Business

8 Famous Entrepreneurs who rightly deserve their title

Marina Symeou
13 Feb 2019
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What makes an Entrepreneur? Who can call himself by this title? How much money they have and what it took to get them to Entrepreneur status.
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By definition, an Entrepreneur is someone who takes a huge financial risk in order to organize and run their business. An Entrepreneur is a leader not a boss. He inspires others and wants his team to excel as well. He is the first in and last out of the office. He learns how to run almost every aspect of their entrepreneurship. He takes any opportunity to raise his status whilst maintaining their ideas and principles. An emerging Entrepreneur can be found at any position in a company, working himself up the ladder and meticulously planning his future.

The following list includes 8 Entrepreneurs (in alphabetical order) that you should watch out for and how they made it. From upcoming to established ones, we are evaluating them depending on their net worth, influence and potential growth. Some of them are social entrepreneurs and we bet that they will have even bigger success in the near future.

Jeff Bezos

Jeff is the brilliant founder of Amazon. He started off humbly with an online bookstore and managed to turn it into the biggest platform for all sorts of products. His net worth is a whopping $159.6 billion and keeps growing. Jeff always tries new innovations for his company such as creating Amazon’s original products, namely Alexa, Audible, Amazon Web Services etc. He was a risk-taker from the start, when he decide to quit his job and start Amazon in his garage. His bigger vision for his company was that they wouldn’t be confined to selling books. His innovative vision and hard-work outshone the competition and established his company.

In the company’s early years his motto was: “Get Big Fast” and he was reinvesting all the profits into the expansion of the company. His 5 principles highlighted in most of his letters sent out to his shareholders make him an iconic entrepreneur: “focus on customers not competitors, take risks for market leadership, facilitate staff morale, build a company culture, and empower people”. These principles are often copied by aspiring entrepreneurs as well as his leading style. He is renowned for his philanthropy and his outreach programs are exceptional.

Sergey Brin

He is the co-founder of Google and with a net worth of $47.5 billion, the 13th richest person on the planet. Born in the soviet union and immigrating at the age of 6 to the US, Brin made the most out of his prestigious education and when doing his PhD came up with the idea of Google. Needless to say, he postponed that PhD (probably indefinitely) and start working with his partner Larry Page to contextualize their idea. His innovative vision allowed him to push ahead of any competition making Google the most successful search engine as well as a popular phrase (Google it!).

As a philanthropist, he created Google.org which invests in renewable energy and alternative sources of energy. Him and his partner manoeuvred the market greatly, sold the shares needed to establish their company but maintained a percent of them to keep their income steady. He issues authored publications and received awards. Google now produces their own products and has become one of the most well-known brands of all time. One of his mottos: "To me, this is about preserving history and making it available to everyone." No other search company will dethrone Google any time soon, so kudos to the 2 geniuses behind it.

Sean Combs

Sean Combs aka “P.Diddy”, “Puffy”, “Puffy Daddy” etc, is a renowned American rapper turned entrepreneur. He started off as a poor struggling artist and managed to become a mogul. Sean wasn’t satisfied being a rich and wildly successful rapper. He wanted to build a brand with his name and become an entrepreneur. He started his own award-winning fashion line and record company.

Along the way he opened his own restaurants, launched his own fragrance made several profitable ventures. He is the epitome of the American dream and made his life goal to become an example to all those growing up with little means in poor neighborhoods. With his eyes on the ball, this entrepreneur managed to become one and be more successful or rich than other entertainers. One of his life mottos explains why he achieved such immense success: “Success doesn’t land on your lap. You have to work, work, work, work and work some more”. He is a workaholic and admitted that he struggled with letting others get on board to help him. Combs likes to give back to the community and through his foundation helps inner city youth to attend various extracurricular classes. He has become one of the most important black entrepreneurs and businessmen of the century.

Bill Gates

Of course, we couldn’t leave the ultimate Entrepreneur of all times out of the list. Bill continues to define and own his rightful title whilst funding large portions of his wealth to charity. With $95 billion as his net worth, this man won’t leave the richest list any time soon. Bill’s vision that Microsoft will be on everyone’s home and desktop, seemed crazy for most people. He knew that with proper strategizing he could manage to make his software the most reliable and popular globally. What he sought out to do, was to make his program necessary for any type of pc. What makes him memorable and more influential than his initial partner Paul Allen is his leadership style and philanthropy.

Often, described as a man who wouldn’t answer any email or phone call, Gates applied himself in to actually ameliorating his programs and his strategy. A fierce competitor and a visionary, he managed to predict that the computers will be our window to the world and became the ultimate entrepreneur of the 20th century. One of his most memorable quotes that speaks volumes on the way he thinks is: “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it”. This innovative way of thinking pushed his company ahead of the curve and makes their products still today the most easy to use in the market. Although, he owns a little over 1% of his company (he sold or gave away his shares) he remains one of the most influential men of industry because of his predatory style of running his business.

Scott Harrison

At 28 he was chilling with his model girlfriend at a beach with his Rolex and his expensinsive BMW. He afforded his luxurious lifestyle as a club promoter and he was partying his way through life. He realised that he was wasting his life and money on pointless objects and decided to give back to the community. He became a social entrepreneur by creating his own charity. His aim is to provide clean water to as many countries in need as possible, via his non-profit organization. Harrison started off with Mercy Ships (the only charity who accepted him) as a volunteer. Via the photos he took and emailed to his contacts (from his club promoting days), people started donating to support the work he was doing. He got the idea of starting his own charity when he realised that he had the power to influence so many people positively. In order to start the charity he threw a party using his old contacts with an entry fee and raised his first money. He is an exceptionally talented public speaker who always manages to move the crowds and he uses all the marketing skills he picked up during his club promoting days.

He is one of the highest paid executives at his charity which affords him a comfortable lifestyle. Therefore, by doing good for the world, he secures his future as well. In an Impact Theory interview he quite memorably said: “There are two kinds of people in the world. There are people in the world that think the world is getting better, and there are people that think the world is getting worse. Who do you want to hang out with?”. He wants to inspire others into giving back to the community and therefore justifies his social entrepreneur title. He is an icon for many and a man to look out for as we are sure his future endeavours will be as imaginative as all the campaigns he has run up to now.

Elon Musk

The ultimate Internet mogul and entrepreneur. Musk has some very overambitious plans, which do tend to pan out for him in most cases and his conquests make him iconic. As the founder of Paypal, Tesla Motors, SpaceX he has an estimated value of $20.8 billion. He is one of the most influential men of the century and was ranked 25th on Forbes “The World's Most Powerful People” list. He is super educated which enabled him to embark on so many different career paths. He is an engineer, an investor, an inventor, a physician, a businessman and ultimately the definition of what an entrepreneur really is. People compare him to Ford and he quoted in an interview:"When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars, people said, 'Nah, what's wrong with a horse?' That was a huge bet he made, and it worked." This is his ideology, bold risk taking.

His eco friendly way of thinking has helped his companies produce products designed to reduce global warming. Although, he is radical in his ideas and his public statements (his infamous Tweets), Musk always manages to handle the public’s backlash. Some of his recent ideas such as driverless cars can cause bigger traffic problems in the long run, Musk doesn’t accept any of the counter arguments. He has received countless prestigious awards and his controversial personality keeps him on the spotlight. He even participated in The Simpsons and other TV shows and movies. In 2012 he joined fellow billionaires in signing The Giving Pledge, which essentially is a commitment that he will give away most of his wealth, either during his lifetime or after his death. Despite, being under a lot of controversy in the past years, we are sure that he will continue rise with more entrepreneurship plans

Blake Mycoskie

Another great example of a social entrepreneur. Blake was always had business spirit. From giving tennis lessons in his back yard to setting his first company at uni, he had a clear understanding of how to contextualise and make successful each of his ideas. When studying, an injury caused him problems getting to the laundry room and that's how he got the idea for his business. He bought a cheap van and decided he would do other people’s laundry. In order to get clientele, he would drive up and down the campus to get people’s interest and gain their confidence. His venture was so successful that he dropped out of college and a couple of years later sold it. As the years went by, he got random ideas for businesses, found the gaps in the market (like setting his billboard company in Nashville) and worked hard to establish his companies. He even participated in a reality show and despite losing, he got the idea to set his own reality channel. Although, Fox sort of stole their idea and the channel bankrupted he got more business ideas. When in a polo camp in Argentina, Mycoskie realised to his dismay that many children were barefoot. He met a woman at a bar who told him that they were collecting shoes from the rich and distributing them to the poor. And that’s when inspiration hit him.

He decide to create TOMS, a shoe company that for every pair sold they would give back a pair to those in need. Inspired by the espadrille-style shoes polo players wore at the tournament he returned to LA and started planning his venture. At first he was rejected by the high-end stores but once he started telling the story behind the shoe stores wanted to purchase them. He kept the promise and free shoes are regularly shipped to people in need. He always planned on giving back as he pointed out in his following quote: “I always thought that I would spend the first half of my life making money so I can spend the second half of my life giving it all away. And one of the defining moments of my life was when I realized that I could do both at the same time with TOMS”. His company keeps adding new products to their collection to make the profits bigger as well as the contributions to the less fortunate.

Mark Zuckerberg

The most popular entrepreneur in the world. Quite often found in the middle of controversy and very much talked about. Zuckerberg’s net worth is over $71 billion which makes him one the youngest and richest men alive. As the co-founder of Facebook he has plenty of cash despite reducing his annual salary to $1. His idea behind his venture is: “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission - to make the world more open and connected”. Facebook keeps expanding by buying other social network apps such as Messenger, Whatsapp etc.

He is the public face of his company and received a lot of backlash in recent years. Despite being a Harvard dropout he managed to become on of the youngest CEOs in history and his company survived the Capitol Hill two-day testament of 2018. Zuckerberg’s career started with legal issues (claims that he copied the idea of Facebook) and as it seems that he carried on that trajectory. Nevertheless, despite being severely criticized over the years, he is still one of the richest men on earth, he still gives speeches and he is still considered an entrepreneur. We are quite sure that we will be seeing a lot more of him in the years to come. Hopefully, not a robotic testament in an official hearing.