Nothing beats a good origin story! If you’re a Startup Founder or contemplating taking the leap of faith and becoming one, I’ve gathered together some inspirational short stories that will make you smile, laugh and think.
Daphne Koller – Co-Founder at Coursera
The Spark
In 2012, Koller and Andrew Ng, both Computer Science professors at Stanford, had spearheaded an effort to offer three Stanford computer science courses for free online. The classes were interactive, with short video lectures, discussion forums, quizzes, and homework assignments that were graded by other students using a rubric provided by professors. Even though students didn’t earn academic credit for it, the courses were a hit. “With no marketing, each of those courses had more than 100,000 learners,” Koller says. “It was a wake-up call about the demand for this type of education around the world.”
In the space of a few months, she and Ng persuaded the universities of Princeton, Penn and Michigan to sign on. They wanted to leverage not only the best that Stanford had to offer, but the offerings from other colleges as well. Though Coursera had no monetisation plan, investors jumped on board.
This was because they felt Coursera had the right ingredients to be successful. “Higher education costs too much, and it’s not available to enough people”, says John Doerr, a lead investor at the time. Doerr recommended Koller and Ng consult with Rick Levin, an economist who had served as the president of Yale for 20 years. In 2014, Levin joined as CEO, after which Coursera began charging $30 to $70 to students who wanted course completion certificates. This was when they started making revenue.
Battering Through
In 2012, MOOCs were all the rage, which saw Coursera’s popularity surge with it. But a couple of years later, the narrative had completely shifted due to the seemingly low course engagement and completion rates. The Coursera team ignored the chatter. When Levin turned the company over to incoming CEO Jeff Maggioncalda, it was on an upswing. Its enterprise business was taking off, and it had tripled its revenue that year.
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Ben Silbermann – Co-Founder and CEO at Pinterest
The Background
Coming from a family of doctors, Ben Silbermann was on track to become one himself at Yale, until he realised it wasn’t his calling. Silbermann would then go on to work in financial consulting at CEB and later in customer support at Google over the next 5 years, before finally quitting his job at Google to startup with his college-mate Paul Sciarra. Together, Silbermann and Sciarra built Tote – an app for online shopping.
After it flopped, they decided to pivot to Pinterest, a platform for ‘collecting things’ – something that Ben Silbermann had held a passion for since childhood. The app was to provide a platform to showcase photo collections. Soon after, Silbermann met Evan Sharp, a talented architect and thus their team grew to 3. “It was like he was the only who understands what [I] was saying”, Silbermann said of the time when he met his third co-founder. Sharp created the iconic ‘Grid’ layout that has become synonymous with the app ever since.
The Long Road
Growth began slowly, and Ben Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users. After 9 months, they still had less than 10,000 users – but slow and steady growth, and belief in their product kept them going. They focused on the small group of fanatical users they had accumulated, and built around them – also gaining popularity for their ‘fan meetups’. “That was the moment where I was like, ‘We’ve got it.'” Silbermann says, after the first meetup. Eventually, Pinterest got some traction and that’s when the tech blogs started paying attention. Their iPhone app, launched in 2011, did surprisingly well, and got more downloads than anticipated. They’ve gone from strength to strength ever since.
Fred Smith – Federal Express (FEDEX)
Fred Smith was an undergraduate at Yale University in 1965. As part of the coursework, he wrote an economics paper exploring the process of transportation of goods in the United States. He found that the shippers relied on transporting large packages across the United States by means of trucks or passenger airplanes. Smith thought of a more efficient transportation idea. He wrote a last-minute paper on how a company carrying small, essential items by plane could be a much better business. He, however, did not go into details about how to actually run such a company. His paper was graded “C”. But Smith did not give up on the idea and launched the company in 1971.
But within three years of the founding of the company, Federal Express was on the verge of bankruptcy. It was losing over $1 million a month, due to the rising fuel costs. At its zenith, the company had just $5000 to its name. Smith made a final pitch to General Dynamics for more funding. The request was turned down.
Most ordinary people would have quit at this point and shut down the company. Not Fred Smith. What he did next is easily the boldest move by the founder of a company. Smith flew to Las Vegas and played Black Jack that weekend with the remaining company funds. Yes, all of the $5000. On Monday, the management of the company had a pleasant surprise lined up. FedEx had $32,000 in its bank account, which was just enough to cover the fuel for their planes and to continue operating for a few days more.
Soon after, the company was able to raise significant amounts of funding. Today FedEx is a global giant with operations in more than 220 countries and territories and an annual revenue of US $45 billion.
Read more at: https://yourstory.com/2014/03/inspiring-stories
Ferrucio Lamborghini – Lamborghini
Ferrucio was originally a farmer who made tractors. His business was very successful and he was among the most wealthy in Italy. He owned Ferrari among other supercars. The Ferrari used to give him constant trouble. Being a mechanic, he tried to fix the problem and found out that his Ferrari had the same clutch as used in one of his tractors.
“All my Ferraris had clutch problems. When you drove normally, everything was fine. But when you were going hard, the clutch would slip under acceleration; it just wasn’t up to the job.”
Ferrucio went to the service guys regularly to have a clutch rebuilt or renewed, and every time, the car was taken away for several hours and he was not allowed to watch it being repaired. The problem with the clutch was never cured, so Ferrucio decided to talk to Enzo Ferrari. He had to wait for him for a very long time.
‘Ferrari, your cars are rubbish!’ Ferrucio complained. Il Commendatore was furious. “Lamborghini, you may be able to drive a tractor but you will never be able to handle a Ferrari Properly.’ This was the point when he finally decided to make a perfect car. Yes, Lamborghini.
Read more at: https://yourstory.com/2014/03/inspiring-stories
Jay Winder built the only company in Japan backed by Angel list.
Life is good for Jay Winder in 2015. His second company – a fintech firm called MakeLeaps – is integrated with Evernote, serves prominent Japanese clients like Rakuten and Voyage Group, and is on track to becoming profitable. He is a familiar face in Tokyo’s startup scene, where his natural friendliness and fluent Japanese wins him plenty of fans. He is even entering the year with some nice momentum, only a few months removed from a US$750,000 funding round that included AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and 500 Startups founder Dave McClure. The signs are all pointing up, but journey did not happen overnight. For Winder, it has been a story 13 years in the making.
Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar started Atlassian with $7,000.00 withdrawn from a credit card in 2002, while still at University.
“We built the first version of our product while working in the garage before we even had our first office,” admits Farquhar.
The pair were 22 years old at the time and their mission was to earn the equivalent of their friends who were working for major consulting firms. Fast forward to 2022 and the Australian tech giant has a market cap of more than US$100 billion.
With a focus on building a portfolio of reputable and affordable products that could sell themselves, their budget for marketing and sales is less than 20 per cent.
Today, Atlassian’s customer base includes Microsoft, Oracle, Toyota, Amazon and Shell, enabling these businesses to manage tasks, collaborate and track bugs.
You don’t need an MBA from a top business school or a lot of experience or money to start a company that can eventually become a market leader, and be worth billions of dollars.
Success never happens “overnight”.
Startups are a Marathon, not a sprint.
You need grit and determination, i.e. the kind of mental toughness and resilience that few people ever have.
James Spurway is an Angel Investor, Advisor, Mentor, Speaker, former Commercial Pilot, and Author specializing in raising debt and equity funds for pre-seed or early-stage seed rounds for Startups in the Fintech, DeepTech, AgTech, ClimateTech, and AgeTech verticles. He lives in Singapore and has spent the past 30 years living and building businesses in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Germany, Switzerland, Monaco, the USA, Thailand, the Philippines, and Australia, where he was born.
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