Alexis Ohanian is the founder of the popular social news and conversational website, Reddit. Ohanian doesn’t rely on a story to boost his business but rather the ingenious design that he had for an idea. Reddit was actually the second business that Ohanian and a friend came up with before they found success. They created Reddit with the intention of selling it to the company Y Combinator which the
y did in 2005. Because of the experience that Ohanian had with creating the platform, he left the company in 2010 and founded another company in the Middle East called Das Kapital Capital. His experience with Reddit allowed him to create this new company without too much trouble. From there, he began to build his personal investments and currently invests in new tech startups.
The interesting thing about the Ohanian is that he didn’t stay with one company too long. He had bigger visions of what he wanted to do with his life. Sometimes its not about riding one idea until the top, but rather letting someone else take it over while he pursues his passions.
It was seeing this struggle from people who were interested in building websites for others that motivated Magdalin to create his service Webflow. It turns a standard coding platform into a visual editor. Unlike having to write code line-by-line, Webflow gives you all the options out front and then allows you to change only the ones you want, without any prior knowledge of coding or the need for drag and drop. This revolutionary platform has allowed many designers to have the ability to create websites for their clients without spending their valuable time learning code. This has created the website’s trademark slogan: breaking the code barrier. Webflow is a great example of an entrepreneur taking skills that they have learned and turning them into a platform that others can use for their own ease of access.
Ernest Garcia is the founder and current owner of the popular online used car trading platform, Carvana. Garcia actually comes from an interesting background as he is not an example of a rags to riches businessman. Garcia’s father had been in the business of selling cars online, as the internet was just becoming something that more and more people were starting to use. His father soon took this skill to create DriveTime. Right before the young Garcia was about to be brought on full time, his father was arrested and convicted of several criminal offenses regarding illegal practices with stock selling and government bailouts. However, Garcia didn’t see this as a lost opportunity. DriveTime quickly began losing money and the younger Garcia began purchasing used vehicles that weren’t selling from the business in order to keep it afloat. Having all these vehicles he wondered if there was a better way to sell the cars than how his father had done it. This gave him the idea of Carvana.
they have created user engagment through their car vending machines. When a car is purchased, you can have it delivered to your home or go pick it up from one of these machines. It created user engagement on levels never seen before and makes people excited about buying a car. This is one of the reasons Carvana has grown to be such a large company and why Garcia himself is now worth over $600 million. Even though he had a head start, Garcia created something that users really love which creates value for the business and gives him value in return.
Our education system has stayed pretty much the same as it was two hundred years ago. This is not a bad thing, considering that there are only a small amount of proven ways to actively engage student’s learning abilities. As technology advances, educators are now trying new techniques to improve the ways that students learn in the classroom. With this increase in technology, students are finding it easier to memorize terms and concepts thanks mostly to one of the fastest growing education sites in the world, Quizlet. Quizlet was founded by Andrew Sutherland in 2007 when he was 22 to be a resource to help student study for test and exams. His initial idea for Quizlet came when he was 15 when he created a platform to help him for a quiz. Since then, it has grown to be one of the top 100 sites used around the world. Not only does the company bring in over $10 million per year, it has seen exponential expanses in its user base year over year with a 2 million user increase every month.
