Midnight hits and instantly my belly rumbles. Since, here in Grove City, practically every food place closes earlier than most, even fast food chains like McDonalds are closed. So therefore, my hunger is only satisfied by Gods gift to the world…Ramen noodles. However, being limited to only a microwave the process takes awhile of boiling water and stopping to mix around the noodles to cook evenly. Christopher Johnson, inventor of the Rapid Ramen Cooker, created the perfect bowl to evenly cook ramen noodles every time and much faster than usual.

Johnson and his invention appeared on Shark Tank. he was successful in partnering with billionaire Mark Cuban. His deal with Cuban was $150k for 15% of equity. Johnson’s bowl was successfully able to tap into an industry that has over 95 billion sales annually at an inexpensive cost of roughly $5. Because of his huge deal and inexpensiveness, Johnson’s has been able to thrive with $5 million+ in sales.

https://urbanintellectuals.com/2016/07/21/christopher-rapid-ramen-cooker-johnson-net-worth/

I remember back in sophomore year of high school (2015) self-proclaiming myself the Trivia Crack King. Typically, I am not an arrogant or cocky person; however, Trivia Crack gave me a new type of confidence as I rarely lost and even beat the valedictorian that year countless times. The game that hit the scene in 2015 was perceived and created by a young entrepreneur named  Maximo Cavazzini who is the creator and founder of the company Etermax.

Mr. Cavazzini started coding and creating apps at the age of 20. Now at the age of 27, his company, Etermax, employs 200 people and looking to grow. His team is mostly a young crowd predominantly ranging from employees from the age of 20 to 45. He has published and created 7 successful apps so far, including the hit Trivia Crack and Trivia Crack Kingdoms. Trivia Crack has amounted an impressive track record amounting to 200 million users, 800 thousand downloads daily, and even reached the number 5th most played game in the world. Obviously Mr. Cavazzini and his team is on the path of success and is doing something right.

Chris and Stephen Harris creators of the ever so famous Ninja Kiwi. The two creators are brothers, who were once a geophysics researcher and a financial analyst,  set off  in 2006 developing their new company. They hit a few rough spots in the beginning, creating a racing game called “Cash Sprint”, which they eventually abandoned due to lack of success. However, out of this failure derived the world famous “Bloons” game.

In the 2007, at the launch of the game over 3 million people played the game within the first week. It was an instant success! In addition to their newly founded game, they created a website called “Bloons World” to capitalize on their success and allow users to customize their own levels. Bloons is not a game for anyone specific, but instead meant for everyone. I think one of the founders, Chris Harris, said it best “‘Bloons’ is the only game our mum has ever played. If your no-gaming-playing mum plays it, you know you’re onto something.”

https://www.forbes.com/2008/07/25/casual-games-bloons-tech-personal-cx_mji_0725bloons.html

Everyone knows the worldwide app known as Tinder. Tinder was founded by two guys named Sean Rad and Just Mateen; who started out as just of a couple of college bros.  Both dudes, just like many other guys in the world, were struggling to find and meet new people; so instead of just waiting for a solution to fall in their lap they went out and created one. Tinder allows for a user to view other people’s profiles and pictures, from near and far,  to either swipe right to “like” or left for “nope”. If two people have a mutual “like” for each other he/she is notified of a match and further interaction like sending a message to one another can be exchanged, depending on whether the user wants to or not. Tinder differs from just a typical match-making site because everything about the app is about being short and efficient. There is no need to put a life story in the bio, no need to extensively indulge in looking for a match,  no need to even make any significant commitment to the app itself.

The two founders didn’t create a dating site, they created a game. Something that is enjoyable and easily accessible to anyone with a smartphone. In doing so, Tinder has risen to be one of the most prominent and influential apps out there to date. Rad and Mateen hit it big with their invention, but that it is not stopping  them to continuously try to have improvements to their product. The pair understands the casual manner that people use Tinder and hope to be able to capture that spirit by transforming Tinder into an app just for meeting up whether it be as friends, relationships, etc.

http://time.com/4837/tinder-meet-the-guys-who-turned-dating-into-an-addiction/

11 year old Mikaila Ulmer is the founder of her own successful brand Me & The Bees Lemonade. Miss Ulmer ‘s backstory is very interesting! She used her motivation of being stung by a bee and her great grandmas recipe for lemonade to fuel her. She started off by selling her drink in a local restaurant. Her product differs from an average lemonade because instead of using sugar or artificial sweeteners, Mikaila decided to use all natural honey. Another big aspect of her company is that she uses a portion of the profits to go towards efforts across the nation to help save the bees and their ecosystems. Hence the use of honey and goal of saving the bees lead to creation of her company name.

Eventually, with enough success, she was able to appear on CNBC’s Shark Tank and was able to win over and convince one of the Shark’s to invest in her company. As of recent she has made a huge deal with Whole Foods. Whole Foods is a giant in the grocery store industry right now. Whole Foods gave her an 11 million dollar deal to shelve her lemonade in the southeastern region (55 of their stores), and if the product does well Whole Foods will go nation wide with her lemonade. It is simply amazing that someone as young as Mikaila is able to address an issue she cares about and transform it into something meaningful.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/slideshow/273222#1

Luis von Ahn came from humble beginnings. He was born and raised in a tough area known as Guatemala City, Guatemala. However, this smart cookie found himself attending Duke University in 1996 and then eventually receiving his Phd. from Carnegie Mellon. Before hitting it big, Luis was just a computer science professor at his alma mater. He worked on several different projects along with teaching his first and notable being a thing called CAPTCHA.

CAPTCHA is something everyone would recognize, but might not have ever known what it was called. Anytime someone makes a purchase of some sort online there usually might be something that pops up saying “click the pictures with a dog in it” and there are usually 9 different pictures to select from and typically they vary heavily. Also, sometimes there might be an assortment of numbers and letters and the instructions might say something like “type what you see” and usually something one will type something strange and random like “Pu43Tq7”, and finally when you’ve performed either task you click the box saying “I am not a robot”. All of these examples are roughly what CAPTCHA is, the goal of CAPTCHA is to prevent things like robots and fake users to be able to compromise security of something such as making an order online. Eventually though, with the success of CAPTCHA Ahn sold it to Google  and helped them create multiple other online companies such as, reCAPTCHA.

Right now Ahn’s moneymaker is in his product “Duolingo” an easy, fun, and free way to learning an array of languages. In 2011 Ahn created Duolingo; he used his background of growing up in a impoverish country as motivation for people to have the access to learn multiple languages. He believes like many education is the foundation to grow out of less than fortunate situations, so by allowing a free easy way to remember and use different phrases and words from different languages he has a great way to invoke change.

Mr. Luis von Ahn is an up and coming entrepreneur with a lot to his name in a relative short amount of time. He has had a great influence on countless routine activities that the average Joe does everyday and with the rise of Duolingo he has had a great influence on learning and and arguably possibly uniting such a diverse world a little more.

https://lifehacker.com/im-luis-von-ahn-ceo-of-duolingo-and-this-is-how-i-wor-1791884794