Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2015, and all market values, fortunes and user counts it cites, such as the companies’ valuations and the billionaires’ net worths, are mid-2015 figures. GoPro’s flotation described as last year took place in 2014.
What matters more: the idea or its execution? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Who cares. Nine out of ten new businesses fail. In other words, out of every 10 business ideas that are put into practice, 9 don’t make it.
Without ideas there’s no business, although an idea on its own is worth nothing until it’s carried out. All the entrepreneurs we mention here are very well known (at least I hope so), and we can only call their business ideas brilliant in hindsight: when they were put into practice, they were just one more idea, and they didn’t necessarily sound like a recipe for success. Some of them, in the industry’s eyes, were doomed to fail, but… execution proved just the opposite.
1. Jeff Bezos (Amazon)
Jeff Bezos was working for a Wall Street firm in the 1990s when he decided it was time to start his own business. His original business idea was an online bookstore with a huge catalogue, where people could buy their favourite books without leaving home.
As we can see, today Amazon doesn’t just sell books. It sells practically anything you might need: wine, clothes, household appliances, DVDs, furniture…
Today, that original online bookstore has a market value of $203 billion, and it is estimated to still be at 50% of its sales growth potential. Bezos’s fortune is estimated at around $38 billion. Not bad for a business idea that was fairly modest at the start.
2. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
A young, eccentric Harvard student decided, just for fun, to create a website called Facemash, and discovered how technology can be used to connect people.
He later used that knowledge to create Thefacebook.com, a website for connecting university students only. In the heyday of Myspace, nobody imagined that Facebook would become a social network with more than 1.3 billion users.
Today Facebook has a market value of $235 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune is estimated at more than $35 billion.
3. Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg)
Can someone who never studied journalism and had no experience running a news organisation create one of the most influential media companies in the world? The answer, evidently, is yes.
Michael Bloomberg was working on Wall Street in the 1970s when he noticed a gap in the industry. He realised that financial firms and investors were willing to pay large sums of money for reliable business information.
So Bloomberg was created: not just another news outlet, but the one that provides fast, reliable, real-time financial information to companies and investors.
Bloomberg has annual revenue of more than $8 billion, making it the most profitable news organisation and one of the most powerful information companies in the world. Bloomberg’s net worth is estimated at $37 billion.
4. Bill Gates (Microsoft)
In 1975, the young Bill Gates and Paul Allen came across an advertisement for the Altair 8800, one of the earliest microcomputers. They built a programming language called BASIC, which became the fundamental code for the Altair 8800.
Before long, the two entrepreneurs went on to build their own operating system, called DOS, and struck a deal with IBM.
Meanwhile, Steve Jobs and Wozniak were shaping what would become the first personal computer. It is said that Bill Gates only had to copy Steve Jobs’s idea and make a few tweaks (what’s known as innovation). And that’s where Windows came from.
Although Jobs got there first, Bill Gates ended up dominating the PC and software market. Microsoft has a market value of $370 billion, and Bill Gates is the richest man in the world, with an estimated fortune of $80 billion.
See also: Bill Gates: his fascinating life and career
5. Marc Benioff (Salesforce)
Although Benioff gets little attention, he was one of the most visionary entrepreneurs of the tech era: his business idea (Salesforce) dates back to 1998, and he was probably the first entrepreneur to look for a way to deliver software over the internet so that users could download and install it directly on their computers.
That did away with the need to go out and buy the CD containing the software, or to wait for it to be shipped.
Salesforce has become the most profitable software sales business, having reached $5 billion in sales.
Benioff has also been one of the pioneers in doing business with the internet cloud, one of the hottest areas in technology (“the new oil of the internet”). Benioff’s fortune is estimated at $3.8 billion.
6. Mark Cuban (Broadcast)
A bartender and computer store salesman at 25, Cuban had his first business idea in the 1990s: a company called Broadcast that provided satellite broadcasts over the internet.
Shortly before the dot-com crash, Cuban sold the company to Yahoo for $5.7 billion. His fortune is currently estimated at $3 billion. Cuban owns the Dallas Mavericks.
See also:
- The fascinating life and career of Mark Cuban
- 6 things you need to be great in business, by Mark Cuban
7. Nick Woodman (GoPro)
Nick Woodman was a passionate surfer, so his first business idea was aimed at helping surfers take pictures of themselves while surfing. Not an easy thing to do. The first versions of the GoPro cameras were a bit of a botch job, although once he got the first feedback from surfers, he improved them.
Of course, the surfing market was very small, so his business really took off when he took the cameras out of the water and put them on racing cars.
Today, if you love sport (especially extreme sports), a GoPro is your best companion. The company went public last year and already has a market value of $7.3 billion. Woodman’s fortune is estimated at $2.5 billion.
See also: 18 business ideas you can start with almost no money
Featured image: Tim Colegrove, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
