Rohan Seth's Winning Streak
Technopreneurs stand out through absorption of the right technical knowledge and its implementation. While they keep in mind their own interest, they also use their capabilities for the welfare of society at large. By using technological solutions to revolutionize traditional practices, they bring about change in the business field. It is all about using creativity and innovation to revolutionize business productivity through modern-day practices.
In recent years, a person of Indian descent revolutionised the way people communicate through audio. Technopreneur Rohan Seth was born in 1982 in Patna, India. Prior to finding enormous success in the US, he tried his hand at building websites for different purposes in India. However, in 2002, he began his Bachelor's degree at Stanford University, US. Later in 2006, he pursued studies in Management Science and Engineering. While he was studying at Stanford he took up a job at Google and spent the following six years working on user location technology and other products. While at Stanford as an intern he designed and developed a video bookmarking app for Stanford Online's distance learning and offline class interactions. Today, he lives with his family in San Francisco, US. He is married to Jen Fernquist, a Canadian-American whom he met while working at Google.
Technopreneur Rohan Seth
Rohan Seth has always been a person who enjoyed creativity and loved scaling the heights of success. His first foray into the world of entrepreneurship was through a mobile app developer, Memry Labs. The co-founder of Clubhouse, began his career at Google and was associated with the firm from 2006 to 2012. While at Google, he was an early member of the company's mobile team, working on product and engineering efforts for Android, Google Maps and the location platform. He was the co-founder of a start-up unit within Google using machine learning on location, social and search signals to immensely tweak content targeting. Along with another Indian-American, Rohan Dang, who was an alumnus of Modern School, Delhi, co-founded Memry Labs in 2014. The firm developed mobile social apps, including KIT Bot (messaging bot), Phone-a-Friend (mobile app), #hashtag (interest-based communication) and Goofer (chrome extension). Memry Labs was eventually bought by Open Door, a digital real estate platform, in 2017. However, Seth remained with the firm until 2019.
True to the old adage, "Failures are the stepping stones to success," Rohan Seth and his business partner Paul Davidson, the co-founders of Clubhouse, had not less than nine unsuccessful apps between them, including Talkshow, which was their first collaboration and the predecessor to Clubhouse. In 2019, Clubhouse started as a social media startup. The original app, Talkshow, was rebranded as "Clubhouse" and initially released for the iOS operating system in March 2020. In less than a year, an Android-compatible app was also launched. Thanks to Clubhouse's rapidly gaining popularity, it was valued at $100 million after receiving funding from notable angel investors, such as Ryan Hoover, Balaji Srinivasan and James Beshara, among several others. The funding was also received from venture capitalist firm, Andreessen Horowitz, for a $12 million Series A investment.
Clubhouse's Exponential Growth
Clubhouse gained popularity during the early phase of the global pandemic. The app developed a unique way for users to listen to live conversations with expert panelists while giving the opportunity to have their own views heard, too. It was a radical idea that combined intimacy and innovation. By the close of 2020, it had 600,000 registered users. In early 2021, Paul Davison, Seth's business partner, announced that the app's active weekly user base was about 2 million individuals. The company started working on an Android version of the app scheduled for launch by mid-2021. Meanwhile, Clubhouse became widely popular in Germany after German podcast hosts, Philipp Klöckner and Philipp Gloeckler, started an invite-chain over a Telegram group. It soon brought German influencers, journalists and politicians to the platform. By the end of the year, Clubhouse raised the Series B funding at a $1 billion valuation.
Clubhouse, which had an estimated 3.5 million downloads on a global level in early-2021 grew rapidly to 8.1 million. The enormous growth in popularity was due mainly to celebrities, such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who made appearances on the app. A year after the app's release, the number of weekly active users was over 10 million. However, its user base dropped 21% during three weeks from late-February to early-March 2021. During its initial roll-out, the app was accessible by invitation only. The invitation codes on eBay were reportedly sold at $400.
In the first quarter of 2021, Clubhouse partnered with Stripe to launch its first monetizing feature, Clubhouse Payments. The firm rolled out the functionality to another 60,000 users in the US. Eventually in mid-2021, it launched a beta version of the Android app for users in the US, and shortly thereafter the app became available worldwide for Android users. Soon thereafter the company added new features known as Wave, and Replays and Clips. However, by early-2023, it began to reduce its staff by half by citing a "resetting" due to post-pandemic market shifts.
Of all the apps that were launched during the pandemic lockdown, Clubhouse has survived the shift back to normality. The audio-chat social network, which works like a live podcasting app, saw a substantial surge in growth since 2021, adding two million new users by 2024.
Through Clubhouse’s remarkable journey, its key differentiator has remained inclusivity. Twitter Spaces and Discord may offer a similar technological service, but Seth-Davison’s direct emphasis on diversity and accessibility is perhaps the platform’s greatest asset.
(Photo: Courtesy Company Site)
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