in high school when he first had the idea for Gimkit. He was brainstorming for a new high school project when he came across the quiz game Kahoot. He realized the concept had potential to be a powerful teaching tool, and with much work and the help of a few other students in his high school, he created Gimkit. Gimkit is a fun quiz learning application that lets teachers create different “kits” that they can use to help students learn and memorize information. Gimkit has proven to be a useful learning tool for many teachers, and it can raise student test scores by as much as 14 percent. Gimkit now has about three million users across 100 countries and in the year of 2019, Josh Feinsilber had a projected net worth of $400,000.

Josh graduated high school in 2019 but he still works as the founder of Gimkit as he is still passionate about helping students learn and teachers teach.

 

I find it very encouraging to see such entrepreneurial thinking at such a young age. I also love the idea of working to make high school more fun and interesting.

 

 

Guillermo Rauch: Making the Web Faster

Guillermo Raunch is the founder of Vercel, a hosting company for web applications. Raunch’s desire is to make the web faster and streamline development. These two features rarely intersect. Typically, complex technology and skills are required to make a fast website. Through Vercel, Raunch has eased this process. With only a couple of clicks, someone can deploy their site, make it globally available, and optimized.Loupe 2019: Guillermo Rauch on Merging Design and Developement - YouTube This idea of simplicity is very new and unique. Some companies find it concerning. Others, however, are embracing it. They see the benefit of letting another company maintain their infrastructure so they can focus on their business. Facebook, McDonald’s, The Washington Post, Uber, and Tripadvisor are examples of companies that work with Vercel. Raunch also wants to make the development process more collaborative. This can be seen in the Vercel dashboard, which allows teams to see what others are working on and view previews of the changes.

Vercel Company Profile: Valuation & Investors | PitchBookUnlike other companies, Raunch believes anyone should be able to host a site for free. As such, Vercel offers a free tier that allows customers to host unlimited sites within reasonable limits. Paid plans are based on the number of team members a company has. This pricing is perfect for big companies and startups alike. It is also competitive with other platforms. Many have moved their sites to Vercel because of this reason alone. Another attractive feature is Vercel’s global network, which allows customers to distribute their website across the world within seconds. This is a particularly interesting innovation. Before, companies had to choose a single location for their servers. Vercel’s technology allows for multiple locations, each being optimized, updated, and maintained automatically.

Rauch has had quite a journey, both as an entrepreneur and as a person. To learn English, he read software manuals. At age eleven, he taught himself web development and started remote contracting work. Most of Raunch’s success, however, derives from Vercel. With his leadership, he has been able to gain 15 investors and $163 million in funding.

Sources:


https://www.businessinsider.com/vercel-zeit-pitch-deck-21-million-accel-github-ceo-2020-4

https://www.gv.com/news/vercel-founder-guillermo-rauch/

Waffles and Dinges- Kraus

Thomas DeGeest was a worker for IBM for 12 years before he decided he was called to do something else. Thomas left his day job and started to pursue his dream job of owning his own business where he is now serving waffles to the streets of New York City. Originally, Thomas was from Belgium and moved to the states in 1997. Waffles and Dinges has now become such a huge hit in New York City, and Thomas has created over 100 jobs. The annual revenue for W&D is $5 million. The business is open 7 days a week and for at least 14 hours each day. Originally Thomas and his wife were thinking of moving to Brazil, where they thought they may be able to open up there business idea there. However, Thomas did not speak Portuguese and they ended up not moving to Brazil. Now the mission of the company is to not just make waffles, but to make it be the customers best part of their day. The waffle recipe is straight from Belgium and Thomas stated that he will never sell frozen waffles.

Originally the company was ran out of a mobile truck serving waffles. This became an issue due to the cost of maintaining the truck and the traffic is hard to maneuver through in New York City. This led Thomas to pivot and tow his business behind his car, and then led to buying actual stores for a home base. Thomas stated, “If you really want to run a food-truck business, realize your most important asset is your vehicle.” He goes further to explain how the truck is running 18 hours per day on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Thomas has grown such a successful business, and he his interviewed on CBS Magazines where he gives his input to other immigrants on how they can grow a successful business, using themes from the country of origin.

Let’s Talk Trash: Trashbots

After teaching at orphanages in India, two brothers, Rohit and Sidharth Srinivasan, noticed that the lack of educational resources available prevented children from learning the latest skills in technology.

Their solution? Trashbots, a company that takes an innovative approach to providing low-cost, effective tools to teach 21st-century computer science, robotics, math, and science to underprivileged children.

The Srinivasans designed Trashbots to work with open-source platforms, thus making the kits accessible to kids in rural and remote areas. Another advantage of the Trashbots platform is the scalability for children of all ages; kindergarteners can learn the basics of building without electronics, or older children can begin coding with “block programming” (synced with the Trashbots app) to program the robot to do anything (like dancing to music!)

A typical kit includes gears, pucks, axels, and starting “trash” (often rubber bands and popsicle sticks) as well as the Trashbots engine and USB cable. From there, Trashbots encourages young inventors to use anything from their local environment to add to the robot.

What further differentiates Trashbots’ kits is their ability to meet the needs of school districts, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, Trashbots began working with school districts to ship the kits directly to students’ homes.

The Srinivasans are revolutionizing the world of STEM, making coding and engineering available to children of all ages, regardless of background. With each kit, Trashbots takes one man’s trash and makes it another child’s treasure.

 

The Bridge to Success

Social media has been building bridges to new ways of innovation and entrepreneurship ever since it began. Those who have capitalized on it when it began, however, are the ones making all the money and gaining the most fame. Felix Kjellberg, or better known to some as “Pewdiepie,” created his youtube account only one year after the website was released. It wasn’t until 2011, though, that he began to post on what would become the largest account on the platform ever (owned by one person). He began by posting quite short and relatively boring videos on his account purely for the entertainment of his friends and himself. As time went on, more people began to find his account, subscribing to it, and Felix’s fanbase grew. Less than a year later he had surpassed the 1 million subscriber mark. He began to post more and more and only a year after that was at 10 million. It was safe to say that he was on the right track.

Pewdiepie began to create merch such as shirts, chairs, headsets, and eventually his own game on the app store. He was rapidly gaining fans and in the spring of 2019, the creator finally reached an astonishing 100 million followers, which meant that 1 in 15 people who used youtube was subscribed to his account. This may not seem like much, however, almost half of the country uses this platform. He is still creating to this day and after selling many products and featuring in other videos and ads, he has accumulated roughly a cool $45,000,000 from online interactions alone. Felix will forever be remembered in the industry of videomaking and for revolutionizing the world by his assistance in bridging the gap between the real and digital worlds of entrepreneurship.

Matthew Mullenweg, Founder of WordPress

Matt MullenwegMatthew Mullenweg is the founder of WordPress, a popular blogging and website platform used by one-third of the internet. Although WordPress is a free product, Mullenweg has still been able to create a thriving business. Mullenweg, being a blogger himself, saw a lack of free blogging platforms. He previously used b2/cafelog, which was free but outdated. Upon seeing this problem, the idea of WordPress was born. Mullenweg, alongside Mike Little, took the codebase of b2/cafelog and began the first version of WordPress in 2003. As other blogging platforms increased their pricing, consumers began looking for alternatives. Many flocked to WordPress because it was free and highly customizable. Once WordPress started to grow, Mullenweg added new features that would attract even more users. Examples include forums, moderation, spam prevention, and themes.

Although WordPress gained massive adoption, Mullenweg did not have a way to gain revenue. Eventually, he created Automattic: a for-profit company that now oversees WordPress. Automattic is a collection of different subsidiaries; however, their most prominent is a premium version of WordPress. They will host your blog, ensure it is secured, maintained, and fast. Automattic also owns various paid extensions for  WordPress. A big one is WooCommerce, which allows WordPress sites to have e-commerce capabilities. It is used by a variety of companies that wish to have an online storefront that is feature-rich and customizable. By introducing these innovations, Mullenweg began to attract companies from all industries to move their sites to WordPress.

Mullenweg has also been innovative in how he runs his business. For many years, he has chosen to operate remotely. Even with 1,747 employees, Automattic continues to be remote first. Mullenweg believes this strategy allows for better productivity and cultivation of talent. He has previously stated:

“It’s one of my life missions to have more companies be distributed. It’s good for the environment. It’s good for opportunity. It’s good for the economy.”

Clearly, Mullenweg has proven himself to be a capable entrepreneur that is able to adapt and innovate. His practice of running a remote business has inspired others to do the same, especially amid the recent pandemic.


Sources:

https://www.yourtechstory.com/2018/08/24/matt-mullenweg-founder-ceo-wordpress/

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/12/business/matt-mullenweg-automattic-corner-office.html

https://ma.tt/about/

Hang In There

The Oxford definition of an entrepreneur is “a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.” When you think of an entrepreneur a few things come to mind: businesses, start-ups, big companies, but many times a select category of entrepreneurs is looked over. The category that I am referring to is YouTube, specifically Logan Paul. Logan has been on the platform since October of 2013 and started on a slow and rocky journey. His account featured funny videos with his friends usually pranking other people and just posting whatever he felt like. Over time, however, his account began to grow, his business and name became more and more popular and he started to gain revenue. Over six billion views and 23.2 million subscribers later he has become one of the biggest names in the YouTube industry.

Logan has started his brand “Maverick Enterprise” as his clothing line symbolizing strength and passion. His goal now is to turn it into a full-on fashion brand. This is not his only source of income though, as he has started his own podcast “Impaulsive” featuring many famous guests. He also has taken up boxing and has fought some big names, such as KSI (twice) and Floyd Mayweather. Logan’s persistence and dedication have taken him so far. He hasn’t stopped yet though, and the future is bright for the young man. He should be a reminder to all of us that even though the trials and pains we face, we just need to hang in there.

Carl Pei: Creator of Revolutionary Tech Brands

OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei confirms he has left the company | TechCrunch

Carl Pei

Carl Pei co-founded Oneplus, a young cell phone company driven by their slogan: “Never settle.” Although the idea of the smartphone is nothing new, Pei innovated by creating an enthusiast brand. He focused greatly on pricing and quality. Essentially, Pei removed the middleman and used his own e-commerce platform. Another innovation Pei pursued was investing capital into his product instead of marketing. In a Business Insider interview, he explained:

It’s more genuine and efficient to make a good product and have your customers spread the word instead of spending on banners and TV ads. That’s what we’ve always bet on.

OnePlus 1 - Technical Specification - OnePlus (United States)

The first Oneplus phone

Through these strategies, Oneplus has been able to offer premium phones affordable for most people. In addition to accessibility, Pei is driven by community, design, and feedback.  These ideals made his customers feel valued. Oneplus, as a result, grew exponentially. In one year of its first product, the company sold almost 1 million units. Popularity was so high that customers were competing for inventory.

Although Pei gained early success, massive adoption for Oneplus was difficult. The brand primarily attracted technology enthusiasts, offered a single product, and faced a competitive industry. Eventually, Pei pivoted by expanding Oneplus’s offerings. They now provide different tiers of phones, earbuds, and smartwatches. This change, however, caused many to believe Oneplus is more motivated by money than their community.

As of October 2020, Pei left Oneplus to start a new company called NOTHING. NOTHING is similar to Oneplus in that it is branded for enthusiasts. They also seem to care more about their customers than revenue, at least for now. Their only product is a pair of wireless earbuds. Unlike competitors, NOTHING has implemented noise cancellation and 34 hours of battery life for only $99. Support for Pei’s new venture has also been strong, even though he has done little marketing.

Pei’s entrepreneurial story shows how innovation can take many shapes and forms. Although he did not invent the smartphone or wireless earbuds, his products are unique in that they took a different approach. This shows how an entrepreneur can be innovative through their process, application, and action.

 


Sources:

https://www.businessinsider.com/a-28-year-old-dropout-has-allegedly-made-the-worlds-best-smartphone-2018-8

https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/06/nothing-founder-carl-pei-on-ear-1-and-building-a-hardware-startup-from-scratch/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EOAEWC9hJ4

Jacob Landis-Eigsti- Jacob LE Video Production

Jacob Landis-Eigsti is the founder of Jacob LE Video Production which helps companies gain new marketing and video production clients. He has run his own business for 10 years now and is very successful. Jacob says he started this business because he saw many businesses struggling to tell their story and connect with others online. He wanted to use his marketing and video production skills to help other businesses.

Jacob’s business is very innovative because he uses the internet to communicate with people on how to grow their business through video. I found it unique that his goal is to teach people how to market their businesses better, instead of only trying to make his business the best. He is very selfless in this sense.

Jacob says he starts off each day by making a to-do list with three things he wants to get accomplished for the day. He also turns his phone off for 90-minute blocks in order to get tasks done without getting distracted. Techniques like these demonstrate a focused business person. He also said a success strategy of his is to always follow up with a client or business partner you’ve been talking to. This allows for closure or further conversation with peers.

Facebook, Instagram, and online video advertising are some of the things Jacob focuses on helping people with in his business. We are becoming more and more dependent on social media every day, so I think it was very innovative of Jacob to incorporate this into his business. If people are unsure how to market themselves online, it could be the downfall to their business. Jacob LE Video Production is an easy solution to help small/medium businesses with these advertising techniques.

Being a marketing major, Jacob Landis-Eigsti specifically inspires me to grow in my marketing knowledge so that I can eventually help people in the way that he does. In an interview with Carlyn Runnels he states, “Also, learn business skills first as an entrepreneur. It’s important to be good at your craft, but business skills and sales skills are incredibly important.” This inspires me to learn the basic business skills first, because this will set the foundation for being able to help people with all kinds of businesses, like Jacob does.

Below is a series of blog posts Jacob has posted on a site called Medium in order to assist with marketing, social media and video strategies.

Jacob Landis-Eigsti – Medium

 

Sources:

Jacob Landis-Eigsti (ideamensch.com)

Jacob Landis-Eigsti – Medium