By M. Suyanto
Many people complain that opening a business has no chance. This is a classic complaint that we cannot hear anymore. In fact, in order to start a business, we can do a variety of ways, one which is to apply the education we have.
Jerry Yang and David Filo, Yahoo founders, started the business by using their education. They used to be students of Stanford University. Yahoo, which started a business by using the back of a parking lot, is now growing rapidly. Jerry Yang and David Filo started the business from small and simple things. Jerry Yang Yahoo illustrated that the discovery was ‘an accident’ when he and Filo finished their theses. Yang and Filo started Yahoo when they were in college. They started doing business with a website, listing some of their favorites, and developing some software that allowed a website to get other web sites that would be placed on the so-called web portals until it was established in 1994 and was called ‘Terry’s Guide to the World Wide Web’. When they learned that their sites had been visited by people from 90 countries, they spontaneously said ‘Yahoo’, and ultimately that’s the word used to name their company. In 1999, Yahoo reached star status. Net income quadrupled in the fourth quarter of 57.6 million dollars while revenues jumped from 91 million to $ 201 million dollars. Then, Yahoo was the best portal in 2002.
Kiichiro Toyoda is the son of the founder of Toyoda Spinning & Weaving Co., which was changed into the field of automatic loom. After completing his engineering studies, he decided to start a business by transforming the company into the production car and he changed the company name from Toyoda to Toyota in 1936. Kiichiro Toyoda became President of Toyota car factory until 1950. The first car model produced was then AA Crown. Offices in foreign countries were first established in Taiwan and then Saudi Arabia. The products that the began to produce were forklift trucks (trailers), which made the factory number one in the international, car market. These trucks entered USA market in 1958 and British market in 1965. The Crown model car failed to enter the USA because they were designed for the Japanese market but it was not designed for being driven on American highways. Then, after producing Corolla cars in 1968, Toyota car factory achieved success so that the factory could shift Volkswagen cars as number-one imported cars in the USA, even it could take Americans with General Motors to make Toyota cars in America. Camry was the most successful car sales in the USA in 1997. Toyota is now extended to other areas of business, namely financial services, telecommunications, housing, machinery navy, recreational boats, parts distribution and aviation services. Toyota is now a number-three car maker in the world after General Motors and Ford. Yoyota has sold 5 million vehicles per year.