This Harvard grad couldn't find job on Wall Street - Now HIS company is worth 600m

[Akаsh]

This Harvard grad couldn't find a job on Wall Street so he launched his own startup — it's now worth $600 million

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When you have a Harvard degree in accounting and finance, you would think it would be a cakewalk to find a job on Wall Street.

That wasn't the case for Daniel Saks, the 29-year-old cofounder and co-CEO of AppDirect, a cloud marketplace and management platform.

When Saks got his master's degree from the Harvard Extension School in 2009, he tried to get a job at a bank like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, but he never received an offer. It was the recession, and jobs weren't opening up.

Things were starting to look bleak. Saks' only work experience at the time was an unpaid summer internship at a small firm in San Francisco. Worse, his family’s 100-year-old furniture business had just shut down because of the recession.

"Life was pretty grim," Saks tells Business Insider.

With no job and his family business going under, Saks needed time to clear his mind. He decided to go on a trip to see his old family friend Nicolas Desmarais, who was in San Francisco doing consulting work at Bain & Co.

At about that time, Saks was also starting to think about launching his own business. He always admired his father's entrepreneurial spirit and felt as if running a business was in the family. He just couldn't figure out what exactly he wanted to do.

Desmarais at the time had large tech-company clients who were looking for ways to upgrade their infrastructure and cloud offerings. So he was aware of the industry's shift to cloud software, or software offered through the internet. And as Saks bounced around ideas with Desmarais, it became clear that if he were going to start a company, it had to be in cloud software.

"We realized cloud computing could completely change the way businesses operate," Saks says. "It could have even saved my family's business."

Saks spent the next five months finalizing his business plan. He also persuaded Desmarais to quit his job to work full time on the new startup. Desmarais' mom was disappointed that he was leaving his lucrative consulting gig, but the two went on to cofound AppDirect in 2009.

AppDirect is now the backend software powering the marketplaces of many companies. It basically builds an app store for its clients, much like iTunes or Google Play, but only for business apps. It provides a white-label marketplace for companies like Samsung or Rackspace, so those companies could rebrand it as their own marketplace. For example, Samsung has its own Samsung KNOX marketplace, and Rackspace runs its own Rackspace Marketplace, where apps optimized for their respective platforms are sold to clients. Both marketplaces use AppDirect's technology.

The idea of AppDirect may sound simple, but companies have to spend a lot of resources to build up app stores on their own. Although some companies like Salesforce have the capacity to build their own, many businesses prefer outsourcing to companies like AppDirect. It also gives AppDirect's clients the ability to curate and monitor the apps sold on their marketplaces, giving complete transparency over use of the apps.

The business has been doing quite well. More than 20 million people are using AppDirect's service so far, including employees at big enterprises like Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, and ADP. Its revenue has been doubling for the fourth straight year and reached $18 million last year.

On Wednesday, it announced another round of funding at $50 million from investors including Peter Thiel and Ajay Royan's growth-stage venture capital fund Mithril Capital Management. Saks told us the company was valued at roughly $600 million, double its valuation from last year.

"AppDirect opened a new market for software makers by helping small businesses find software and use it well," Thiel said in a statement.

Saks says AppDirect expects to continue doubling in size (both in revenue and employees) in the foreseeable future. It already has offices in San Francisco, Munich, London, and Montreal, but Saks plans to keep expanding with the new funding.

Desmarais' mom is also convinced. After AppDirect signed on Bell Canada, one of the biggest companies in Canada, she told him, "If you signed on Bell Canada, then sure you can go start this business."



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Whats your opinion guys?? :3

 

[Joker]

Oh, that's nice.

 

[Urda]

Good for him I guess.

 

[Chief Toad]

Well ok... must be nice

 

[Sol Ku]

Cool beans for him, Though I hate the attitude "I got a degree so where's my job?" Like shit man .. how about looking for one?

 

[Cunning Linguist]

And for everyone of this guy, there's thousands of more people who's businesses will fail. This is called winner's bias. Boohoo. Mr. Harvard couldn't get a job on Wall Street. Very few people start on Wall Street. You need to prove yourself.

 

[Conspirator.]

And for everyone of this guy, there's thousands of more people who's businesses will fail. This is called winner's bias. Boohoo. Mr. Harvard couldn't get a job on Wall Street. Very few people start on Wall Street. You need to prove yourself.

Have to agree with this. Also, the luck of the draw plays a bigger role with regards to your success (or not) in life than most people think.

 

[Multiply]

Am I supposed to be happy for the rich kid that got even more rich? Lol. Okay...

 

[Red Flag X Drake]

Am I supposed to be happy for the rich kid that got even more rich? Lol. Okay...

Be happy he actually did something. I mean rich or not most kids straight out of school can't do this. Plus he might not even be rich. Schools give scholarships. Don't be so jealous

 

[Aim64C]

The National Socialism is strong in this thread.

100 years ago, you didn't go to college in order to get a job. You applied for a job because you lacked the equipment, notoriety, facilities, or practical experience to do whatever it was as an independently employed tradesman.

You went to college in order to study theories and applications of those theories to various trades - to help one advance his or her "art" over the others who were performing the same "art" (such as machining, mining, farming, etc).

This was the case up until the major economic crunch following the 1929 stock market collapse (made possible by the Federal Reserve in 1914). The impact on the business sector was devastating and the response by the Roosevelt administration destroyed entrepreneurship and prevented a recovery.

It wasn't until the war in Europe began to escalate that Roosevelt realized the need to appeal to large industries - and thus the Military-Industrial Complex was born as a merger between a controlling government and the owners of large businesses/industries. The government funneled massive amounts of money into individual firms who then had to hire a massive number of employees to accomplish the work.

The gambit 'worked' - but it caused a fundamental shift in how Americans view academic and career success. The focus of academic success became "will someone hire you" and career success became "how much someone is willing to pay you." Subconsciously, America set itself up as a slave labor market by destroying the notion that an individual who was educated was always self-employed and employment under another business was a contract for labor services (IE - the company was contracting your services - not a request for you to be able to work).

Breakthroughs in certain fields led to unregulated sectors of the economy where entrepreneurship advanced. Electronics and related industrial controls became a very competitive sector with many "no-names" competing for business. Food service remained a classic entrepreneurial venture, as do most service-based industries... but the "Hard" industries - the "Real" industries of mining and manufacturing have been largely held hostage by the Government's fascist conglomerate since the 30s.

The Internet provided the greatest reprieve from government domination and we saw a massive rise in entrepreneurship and related successes. Amazon, Google, Cysco, Apple - even Microsoft - all started off almost literally from the garage or dorm room. The Internet and related hardware technologies became the most rapidly expanding and heavily invested industry.

But National Socialism can't stand success. Misery must be equally shared by all. Thus, we get Net Neutrality and the end of the free internet age. It won't be immediate, but as the government begins to close down around the Internet, we'll be waiting in line for downloads we have to pay taxes on (when that used to be the 'free' option) and we'll be lucky to see any company invest in "5G" mobile networks, much less install them. Fiber optic installs will be halted (why didn't the Cable companies ever adopt fiber, but the Internet did? - think of the Pay-per-view that can stream over that... it's because TV cable broadcast is a Title II regulated industry), and new server investment/construction will be considerably slowed, if not halted all together. Even as the number of devices increase, the server processing power will not.

Which means a lot of the smaller companies currently involved in server hosting will simply sell to the larger names that contract from them, currently. The local networks will be lost to the larger conglomerates and it is basically the end of the internet as an expansive entity. It will be frozen in time like Cable TV and land line phone service that no one wants, these days.

So - a guy who made a business when he couldn't get a job?

That's exactly the mentality America needs. Who is anyone else to tell you where you must start?

Who is anyone else to tell you what you can work at, and what you can't?

Seriously - you all seem to think you're liberals, or something - but I've never seen a group more possessed by slavery and starved by jealousy outside of a union rally.