Steve Jobs in known as a world class Entrepreneur yet he founded Apple at the age of 21. Steve Jobs had previously dropped out of Reed College and worked the night shift at Atari (because employees complained that he smelled awful). He founded Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak the engineer behind the company and Ron Wayne a trusted businessman. Their early Apple computers where popular with hobbyists. Steve insisted that they purposely made the machine a closed system that would be difficult to repair much to Wozniak’s dismay. Today apple maintains this policy with IOS and the apple ecosystem. The Apple lll was a hit and the company started to grow and Steve convinced the CEO of Pepsi to join as the new CEO while he worked on the Macintosh a revolutionary product that had disappointing sales. He was kicked out by his board and he sold all his shares in the meantime he founded NEXT electronics and Pixar which he later sold to Disney. He made a comeback to Apple as the company was struggling in the 90s and made one of the greatest comebacks in business history launched the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. The company today is worth over 2 trillion USD and is the largest company in America. Steve’s success started from a young age and his ability to “think different”.
Author Archive for DROrsborn
Markus started Bolt at the young age of 19. He is from Estonia which is a country that has seen significant growth in the decades after it left the Soviet Union. Villig was frustrated by the local taxi services in the area and came up with the idea to use an app instead to make rides easier and cheaper. He was inspired by the recent blossoming of the Estonian tech scene with the popularity of Skype. He worked developing the original product in Tallin and personally would get into taxis just to pitch the driver to sign up. When he was not building Bolt he was advertising it. As the company grew he found trouble gaining investment for expansion as it was assumed that Uber would destroy any European competition, yet Bolt purebred by focusing on areas neglected by Uber like Eastern Europe and Africa. Bolt outperformed in this areas as the worked harder or adapted the services to the area for example in many parts of Africa the majority of paid taxi rides are on bikes which Uber does not allow so Bolt is more popular. The company hopes to continue to expand in areas overlooked or misunderstood by its competition and want to provide on demand car rentals in Europe to encourage Europeans to not buy cars.
Jake Loosarian is the founder of Gecko Robotics and a Grove City Alumni, he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering. During his time at Grove City College he started a campaign to raise money for a need based scholarship by biking across the country. His Entrepreneurial journey began at Grove City where he started creating robots that were made to examine and fix problems in power plants where humans would have trouble reaching like boilers and nuclear reactors. Jake got into the Y Combinator for his company Gecko Robotics and partnered with fellow alumni Troy Demmer. Gecko Robotics has raised 123 million USD and is estimated to be worth anywhere from 500 million to 1 Billion USD. The company has seen success because a considerably portion of America’s infrastructure and power plants are old and have problems that Gecko can help fix safely through the use of their robots.The ability to inspect problems that would be dangerous for humans and provide companies more data has led to Gecko robotics success. This success started at Grove City College by a student who would go on to build a billion dollar company it provides inspiration for students to realize their potential when they dream big and provide innovative solutions.
Alexandr Wang is the founder and CEO of Scale AI. Alexandr is the world’s youngest billionaire at age 25. Alexandr’s parents where both physicists and he grew up near a national lab. He was surrounded by science at a young age. As a student he would always try to achieve more. One of his hobbies was the violin and he decided to dropout of High School his junior year . He went on to work for the Quora App as a software developer and then left there to study AI for a year at MIT. During the summer he worked on Scale AI with a friend and the company got into Y combinator so he decided to drop everything and work on Scale. The company has grown exponentially as their focus is to provide custom AI solutions to companies and enhancing the use of their data. This is a strong idea because while all companies can benefit by adopting AI it can be very costly to do so and very few people have the knowledge on how to use AI to enhance a business. Scale is evaluated at over 7 billion USD today making Alexandr a Billionaire because of his stake in the company. Scale provides services to companies like Toyota, Microsoft and the US Army. They offer a wide arrange of AI services. They have also made good use of their technology by utilizing it to benefit medical research and deploying it to help access damages in the War in Ukraine. It is exciting to se where Alexandr and Scale will go in the next to years I beleive they will likely continue to innovate in the AI industry.
Rockefeller Center was built through his Oil fortunes to help create economic activity during the Great Depression. (Photo by David Shankbone)
John D. Rockefeller is often considered one of histories richest people. His journey to Entrepreneurial success and business fame started at an early age. He grew up with a tough childhood, his father would often leave and even had a secret second family in Canada. Rockefeller knew he could not pay for a higher education so at the young age of 16 he went to work at an accounting firm as an assistant bookkeeper. He quickly distinguished himself among his peers and teamed up with some local merchants in Cleveland to start a produce shipping company. Rockefeller achieved moderate success at a young age but quickly pivoted to what he would be famous for, the emerging Oil industry. Rockefeller was able to capitalize on his current success to shift into the new market at a perfect time. While most of the companies getting in on the oil rush at this time where rushing to drill oil in the newly discovered oil fields of Pennsylvania Rockefeller knew that the oil was useless until it had been refined so while the market had too many drillers Rockefeller put all his efforts into refining the Oil. He was very successful at this because of his focus on efficiency and chemical innovations, he despised any type of waste. His success continued as he grew older he continued to expand and bought out much of his competition offering generous stock deals to join his Oil Empire. This gave him a dream time of the best oil Entrepreneurs on his team. This company was Standard Oil which became the largest company in the U.S and was technically a monopoly. This led to it later being broken up by the U.S government though this did not effect Rockefeller much as the next years he made his biggest fortunes off of the new automobile industry. Today the Standard Oil company is the origin for almost all major U.S Oil Companies like Exxon and Chevron.
Polaris Dawn Team training for their next mission (Isaacman is the third on the right)
Jared Isaacman is today worth around 1.4 Billion USD his story begins in New Jersey. As a teenager Isaacman dropped out of high school when he landed a job with Merchant Services Inc. as an consultant who provided information on the web which was new at the time. He had previously took advantage of the new trend of the web by selling web services to local businesses which is where he got the connection with MSI. During his brief time working at the company he realized the opportunity in the industry, it took to long for businesses to adopt POS systems (Credit/Debit Card terminals) and where eager to have a third party bridge the gap by making these services easier to use which in turn increases sales for the businesses using POS. Isaacman left the company to start his own business as a teenager, because of his age he needed family connections and a loan to be approved for a credit ID to use his businesses. His business quickly took of as the digital age became inevitable and Isaacman brought one of the first Digital terminals to market which is what we often see today shopping at local restaurants where you simply put your card in to pay. His business expanded and included his former employer MSI and Shift4 a large competitor whose name he took for the company. Today the company is one of the most competitive in the industry rivaling only Square who has a different target customer. In addition to Shift 4 Isaacman is a extreme aviator holding multiple records for his daring trips in fighter jets. Later as an adult he also founded Draken International which is the largest private air force in the World which trains Air Force pilots saving the USAF money and time. As if that was not enough Isaacman has also been to space… He partially funded and was a part of the first fully-private Space mission, teaming up with SpaceX for the Inspiration 4 mission which also raised million for Charity by raffling a seat on the mission. Today Isaacman is training for Polaris Dawn his next Space Mission again with SpaceX. This time he will be team commander a position usually only held by the most experienced NASA astronauts.