Startup Success Stories

 

Abstract

We are all social creatures always looking for fantasy in real life to trigger our thought process and seek inspiration from them. On a daily basis we come across a lot of strangers but we seek inspiration from only a few of them, and what sets them apart is the stories that they have to tell. Even as a child, we grow up listening to stories of how a hero comes to the rescue of his people and his family, we find solace in such stories. Studies have also found that such inspirational stories have a positive effect on our brains and helps us become more emphatic, generous and improve our overall outlook on life.

Facebook

A 19-year-old lad and a second-year Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg launched an internal social networking site for Harvard students. Soon after the site got popular among students, it expanded its reach to other universities. In 2004, the site moved its operations base to Palo Alto, California and received its first investment from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.

WhatsApp

Jan Koum and Brian Acton, two friends and colleagues from Yahoo were frustrated with the idea of having so many advertisements on any page. In 2007, both left Yahoo and took a year to decompress. Both applied, and failed, to work at Facebook.

After a lot of ups and downs they launched WhatsApp in 2009, with a clear purpose that their service would definitely not carry any advertising and would maintain a relentless focus on delivering a gimmickless, reliable, friction-free user experience.

Twitter

Twitter’s origins lie in a day long brainstorming session held by board members of the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, then an undergraduate student at New York University, introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group.

Uber

After a conference in Paris, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp were complaining about the many crappy things we all have to deal with in life, including finding a cab. The next thing you know, the two were already brainstorming, thinking about ways to find cars at the right place, at the right time.

Snapchat

Evan Spiegel, Reggie Brown, and Bobby Murphy, three friends from college were testing out their entrepreneurial skills. During a casual chat Reggie said, “I wish these photos I am sending this girl would disappear.”  Soon after, Evan referred to as a ‘million dollar idea.’ They worked on the app and launched in the name of Picaboo. But later after a clash between with Reggie, Evan and Bobby asked him to leave and changed the name to Snapchat.

Linkedin

In late 2002, Reid Hoffman recruited a team of old colleagues from SocialNet and PayPal to work on a new idea. By May 2003, Reid launched LinkedIn out of his living room, inviting 350 of his contacts to join his network and create their own profiles. The business started with a slow growth at first—as few as 20 signups on some days—but, by the fall, it showed enough promise to attract an investment from Sequoia Capital.

Pinterest

Raised by doctor parents, Ben Silbermann assumed he would follow the same path. He attended Yale University starting in 1999 and soon realized that he didn’t want to be doctor. After a consulting gig in Washington DC, working for Google, and a failed app, he came up with the another idea.

In 2009, Ben and a college friend, Paul Sciarra, along with Evan Sharp, started working on a site on which people could show collections of things they were interested in, on an interactive pin-board format.

Ben personally wrote to the site’s first 7,000 users offering his personal phone number and even meeting with some of its users. Over Thanksgiving dinner, Ben’s girlfriend thought of a name for it: Pinterest.

Instagram

This is a story of two guys who made an app in flat 8 weeks. Kevin Systrom, a Stanford graduate who worked on Google’s Gmail and corporate development, spent his weekends building an app that allowed location-aware photo and note-sharing, dubbing it Burbn.

That’s how Kevin met Mike Krieger, an early Burbn user and Instagram’s co-founder. Later, Burbn was reduced to photos only and dubbed named Instagram.

AirBnB

This is a story of 3 guys and how they went from renting mattresses to a $10 billion company. In 2007, designers Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, couldn’t afford the rent on their San Francisco apartment.

There was a design conference coming to San Francisco and the city’s hotels were fully booked, so they came up with the idea of renting out three airbeds on their living-room floor and cooking their guests breakfast.

They set up a simple blog and got three renters (two guys, one girl) for $80 each.

After a small success and product market fit, they enlisted a former flatmate and a computer science graduate, Nathan Blecharczyk, to develop the website and join the venture.

tesla

The company was founded in 2003 by two Silicon Valley engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, who, according to the company website, “wanted to prove that electric cars could be better than gasoline-powered cars.”

The seeds of the company go back to 1990 when Tarpenning met Eberhard, then an engineer at Wyse Technology, and they became good friends. The two had much in common including a passion for starting companies, and they soon launched companies including NuvoMedia, which released the Rocket eBook in 1998. A passion for autos started soon after Eberhard went through a divorce and decided to buy a sports car. He invested in a company and boutique electric auto maker called AC Propulsion, and wondered if this was a market he could get into.

In 2001 Eberhard and Tarpenning met Musk when they heard him speak at a Mars Society talk at Stanford University and introduced themselves. Musk came with a successful history of starting up companies. He along with Peter Thiel and Max Levchin were co-founders of PayPal. After making a fortune from his shares in PayPal after the company was sold to eBay in 2002, he launched another company Space X, which designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft

A few years later their paths would cross again when Eberhard and Tarpenning asked to meet Musk to share their idea of the electric car with him. The three met to discuss the idea with Musk on board. 

Tesla was officially incorporated in 2003 with the goal of inventing an electric car that was powerful and beautiful with zero emissions. Other co-founders were JB Straubel who is still the CTO at Tesla and Ian Wright who left Tesla in 2004 and founded another company Wrightspeed.

In 2004 the company’s co-founders went through initial rounds of investing with venture capital firms. Musk, a co-founder of PayPal, came into the picture a year later when he led the initial round of funding for the company, and joined as the head of the board of directors.

alibaba

Jack Ma is the founder of the E-commerce giant Alibaba and is a stakeholder at Alipay, it’s sister company which is an e-payment portal. He is now officially the richest man in China with an estimated net worth of $25 Billion, on the back of the recent world record $150 Billion IPO filing of his company. Given all of this, Jack Ma only holds a 7.8% stake in Alibaba and a 50% stake in Alipay. Alibaba and Jack Ma, although are not household names out of China, you must know that Alibaba is worth more than Facebook, and processes goods more than eBay and Amazon combined!

This might be beginning to seem like the story of an arrogant and rich billionaire who hasn’t seen the dark. But don’t be mistaken by the numbers that you see above, they can fool anyone. Although as simple as it may sound, Jack Ma has had it hard in his life to get to where he is today. A true rags-to-riches story and definitely a one which will inspire you even in your darkest days.