When you hear this name “ Samsung”, I guess most of the people think about cell phones and that too typically the Samsung Galaxy. Even right now, you must  be reading this article on Samsung Galaxy. They have been selling hundreds of millions of those cell phones more than any other company. But little do you know that Samsung is not just about the smartphones or should I say, Samsung is more than just you know.

Samsung electronics has been consistently ranked by the Fortune as the one of the largest companies in the world. Their sales have been more than $200 billion each year. You can see Samsung LEDs in most of the houses in your neighborhood or in your house as well. They’re from South Korea and for their entire country, their GDP is like about $1.6 trillion meaning that this only company accounts an eighth of that. Not only South Korea is ahead in electronics field but their dramas and songs (K-pop) always remain popular. This country is ahead of many country in so many areas. Samsung electronics is just a small part of whole Samsung group.  After combining all, they hold responsible for atmost 20% of Korea’s GDP.  Samsung started in the year 1938 before the electronics branch started. It was all started by Lee Byung- Chul. He was 28 years old back then and their official logo featured three stars which actually depicted the longevity of the business. The Korean war made things more

difficult but when it ended in 1953, he took advantage of the opportunity and expanded into all of these other industries. First, it was commodities when he built a sugar refinery that happened to be the first of its kind that was

built in the country after the war. Following that was textiles when he opened the largest woolen mill in the country, after that it was insurance a tv station and a department store for these first 30 years. They seemed to be involved in everything

except electronics. They were already generating over 100 million dollars in annual revenue before what became Samsung electronics company. Samsung became so successful so fast because of Chaebol  that is a Korean word that is defined as a family controlled industrial conglomerate in South Korea.

Samsung fits that definition perfectly because they are the biggest in their kind. Following the Korean war, the country’s economy was in some trouble that they weren’t producing much and they definitely weren’t exporting much then in 1963. There was this new president named Park Chung-hee who was very set on expanding this economy.

His main method of doing it was to try to centralize everything. He essentially wanted to take the bigger businesses and help make them bigger. The idea is simple enough if the companies grow so does their economy.

Now Samsung already being one of these larger businesses was tremendously helped by this intervention. The Korean government would help Samsung, they would be providing them loans under favourable terms and by giving them special tax breaks.

The market pushed the consumers towards Samsung.

Later in that decade, when they started making semiconductors, the Korean government said that they would only allow International companies to enter their market only if they handed over some of their technology secrets to Samsung.

The methods were successful in growing Samsung and the Korean economy in general but it may not have been the best way to do it.

The country is now very reliant on one company. Not only in electronics, Samsung has produced washing machines, vehicles and has sold life insurance as well.

Samsung is not just about phones but it holds big parts in different areas !!

TikTok is the app which made a chaos in the world with  its features and popularity. Almost every corner of the world has some people who either make TikTok videos or watch them.

But there are countries like India and Indonesia that applied the censorship on this app due to its negative effect on the young generation and Spreading the misleading information out there in the world.

What were the reasons behind this app and what made this app super famous?

In 2014, two friends, Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang had the idea of making an educational app. They wanted to make a short video app through which people would learn more about the educational topics in short period of time.

They thought that there was this need of that idea and had the funding of $2.5 Lakh. They created that product but they failed in the market as the educational content was not sufficient to absorb and understand that quickly.

They learnt from these mistakes and decided to go for some other ideas. They observed that the younger generation at that time was indulged in the taking selfies and having cameras on all the time. They got the idea of creating a social platform which would be the combination of video, music and photos after observing in the market. They focused more on the duration of the video that the video should be at least of 15 seconds and more. With these ideas and the old experiences, they launched the app named “ Musical.ly”. It was getting the responses but it did not turn out to be a trend.

They had the feature of lip-syncing and they saw potential in this feature. They started to promote their app through this feature and it turned out to be a trend. This app has always been in top apps in the iTunes

People already had Instagram, snapchat and Facebook, they needed  something new now. So, the creators decided to come up with a platform consisting all these features.  Musical.ly had an overwhelming response. In 2017, Chinese company ByteDance bought that company in 1 billion dollars. There are in-app purchases in the app through which it generates the revenue. Through funding as well, this app reached the revenue of 75 billion dollars. Also, Musical.ly turned into the Tik-Tok in 2018.

This app has been growing and creating controversies ever since then. Even when everything has turned online, this app did not get affected much but despite it grew more bigger.

Pepsi, the name that we often hear when our throat gets dry and we need something other than water. But this name is bigger than what we think of.

Their products are sold in over 200 countries and territories. The company that sells over 1 billion dollars over a year would be very big, right?

Pepsico is the owner of 23 separate brands that all exceed that figure in addition to numerous offers. It all combines to over $70  billion in revenue.  They have been consistently placed in the Fortune top 500 list which means they are one of the biggest companies out there in the market.

They sold their first time under the name “Pepsi”. It was initially made by the pharmacist “Caleb Doc Bradham” who created the original Pepsi. Coca- Cola was somewhat popular back then so he created something similar to that demand. He first named the drink as “Brad’s Drink” but later on he changed it to “Pepsi-Cola”. Afterwards, he started his business of it quite similar in the terms of Coca-Cola.

He would sell the formula to the soda stores to add soda to it and then sell it to customers. Once, this business started gaining the momentum then he closed his idea of selling the formula rather than that he started to make syrup for his own company.By 1910s, he built up a company for colas  of a very good size. During the world war, fearing that the price of sugar would go high, he spent a lot of his money on the sugar. Unfortunately, instead of increment in the price, the price went down which was quite shocking for me.

He after that returned to his original career of being the pharmacist. Pepsi went through two bankruptcy with the two owners of that product which means only third owner of the Pepsi was successful to make Pepsi to what it is right now!

The third owner of the brand was Charlie Guth. He actually was selling Coca-Cola which he stopped and started selling Pepsi-Cola. He decided to increase the quantity with having the same price. So, now Pepsi-Cola was coming more than Coca-Cola at the same price which was a great move to boost up their sales.

In 1977, the Pepsico bought Pizza Hut then in 1986, they bought Kentucky Fried chicken for about  850 million dollars meaning they were the owners of three top brands of Fast food including Taco Bell in 1978. It shows that Pepsico is not aiming to have the ownership of only Pepsi but other top brands as well.

Everything they owned were surely selling the Pepsi with their own original product. So, you could say that it was one of their marketing strategy as well.

Now, with this we can conclude that Pepsico is not all about Pepsi but other things as well. Pepsico is surely a bigger company than Coca-cola as in the recent years, it had $64 billion in revenue that is almost twice as Coca-Cola.

It’s unpredictable to judge its further future growth but there’s no doubt that it has been growing itself like crazy!!

Well, I think there is no one out there who is working but not heard the name of Zoom. From students to office workers, it has become a common virtual workplace. Who could have thought that such a world would be contracted to a small screen and to a small video meeting platform. Almost every big company has its own video meeting platform, be it google or Microsoft. But the growth that Zoom has shown in the recent years is really remarkable and incredible.

What makes them so special to rule over this industry??

Growth in the market:

When there are new customers out there then they don’t need to worry for the growth. When the online market was increasing its expand then new customers will be more too.

The company started in April,2011. Initially, it called to be Saasbee. They soon changed it into Zoom Communications. And then ultimately to Zoom Video Communications. It has been released before Apple launched their face time app and Microsoft decided to buy Skype for $8.5 billion. Zoom has been growing so much especially during this social distancing thing.

People using this app have increased so much in the number.

Easy to learn and use:

If you have used other video meeting apps, then you would be able to compare Zoom to them. It’s quite obvious how Zoom is more convenient to use than other apps. It is easy to learn and has more features. The closest substitute that it has is probably Google Meet but still ZOOM will be ZOOM.

It’s stock price has also increased from June 2020 that was $68 to over $200 till this date. It is unclear whether it would stay at this height or not.

Zoom came from the vision of a man named “Eric Yuan”. He is the perfect leader and has been the CEO of the company ever since.

He is originally from China. He had this idea when he was in the college and wanted to meet his wife. But he had to take 10 hour long train to get to meet her. He despised that idea and started to think whether there could be a better way out there. He wanted to work in the Silicon Valley after keeping that thought in his mind. Though he was denied for the American VISA for about 9 times but he still did not give up. Eventually, he got the VISA and found the job of software developer despite not being influent in English. He worked at a small company called WEBEX. They soon become known for their communication services.

Cisco acquired Webex for more than $3 billion. Eric Yuan became the vice president of the communication services department then. He quitted his job after the company started to ignore that department. He decided to make his own company which would be customer-oriented company. This is the another trait of Zoom that it has been providing the customer oriented services.

With the success of the company, Eric Yuan has become one of the richest persons out there with network in billion dollars. Eric Yuan identified a growing market and applied his passion and experience into creating a customer oriented highly accessible service because of that they’ve been able to attract investors and steadily grow into a multi-billion dollar industry leader and then on top of that in 2020 when the demand reached unexpectedly high levels they were in a position to take advantage of it. Zoom has been growing at an unexpected rate since then.   !!

Marvel cinematic series is the most successful series that have been ever made. The Endgame was the highest grossing movie of all the times. The critiques and the audience both like them.

It has experienced both rise and fall to reach to the place where Marvel is standing now.

It is the time of 1930s when the comics were used to be very popular before Marvel ever existed. In 1938, action comics number 1 was published exposing the world to the superman with the cliché superman suit consisting red and blue colours in it.

It was a huge financial success as people start looking at comic books with a huge business potential. Martin Goodman who was involved in publishing business. A company named Funnies Inc. which had the talented artists and writers working on the comic books approached Goodman for the publishing and the marketing purposes. Goodman saw potential in the comic industry , so he agreed to this proposal.

The first comic book that got published under that agreement was none other than Marvel Number 1. This comic was such a success that made Goodman to be motivated enough to make a company fully devoted to comics that was called “Timely Productions”.

The rise of the Marvel can be seen when the productions made the comic targeting world war 2. The comic was called “ Captain America” where on the cover he was punching Adolf Hitler right on the face.

Nevertheless, It was hilarious to see Captain America punching him tho..

This comic was published months before the phase where U.S. entered in the war. This content intrigued the older generation, even the people from the military was reading that comic..

The war was huge contributor to the success of this company  and to the comic books as well. Their first fall happened when the war ended and people took no longer interest in the superheroes they introduced. Eventually, the sales went down.

In 1961, Stan Lee who was working in the company since his teens created “The Fantastic Four”. It marked the beginning of the first era for the company and shaped the marvel to what we know them as today.

The characters that he designed were not flawless at all, they were quite relatable. All the characters like Spider man and Incredible Hulk made the marvel universe. These characters were standing under the marvel name.

In 2009, Marvel was acquired by Disney for around $4 billion for both cash and stock. The motivation  behind this acquisition was to buy all of their characters and rights to make movies. In 2005, Marvel studios was made to make the profits and to have all the characters together on a single floor. Since then, they have been creating movies which attracted loads of audience from all around the world that would go crazy over the characters named Iron Man, Thor and Black Widow etc..

Walt Disney, a name that would forever be in the history, was born on 5 Dec., 1991 in Chicago. He was a very creative child and he started selling his creative paintings to his neighbors. He started his company name Laugh-O-Gram which went bankrupt later during Alice Wonderland project. He went through a lot of hard-work. Disneyland started on 17 July, 1955.  

Not only we have spent our childhood while watching the movies made by Disney but we have been spending our current time while watching the movies made by Disney which are making everyone crazy all over the world.

Have you heard of the name of the movies like Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity war?

Of course, you would have, after all who doesn’t?

These movies are made by the Disney itself. They have a very higher market share in comparison to other studio. Disney has been growing like crazy over the past few years. In the recent years, Disney’s revenue has grown so much. In 1993, they bought up like$8.5 billion and in 2020, it went up to $65 billion.

Isn’t it amazing?

Disney is 8.5 times bigger than they were 25 years before. A big part of their growth can be assumed from their strategic acquisitions. One of them was of $71 billion acquisition involving Fox’s assets that was finalized in March, 2019.

In 1993, Disney bought Miramax, a movie company, for $60 million and really turned them into something. After running it for 17 years, they decided to sell in 2010. They ended up selling it for 660 million dollars.

In 1995, Disney spent $19 billion for Capital Cities. Capital cities had bought the TV network called ABC who was already the owner of ESPN. In 2001, Disney acquired Fox Family for about $2.9 billion. They quickly renamed it as ABC Family. In 2004, they bought Pixar for $7.4 billion, at that point Pixar had yet to create anything that could blow up the audience’s mind. In 2009, they bought Marvel for $4 billion and this acquisition is being continued to talk about the people. But before the acquisition, Marvel already sold a lot of character like Spider-man but Disney did get some good ones. In February 2015, Disney, Marvel Studios, and Sony made a deal to share the Spider-Man film rights. In 2012, Disney paid $4 billion dollars to buy Lucasfilm which is the owner of the Star Wars franchise.

Disney will continue to be dominant in the movie and streaming industry and would provide us with some marvellous movies in upcoming years.

I couldn’t even tell you how much time I’ve spent watching Netflix.

Today everyone thinks of it as a video streaming service but I’m sure many of you remember that they actually started out by renting DVDs.

There were two people who started Netflix together, they were Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings. Before founding Netflix, they were working in the software industry in the Silicon valley.

In 1991, Reed Hastings was the co-founder and the partial owner of a company named pure software. Within five years, that same company became so big which made it involved in a near billion dollar merger to a company named Atria that further made a new company called Pure Atria.

Soon after that, they acquired a small start-up with only nine people in it and Mark Randolph was one of those people. He became the Head of the Marketing where he soon started working with Reed.

They became quite good friends as they used to live close together. After one year of that big merger, Rational software acquired Pure Atria. This transition led them to leave the company for the better. They had the money, experience and the time to think of a new business. They used to research on ideas for their new business in the big portion of the day.

They knew that internet community was growing at an excessive limit and will continue to grow in the future as well but they didn’t know what products to sell.

They were gravitated towards the ideas of movies but then they extract the exact potential of DVDs. For them, DVDs could bring them a profitable business. DVDs were released in early 1997 in United States and these two started testing them immediately.

They test these with CDs and the test went well. In April of 1998, they started NETFLIX. It is a startling fact that if DVDs would not have been released at that exact moment then Netflix was most likely would never been existed. So, starting of something can lead to the generation of something more marvellous phenomenon and only a starting push is required to do so.

When the service first started, they offered DVDs for a 7 days rental period. They procured more money by selling them rather than renting them.

In 1999, they completely stopped selling movies and it was kind of a bold move to cut off their main source of the revenue. For that year, their sales accounted for only 3%. They were getting sales due to lack of competition but once the competitions start their sales could have gone down. So, they came up with the idea of monthly subscriptions…

They called it as Marquee Program where some one can four rentals for $15.95 per month which also included shipping in it. In February, 2000, they extended their subscription to unlimited rentals at $19.95 per month with the limit of 4 at a time.

There were no due dates or late fees in Netflix which people hated in other rental shops. They always thought of a strategy for a long term. Basically, they were never concerned about making quick money. They wanted their product to be known for the better.

For their first five years, Netflix made about nil money and they sacrificed something to get much better in the further future.

Reed Hastings keep investing his money on Netflix for a long period of time. Even though the company was facing the losses, it had believers.

In 2002, they raised 82 million dollars through a public stock offering. Netflix went crazy with their marketing budget.  They would run advertisements all over the internet. They would run radio commercials, prints, mails and they even had the free trials to promote Netflix every place they could get into. Needless to say, all that hard work actually got paid off.

In 2004, they announced their partnership with TIVO saying that they would work together to develop an effective way of streaming movies over the internet. Everyone was excited about this. In reality, it was in 2007 when Netflix actually started its first streaming through their watch now service.

Today the streaming service make up of 98% of their total revenue and Netflix has become a leader of its own in the streaming of movies.

Twitter has become a new way to break the hot news everyday. Almost 83% of world leaders are on Twitter and it has become the method of disseminating the news. But the road of evolution of Twitter was not filled with all cherry blossoms.

It was filled with thorns of controversy and scandals. You can undoubtedly find more about Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey as the founders of Twitter but there was another man besides them who started this revolutionary company that is NOAH GLASS.

His twitter account has somewhat 45k around subscribers with a short bio in which he wrote that “ I started this”.

What were the behind the scenes of the growth and the fame of Twitter??

This story starts in early 2000s in San Francisco, Noah Glass created a product where a user would dial a number and the service would turn your voice message into an mp3 message which would be hosted on the internet.

Noah turned this idea into a company named Odeo. One of the early investors of Odeo was former Google employee , friend and the neighbour of Noah who was Evan Williams.

Evan sold his company named BLOGGER to Google and he had a ton of cash. The company work for turning mp3 voice messages into podcasting platforms transferred into a big office. Company started hiring more and more employees. One of them was a web designer named Jack Dorsey.

He was a university dropped out and was living in a tiny apartment in San Francisco. He had turned down his job in a  shoe store. Apple announced iTunes would include a podcasting platform which made them realize that Odeo was now doomed as the customers started drifting from their platform. Now, Evan Williams was the CEO of the Odeo believed that Apple had crushed them without warning.

For a comeback, all the employees of Odeo started working on the new ideas they could come up to bring Odea the success.  Jack and Noah became good friends meanwhile, Jack was not at all happy with the work he was doing back then. He then introduced the idea of status which could act as a lifesaver plan.

One day in February 2006, Noah and Jack presented their idea of status in front of the company. Through this you could send your message to all your friends in one go and you could add more friends via that text message.

They called this whole thing “TWITTER”. Noah took the charge of this project while Jack did the coding.

 After the February presentation, Evan Williams was skeptical about the potential of twitter but regardless, he put Noah as the in-charge of the project.

In August, an earthquake shook San Francisco and then the usefulness of Twitter was seen by the world that was “NEWS”.

Twitter is more of an information network rather than a social network. At that time, the company started to divide into two factions, one with the original audio tasks and other who were obsessed with twitter.

Evan Williams who was now the CEO of Odeo was regarded as a calculating person by the employees of the company.

Noah presented the idea of Twitter to Odeo investors but no one seemed interested in and couldn’t understand the point of it. Later, Evan wrote to Odeo investors that the company is going nowhere so to reduce the losses they should give all the stocks back to him which included Odea and Twitter both. The value of the assets the investors got through this deal was $5 million and after 5 years, those assets were worth of $5 billion, 1000 times more.

The question arises if Evan knew about the worth of Twitter and wanted to snatch all the assets to himself. Well, it’s normal to happen in Businesses but the betrayal to the person who had the original idea first came as a shock to the world.

Evan and Noah’s preferences started to clash as Evan wanted Twitter to get separated from Odeo and wanted to become the CEO. Noah share his insecurities to Jack but he only sympathized to it and said that it’s going to be okay. After that Evan told Noah that he was fired. The actual person who wanted Noah to get out from the company was Jack Dorsey whom Noah thought of as a friend and the reason for this was never been revealed. Jack soon became the CEO of the company and Evan went to a chairman position.

According to many employees and investors, Twitter could not have been created without Noah Glass. He was quite shocked by the betrayal he got by his friends and his company.

From then, Twitter became the platform for the millions of people to get the news instantly in their hands and the world leaders to make people know about what’s happening in their countries.

Not only politicians but now entertainers made their accounts on Twitter. Though Twitter recently has became a house of controversies and toxicity but it surely has taken a huge space in our mobile phones as a daily activity.

In the era of fast foods, one can not resist talking about Pizza at all. After all, Who doesn’t like PIZZA?

A slice of Pizza with topping of gold leaf and  caviar can cost you up to $400. But this dish has much humble origins in comparison to its costly personality. It first appeared in Naples, Italy in the 1700s  as food for the lower class.

When Italians migrated to U.S. , so did pizzas. New York people started to perfect the dish for good. If you go to that time period for Pizza then you would most likely be surrounded by the Italian Americans. To became a mainstream favourite, pizza needed a lot of help from the restaurant chains popping up in the mid-west.

Coming back to Domino’s, it was not founded by someone from Italian Heritage. In 1960, Toma and Jim Monahan , two Irish American brothers borrowed 900 dollars to buy a pizzeria called Dominic’s.

Within a few months, Jin gave his half of the business to Tom in exchange for Volkswagen Beetle, the same car they were using for the delivery for the Pizzas.

Now, the company was of all Tom’s and he changed the name of the company from Dominic’s to Dominos.

In 1967, Monahan started franchising the restaurants.

New franchises didn’t have to pay an initial fees to open their own stores. Instead of that, they had to manage the existing Domino’s restaurants for a whole year. The company decided to open these stores near colleges and the military bases as both of them had a lot of customers.

Domino’s ovens had rotating racks. It had standardized the delivery box and all of the pizzas started to look the same too. Around the same time, pizza hut and little Caesars were also getting their start in the Midwest. Little Caesars had 50 stores by 1969 but pizza hut was far and away the fastest growing chain of the 1960s.

Unlike domino’s, they wanted customers to eat their pizza inside their restaurants and it had more options.

Just 12 years after it was founded, pizza hut opened its 500^th location but domino’s was doing its best to catch up. By 1978, it had 200 stores and the chain just kept growing from there. The pizza chain’s 30 minutes or less delivery promise help set it apart from the competition.

Domino’s created the guarantee in 1984 and for nearly a decade, the incentive worked but the company dropped it in 1993.

By 1998, domino’s had thousands of stores and 3.2 billion dollars in annual sales. Monahan decided to sell the company so he could focus on philanthropy instead.

He retired from Pizza biz with the money from the sale of his company.

David Brandon became the CEO of the company in 1999.

In 2004, Brandon took Domino’s in Public. Pizza wars started heating up in the late 1990s. The different brands for Pizza were having a fierce competition during that time line. Pizza Hut even sued Papa John’s for the false advertising.

In the early 2000s, China and India have become the new battlefield for the pizza wars. As major American Pizza players started opening their franchises in these countries.

You know that these countries are the most populous countries in the world, so all the pizza players started to dominate the people with the magic of their own pizza.

Domino’s couldn’t boost sales by hiking prices, so starting around 2003, sales unsurprisingly flattened.

Another big problem for domino’s was that its pizza became forgettable as it cut corners on ingredients in order to keep its pizzas cheap.

Domino’s used frozen canned and pre-made ingredients to cut down on costs as the economy started to slip.

In late 2009 , it launched an ad campaign that admitted what customers already knew that Domino’s pizza wasn’t good as it had cardboard crust and ketchup like sauce.

The commercials told customers that they had totally reformulated its recipe with a brand new sauce and a garlic infused crust. As folks realize that this really is an improved product from what domino’s had for years and years.  It’s kind of been a snowball effect that continues

to benefit domino’s to this day. In the middle of its relaunch in 2010, Domino’s appointed Patrick Doyle as CEO, he had been with the company for more than a decade as an executive.

Now, he was entrusted to lead its turnaround.

Customers were buying the ad campaign and domino’s pizza. In fact the campaign was so successful that pizza hut later mimicked it in 2014 when it changed its own pizzas recipes.

In 2017, it overtook pizza hut as a market leader in the quick service pizza sector. Since 2010 , its stock has risen up more than 3, 200 percent. Even after Ritch Allison took over as CEO in June 2018, Domino’s tech focus has continued.

In early 2019, the company incorporated artificial intelligence into its loyalty program.

Users just had to take a picture of pizza to get points to redeem for a free pizza. But Allison isn’t just focusing on tech, he also has a big plan to revolutionize

the chain’s delivery strategy. Third-party delivery services have made it possible to deliver any kind of food that means that consumers options are virtually limitless.

Now, Domino’s is hoping that it will help the pizza chain reach 25 billion dollars in sales by 2025!!

In the year 2021, Apple is recorded as the most valuable brand in the whole world with an estimated brand value of about 263.4 billion U.S. dollars. It is followed by Amazon, the second most valuable brand, with the brand value of about 254.2 billion U.S. dollars.

Apple screams to whole world that it is here to dominate the tech market.

How Apple got the honour of becoming a King in this industry?

The birth of Apple began in the mid 1970s as an assembled circuit board Apple 1 invited by the co-founder Steve Wozniak. The Apple 1 did not have any keyboard or a monitor, it was just a circuit board.

Steve Wozniak was an Albanian inventor who was born in 1950. He met Steve Jobs while designing the calculators. Jobs was five years younger than Wozniak.  At that time, while working for the arcade game company Atari in the 1970s, Atari gave Steve Jobs the assignment of creating a circuit board for one of their video games.

Jobs having limited knowledge and experience of circuit boards made a deal with Wozniak to share the pay if he could design the circuit board. Though Wozniak designed the circuit board, it wasn’t accepted by Atari. The same invention that would later lead him to the Apple one.

Just two years later, Wozniak designed , developed and tested his first prototype by 1976. The Apple 1 was completed.  It was Steve Jobs idea to sell the Apple 1 themselves. They sold most of their belongings and assembled the first Apple 1 boards at Steve Jobs’s house. They sold the Apple 1 for 666 dollars and their first 50 system boards were sold to a new computer shop called The Byte Shop in California. Apple computers now called Apple Inc was founded.

One thing they lacked was money, though they had an order for 50 system boards with a

byte shop, they didn’t have the resources to fulfil the order. They were both turned down by banks and Atari where Jobs worked and wanted payment for any components.

Steve Jobs convinced Intel executive and multi-millionaire Mike Markkula to invest two hundred and fifty thousand dollars into Apple.

The next three years Apple saw an incredible growth as sales grew approximately 118 million dollars . However, during that time, other companies began to emerge .IBM launched its own personal computers and took full advantage when Apple was facing losses.

Due to the lack of interest, the apple also faced a lot of in-house issues as Wozniak decided to leave Apple in the 80s. He was simply no longer interested in running Apple computers. Steve Jobs then brought on John Sculley to be the President.

Jobs became the interim CEO and immediately began implementing his plans to revitalize Apple. One of his first acts was forming an alliance with

Microsoft to create a version of their office suite software for Apple. This would help them to retain their current customers as well as gain those that

previously didn’t use Apple.

Steve Jobs launched the iMac in 1998. Its unique design and use of modern technology made it a favourite and Apple sold approximately 800,000 units in five months. Not long after that he reimagined, the personal computer and introduced the iBook.

Three years later, Apple launched their iPod a digital music player freeing up customers from portable cassettes and CD players, giving them the capacity of taking more music with them.

Steve Jobs in 2007 he showed the world the shift Apple was making in the direction of consumer electronics even further by launching the iPhone with phenomenal success.

Apple continues to launch innovative yet modern and stylish looking products that always come with a new assortment of upgrades.

Apple has also made shopping for their products and experience at their 506 branded retail stores worldwide. Apple believe that traditional retail stores would not provide the experience they wanted.

Tim Cook, the current CEO of Apple, shared at Apple’s annual meeting that there’s a long great roadmap of fantastic products on the horizon.

Apple has begun developing its services category, there have been improvements to Apple music, the App Store and they may be launching a new streaming TV service with original television series.  Netflix may have something to worry about especially as consumers who subscribe to Netflix through their iPhone or iPad app, 30% goes to Apple every month for a year. Situations such as these are key factors in Apple’s growth.

It’s clear that Apple’s long term profitability is due to control and not allowing their products to be standardized. However, unless Apple creates the next iMac or iPhone, recreating some of their

historical profits may be quite a task especially with a trade war between the US and China.

In, 2018 Apple recorded its highest annual revenue of approximately 265.6 billion dollars. 218 billion was generated by iPhone sales.

Apple has been a pioneer in the computer industry on several occasions throughout history.

It believes in innovation and removing any boundaries that limit creativity in order to produce valuable products for its consumers. It is undeniable that Apple has provided immeasurable value and made an impact on technology influencing how we use it in our daily lives!!

K-pop, the South Korean music industry, this is name which has been ringing in the heads of music lovers from the recent years.

K-pop or should I say Korean Pop has taken Korea in top 10 in the music market. Not only Korea has achieved a successful acceptance from all over the world through their amazing dramas but also the music they produce has been making a chaos over the world.

BTS (internal screaming), yeah we all have heard this name, right? BTS  is one of the K-POP groups who made Korean music more popular in the western countries. BTS is the only group which brings in nearly 5 billion dollars to the Korean’s economy.

Shocking, right?

Well, they didn’t have an easy life tho. Working from a very young age, being a trainee who trains day to night, dedicated solely to dance, rap and singing, all these things are not easy to master. But BTS and all other K-pop groups did that and the results of their hard work can be seen by the love of the fans from different corners of the world.

Even though people can not speak Korean but they surely do enjoy their music. It is proven that music has no language and barrier.

But How did it start?

How did K-POP become a billion dollar industry?

The beginning of K-POP was accelerated in 1990s. The music at that was not like the Korean music we hear today. Trot music used to be popular during that timeline of music. A group was formed and called to be Seo Taiji and boys.

Seo Taiji and boys were formed from the breakup of a metal band called Sinawe. While Sinawe was metal,

Seo Taiji and boys went in a totally different route and introduced Korea to hip-hop. While Seo Taiji and boys was heavily inspired by the American hip-hop.

They turned around and made it their own . But when Seo Taiji and boys debuted, they weren’t met with praise.

Actually, they were met with criticism.

The older and previous generation saw this music as deteriorating the minds of the youth. Yet Seo Taiji and boys were able to succeed by being the highest selling group of their generation with over 8 million albums sold and regarded as legends in Korean music history.

So the beginning of K-pop wasn’t all bright and cheerful as many of us know what it is today. But in order to break the chains of Conservative Korea. Seo Taiji had to be the to pave the way for the first K-pop idol group, which was H.O.T.

H.O.T. was the first look at the real vision of a K-pop group created by Lee Soo-man , the founder of SM Entertainment which is  one of the three biggest K-pop companies in Korea.  H.O.T. had a brighter image than their predecessors , producing a more pop sound,

choreography and catchy songs. Unlike Seo Taiji and boys, H.O.T. was beloved by the public when they

debuted. They went on to be quite successful and led to the creation of more first generation K-pop idol groups like G.O.D and S.E.S. .

While the first generation was inspired by American pop, the second generation had to create something new and which they did too.

This is where we see Big Bang, Girls Generation, 2ne1, SHINee, Wonder Girls, BoA. When someone would ask K-pop fans today what caught them into K-pop, most will respond with one of these groups. The second generation of K-pop became the most influential and known by many as the the GOLDEN ERA of K-pop.

BoA was a solo artist who was known to do it all dancing, singing and the looks.

She was a top Idol even at a young age. Wonder Girls would be the first to break ground in America coming from JYP entertainment which is the another company from the big three. Wonder Girls adapted and created an English version of their breakout hit “nobody”.

They were even performing on US television and going on tour with the Jonas Brothers.

YouTube is an undeniable reason K-pop made it to people’s ears. Groups like BIGBANG, 2ne1 and girls generation would have music videos that surpassed millions of views in a day.

Steam was building up and on the verge of bursting in the form of one song “GANGNAM STYLE”. Everyone has caught wind of a viral video by PSY a solo artist in Korea.

His new song Gangnam style found overnight success.

For some reason, people were intrigued by a comedic odd yet catchy song. Most people didn’t know PSY

was a singer in Korea for years before Gangnam style.

He was considered one of the top performers in the country, but no one knew who he was internationally.

Gangnam style was meant to just be a new song by PSY but it grew out of control becoming the most viewed video on YouTube at the time with 800 million views and out today with over 3 billion views, with this PSY was all over the world radio, TV even New Year’s Eve shows.

PSY without knowing it opened the first window for K-pop with times dying down a

A second wave was on the horizon in the form of groups NCT 127, Monsta X, Black pink and of course BTS .

While PSY opened a window, BTS kicked down the front door.

BTS origins were a humble one, coming from BIGHIT entertainment.

They were practically unknown at debut. Similarly debuting with a hip-hop style like Seo Taiji but BTS was able to explode in Korea with lyrics that spoke to the youth and music that spoke to everyone. BTS made the history as the first K-pop group to attend and be nominated at the Billboard Music Awards in 2019 and then made history the same night as they won social artists of the year.

BTS couldn’t be stopped, breaking music video views, record number of streams and a lot more first for a K-pop act including selling out stadiums.

BTS  performed for over 1 million fans on the latest tour as people are, more importantly, companies saw the numbers and support BTS.

This led them finding interest in the next group that is BLACKPINK. BLACKPINK was the first K=pop group which performed in Coachella in 2019 when they perform.

Why is K-pop a billion-dollar industry?

Well, there are a number of factors.

One is Tourism.

K-pop is so beloved by fans that many of them dream of the day to make the pilgrimage to Korea.

It isn’t just to see if they can find their favourite idol on the streets, many fall in love with the music first.

Another thing is, if you sit with a person down and have them watch a music video.

The first thing they’ll say is “wow“.

This music video itself is amazing.

The color, dancing, outfits, the effects. One thing that many people admire is attention to detail.

It is something people are missing in other music videos. Likewise the physical album sales are in a decline across the world except Korea.

Why?

Well in K-pop, an album is much more than just a CD, a K-pop album will come with a CD, of course, but also random photo cards of a member from that group and a poster. K-pop is able to market and advertise everything to a max, they will sell anything from shirts, hats, cups, bag, stickers, pants, figures and even trash cans.

Groups have their own lightsticks.

Lightsticks are these devices that light up and sync to others at a concert and flashed with the rhythm of the music.

It is designed with the group’s colors which makes a fan to be more involved. It’s truly an amazing device.

There is just something special about K-pop . To put it simply , K-pop was able to utilize each and every technology and opportunity to grow.

K-pop is able to be more than a music.

It’s a niche community where people looking for something different and can learn a whole new culture a music where so much time effort and dedication are invested.

That’s why K-pop is a billion-dollar industry and will continue to expand to infinity in the upcoming future.

Music, an art, which has mesmerized all of us in this monotonous life. Music has become a part of our life which cannot be denied. Today, Not only Music but music artists are also getting recognized by millions of people through various mediums.

Music has been alive for hundreds of years. Streaming music online has become a common and a very popular practice nowadays.

What started out as Music piracy became an 11 billion dollar industry, making 56% of global music industry’s revenues in 2019.

And one company has become the clear winner globally in terms of paid subscribers, that’s none other than ‘SPOTIFY’.

Spotify has dominated the music streaming industry with about 130 million premium subscribers worldwide.

Despite being in number two behind Apple Music in U.S. in 2019, Spotify has been on a winning streak recently with the acquisition of Joe Rogan’s incredibly popular podcast, along with exclusive deals with Kim Kardashian and DC Comics, all in an attempt to broaden its scope from music streaming to audio giant.

The man behind the popularity of the name ‘SPOTIFY’ is Daniel Ek.

Daniel Ek is the reason behind that we know the name “Spotify” now. He was into programming way back then. He was earning thousands of money by designing websites. He co-founded the company back in 2006 and has been in charge as the CEO ever since. He’s from Sweden, by the way, Spotify is a Swedish company.

He was a genius programmer and businessman with the exact impressive background.

He went to college but only for a few weeks before dropping out and quickly becoming tremendously successful working at various tech companies. His big payoff was in 2006 when he sold his online marketing company for over a million dollars and briefly retired directly after. All of this happened before the age of 23 so he decided he wasn’t quite ready to retire especially considering he perceived a great opportunity for a new business.

They spent a couple years getting everything together and in September of 2008, they officially launched Spotify. Initially the service was only available in six large countries throughout Europe but by 2011, it was finally available in the United States and as of 2019 they claim to have reach in 79 different countries and territories

There are some reasons behind its success. First of all, the music Catalog that was their first big hurdle back in 2006 and it remains a huge risk for them today. this relates to what I talked about in the beginning a core difference between

Spotify and Napster (music file sharing site)  and all those other crazy illegal sites is that Spotify pays for the rights to stream the songs they have to make all these deals with record labels and original artists.

Spotify provided a potential solution as it was a cheap and easy way for the users to access the music but still have the labels and artists and everyone else get compensated.

After two years of making those deals, they had secured enough European streaming rights to launch their service in Europe. Their growth after the launch made them even more attractive to record labels. They made new deals with Universal Sony Warner and by 2011 had secured enough US streaming rights .

They’ve existed for over a decade in a way that they were the first of their kind predating any competitor that uses this model. Their biggest competitor Apple music didn’t exist until 2015.

They had a seven-year head-start.  In the United States, the two are very similar.

As far as paid subscribers are concerned, Apple music passed Spotify in April of 2019 The difference comes internationally which leads into the next reason. Spotify is more focused internationally. Not surprisingly, most of the revenue comes from outside of the US. They started in Sweden, focused solely on Europe for years and as a result are dominating the international market

Spotify is really good at figuring out what you want to listen. Many people agree that their recommendations are among the best in the industry. This may be related to their continued investment in research and development and the fact that they had that jump start in collecting the data and in perfecting their system.

The biggest reason of their success might be their free option. It’s got to be the biggest difference from Apple music.

Spotify has this option where you can listen to everything they have to offer for free. This version of Spotify has so many limitations and it allows to skip a few songs at a time that forces people into listening to things. Then the ads came on every few songs which you have to expect but it gets annoying.

The three-month trial for the premium is so much better. When the three months end, No one can go back and end up paying $10 a month.

As of September of 2019, they have 113 million premium members compared to 141 million members on the free plan. The money they make from those ads is almost insignificant but that’s a group of people that are very likely to upgrade.

More than 60% of their new premium members come from the free service and they have a very specific path to make it happen. Around 75% of those people who engaged in the free trial ended up converting to a paid premium subscription because it’s hard to go back .

This is a controversial yet effective way of attracting customers as being a big reason for their success.

Spotify took advantage of the conditions of the industry and later on their size to build up an impressive music catalog. With just about every song you can ever want to hear take an advantage of a head start over all their competitors in the US and internationally. Part of that includes their data collection resulting in sophisticated recommendations and playlists. The unique free service providing a path for millions of people to sign up for their premium service that they really care!!

In the world of sneakers and sportswear, ADIDAS ranks two and Of course the number one is NIKE. According to Forbes, it is 68^th biggest brand in the whole world. Their sales have been growing from the last five years and now ADIDAS has become a very big name.

How did ADIDAS became so big??

Most of the people who do sports or watch sports shows definitely know about ADIDAS. Even you know nothing about sports, there is a big chance that you know the name ADIDAS. You can take my example, I know a little about sports but I am familiar with the name ADIDAS. That’s how this name has become big within past years.

Like most companies, it didn’t start out big. In the 1920s, in a small town in Germany, Adi Dassler and his brother Rudolf Dassler started the company when they began producing shoes in their mother’s laundry room. At that time, it wasn’t even called ADIDAS yet it was called the Dassler brothers shoe factory. Now, obviously there’re numerous factors that are responsible for transforming that little business into the giant one that we know today.

There are three things that have made the greatest impact and are most responsible for their growth.

The First thing is a man named Jesse Owens. Jesse Owens was an American Athlete. In his time, he probably was the fastest man on the planet.

 In the 1936 ,Olympics held in Berlin, Germany. He won four gold medals and track events breaking records along the way. A very impressive performance. You know ,how in every Olympics there tends to be one or two people who become really famous and are just the star of the whole thing well in 1936, it was Jesse Owens.

These Olympics were in 1936 held in Germany, at the time the country was led by Adolf Hitler. He was planning for these Olympics to prove how the Aryan race was superior and obviously Jesse Owens ruined that Plan.

These Olympics took place in Germany and the Dassler Brothers shoe company was from Germany. Somehow, Adi Dassler convinced Jesse Owens to wear a pair of shoes during his historic races and it looks like he didn’t specifically target Owens rather he was just kind of trying to convince all the athletes but the one that paid off was Jesse Owens.

You can imagine the demand that it created for them and it really helped bring the small shoe company to the next level.

After the second world war, the two brothers that were running the company found it impossible to work together and they split apart.

Rudi left so that he can form his own shoe company. The company he started is now known as Puma that you probably know.

Adi stayed put and redesigned the existing company that’s where the name was changed to ADIDAS and he came up with the three stripe signature look and it really just started taking shape and to the company that we are familiar with today.

In 1954 World Cup final it’s been called the miracle in Bern that took place in Bern , Switzerland and showcased a very strong Hungarian team against the underdog team from West Germany. The game started with two early goals from Hungary which solidified their victory in the minds of many people but Hungary didn’t score for the rest of the game while Germany scored three times making them the winner by three to two. There were a lot of politics tied to this game as well. It was the second World Cup following the war. The first one was held in Europe since the war. It was held in Switzerland because they were neutral during the war and mostly unaffected. It involved a newly formed and weak German team.

The Winning German team was famously wearing ADIDAS shoes.

They called it “dassler boot” , with all its features that make it superior to the traditional boot.

You can imagine how being attached to such a big event like this could help the brand. The success with Jesse Owens was linked to the old brand before all the changes. So this helped bring the new brand into the mind of the public. It was where many people first saw their signature stripes and learn the name ADIDAS.

The third thing that I’d like to highlight may not be as significant as the first two but it’s worth mentioning Run DMC, it’s a really popular rap group from the 1980s. They were pioneers in the genre. They had a song called my adidas.

It was one of their most popular songs. They sang about how they wore adidas and they were known for wearing adidas.

Unlike the first two contributors to their success, this one started independent from adidas meaning Run DMC wasn’t approached by them to create the song or anything like that.

They made it on their own. The story goes that they invited an Adidas executive to one of their concerts and before they sang their song, they asked the crowd to raise their Adidas sneakers in the air and thousands of people did it showing the executive how influential they were.

It motivated them to sign Run DMC to an Endorsement  deal which is said to be the first-ever endorsement deal in rap.

Here we have a popular rap group singing about them and wearing them not just the shoes a head to toe adidas and they were obviously influencing their fans to buy them or at the very least familiarizing them with the brand.

All three of these contributors have something in common. It was someone famous and influential wearing their shoes which is a very common practice for companies like these.

ADIDAS continues to be reliant on their marketing and continues to be aggressive with this type of marketing a few years ago they had a big campaign labelled “Impossible Is Nothing” involving David Beckham and Muhammad Ali .

Today they have some of the top athletes in each sport signed to endorsement deals.

For soccer, they have Lionel Messi. For Basketball, they have James Harden. For Football, they have Aaron Rodgers. For baseball ,they have Kris Bryant.

Almost half of their marketing budget every year goes to paying all these players from different sports to wear and endorse their shoes.

Today, ADIDAS is the largest sportswear manufacturer in whole Europe and the second largest in the world with nearly 20 billion Euros in annual revenue!!

If someone would ask me which is the biggest learning app out there ?

I would instantly answer that it’s YouTube. You can learn anything and everything using YouTube, be it cooking, dancing, technical skills, singing, painting and writing etc.

You can even study through YouTube as well. There are a lot of entertainment and sports related videos on YouTube which get trending every now and then.

How the idea of creating such an amazing video app came up?

Not only, one can learn through YouTube but also can help others to learn new skills. It is the era of social media influencers where people have different platforms in front of them to share their creativity with millions of people through online media.

YouTube is the world’s largest video streaming website and the second largest search engine after Google.

The creators behind this wonderful innovation were Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim who just not made their mission possible but also  created a phenomenon that is everlasting and never gonna end anytime soon.

After college Chad Hurley worked in PayPal division where he met Steve Chen and Jawed Karim who later came together to create YouTube in 2005.

Hurley worked in PayPal till it got acquired by eBay in 2002 and after that he started working in Silicon Valley as a Consultant.

In January 2005, Steve hosted a party for his friends and Hurley was one of his guests. Both Steve and Harley recorded the party on a camcorder and digital camera but were not able to send the recording to their friends and guests because of the massive file size.

It was then they came up with an idea of creating a site which would help people to share their videos.

They wanted to do something like the concept of Flickr which was one of the new websites back then that facilitated the sharing of the photographs.

After a few days, the team came up with a memorable and consumer-friendly logo. The website was launched on February 14, 2005.

A sneak peek was offered to interested parties in May , 2005. However, potential youtubers had to wait for another six months to be able to freely enjoy the site.

YouTube employees had to work from home and even from the garages where many start-ups used to work. It had roughly 8 to 10 employees who were enthusiasts and were working without any pay.

The first video published by the YouTube was titled “me at the zoo” by one of the co-founders of YouTube who was Jawed Karim.

In no time, YouTube became a huge success.

Later in September, 2005, YouTube got its first one million hit video. The video was a NIKE ad which went viral. YouTube acquired $3.5 million funding from Sequoia Capital and made an official launch in November, 2005.

In July, 2006, the company relieved that 65,000 videos were getting uploaded on YouTube every day. It slowly became the 10^th most popular website all around the world.

This much success in such a short time was unbelievable. In the later year, YouTube witnessed another huge success.

This tech video start-up got acquired by tech giant GOOGLE  for a whooping $1.65 billion. The idea of two technically inclined pioneers turned out to be a revolutionary milestone in the history.

In May 2007 , YouTube launched its partner program which allowed the creators with the viral videos to get paid. Now, people started to get paid due to their hobbies, only thanks to YouTube.

In August 2007, Google decided to introduce Ads on YouTube.

In 2007, Usher introduced the world to Justin Bieber via a YouTube video which got hit and made JB one of the greatest singers in the history of music. With Gangnam Style becoming viral on YouTube also was a huge event in the YouTube history. A lot of artists made their careers through YouTube. Not only artists but also videos related to education are getting popular among the people. YouTube also helped many K-pop groups like BTS and BlackPink etc. to be popular worldwide.

Now, It has become impossible to imagine a world without having YouTube in it!!

The world’s biggest and the most popular sportswear company – NIKE . In just 50 years, one man’s dream of better shoes turned into a global corporation worth over a $100 billion.

What did NIKE had that others didn’t? How come NIKE achieved the spot where it is right now??

The year is 1962 and Phil Knight was just graduated from Stanford.  Becoming a successful entrepreneur is a difficult task if you don’t have an idea which can make a bigger impact in this world.

He was a distance runner back in the university. In one of his business classes, he wrote in a paper title:

“Can Japanese sports shoes do the same to German sports shoes that Japanese cameras did to the German cameras?”

He was aware of the fact that Japanese cameras replaced German cameras and was pondering if Japanese shoes could do the same to Puma and Adidas which were domineering in America at that time.

He got so conscious of that idea of bringing Japanese shoes to U.S.A.

He could not find much exposure to Japanese shoes, so he decided to contact the Japanese company in order to import the goods in America. But he had zero experience in it.

As a determined man who created NIKE, we all know he actually did it.

In November 1962, he flew over to Japan like a tourist and just started exploring. In a beautiful city of Kobe, he laid his eyes on a shoe store that caught his eyes.

It belonged to the company called Onitsuka Tiger and the shoes they were producing at that time were of very high quality that Phil got tempted to import them to America.

He proposed to the company to let him import the shoes to America and became the distributor. Surprisingly, the company accepted the offer. He received his shipment of 12 pairs of Tiger shoes in 1963 and he started selling them at every running track he could get into.

Obviously, his strategy was not that scalable, so he approached the right person he knew at that time who was his former coach at the University of Oregon, Bill Bowerman. Bill was one of the famous coaches in America at that time. He had in fact trained multiple Olympic Athletes.

He liked the Tiger shoes so much that he wanted to partner up. Thus, in January 1964,  Bill and Phil incorporated Blue Ribbon Sports, each investing $500 into it.

They spent all that money on their first order, which at $3.33 a pair, amounted to 300 pairs of shoes.

The shipment came through in April, 1964 and thanks to Bill’s connections it was sold out by July.

In their first year, BRS sold $8,000 worth of shoes and with that money Phil started hiring salesmen for his company.

In 1965, their revenue had increased to $20,000 and pretty soon they opened their very own store in Santa Monica.

But while Phil was handling the business side of the operation, the actual innovation was

coming from Bill.

He was the guy who single-handedly brought jogging to America.

In 1966, he wrote a book about it that sold over a million copies, and of course his company was among the first to start marketing the Tiger shoes for jogging.

Bowerman was all about innovation and with every new shipment from Onitsuka, he’d cut open a few shoes to see how they were made, and he’d always try to improve them, for example adding to the cushion or using more lightweight materials.

He’d constantly sent his notes to Japan requesting changes; he was effectively designing Onitsuka’s shoes for them.

It was one of Bill’s designs that catapulted BRS into the mainstream: the Cortez, as he

called it, became one of the best-selling shoes in 1968, undoubtedly thanks to the 1968 Olympics, held in Mexico.

Thanks to the Cortez, BRS sold $300,000 worth of shoes in 1969.

But they had a big problem: the Cortez was so successful that they couldn’t keep up

with the demand.

Every new shipment they received sold out faster than the one before, but Onitsuka kept sending them at the same glacial pace.

What Onitsuka were actually doing was satisfying their local demand in Japan first and then sending whatever was left to America.

Phil and Bill knew that to expand they would have to evolve beyond being just a simple

distributor. Then they realized that they held all the cards: the Cortez was Bowerman’s design

so as soon as their contract with Onitsuka expired, they were free to start making it for themselves.

Luckily for them, their contract would end in 1972, just before the Olympics in Munich.

Thus, Phil had plenty of time to prepare for his big move.

In 1971, he started working on the branding: his first employee suggested calling the brand Nike, after the Greek goddess of victory.

Then, Phil needed a logo, so he went to a nearby university, snatched the first graphic design student he could find and told her to make him a logo.

For the impressive sum of $35 he got this: the swoosh.

In hindsight, that was money well spent and with his branding now complete, Phil was ready

for the Olympics.

This time, instead of locking himself into exclusive agreements, Phil established a network of subcontractors across Japan.

With production under his control, Phil could finally spread his wings.

You can see in this graph of Nike’s sales exactly when Phil started importing shoes from his Japanese subcontractors, and yes he started before his contract had even expired in 1971.

From then on, the story of Nike became one of growth.

They became the largest sportswear company in America in 1989 on the back of brilliant marketing like the “Just Do It” campaign and by signing rookie athletes that would eventually become famous across the world!!

LinkedIn is a very famous employment oriented online service where various professional corporate workers and job seekers get connected with each other. It provides the best networking opportunity in this online era.

How the idea of creating this kind of site came up?

How Reid Hoffman built LinkedIn?

Reid Hoffman was born on 5^th August, 1957 in California. When he was only 12, he wrote the suggestions for the gaming company and then the game developer asked him if he wanted to do something with the game, after that he started working there and received his first pay-check. After graduating from high school, Hoffman graduated from Stanford University. At Stanford, he met Peter Thiel who became his good friend from then. While being at Stanford, he pondered about influencing others at a large scale. He wanted to make a big impact in the world. Hence, he started to invest his time in making software which can be used by billions of people.

He tried to get funding from various company but got rejected each and every time. Hoffman joined Apple Computer in 1994 through the reference he got from his room-mate at Stanford. At Apple, he worked at eWorld which soon got stopped due to heavy losses.

He left Apple and join Fujitsu and overtook project management field. In July 1994, he resigned from Fujitsu and took a big step of opening his venture on his own. He named that venture socialnet.com!

SocialNet was focused mainly on online dating although you can connect with people for different purposes as well on it. It was a good venture from the beginning but it didn’t last in long run. It started to look scattered due to lack of a clear purpose. Online dating and making friends was a new idea back then which was not accepted by the people at that time.

He learnt a great lesson from this failure that the product distribution strategy is as important as the quality of the product itself.

After that he joined PayPal, where he was responsible for the external affairs department. In 2002, PayPal went public, Hoffman was a real contributor in the success of PayPal. After that he achieved the financial freedom by becoming a millionaire.

He though of taking a long break after a huge success but he got back to work only after the break of three weeks. He founded LinkedIn in December, 2002 with his teammates from PayPal and Socialnet.

He founded LinkedIn on his idea that the people would have two identities on the internet . One is their social identity which people want to show others to befriend them and the other one is the real identity which is for their achievements, educational background and works till that date.

LinkedIn is a professional networking site which connects professional people and job seekers from all over the world to help them in getting better opportunities and the better insights of real corporate world.

Initially, they invited the people they already knew about. From there, the things began to grew. In first month of operation, a total of 4500 users joined the platform. Some of them found jobs and new clients through LinkedIn which itself was fulfilling the purpose of the platform.

 People started to recommend the platform and more people started to join in. By the time, LinkedIn was a year old, it already bagged about 5,00,000 users on its platform.

Meanwhile, Sequoia Capital invested in this venture. By the year 2004, the platform managed to have a million users already.

Hoffman pointed out two major problems with LinkedIn in 2006. One was its user base which was comparatively low and the other was the product itself.

He resigned from the post of CEO and appointed Dan Nye as the new CEO of LinkedIn.

He worked as CEO for two years and helped LinkedIn to grow more and more. During those two years, the site reached to 35 million users and sales jumped over 900%.

A mobile version of LinkedIn was introduced on February, 2008. In January 2011, LinkedIn filed for an Initial Public Offering.

Over the years, LinkedIn acquired many small start-ups to increase the quality of the product and make it more useful for their users.

On 13^th June, 2016 , nearly 14 years after starting the company, Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion.

This was the largest acquisition made by the Microsoft till date. This deal made Hoffman and his teammate billionaires!

Today, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking site with over 706 million users all around the world.

Money, if someone would ask what exactly money is for me then I would tell him without hesitation that it is the thing that can either make me or break me.

Pretty daring, right! When you know that without money, you can’t even survive by yourself then why not better manage it carefully. From office workers to comedians, everyone needs to manage their money.

Investing your money as early as possible is what we need in this era. When your money is sitting idle in your banks, there would be person who’ll be multiplying his assets through investment in other corner of the world.

First advice: Don’t take loans hastily

You get bound with liabilities once you take loans. Buying a house is definitely gonna help you in making assets, but buying it with the money from your loan will increase the liabilities. Taking education loan is still fine as the ROI ( Return On Investment ) in this case would not only include the money but also your overall personality . But always ensure to take the education loan under your own name. Avoid taking personal loans or loans to buy bikes or cars etc. At your 20s, it’s necessary for you to reduce and eliminate the loans as much as possible.

Second advice: Insurance

For the planning of unforeseen or any unexpected situation that might occur in your future, Insurance for that time becomes inevitable. There are two types of insurance which are highly recommended and attainable:

First is Life Insurance and

Second is Health Insurance.

In Life Insurance, choose term plan. As a working professional, to get a good idea of cover, 20 to 25 times of your current salary would surely make a good cover. If you have salary of 6 lakhs per annum then a financial cover of 1.5 crores would be a better choice which comes under a term insurance plan. If you are in twenties then you could get this cover in minimum price which is a huge benefit in itself.

Health Insurance should be taken for everyone dear to you. If you work in a company then it is most likely they would have a corporate health insurance on their own which would cover you and your family.

When should you start investing?

In your twenties, when you don’t have to pay large amount of taxes due to low income, you have the potential to invest as much as possible at that rate.

What is the right investment ratio?

Investing at least 20 percent of your income is the best choice. If you are investing 50,000 per month then investing at least 10,000 rupees is an ideal  choice. In 20s, no one expects you to be rich from the beginning of your working life. When no one expects from you then you have the less pressure on you , so why don’t you use that to be focused on doubling your assets as much as possible through investing. Having luxurious food, living in lavish places and hanging out with your friends is not necessary but having financial freedom as soon as possible is the most important thing in the 20s. If you invest 1 rupee from your twenties and if you invest the same 1 rupee from your 30s then it will make a huge difference.

In 10 years, the same rupee would lose half of its value meaning the value of 1 rupee now would be equal to 50 paise in the next ten years and that is how inflation works.

Inflation is the biggest reason for you to start investing as early as possible.

To get a satisfying return through your investment, where should you start to invest exactly?

Firstly, avoid investing in FDs (Fixed Deposits). FD is the worst investment you can make if you are in your in 20s. As you are free to take risks in your 20s then let your money to grow as much as possible than to protect it under the name of FD.

Invest and hold in stocks and equities..

Invest in the stocks of the companies which are doing great in the market but if you don’t have the knowledge of the stocks that much then invest in mutual funds. You can invest in direct stocks, portfolio stocks and in cryptocurrency (though it’s a bit risky)..

Don’t wait for your 40s to invest. Start investing your money in 20s as soon as you begin to earn!!

Way back in 1992, an immigrant from Ukraine came to the U.S. in search of some opportunity. This young teenager was accompanied by his mother and they’d barely had any money for their daily expenses. Due to the limited cash on hand, he used to save his old Soviet notebooks for schools and queued up with his mom for food stamps under government subsidy.

At the same time there was another guy who had lost a small fortune in the.com bubble and wasn’t close to finding something big. Now the friends have come together to disrupt the communication sector by merging a mobile messaging app that today has over 1.2 billion monthly active users with over 30 billion messages sent every day the friends. This journey is about Jan Koum and Brian Acton who founded the company together which is none other than the most popular mobile app currently in the world WhatsApp…

Jan is no stranger to failure and as a founder who had to go through his fair share of reductions by top tech companies including the one that eventually bought their servers only to become the most valuable messaging platform on the planet.  

Jan was born in the rural areas of Ukraine this was during the Soviet era so being a Jewish and living in a rural area was definitely not easy. He lived in a house that did not even have electricity connection. Being in a country that mostly had a temperature below zero degrees, they didn’t even have hot water.

His parents also denied the usage of course because they were often tapped by the government. To worsen things more being financially unwell , they also had to go through a regularity of hardships as well. Hence, in an attempt to put an end to all the sufferings, Jan along with his mother and grandmothers decided to move to Mountain View, California in 1992. In the U.S. , they were helped by a social support program to get a small two-bedroom apartment.

During this time, Jan started learning computer network by reading manuals that he used to purchase from a used bookstore at the age of 16. He had also begun working as a cleaner at a grocery store while his mother worked as a babysitter. Just once, things began to look normal, another tragedy hit his life when his mother was diagnosed with cancer but he became more stronger and his adversities were only making him more resilient. In the next two years, he had fully trained himself all about computer networking and was all set to take the next step. This is when he gains a sudden interest in programming and got himself enrolled at San Jose State University along with that he also began working with Ernst & Young as a security tester.

After working there for roughly six Months, Jan got the biggest opportunity of his life where he got selected to work at Yahoo as an infrastructure engineer. Now this was when he was still studying at San Jose State University.

Yahoo Back then was just another start-up and was beginning to grow and since Jan loved what he was doing he dropped out of his college and moved ahead with Yahoo. However, the happiness was short-lived and his mother couldn’t out beat cancer for long and passed away in the year 2000. He was suddenly left all alone and that is when his friend from Ernst & young and Yahoo, Brian Acton helped him fight the loneliness by inviting Jan to his house for playing soccer. Together they went on to work with Yahoo for more than nine years. they got  to intake numerous amounts of priceless knowledge and experience. Later in January 2009,

Jan bought an iPhone and realized that the seven-month-old App Store was in the process of launching a whole new range of apps. This gave him a brilliant idea although the idea itself was at very nascent stages. They were very clear about three rules:

• Their service would definitely not carry any advertiser.

•  The service would have a satisfying experience and

• Keeping in mind the privacy of their customers, their product would not store any messages.

Additionally it would also maintain to deliver the product without any gimmicks or signs with endless amount of readability and rich experience. Having said that, Jan quickly got the name WhatsApp incorporated on his birthday that is on 24^th of February 2009 in California. Now, as the world progressed, they figured that WhatsApp kept crashing or getting stuck at a particular point, this went on for a long time. It built up a great amount of frustration. Jan at one point even lost hope and felt like giving up and started looking for a new job but Brian helped him to motivate and got his act together and asked him to invest a few more months. And finally a few months down the line, help came from Apple.

They launched their push notifications which used to pin their users whenever they were using the app. By August 2009,  WhatsApp had no significant growth. This time Jan persuaded Brian Acton to join the in.

Later, on October 2009, Brian contacted several old Yahoo buddies and got together a 250,000 dollars in seed funding. This made Brian to earn the title of co-founder and since then there was no stopping to this Tech phenomena.

By the early 2014, WhatsApp has witnessed humongous growth In its user base with millions of people across the globe using its messaging service. WhatsApp had never publicized or promoted itself anywhere and at organically growing numbers. By this time, it only had 55 employees over serving millions of people each day. Later the very next month in February 2014, Facebook declared that they were acquiring WhatsApp. It was the deal which is known to be one of the biggest acquisitions in the tech history.

Facebook acquired WhatsApp at a whooping 19 billion dollars and also offered a board member position to Jan in Facebook. Jan signed the Facebook take over contract at an unused building in Silicon Valley where he and his mother once queued for food stands in the city of Mountain View where WhatsApp was located!

Well the story of WhatsApp is yet another live example of innovation in true terms for everyone out there waiting for motivation. The journey of Jan Koum and Brian Acton is a lesson for every entrepreneur that capital jumping and marketing will not reap benefits, it is ultimately the product and service that automatically drives customers’  attraction without any need for paid publicity.

Well with billions of users addicted to WhatsApp style, it is undoubtedly a tech marvel of this era!!

“They frame it as if the whole reason for making Facebook and building something was because I wanted to get girls or wanted to get into some kind of social institution they just can’t wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things” – Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg, the programming prodigy who turned to town for making cool things into social network dynasty the website he started in his dorm room when he was 19 years old is one of the most influential in the world with profiles for over a quarter of the world’s population. Zuckerberg became a self-made billionaire before his 24th birthday!! How is that possible that’s what we’re gonna find out…

Mark Zuckerberg was born on May 14^th, 1984 in upper-middle class parents in the outskirts of New York. His father told him to go basic in the early teens and Mark really took to it. He created a program that allowed the computer at his dad’s dental office to communicate with the family computer in Colditz arcnet.

The program was an early form of messenger while in school he excelled a number of subjects from computer science to languages and literature, he transferred to Exeter prep school where he met his good friend Adam D’Angelo.

They created music software called synapse that learned what music people liked and made suggestions based on it as writer Jose Antonio Vargas said

“some kids played computer games…. Mark

created them”.  It was clear he had an entrepreneur’s mindset from an early age. Synapse was treated as a high school project but drew the attention of big software companies including Microsoft who apparently offered Zuckerberg a rumored 1 million dollars for it as well as a job before college.

Despite the job offer Zuckerberg chose to attend Harvard doing computer science and philosophy his first year of college plus without any significant creations, probably love partying. It was in his sophomore year that he began to show signs of things to come.

He created a site called Coursematch at the beginning of his second year which had led his classmates to log in and see what courses their friends. It quickly became popular which prompted Zuckerberg to try a new idea he’d recently had that he’d go on to call face masters. Facemash was created October 2003 with the intention of finding the most attractive person on campus.

Slowly a ranking was formed that created the entire thing during a tipsy eight-hour coding session that ended at 4 a.m. Despite the drunken programming, Facemash was an instant hit, been used by 450 students in one day before the Harvard admin team shut it down to new plates of sexism things.

Zuckerberg was put under probation over the incident  “I was thread with exclusion” although apparently didn’t faze him too much at the time as it’s written in David Carr Patras book the Facebook Effect “ it’s not the mark necessarily set set to break the rules… he just doesn’t pay much attention to them”.

Over the next few months, undeterred by his warning from Harvard’s, Mark worked more on computer programs simply because he enjoyed it, he created a web program that brought art images from his art in the time of Augustus class and encouraged his classmates to add comments beside them to create study aids. He then used these notes to cram for an exam far more quickly. He also created a program called six degrees of Harry Lewis, a program that created links between people and his favourite computer science professor. He also began  to work on other people’s produce , setting up a website for the association of Harvard black women and significantly helping three Harvard seniors finish coding on their web site idea the Harvard connection.

Zuckerberg was sold for the project in November, 2003 after the founders heard about Facemash through the Harvard magazine. They asked him to finish programming their social network site Harvard connection since he didn’t have much coding experience themselves Zuckerberg agreed to do it soon lost interest in favour of his own site, the Facebook. He stalled the

Harvard connection team by coding his new site and may have borrowed some ideas which led to a lawsuit and even a movie down the line although the initial idea of sourcing process may not have been entirely on the up the execution and launch of

Facebook was close to flawless. Zuckerberg bought the domain the facebook.com on January 11^th  for $30 and officially launched the site. On February 4^th , by emailing a few of his friends to check out just four days after it launched, 450 Harvard undergrads signed up and 300 joined the following day. As previously mentioned, he had a knack for building social websites that people wanted to use.  The idea of

Facebook was to move the physical books the university issued with a picture of all the students called face books online and students to update them with more recent pictures. It also allowed students to see what other students were talking about, what their interests were and also their relationship status. Another two weeks later , Facebook had over 6,000 users which formed over three-quarters of the undergraduates as well as some alumni. Not only did thousands of students sign up but they also readily spent hours on it each day which  made it unique to every other website. Zach put a team of his roommates and friends together to handle various aspects of the project as he didn’t yet consider a business.

Eduardo Saverin handled business ,Dustin Moskovitz was a programmer, Andrew McCollum was a graphic artist and Chris shoes as a spokesman all joined the team. With the team around him that complemented his strengths and weaknesses, Zuckerberg tried to span

Facebook into other colleges starting with the Yale, Stanford and Columbia. Facebook sweat the competition and the number of people signed up kept growing.

It took them a few weeks for 80% of each of the campuses to sign up for Facebook. The team decided to rent an apartment in Palo Alto for the summer as it was where all the big start-ups seemed to come from.

After many 16-hour days, in all-nighters Facebook reached a hundred thousand users in June 2004. Just four months after its launch, a venture capital firm offered ten million dollars to buy Facebook.

He apparently didn’t even consider the offer and often said to continue drawing it for themselves. For Zach, it was never really about the money but always about really a really cool product. Over the summer, the team continued to expand Facebook’s functionality and user base. They also met Sean Parker, a Silicon Valley veteran, who became their president and introduced him to investors including

Peter Thiel who put 500k into the venture for around ten percent of the Business. All in all, a pretty solid Investment. It took Mark and his friends all of two minutes to decide to postpone their Harvard return as the social network was all about timing and they didn’t want to screw this up.

“Well that’s unclear… I am 21 but I finished my sophomore year and came out to Palo Alto fully expecting that I’d actually go back to Harvard in the fall but didn’t quite make it after Peter put his money in but started building a company instead and I got a little side-tracked but fortunately Harvard lets you take indefinite periods of time off so you know if the sever falls through… I’m back at Harvard”, he said.

They’re dropouts. The team focused on expansion, they hit many road bumps and continued to work extremely hard but it paid off for them as they reached a million users in early 2005. They continued to add more features such as the ability to share photos and post on people’s walls and their valuation kept climbing.

If we fast forward seven years, Facebookwent public in the largest tech IPO to this date and become the company over a hundred billion dollars and made all the founders billionaires while still in their early to mid-20s. While there’s no doubt Mark’s a genius. There are so many things that we can learn about him and his story so far.

Facebook was an example of a great idea at the right time with fantastic execution. They made many mistakes along the way but it all paid off in the end. One thing we have to remember is that the multi-billion dollar company that we all use today was started by a handful of forward-thinking teams in a college dorm room. With that in mind, encourage yourself to keep hustling towards your own goals!!

Cadbury, one of the biggest chocolate brands in the world with operations in more than 60 countries and billions of dollars in revenues. It is not only a brand of mouth-watering chocolates liked by Consumers of all ages, but also one with a 200 year old history filled with wonderful achievements and depressing failures.

Let’s dive into the origins and rise of Cadbury and see how they got to where they are today coming from a wealthy family of Quaker Christians in Britain, John Cadbury, just like any other member of his community was not allowed to attend Universities and his non-violent beliefs and values Kept him out from Joining the military. So, starting a business was the only option for him to make a living. That is why, in 1824 he Opened A Grocery Store In Bull Street, located in the city of Birmingham, UK.

As Alcohol was considered bad For Society by quaker community Tea, Coffee, Cocoa and drinking Chocolate were seen as healthy alternatives by them including John himself. That’s why among other things he sold high quality Cocoa and drinking Chocolate in his store, which he used to prepare using a pestle And mortar.

Due to high demand in 1831 John moved to a four-story warehouse nearby and started producing Cocoa and drinking chocolate on a commercial-scale.

Thus, the Cadbury manufacturing business was born.

Because of the high cost of production these were sold mainly to the wealthy people. By, 1842 he was selling around 11 varieties of Cocoa and 16 varieties of chocolate.

In 1847, his brother Benjamin Cadbury became a partner in the business and the company came to be known As Cadbury Brothers. The same year they rented larger factory in Birmingham which had a private canal that connected to all the major ports in Britain.

In 1854, the Cadbury Brothers of Birmingham received an exclusive royal warrant as manufacturers of chocolate and Cocoa to Queen Victoria this was a great luck for them as businesses which used to have these warrants had a better and sophisticated image among general buyers. However, just six years later in 1860, they had dissolve their partnership due to John’s wife’s Death and his declining mental and physical health. In 1861, John handed over the complete control of the business to his sons Richard and George Cadbury who were 25 and 21 at that time. During this time the market was not doing well and most chocolate manufacturers in Britain were going out of business of which Cadbury was not an exception.

Richard and George invested 4000 pounds each from their inherited money and started to work long hours to keep the business alive. But their turning point came in 1966 when they decided to buy a new type of Cocoa press developed in the Netherlands which removed much of the unpalatable Cocoa butter from the Cocoa beans. Up until this point almost all Cocoa makers including Cadbury had a high level Of Cocoa butter in it, to which they had to add starches to mask its taste and texture. But with this press, that would not be necessary anymore. However, buying this machine was a massive risk for Cadbury as it was expensive, they had very little money to invest, and no one knew if there would be enough demand for the products that came out of it.

But they decided to go for it and were the first British manufacturers to do so. Thus they introduced the Cadbury Cocoa Essence as the UK’s first unadulterated, pure Cocoa. With its high quality and extensive marketing it became extremely popular leading to dramatic sales numbers and changed the future of British Cocoa industry.

In 1893, George Cadbury bought 120 acres of land surrounding the factory at his own expense to create a model village so that many more of their workforce could be given a healthy, pollution free And greener environment where they could thrive. By 1900, this was expanded to 330 acres with 313 cottages and houses along with other facilities like playgrounds, swimming pools and medical centres. Many more similar properties were built in.

The years leading up to the First World War, with smaller developments taking place later on in the 20th century. In 1897, Cadbury introduced their First Milk Chocolate bar. Although they were making milk chocolate drinks from 1849. This was a new recipe that they copied from contemporary Swiss Chocolate manufacturers.

But in terms of texture Swiss Chocolates were far superior as they added condensed milk instead of milk powder. Because of this, Swiss Companies dominated the British Market which Cadbury started to challenge. In 1904, Cadbury launched their Dairy milk bar. Developed by George Cadbury Junior, it was a production of exceptional quality with a higher proportion of milk than any previous chocolate in the market. On the suggestion of a customer, it was named Dairy Milk. With a distinctive and attractive purple wrapper, gradually it became, Cadbury’s best-selling product by 1914.

Due to the shortage of supply, the British Government banned manufacturers from using fresh milk. So, dried skimmed milk was used instead. Due to these issues with essential supplies, the Dairy Milk and many other Cadbury products came Off the shelves during The War. But once the war ended, the company worked hard to restore their business did a lot of promotions, kept competitors away with a direct distribution chain and continued launching new products like Milk Tray Bars, Fudge, Toffee Buttons and Picnic. In a few years they were back to the game like before.

In 1969 ,they merged with Swiss Drinks company Schweppes and demerged again in 2008.

Then in 2010, Kraft Foods bought the brand for an astounding $19 billion but they themselves split into two companies one of which was named Mondelez International which owns the Cadbury brand till date.

In 2019, Mondelez ranked 116 in the Fortune 500 list of largest corporations by total revenue.

As of today, Cadbury is the second largest confectionery brand in the world with products ranging from chocolates, ice cream and beverages to biscuits, desserts, spread and much more.

With operations in more than 60 countries including the UK, USA, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and India, it continues to be one of the most favoured name in the segment of chocolates, confectionaries and most probably would continue to be so for a long time!!

John S. Pemberton  first produced a drink in 1866 and named it COCA-COLA.

It is a really astonishing fact that the beverage with 1.9 million daily servings was initially made as an alternative to morphine, a pain reliever.

Pemberton was working as a colonel in the confederate during the American Civil War as well as a pharmacist. He sustained a saber injury from the war in April 1865 and was prescribed morphine to relieve his pain.

He realised that gradually we was becoming addictive to morphine and decided to prepare an alternative that would not contain morphine in it. He then experimented with a lot of different pain relievers.

After a lot of trials, he finally came up with an alcoholic wine that he called Pemberton’s French Wine Coca. The drink was mixed up with cocaine  extracted from coca leaves and caffeine from kola nut. Pemberton registered this French Wine in 1885. In 1886, Atlanta and Fulton County prohibited that wine,

This led to development of a non-alcoholic version of the wine.

Pemberton relied upon the Atlanta drugstore owner Wills E. Venable to help him perfect the product.

While trying to make the beverage, he accidently mixed the base syrup with  carbonated water which eventually gave birth to the drink Coca- Cola.

Frank Mason Robinson, Pemberton’s bookkeeper and partner came up with the name Coca-Cola which is the hybrid of the coca in Cocaine and cola ad in kola nut spelled as ‘cola nut’ at that time. Robinson also hand wrote, using the standard writing script for business correspondence in the U.S. at that time; Spencerian script on the bottles and ads, which are still in use until today.

The Coca-Cola was first sold at Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia on the 8^th of May, 1886 at 5 cents per glass at soda fountains, which were popular at that time in U.S. due to the belief that the carbonated water was good for the health.

Pemberton claimed Coca-Cola as a brain tonic which could cure many diseases such as morphine addictions, headaches, nerve disorders and impotence. It sold 25 US gallons the first year. By 1888, three versions  of Coca- Cola were produced and sold by three separate businesses. Years later Asa Griggs Candler, an Atlanta Pharmacist and businessman stated in the testimony that he had acquired stakes for $2,300 in Pemberton’s company as early as 1887. Candler sold products called ‘yum yum’ and ‘koke’ which he prepared with the same formula while Charley Pemberton, the son of John Pemberton, kept selling cruder syrup under the name of Coca-Cola. After the death of Pemberton, Candler bought the name ‘ Coca-Cola’ for $300.

By 1888, Candler had the full control over the ‘Coca-Cola’ company. In 1889, Benjamin Thomas and Joseph Whitehead, two entrepreneurs from Chattanooga, Tennessee suggested bottling and offered to be in charge of the procedure. They were so compelling that Candler agreed to a contract of only one dollar granting

them exclusive rights to bottle and sell the Coca-Cola.

Candler never collected his one dollar.

The first bottling of Coca-Cola was done in Biedenharn Candy Company in Vicksburg, Mississippi

in 1894 with John Biedenharn as proprietor.

In 1899, the first Coca-Cola bottling company was set up in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The contract came with many issues for the Coca-Cola Company.

It stated that each bottle was to be sold at 5 cents without stating a specific period.

As a result, a bottle of Coca-Cola was sold at 5 cents from 1886 to 1959.

The first outdoor wall advertisement of Coca-Cola was painted in Cartersville, Georgia in 1894.

Coca-Cola from 20th Century In 1910, the papers of the old Coca-Cola Company

were burned during a move to New Corporation offices and surprisingly in 1914, Margaret

Dozier, came out to profess that her signature on the Coca-Cola company bill of sale was

forged.

Analysis of certain similar transfer documents showed that John Pemberton’s signature was

forged and some accounts show that Charley Pemberton did it.

However, on September 12, 1919, a group of investors purchased the company for $25 million

and proceeded to release five hundred thousand shares to the public with each share costing

about $40.

In the same year, the company merged with Johnston Coca-Cola Bottling Group Inc. and

in 1986, the Coca-Cola company merged with two of its bottling companies, owned by HTL

corporation and BCI Holding company, to become Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc.

The longest running soda fountain that sold Coca-Cola was Fleeman’s pharmacy, established

in 1914 and existed for 81 years until 1995.

On July 12, 1944, the one-billionth gallon of Coca-Cola syrup was produced.

In 1955 the Coca-Cola cans were first introduced.

On April 23, 1985, Coca-Cola tried to change the formula of the syrup by preparing “New

Coke”.

Subsequent taste tests showed that people loved the taste of New coke better than Coke

or Pepsi and the company went on to produce more of it.

Soon after, the public wanted the old Coca-Cola soda back.

The Coca-Cola Company granted the wish of the public and produced the old drink with

a slight variation in the main sweetener; using high fructose corn syrup instead of

cane sugar.

This new drink was produced under the name Coca-Cola Classic on July 10, 1985.

Coca Cola in Recent Years On July 5, 2005, it was announced that Coca-Cola

would resume production in Iraq for the first time since the Arab league refused its use

in 1968.

By April 2007, Canada removed the “Classic” from the name, as New Coke was no longer in

production, so there was no need to differentiate between the two kinds of coke.

In 2009, Coca-Cola introduced the 7.5-ounce mini can.

Also in 2009, the “Classic” was removed from the 470 ml bottles of Coca-Cola sold in the

South Eastern United States and in 2011; “Classic” was removed from all Coca-Cola products.

In September 2011, the Coca Cola Company announced price reductions asking retailers to sell

eight packs at $2.99.

That same day, the company announced that the 12.5 ounces would sell at 89 cents and

the 16 ounces would sell at 99 cents.

In 2012, Coca-Cola resumed operations in Myanmar after 60 years of absence due to investment

sanction imposed on the US.

In 2013, the company announced that Coca-Cola Life would be introduced to Argentina and

other parts of the world.

This drink contained stevia and sugar but the production of Coca-Cola Life was discontinued

in Britain in June 2017.

Coca-Cola together with its investors is working to invest $5billion in their operations in

India by 2020.

Presently, The Coca-Cola Company owns several outlets around the world with the headquarters

situated as a 29 story; 403-foot tall building in Atlanta, Georgia called the One Coca-Cola

Plaza.

As of 2017, the company employed 61,800 members of staff with Muhtar Kent as the Chairman

of the Board and James Quincey as the President and Chief Executive Officer.

The net income in 2017 estimated around $1.4 billion with total assets worth $87.8 billion

and estimated net worth around $180 billion.

With more than 30,000 cafes around the globe, Starbucks has become a well known name across the world. From its iconic and popular cups with espresso inside them, Starbucks evolved from on coffee bean shop in Seattle to a brand with $80 billion business over 48 years. Starbucks cover total of 57% sales in the cafe market.

You heard it right!!

57% is not a small number. Nearly 2/3 of the coffee sold in the U.S. comes from Starbucks. But this itself has come with real pains. With 14,000 locations in U.S. alone, Starbucks has spread itself too thin.

Having too many stores out there led to fewer transactions in individual stores. To compensate the loss of fewer transactions, the company tried to increase the prices of their products. Doing this frequently can drive the customers away.

So, what strategy did Starbucks use to attract its customers ?

This was the time of 1970. Three college friends Zev Siegl, Jerry Baldwin and Gordon Bowker decided to go for a coffee business. They found a mentor in Alfred Peet, founder of Peet’s coffee and the man behind the custom coffee roasting to the U.S. So, with the help of Peet, the three friends founded Starbucks , a coffee bean shop and roastery at Seattle’s famous Pike Place Market in 1971. Peet helped those young entrepreneurs with coffee beans and helped them to connect with coffee brokers to provide the source to get their own roasted coffee beans until they could set up their own roastery. For the first decade, the founders opened the branches of Starbucks at 5 locations. At that time, the conventions coffee consumers found out a glaring absence that was actual coffee drinks or the actual cups made especially for coffee. There was no actual bars and no such demand for espresso based drink at that period of time. People usually take coffee beans their homes and just with simple method, they used to brew the coffee. No one had the thought of getting a beverage at a Starbucks coffee shop until 1980. Initial focus of Starbucks was the high quality coffee as customers were more focused on the canned coffee.  The company hired its first Director of Marketing and Sales, Howard Schultz. That man was very professional to the level where he became the CEO of Starbucks later.

In 1983, Schultz went To Italy and returns with an idea that was turning the coffee bean stores into cafes. Starbucks launched its first latte the next year. That experiment was a success and four years later Schultz partnered with the investors and bought Starbucks with $3.8 million. Schultz proposed a strategy of aggressive expansion.

By 1996, the company had opened the cafes in the more than thousand  locations including the international cafes in Japan and Singapore.

Growth was too rapid in the case of Starbucks that in just three years later, the company opened the café in 2000^th location as well.

Schultz switched from CEO to Executive Chairman at 2000. Between 2000 and 2007, Starbucks witnessed the extreme growth that the number of its cafes got more than quadrupled like 3,500 to 15,000 cafes directly.

Sales hot up from $2 billion to $9.4 billion in that period. But then Starbucks hit a wall.

The 2007 financial crash:

The growth from that year remained constant. The stock price fell by 50 percent. So Starbucks brought back Howard Schultz.

This news alone raised the Starbucks stock by 9 percent. He laid off 6,700 baristas in the café. He wanted customers to remember his brand. Schultz ordered all the cafes in the U.S. locations to call off in the afternoon so that he could show the baristas how to make the signature espresso. He wanted to make the customers to experience real life coffee in the stores to let it remember fresh in their minds. Schultz even ordered to remove automatic espresso machines.

Schultz’s strategy worked and the company stock price soared up by 149 percent in 2009. The company has been gaining positive reviews since then.

Starbucks took the big step of opening the new kind of stores that are Starbucks Reserve Roasteries. These massive foot stores are designed to be a tourist destination. Here, Starbucks baristas experiment new and different brewing methods to come up with delicious beverages. With this , Starbucks decided to come up with something new for the customers every now and then.

You got your pay-check in the end of the month. Congrats!! But now what? Either spend it or save it. Now, you know the things on which you want to spend the money. But a lot of people don’t know how to save money in such a way where the money they saved does not lose its value but in reality let it increase. Now, you must have this in your mind – How?

Simple, through investing it. There are four different areas where people usually invest in our country. First is Savings Account, second is Fixed Deposit, third is Gold or Jewellery and the last is real estate. Another way is investing in the stock market where the risk is comparatively higher.

Every investment contains three aspects viz. Return, Time and Risk.

Return is basically the profit you actually get through your investment and make sure that the profit percentage is higher than the inflation rate in your area otherwise the investment that you make would not make any sense.

Risk is about the chance of how much money can you lose through your investment. What are the chances of going in loss after investing in certain area , this mainly come under the risk aspect.

Time is about for how long are you planning to invest.

Savings account has the minimum risk with no restriction. You can take or save your money at any time. But the return is something in savings account which you have to compromise. In simply words, ROI ( Return In Investment ) in this case is low.

Fixed deposit is also another less risky option but there is a time limit here in which you can not take your money out. But the return here is slightly higher than that of savings account.

There is no risk in investing in Gold and Jewellery but ROI is not confirmed as their prices fluctuate a lot.

Investing in real estate depends on a lot of factors especially the area. There is a low to moderate risk in investing it. As the fluctuation of prices prevail here as well. You need a lot of capital as well in order to invest in the real estate.

Investment into the stocks may lead to higher return and higher loss as well. It depends on the stock in which you are investing.

It is advised to invest in multiple arenas in order to avoid higher risks.

What are Mutual Funds?

It is a special kind of investment through which you can invest on different types together. It is a better way of diversifying your investments by investing in a one place.

An asset management company collects money from different investors. Afterwards, it invests that money in different places. The collectively return that it gets is given to you after deducting small percent of it for the company itself. A lot of organisations have their own asset management companies. The risk and return all depends on which kind of mutual funds you are investing in.

Types of mutual funds:

There can be different types of mutual funds according to the places on which asset management company is investing.

Equity Mutual funds:

In equity mutual funds, money is invested in the stock market. In this category, generally risks and return both are high. If the investment in big company then it is called large cap equity fund and so on.

Diversified Equity Fund:

Here the investment is done in the large cap, medium cap and small cap companies simultaneously or it is done in different companies.

Equity Linked Saving Scheme (ELSS):

In this scheme you can save your tax that you get in the profit. The fund manager purposedly invests in the places where there is large return and large risks.

Index Funds:

Index funds are passively managed fund where no agent of asset management company looks for the places to invest. The return on these funds depend on the market price.

Debt Investment:

These are mutual funds which are invested in debt instruments like bonds, debentures and certificate of deposits.

What are bonds?

When government borrows money from people as loans then that is called a bond. The government will return the money to you with a fixed interest.

Hybrid Mutual funds:

 In this type, the money is invested in both equity and debt mutual funds.

For investing the money, you should gather the complete information about the type of investment you want to make first. Afterwards, make the right decision. But don’t let your money to sit idle in the banks.

There are people in the world who are having high income but are still living petty lives as they don’t know how to manage their finances.

Can you be financially secure even if you are not making a lot of money?

Can ordinary people invest in the stock market with manageable risks?

Answers to these questions are YES if you are well versed with Financial literacy.

Today managing money in a beneficial way has become a skill. It all starts with the income or money you are making in present. It can be through your salary or investments.

INCOME-

Your first step towards becoming a financial literate is to have enough money to manage. How can you make money now? For making money, you have to create your own value in the market. Employers would never hire YOU but they will hire your SKILLS. When you are imparting skills in yourself then you are creating your value. The more and better skills you have the more the value you would have.

EXPENSES-

When you get your income then what is the first thing you do?

Of course you either save it or spend it. In most of the times, you spend your income first. Now, how, when and on what to spend your income are the important aspects of financial literacy. Do you even know where your all money goes?

There is a 50:30:20 rule where 50% of your income goes to your urgent costs that can’t be delayed for example monthly bills including housing or rent other 30% of your income goes to Debt or savings and the rest 20% goes to your entertainment or the things you like to do or buy. If you don’t manage your expenses carefully then the repercussions only contain the regrets. People should note down their financial priorities every month then spend the income accordingly.

ASSETS-

Assets are the things on which you have the ownership. Everything from your house and saving accounts to your car are regarded as your assets. It is advised to develop the habit of saving from as earlier as possible while earning. Even if you save a very little amount then also this is not the problem. The thing is you should save and get into the practice of saving. Save regularly for any upcoming unexpected expenditures. Save as much to build more and more assets. After saving, make a diverse financial plan through which you can efficiently use your income.

STOCKS-

Investment nowadays has become  a necessity. Your one portion of your income ought to be used to buy a stock as to open multiple ways to earn money. There is always some amount of risk while buying a stock as the company in which you are investing may get profits in future or maybe not. So, you have to choose the company wisely in which you are investing. For a beginner, it is advised to invest in index funds or mutual funds. A mutual fund is a professionally managed portfolio for investment  that pulls money from all sorts of investors especially for those who are looking for diversifying their investments. Index funds are which are able to manage the performance for a group of companies like a group of tech companies or group of consumer goods company etc. An index basically consists of a basket of companies related to a particular niche. There are a lot of indices out there which can grab your attention. There comes the role of financial literacy which helps you to understand the tools required for achieving the short- term goals, intermediate goals or long-term goals.

LIABILITIES –

Liability is basically the debt you owe to  a person or a business. Buying something with credit that is an asset and consuming something with credit has a vast difference. Using your student loan to go for a trip or investing your student loan to build assets and to hone your skills create a big impact in your life. Whether you use your money to invest on yourself or spend it on having fun, it all depends on you and your mindset. The worse repercussions of more debt than your income have all been emotional. They suck all the joy of one’s life. Try to limit your expenses and liabilities. In the end, it all depends on you whether you make right choices or wrong. These choices can be related to money , education and relationships etc. Every choice you make has an impact in your life. It does not matter whether the impact is large or small. So, choose wisely!

Time, a word consists of only four alphabets but still holds the biggest impact in life. Time is like a flow of river which is irreversible in any case. Once it’s gone, YOU’VE COMPLETELY LOST IT. Still, we let lots of our time go in vain on the daily basis. Of course, there are humans who never learn until and unless they get a hard punishment for it or they go through regrets. From study to relationships, everything has its right time to be completed on.

Even so humans waste their time in thinking how their time is wasted. It’s ridiculous. Isn’t it? They regret why they wasted their time when they could have done something better with it. Only foolish people think that time is free or granted to them. Once this thought gets stuck in their mind, then their life is OVER which will be filled with emptiness.

What to do now when you are in a phase where you don’t know even where your time is going ?

In simple words, you just wake up and do the things which are required to do at the spot and then just go to sleep. NO goals and NO satisfaction. What is the solution now?

• Find out the leakage first

You must be wondering what kind of leakage I am talking about! I am referring to the leakage of time. Analyse your whole day and find out where your most of the time is leaking or wasting when at that period you are not even doing some productive work. Once you find out then cut that time and restrict yourselves to do that activity gradually day by day. You can not cut down an activity (unproductive) which you have been doing for a long time immediately. You will get to know that your half of the day is spent on doing insignificant things which are not gonna help you in long run.

• Stop your leakage to turn into a disaster in the future

Now when you know in which activities your time is being leaked, try to stop them one by one. You can’t control your mind immediately. To avoid distractions, you have to stop looking at them like distraction. For example, watching Netflix is a distraction and a leakage for you. You had decided to watch  a particular series for one hour and ended up watching it completely for the whole day and these things had been repeating day by day. Believe me, in a blink of eye, your whole month will be wasted on it as on Netflix many series are going to come everyday. You need the resolution and strong determination to reduce your leakage of time gradually. Invest your time in doing something productive which is going to be helpful in your life.

• Build a strong foundation

After allocating your time to do productive activities, you need to decide daily short goals and accomplish them. The satisfaction you will get everyday after completing the goals would be immeasurable.

This is your life whether you make it meaningful or meaningless, this all depends on you. Some use their time meticulously to become the top leaders in the world while other give mediocre efforts to live an average life. You only get one life. Why not give your best to live the life of your dreams ? Just decide for yourself what you want to do and then work tirelessly to achieve the top results with the utmost efforts!

The story begins around the time of 17^th century when Dutch East India Company employed hundreds of ships to make the trade of various products like gold, porcelain, spices and silks around the globe. Trading of these things required a lot of money with good business plans. Things being not cheap, company came up with a wonderful idea. In order to have money for their expensive voyages, company started to target the private citizens. They targeted those group of people who could invest in their business.

In exchange, they agreed to share a certain part of the profit from their business with them. This practice allowed them to make large amount of profits not only for themselves but also for their investors. Selling their shares in various kind of places, Dutch East India Company unknowingly invented the world’s first Stock Market. With their first step towards the stock market, till now the company has been collecting the large amount of money in form of shares to support their different businesses.

Stock basically refers to the part of ownership of investors in one or several companies. Modern Stock Market is definitely more complicated than the prior one.

How do companies and investors use stock market nowadays?

 When a company decides to launch in a market, then it first proposes its central or main idea in front of the big investors. If the investors like the company’s plan and ideas then they offer their sponsorship to it which is called Initial Public Offering (IPO).

Afterwards, company advertise itself in the official public market where any company or the individual who thinks the plan can be profitable starts to invest in the stocks of the company. Investing in the stocks make the investors partial owners in the business. With increment in the growth of the company, more investors see the potential of it and start to invest in the company.

With increase in the demands of the stocks, the price of them also increases which further raises the value of the stocks that people already own. This also increases the market value of the company. If the company seems to be less profitable in future then the demand of its stocks also decline leading to a loss for the investors if they not sell their stocks prior to when their value declines.

These situations occur due to unavoidable circumstances of market forces i.e. demand and supply. Demand and supply are totally dependent upon people’s preferences and contentment. Some other factors which also influence these situations are change in production technology, shifting costs of labor and fluctuating price of materials etc. It is highly unpredictable to get success in each and every investment due to the changing of circumstances. That’s why, various experts are building different tools to predict high chance of success in investment. With the help of internet, now in each and every part of the world, there are people from rich to poor who are ready to dive in the sea of investment. While earning income, it has become a duty to invest some money in stocks in order to pursue long-term financial goals.

Crypto means hidden or secret. So, literally cryptocurrency is the  (private digital) currency which is concealed. To put it in simple words, this currency does not exist physically but digitally in secret. When someone trades using cryptocurrency then the transaction is being registered through public ledger. Some of the famous examples of the cryptocurrency are Bitcoin, Ripple, Dogecoin and Ethereum etc. With passing of time, the popularity of cryptocurrency has risen up.

How does Cryptocurrency work?

The ledger where the transactions through this currency happens is being maintained by a lot of computers with the help of a lot of people which is popularly known as Peer to Peer Network. These transactions are being recorded as the blocks. With increment of each transaction, new blocks keep adding up to create a chain which is called as Blockchain. No one can disturb this order of Blockchain with any kind of fraud as it is present in a network of computers with full transparency. It is easy to track any kind of trickery with such a high level of transparency.

The software or computers which  carry out these transactions are called Miners and the process through which these transactions is being carried out is called Mining.

As the transactions are registered on public ledger, so to maintain the privacy of the money that one person have, all the money and transactions are being coded which is called as cryptography.

 The idea of making currency decentralised gave birth to cryptocurrency. So that everyone can try out their luck  to have more and more money. But to handle the situation of how much money in this currency should be produced, the prices are being fixed prior to any trade. So, the price of any currency would be determined according to its supply and demand.

       What are the advantages of Cryptocurrency?

• It is a centralised currency. So, no one can have monopoly over it.

• There is no government control over it. Countries conflict would not affect the value of money of the people.

• Cryptocurrency is limited. There is no issue regarding printing more paper currency in Bitcoin.

• Cryptocurrency is more reliable due to the usage of Blockchain technology.

  What are the disadvantages of Cryptocurrency?

• There is no authority which can resolve the issues regarding the cryptocurrency.

• There can be unethical or immoral use of cryptocurrency that we can come to know in near future.

• It is not eco-friendly to use as making of cryptocurrency drains a lot of power and resources.

In India, it has not been recognised as the legal tender of the money. So, people can’t use cryptocurrency fully here. But investment in cryptocurrency is legal in India. Nonetheless, what new changes cryptocurrency will bring into this world are yet to be seen..