Most Influential Entrepreneures, #3

Historical Entrepreneurs that have most Influenced the World

from Income Diaries.com 6/13 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4biz 7/14

#3 Bill Gates, MicroSoft continued. Many people call Bill Gates a college drop-out, or that he failed college, this simply is not true at all; it was a decision he made himself, he did not fail or give in. He saw an outstanding opportunity and he took a huge leap of faith that eventually paid off big. Having gained interest from MIT’s director Bill & co-founder Paul Allen, created an emulator that ran on a micro-computer to simulate a computer they had no access to (but had said they had) to show to Ed Roberts (MIT). They received a deal from MIT and began working on their new business in 1975 with the company name “Micro-Soft” although in 1976 they changed it to Microsoft, dropping the hyphen. Throughout the years Bill & Paul made some amazing advancements in computer technology and partnered with some massive businesses, in order to gain the capital they needed to start the manufacturing of their own products & software.

Starting at the top with IBM, when they approached Microsoft in 1980 asking for them to develop code for their BASIC (computer language) computer the IBM PC. MS DOS was created and this made Microsoft a very big player in the industry overnight. In 1985, a decade after beginning their business, they launched the first MS Windows – a graphic user interface. As we know, Microsoft became the standard in computer technology and has now become the largest computer information and technology business in the world by 2010. Microsoft currently stands at $62.4 billion with Bill Gates have a personal fortune of around $53 million which he uses to help very worthy causes and charities; including his own, the Gates Foundation. His second, Steve Ballmer took over as CEO of Microsoft (in 2000) upon Gate’s early retirement, to spend more time on his charities.

#4 Larry Page, GOOGLE co-founder, 37, is from Lansing Mich. Net Worth: $15B. It’s no wonder why Larry became interested – and later – an entrepreneur within the computer science industry; his parents were both computer science professors at the University of Michigan. Being of quite a wealthy background, Larry was a very lucky person. He attended the Montessori Radmoor School (formerly the Okemos Montessori School), and later completed a degree in the science of computer engineering (BA Honors Degree) as well as completing a Masters Degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. In 1995 Larry met Sergey Brin, who was also a fellow Stanford student. They became close friends and eventually went into business together in 1996, forming Google. Larry alongside his partner Brin ran Google. as co-presidents of the company, until hiring the CEO Eric Schmidt.

Funding. Larry and Brin got their first financial backing from one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, with the sum of $100,000. It was here that Page’s “Web Crawler” was soon to become the search engine we know today. Starting from his own Stanford University home page, the Web Crawler began to search the internet for web pages, with the home page being the only starting point. To assess the importance of the information which the Web Crawler had found; Page and Brin created a complex algorithm which they later named PageRank. In 1999 just three years since they went into business, Larry and Brin found themselves becoming hounded by investors, and they finally accepted $25 million from Kliener Perkins Caufield + Sequoia Capital. By 2001 Google, now global; was producing profits of over $100 million, and by 2003 had raised those profits to $960 million a massive amount growth in just two years! Google is the most popular search engine in the world -80% of traffic and is now worth > $172 B.

[#5 Sergey Brin, GOOGLE, #6 Mark Zuckerberg, FACEBOOK, #7 Jeff Bezos, AMAZON in next Premium Content ]