Derek Ek, age 34, is currently the CEO of Spotify, one of the leading titans in the musical business. Named #1 in Billboard’s Power 100, the Swedish millennial has completely changed the world of music. Ek co-founded Spotify in 2006, launching it in 2008, and rapidly gaining major-label support for the vision of an industry-backed site making a vast catalogue of music available. It has also become a significant driver of music discovery, with the playlists it suggests to users. In 1999 Daniel Ek was a 16-year-old Swedish programmer, getting rich building websites, when he pondering a simple question: How do you get people to pay for music that can, if illegally, be downloaded free—and without charging them for each song?

Ek’s eventual solution: Spotify, a jukebox in the cloud that provides legal, on-demand access to millions of songs. Supported by paying subscribers; it now has more than 15 million users, four million of whom pay. With an estimated value of $4 billion, Spotify is one of the hottest Internet companies in the world.

Spotify isn’t the only service to let listeners stream music on demand. But it distinguishes itself from Internet radio services like Pandora and Slacker through the vastness of its music libraries and its deep integration into social media. Spotify lets users seamlessly share playlists and swap music on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. And Spotify makes it easy for others to build apps that work with its platform in order to give users yet more ways to discover and share music. “The trick was to think through the social aspect of the service from the very beginning,” says Ek. “We didn’t want it to be an afterthought.

Now Ek is trying to find ways to make it as easy to find and play music as it is to find and play videos on YouTube. This year the company introduced a radio service for computers and mobile devices, launched its first iPad app, and made it possible to embed a Spotify play button into any website. The Huffington Post, the blogging site Tumblr, and Rolling Stone’s website are among the many that now offer music that way (Dyer, Technology review)

Ek is a great example of an entrepreneur who has discovered a problem from asking questions, finding a solution to his question, and distinguishes himself from the rest of the competition.

There are many millennials who have changed the world with their innovative thinking. One prime example of the millennial entrepreneur is Matt Mullenweg, the creator of Word Press. At age 21, Matt launched a website called Automatic, which became the secret force behind WordPress. Automatic reached over a billion people every month, and became the basic skeleton for many other websites, like Akismet, Gravatar, VaultPress, IntenseDebate, Polldaddy, and eventually, WordPress.

WordPress was created from the multiple passions that captured Mullenweg’s heart. Matt has written code, prose, and music for many years. He took these passions and combined them in one of the most successful blogging posts of today.

“I am a founding developer of WordPress, the Open Source software used by over 26% of the web, including this site. The website says WordPress is ‘a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform’ but more importantly WordPress is a part of who I am. Like eating, breathing, music, I can’t not work on WordPress. The project touches a lot of people, something I’ve recently begun to appreciate. I consider myself very lucky to be able to work on something I love so much.”
-Mark Mullenwag.

Many of us think we need to separate our work and our personal lives. Mullenwag shows us that it’s possible to combine work and play, and to be extremely successful at it as well.

One of the biggest social media’s currently is snapchat. Becoming popular only a few years ago, the little white ghost has taken photo sharing to a whole new level. Snapchat creator Evan Spiegel became the youngest public company CEO when Snap began trading in March 2017. Every day about 170 million people, mostly teens and millennials, use Snapchat to send disappearing messages. Spiegel came from a wealthy family and was the son of two ivy league graduates. When he attended Stanford, he took classes in entrepreneurship and venture capital, where he learned from the Google CEO Eric Schmidt and YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley. Spiegel came up with the idea of snapchat with two of his friends from Stanford. After developing the business and acquiring investors, Spiegel dropped out of Stanford in order to fully dedicate himself to his company, which was called “Picaboo” at the time.

After gaining monumental success, Mark Zuckerburg offered to purchase Snapchat for 3 billion dollars. After he was turned down, the founder of facebook attempted to make his own version of Snapchat, a failed app called “Poke.”

The 26-year-old has been named the youngest self-made billionaire in the world by Forbes for the past two years. He has an estimated net worth of about $4 billion based on Snap’s value as a public company.

Evan Spiegel is the splitting image of an innovative, millennial entrepreneur. His business idea of disappearing images has transformed the social media market, the foundations of executive management, and the culture of millennials.