Quan Zhou

Case Study – Blogger.com

                        Evan William is an American entrepreneur and was the cofounder of Pyra Labs in 1999 and developed Blogger to manage his personal weblog and it quickly became an important mechanism for sharing ideas internally at Pyra. It is one of the first web applications for creating and managing blogs.

                        Good thing about Williams was he had never worked anywhere, he was just totally self-taught about his ideas and that was really amazing about him and he founded this booming company Blogger.com. He always been very entrepreneurial and started a couple of other companies. He was a dropped out student because he believes that he didn’t need to have a degree to go try to get a good job. His stressful moment while building his company was when his site has been hacked on Christmas Day and didn’t find it out yet because he was out of town. But he had already solved it by the rest of his holiday vacation. He always thinks about quitting but it didn’t happen because he always dreams about having his own company and he was almost on the top in the industry.

                        These are some advices that I got from Williams, never get influenced by the negative feedbacks around you because it will pull you down, we have to have the strength to ignore it sometimes. Always try new things because there’s no way to know if it’s good or bad until you roll with it.

Case Study – Lotus Development

            Mitchell David Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer application" often credited with making the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s. He is known as an entrepreneur, investor, social activist, and philanthropist.

Lotus' first product was presentation software for the Apple II known as Lotus Executive Briefing System. Mitch founded Lotus after working as head of development at VisiCorp and selling the rights to his products; VisiPlot and VisiTrend to VisiCorp.

Today Kapor's world has again contracted inward, possibly to reserve his creative energies for yet another venture. Whatever the reason, his contributions to the fields of computing and technology have been written in indelible ink. His life, to date, has been an unusually effective combination of psychology, entrepreneurial spirit, vision, timing, and genuine empathy for human beings and their connection to technology.

Case Study - Groove Networks

                        Many people would like to put up a business on their own but couldn’t find a better funding. One of these people is Ray Ozzie from the University of Illinois, he wanted to form a start up and it worked when Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs invested in Ozzie’s idea which is the Lotus Notes and it became the first widely used collaboration software.

                        Groove Networks was also founded in 1997 by Ray Ozzie, the creator of IBM's Lotus Notes application, the privately held company specialized in productivity software that allows multiple users to work collaboratively on computer files simultaneously. It was first managed by him, his brother Jack and his friends Eric Patey and Brian Lambert. After a couple of months, another former Iris engineer Ken Moore joined his team and it is getting bigger at that time. The first thing they coded was a primitive version of their synchronization algorithm. Of course, frustration is always on the way while doing a business, it is when their customers tried to deploy systems across enterprises. Because of this, they came up into a conclusion that what they really needed was to build a system that just worked instantly.

                        These are the lessons that I’ve learned from Ozzie, we have to hire people who are willing to believe in something they are trying to accomplish and never do it because you are compensated, it should be a mission that you must do and it should be about changing the world. Because the more you focus on the things that matter when you are talking to people, they will believe in you and it will be a sustainable thing. A good leadership is very important for starting up a company. And always learn to respect and appreciate everyone’s skills, because it may be helpful when you needed them to your company.