Peter Kelly is a self taught home cook. He never attended culinary school, but he always had a knack for making food taste delicious. In 2006 he beat Bobby flay in a cooking competition and became an Iron Chef. On top of all of these astounding achievements, Kelly has built an extremely impressive restaurant group that generates over $10M in revenue each year. Kelly was able to take something that he loves and turned it into a very successful entrepreneurial venture!

In the early 1900s, Chinese citizen Eric Yuan recognized the importance of the growing internet boom. He applied for citizenship in the US, so that he could be a part of it. However, things did not go as planned. He had to apply for citizenship 8 times and was denied every time. Finally, on his 9th attempt, Yuan’s application was accepted, unfortunately the process took another 2 years before it went through. Once Yuan gained citizenship, he settled down in Silicon Valley where he worked several different tech jobs for over 10 years. In 2012, Yuan founded a company called Zoom. Zoom was a digital product that allowed people and companies to interface with each other virtually. It became a quick success. Zoom really became a hot product this year in the midst of the global pandemic. Since the beginning of 2020 until now, the share price of zoom has increased by 400%. In 2012 when Yuan founded Zoom, little did he know what a huge impact his product would make on the business world.

John Paul DeJoria has an incredible entrepreneurial story. He was born to low income Italian immigrants and lived in poverty for the entirety of his childhood. After his parents divorced, DeJoria began selling Christmas cards and newspapers just to make ends meet. By the time he was 22, John found himself without work and living on the streets with his son. After jumping around jobs, John founded his own company with a hair dresser named Paul Mitchell called John Paul Mitchell Systems with a loan of only $700. Nine years later, John confounded Patron Spirits Company. After years of hard work and dedication, DeJoria was able to build two massive corporations that have blossomed into staples of American Culture. John Paul DeJoria is truest a great American entrepreneur and has a very inspiring story!

In early 2011, Garrett Gee, a college student, anticipated that the release of the iPad 2 would revolutionize the technology industry. He made an educated guess that with the release of the second iPad, would come a wave of new and transforming apps. Gee wanted to create one of those revolutionary apps, so he took a shot in the dark and began planning to create a seamless QR code scanning app. When the iPad was finally released, Gee was able to quickly get his hands on one and was able to create his app called Scan, in a record two days. Within a month, scan had accumulated over 1M users. At its peak, Scan was being downloaded 85,000 times per day and by the end of 2012, the app had been downloaded 25M times. Gee had an extremely successful business model. Scan was a totally free app, and generated all revenue through advertisements. Gee’s business became so attractive, that it caught the eye of massive corporations like Snapchat. In 2014, Snapchat and Scan struck a deal and Scan was purchased for 54 Million dollars, 30 million in cash and the rest in snapchat equity. Garrett Gee is a perfect example of an entrepreneur that recognized a need, used intuition and risk, and created a revolutionary technology that was eventually acquired by one of the most promonate app companies in the world. Gee went from a regular college student to a multimillion dollar businessman in a matter of three years. Just goes to show what a little risk mixed with creativity and a forward-looking mentality can do.