Learn How to Unleash Your Billion Dollar Idea at OMBC
Global Entrepreneur Chinedu Echeruo Talks $1 Billion Apple Deal at the Ohio Municipalities Business Conference
Chinedu Echeruo will speak on Wednesday, August 2 at the OMBC.
The two-day statewide conference will provide tangible tips, resources and business opportunities to start-ups, entrepreneurs and small business owners across the state. Hosted by Mayor Andrew Ginther and the City of Columbus, Office of Diversity and Inclusion, the conference will provide an interactive platform for municipality leads, procurement officers, supplier diversity professionals, business owners and leaders, and industry influencers to discuss best practices in supplier diversity to build and grow their businesses.
Recognized in Fortune, Forbes and others, Chinedu Echeruo is a serial entrepreneur who has dared to invent the future. In 2005, he founded Hopstop, the pioneering travel app that helped millions of users navigate public transportation in major metropolitan areas around the world. In 2013 he sold the company to Apple for a reported $1 billion.
Chinedu Echeruo, a former hedge fund manager and frustrated New York City resident lost in a vast bus and subway system. His desire to fix the dilemma of figuring out how to get from point A to point B using public transit led to the invention of HopStop.com, a pedestrian navigation service that helps people get door-to-door directions or find nearby subway stations, bus stops, taxi service providers, and car rental places.
Launched in 2005, New York-based HopStop distinguished itself as a perennial innovator in the burgeoning location-based service market with not only its popular online and mobile Websites, but also its industry-leading mobile applications for both iOS and Android. The apps cover more than 300 cities throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, and the United Kingdom. HopStop grew 250% in three years, from $574,268 in revenue for 2007 to $2 million in 2010 and an estimated $5 million in 2012.
In a historic move, HopStop was sold to Apple Inc., for what some analysts estimate to be $1 billion. HopStops’s acquisition by Apple helps to bolster the hardware company’s software mapping tools. There is not doubt that Apple paid a large sum for HopStop, says Jim Thatcher, a researcher who specializes in mobile mapping technology at Clark University in Worchester, Massachusetts. “There is a gold rush for mapping apps like it.”
As a child growing up in eastern Nigeria, Echeruo always wanted to be an entrepreneur. He attended Kings College in Lagos and Syracuse University and Harvard Business School in the U.S. After working several years in the Mergers & Acquisitions and Leveraged Finance groups of JPMorgan Chase, and later at the hedge fund AM Investment Partners, he founded two Internet-based companies, HopStop.com and Tripology.com (a lead-generation and travel referral business for the travel industry), for which he raised nearly $8 million from private investors. In 2010, he sold Tripology.com to the travel and navigation information company Rand McNally for an undisclosed amount. Tripology is now owned by USA Today.
More information on the conference can be found at www.columbus.gov/OMBC2017
Echeruo bio source: Black Enterprise
Printed in OhioMBE – August 1, 2017
