Entrepreneurs

Phil Knight was a 24-year-old man who had just returned home to Oregon after graduating with a master’s from Stanford and serving in the US Army for a year, but he still felt like a child. The straight-laced young man was good at running, very good in fact, but not quite elite level. It was on one of his morning runs where he thought about his crazy idea that he’d formulated in Stanford Business School and decided to work on it and keep going until he achieved it.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has led an extraordinary life. Arriving in America as an immigrant at the age of 21, he went on to dominate bodybuilding, before switching to movies and then again transitioning into politics.

Born in Austria in 1947, he grew up in a farming village. His father was a police officer and extremely strict with Arnold and his elder brother. He enforced discipline and training for his sons, who regularly completed chores from a young age and later played sports and exercised. They even had to earn breakfast by doing sit-ups.

Bo Peabody is an entrepreneur. The first company he built, Tripod was the 8th largest website in the world before it was sold to Lycos for $58 million in 1998. He then sold his Lycos stock a few months before the dotcom bubble burst and invested in real estate all by the age of 28. So, was he lucky or smart?

Instagram is the largest-growing social-media platform. It was a success right from the beginning with over a million users only two months after it was launched.

Uber is worldwide transportation company. It allows its users to press a button on their app and a taxi cab will turn up for them.

Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp were waiting in the snow on a Paris evening in 2008. After having trouble hailing a cab down, the two entrepreneurs came up with the idea of an app that can be used to request a car.

The Californian entertainment company Netflix began life by offering people the opportunity to rent a movie from home and receive it on DVD in the mail. It has morphed into a streaming service with over 93 million subscribers worldwide.

Airbnb is the tale of how three men went from renting mattresses to a $30 billion company.

Dropbox is an internet hosting service, allowing users to store their files in the cloud. They gathered a million users just seven months after their public launch. The story of Dropbox is coming up.

The idea for Dropbox was conceived by University student Drew Houston after he kept forgetting his USB memory stick. He originally built the solution for himself but soon realised others could benefit from it. He and fellow student Arash Ferdowsi co-founded Dropbox as a start-up in 2007, officially launching the service for the public the year after.

Snapchat is an image messaging and multimedia app originally created by three students from Stanford university. After a very slow start, it’s now hit over 10 billion daily video views.