I
get motivated by technology startups that have proven to be mighty
and have grown to be multi-billion companies. And who is to thank for
the remarkable growth of the startups? The answer is their founders.
Here is my top 5 list of technology startups that motivate me
everytime I read about them.
Facebook
is a social networking site that was co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg
and a couple of his college roommates at Havard in 2004.
The other co-founders are; Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, Eduardo
Saverin and Andrew McCollum. It's
headquarters are the
former Sun Microsystems campus in Menlo
Park,
California.
Facebook
has had a steady growth since it's reception 9 years ago. In 2012,
Facebook user-base hit 1.15 billion users, as at March 2013. Due to
this fact, I must confess that Mark Zuckerberg is keeping the likes
of Sergey Brin and Larry Page awake! Indeed, Facebook is slowly
achieving its mission which is to ….
Facebook's
IPO
Facebook
filed their S1 document with the Securities
and Exchange Commission (SEC)
on February 1, 2012. The company filed for a US$5
billion initial
public offering (IPO),
making it one of the biggest in tech history and the biggest in
Internet history.
Facebook
valued its stock at $38 a share, pricing the company at $104 billion,
the largest valuation to date for a newly public company The IPO
raised $16 billion, making it the third largest in U.S. History.
The
shares began to be traded on May 18, and though the stock struggled
to stay above the IPO price for most of the day, it set a new record
for trading volume of an IPO, 460 million shares.
The
first day of trading was marred by numerous technical glitches that
prevented orders from going through. Only the aforementioned
technical glitches and artificial support from underwriters prevented
the stock price from falling below the IPO price on the first day of
trading.
Google
Inc. is an American multinational
corporation
specializing in Internet-related services and products. These include
search,
cloud
computing,
software
and
online
advertising
technologies.
Most of its profits are derived from Ad
Words.
Google
was founded by Larry
Page
and
Sergey
Brin
while
they were Ph.D.
students
at Stanford
University.
Together they own about 16 percent of its shares. They incorporated
Google as a privately held company on September 4, 1998. An initial
public offering
followed
on August 19, 2004. Its mission
statement
from
the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it
universally accessible and useful",
and
its unofficial slogan was "Don't
be evil".
In 2006 Google moved to headquarters in Mountain
View, California,
nicknamed the Googleplex.
Rapid
growth since incorporation has triggered a chain of products,
acquisitions
and
partnerships beyond Google's
core search engine.
It offers online productivity
software
including
email
(Gmail),
an office
suite (Google
Drive),
and social
networking (Google+).
Desktop
products
include applications for web browsing, organizing and eiting
photos,
and instant
messaging.
The company leads the development of the Android
mobile
operating
system
and
the browser-only Chrome
OS for
a netbook
known
as a Chromebook.
Google has moved increasingly into communications hardware: it
partners with major electronics manufacturers in production of its
high-endNexus
devices
and acquired Motorola
Mobility
in
May 2012.
In
2012, a fiber-optic infrastructure was installed in Kansas
City to
facilitate a Google
Fiber
broadband
service.
The
corporation has been estimated to run more than one million servers
in data centers around the world
and
to process over one billion search requests
and
about 24 petabytes
of
user-generated data each day. In December 2012 Alexa
listed
google.com as the most visited website in the world. Numerous Google
sites in other languages figure in the top one hundred, as do several
other Google-owned sites such as YouTube
and
Blogger.
Its
market dominance has led to criticism
over
issues including copyright,
censorship,
and privacy.
Twitter
is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables
users to send and read "tweets", which are text messages
limited to 140 characters. Registered users can read and post tweets
but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter
through the website interface, SMS, or mobile device app.
Twitter
was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and by July 2006, the site
was launched. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with
500 million registered users in 2012, who posted 340 million tweets
per day. The service also handled 1.6 billion search queries per day.
Twitter is now one of the ten most visited websites, and has been
described as "the SMS of the Internet."
Twitter
Inc. is based in San Francisco and has offices in New York City,
Boston, and San Antonio. Twitter, Inc.
Twitter
Leadership
As
chief executive officer, Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of
capital funding by the venture capitalists who backed the company. On
October 16, 2008, Williams took over the role of CEO, and Dorsey
became chairman of the board.
On
October 4, 2010, Williams announced that he was stepping down as CEO.
Dick Costolo, formerly Twitter's chief operating officer, became CEO.
According to a Twitter blog, dated October 4, 2010, Williams was to
stay with the company and "be completely focused on product
strategy."
According
to The New York Times, "Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Costolo forged a
close relationship" when Williams was away.\\,.e/ According to
PC Magazine, Williams was "no longer involved in the day-to-day
goings on at the company". He is focused on developing a new
startup, but he became a member of Twitter's board of directors, and
promised to "help in any way I can". Stone is still with
Twitter but is working with AOL as an "advisor on volunteer
efforts and philanthropy".
Dorsey
rejoined Twitter in March 2011, as executive chairman focusing on
product development. His time is split with Square (where he is CEO),
whose offices are within walking distance of Twitter's in San
Francisco.
In
September 2011, board members and investors Fred Wilson and Bijan
Sabet resigned from Twitter's Board of Directors.
In
October 2012, Twitter announced it had hired former Google executive
Matt Derella to become their new director of business agency
development.
