Nigerians are not lacking in talents. This is a well-known fact, even harshest critics of the country admit this. What is lacking is the infrastructure to actualise their potentials. Stories abound of Nigerians making giant strides abroad.
This is the reason, Senator Ben Murray-Bruce, in one of his twitter messages, asked the federal government to invite Echeruo to mentor our youths.
Bruce said: “Ideas are ruling the world. Nigeria must prepare for the new idea age or fade away… FG should consider inviting Chinedu Echeruo who recently sold his idea to Apple for one billion dollars to mentor our youths.”
Chinedu Echeruo, an investment banker, is the founder of Hopstop.
HopStop.com, Inc, (branded as “HopStop”), is an online city transit guide offering door-to-door subway and bus directions and maps for over 140 cities around the world using its website, or apps for iPhone, iPad and formerly Android. The company, which was founded in 2005, was named one of the top 100 fastest growing software companies in the United States in 2011. It was purchased by Apple Inc. in July 2013. The Android version of its app was removed from the Play Store in September 2013.
Apple acquired Echeruo’s Hopstop for $1 billion, The Wall Street Journal’s publication, All Things Digital, reported.
He is now Chairman of the Board for Hopstop. He has been compared to Israel’s Waze, which was recently acquired by Google for $1 billion. The move is seen as Apple’s plan to bolster its map offering, especially given Google’s recent acquisition of Waze.
Echeruo budded in Nigeria. He grew up in Ebonyi State in the Eastern Nigeria and attended Kings College, Lagos. He attended Syracuse University and the Harvard Business School in the United States and founded Hopstop.com after working for several years in the mergers and acquisitions and leveraged finance groups of J.P Morgan Chase where he was involved in a broad range of M&A, financing and private equity transactions.
He also worked at AM Investment Partners, a $500 million volatility-driven convertible bond arbitrage hedge fund. He founded and raised nearly $8 million for his two U.S based internet companies: Hopstop.com and Tripology.com. Tripology.com was acquired in 2010 by American travel and navigation information company, Rand McNally.
Echeruo is a partner, and head of Principal Investing at Constant Capital (Constantcap.com), a West-Africa based investment bank.
Prior to joining Constant Capital, Echeruo founded two U.S-based internet companies; HopStop.com and Tripology.com. Tripology.com was acquired in 2010 by Rand McNally and is now owned by USA Today. HopStop was acquired by Apple in 2013. He was also named Black Enterprise magazine’s Small Business Innovator of the Year and listed in the magazine’s Top 40 under 40.
HopStop does for subway and bus riders what Mapquest does for drivers. The Company’s services are delivered through a website (www.hopstop.com), SMS and voice interface and a downloadable mobile application; allowing users to access the HopStop service anywhere and anytime.
According to Echeruo, “There is no reason why every entrepreneur should have to reinvent the wheel every single time in all the countries in Africa.
“My idea is to essentially have one place where a budding entrepreneur can access a template for starting a business, and then customise it to suit their own situation; essentially, a business-in-a-box.”
Echeruo is working on yet another venture but this time, focused on small businesses in Africa.
Transit directions are available for New York City and several other major metropolitan areas, including Atlanta, Boston, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, Paris, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto, and Washington, D.C. Service in Chicago is suspended as of mid-October 2013, with no announced timeline for restoration.
Since the release of iOS 6 in September 2012, in which Apple replaced support for Google Maps with their own mapping, HopStop has been named as one of the top transit apps for Apple products by multiple publishers including Business Insider, Fast Company and Wired.
They dropped support for Windows Phone a few days later.
