Emily Weiss is the founder of colossal cosmetics company Glossier. Her career in fashion began in high school, where she had some time as a clothing model and even was in three episodes of a popular soap opera show. After school, Weiss worked at famous fashion conglomerate Vogue, but as a side-hustle had her own fashion and cosmetics blog and worked on developing her own lines outside of Vogue. She soon quit Vogue at a young age- a dream job for most fashion lovers- to pursue her business ventures in her blog full time. This was a huge entrepreneurial risk for Weiss, but she was confident she could succeed on her own. Emily Weiss founded Glossier.com as an e-commerce website for beauty products, and the company soon spread to develop its own products and was huge in the fashion industry for making stylish cosmetics and beauty products assessable to people online. Emily Weiss was listed in the Forbes “30 under 30” list in 2015, as well as Time Magazine’s “Next 100” as a successful ‘girl-boss’ businesswoman. However, Weiss’ downfall came in early 2019 when the company launched an experimental line of pigmented and metallic makeup products, which failed. In 2022, Weiss stepped down as CEO but remains a consultant for the company. The fault of Weiss was that she overstepped on expanding her company and didn’t stay within her product boundaries.

David Karp would’ve been the most successful young millionaire, if it wasn’t for YouTube and the rise of short vlogs like Vine and TikTok. Karp was an innovator but came too early and was too cautious to top the short vlog games. He began his career without a high school diploma, dropping out to intern for big tech companies. In 2007, he launched Tumblr, a short form blogging platform for people to easily view and create content. Karp would lead a campaign calling tech industry leaders to support Planned Parenthood in his personal ventures with the company. However, as Tumblr had become a massive company on its own, having 75.4 million blogs, Karp would get cautious about the future and sell the company to Yahoo for $1.1 billion, Tumblr would be Yahoo’s downfall, with Yahoo losing nearly half its earnings from Tumblr as it was eclipsed by YouTube and Vine. Karp would resign from Tumblr and the company with massive promise would fail. What I learned from the mistake of David Karp and his company Tumblr is that you have to double down on your product and not sell out to the highest bidder when things are looking up. Entrepreneurs need to be futurist minded.

David Dobrik is a Slovak internet personality. His career began with early success on the video-sharing app Vine. Soon after in 2015, he started his famous YouTube vlog, which today totals 19 million subscribers. He leads the popular YouTube ensemble the “Vlog Squad” who appear in the vlog episodes. Another venture Dobrik pursues is his photography app Dispo. Dobrik co-founded the photography app Dispo. In 2020, Dispo was listed on Apple’s “Apps We Love Right Now”. The famous “Vlog Squad” YouTube ensemble has been called by The Verge as “thinking of it like Friends, but for vloggers”. The famous Entrepreneur is not without his faults, however. Recent problems have left the young entrepreneur under public scrutiny. His video vlogs focus on pranks with his friends which have led to some lawsuits that threaten the vlogger’s public image, and that’s not good in a business area focused on the public. He faced sexual assault charges after he made one of his former Vlog Squad male members kiss another male member blindfolded when neither were homosexual. Then, more sexual allegations were faced by the Squad as some members were accused of rape. Adding on to these charges, Dobrik faced an injury lawsuit from one of his former members being injured in a wakeboarding accident.

A young boy named Declan who attended a summer camp hosted by the Ontario Humane Society decided to make a difference by recognizing the problem of entertaining the dogs without homes or owners. Declan began creating toys for the dogs after learning how to at the summer camp and began Project Playful Paws. He uses recycled t-shirts to make the toys which he sells to benefit Humane Society efforts. The toys are sold for $3 each and $2 of the profit is donated to the ASPCA. The profit not only benefits animals in need, but also limits the amount of unwanted clothing in landfills. Declan began to start his business selling at craft shows. In the first year, he donated $300. The next year, he expanded to include fetch toys and cat toys and donated $580. Some of Project Playful Paws’ toys have gone as far as Cuba, England and Spain. The idea of combining environment-friendly ideas of recycling unwanted clothing with the idea of helping animals in need makes costumers want to buy Declan’s toys over normal dog toys as it makes them feel like they’re making a difference. This is very inspiring as young entrepreneurs like Declan work to better the world and make a profit.

https://sites.google.com/view/projectplayfulpaws/home#h.p_fobCZORoRFvC

Alex Atallah became the first billionaire to make his money off of non-fungible tokens (or NFTs). He and co-founder Devin Finzer are worth around 2.2 billion with their blockchain startup OpenSea. The company’s name shows just how deep and free this market can be. Atallah graduated from Stanford University and worked as a programmer then at two other startups before deciding to co-found his own back in 2018, when NFTs were a risky, unexplored venture not trusted by common people and businesses alike. But by January of 2021, Finzer and Atallah’s gamble paid off with them officially becoming billionaires. But in July of 2022, Atallah decided to step back from OpenSea to pursue other ventures. His abrupt step away from the company was announced with a simple blog post ‘heard round the world, as he desires to find new ways to be an entrepreneur in society. This truly shows the entrepreneurial spirit in a young mind- constantly wanting to reach new heights. The first known NFT, known as “Quantum”, was created by Kevin McCoy and Anil Dash in May of 2014. Ever since the beginning of the non-fungible token, the economy has boosted due to investment in the new ideas of NFTs and perhaps is the key to avoid future economic calamity.

This year, 2022, Daniel Ek, with an overall net worth of 1.9 billion, made the Forbes 30 under 30 list for his successful music app Spotify. The app taps into the music listening monopoly cornered by Apple and other phone companies and allows listeners to develop their own music taste with a wide variety of music and podcast choice and does not discriminate on device choice unlike some music apps. Spotify is available on all types of laptops and phones and even smart TVs and is arguably the most accessible music player app in the business.

Daniel Ek comes from Stockholm, Sweden, and started making websites for clients at just 13 years old. He expanded his website business among his classmates and by 18 was managing 25 people working for him and bringing in around $50,000 a year. After bouncing around various computer industry startups, Ek came up with the idea of Spotify seeing the fall of Napster. Napster was horribly wrecked with legal lawsuits from musicians since they did not get consent to use the music in peer-to-peer sharing. Ek realized “The only way to solve the problem was to create a service that was better than piracy and at the same time compensates the music industry.”.