Steve Jobs founded apple in his garage at the age of 21. Steve Jobs had previously dropped out of Reed College and worked the night shift at Atari. He founded Apple with Steve Wozniak as the engineer and Ron Wayne as businessman. Their early Apple computers were popular with people who weren’t using them for serious business.  Jobs wanted the computers to be make so that they would be difficult to repair ignoring Wozniak’s objections. 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 fired by his board of directors and so he subsequently sold all his shares of stock and founded NEXT and Pixar. He then sold those 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 and the largest company in the whole world. Steve’s success started from a young age and his ability to “think different”. Steve Jobs was a true revolutionary thinker in the entrepreneurial world and his success proves so.

In 2012 John Zimmer launched Lyft as a computer programmer as an extension of Zimride, the original platform for the taxi service. As many of you know, Lyft is the primary competitor to Uber. Lyft was originally designed for college students and was for students who didn’t have a ride from place to place and couldn’t pay the high prices of a taxi service. They are alternatives to a traditional taxi service. The idea is that they can provide taxi services at a cheaper cost by allowing employees to use their own cars instead of taking on the costs of owning many cars, buildings and funding taxi drivers. Zimmer then sold Zimride to Enterprise Rent a Car in 2013 in order to focus on the Lyft program. This platform has changed the way people think about travel. They no longer have to rent cars or order taxis when in their non native area. Additionally, this results in cheaper prices for consumers and creates new opportunities for side jobs for people looking for extra work since the app employs regular people and not specific taxi cab drivers who do that as a full time job. In in the same way, people can still make a decent amount of money by exclusively driving for Lyft and forgoeing a full time job.

Evan Hafer started the now famous Black Rifle Coffee Company (BRCC) in 2014, just 8 short years ago. For those who don’t know, BRCC is famous for employing many veterans in its premium coffee business and providing premium coffee for the multitudes. Evan himself was a former Green Beret and between his deployments from Iraq to Afghanistan, Hafer would practice and refine his two favorite things, coffee roasting and firearm skills. He was driven to create this business to help his fellow veterans and also to use his abilities to brew and create good coffee. His company stands for the very things you’d think it would, conservative republicanism, trump style politics, and the second amendment. BRCC is striving to become the anti-Starbucks with their pledge to hire 10,000 veterans after Starbucks pledging to hire 10,000 refugees. In addition, BRCC has opened many stores across the United States as a result of the company going public in early 2022. These stores are similar to Starbucks and have baristas crafting good, caffeinated drinks. Black Rifle knows their target market, and they’re sticking with them in every profitable way. For example, BRCC has sided with the former President Trumps policies and has supported his and many other conservative, pro-gun candidates’ campaigns. A good take away from BRCC is to find what you’re good at, do it, know your market and align them with your values in a profitable way.

Matt Carriker is a millennial Entrepreneur who hosts multiple YouTube channels, all of which have over a million subscribers. He hosts the popular Demolition Ranch with 11 Million subs, Vet Ranch with 2.8 million subs and Off the Ranch with 4.2 million subs. Demolition Ranch is his most popular channel where he often hosts other youtubers or influencers and he invites then to come and shoot random targets on his range. Also on this channel, Matt reviews and shows new or old rifles and handguns that are typically given to him by a manufacturer to review. On Vet Ranch Matt shows videos where he is working with animals at his veterinarian clinic. On Off the Ranch, Matt shows his life outside of the vet clinic and outside of his gun channels. This entrepreneur has grown his audience by consistently creating good, innovative, and wholesome family friendly content for many to enjoy. He started humbly by working as a veterinarian for many years while trying to boost his YouTube channel. For years, he was subject to trial and error in his channel where he was trying different things and seeing what worked. This has brought him great fortune as he was patient, continuously working and experimenting with new ways of creating videos.

Johanna Milby is a young millennial who started a business called JLM Design and Events which mainly plans wedding events and built it from the ground up even through the Covid-19 crisis. She is driven by profit and success to provide for her family. Her business is interesting because unlike most wedding planning operations, she provides different levels of services and offers them at a lower cost compared to similar services due to less overhead from buildings and lots of full-time employees.  Instead, she has as needed part time employees who come directly to the weddings and wedding rehearsals to assist Johanna in whatever she needs to provide the best experience for her clients. She demonstrates the Entrepreneurial Mind by seeking to out-compete the competition and operate with a similar quality and outcome but for much cheaper. Johanna is also passionate about what she does. She loves planning as she has been doing that from a very young age and even planning her own birthday parties when she was still in elementary school. Johanna Milby is an inspiration to seek out what you like to do and create something better than the competition can offer and thus make the world a better place and with higher economic growth throughout her region due to her business being local.

Brandon Herrera is unique to the YouTube platform as well as the firearm manufacturing community by continuing to host new and creative shows on his YouTube channel and continuing to have a growing audience. He is famous for many popular shows such as gun meme review and the Darwin awards. He is also unique to the firearm manufacturing sector with his business, The AK Guy Inc. where he makes specialty AK style rifles and specializes in recreating Soviet Kalashnikov rifles such as the AK-47 and AK-74. He is even innovating in new designs such as the AK-50 which is an AK style rifle that is chambered in 50BMG. Herrera is driven by profit and by his Libertarian ideology of limited government. His business is interesting because it targets younger audiences through the YouTube channel while educating and entertaining his viewers.  He is constantly innovating by coming up with new and interesting ideas to implement in his videos. He also is innovating by creating new and interesting firearms to sell in the AK Guy Inc. He is inspiring to many younger viewers because he himself is Gen Z being only 24 and he has become so successful because of his innovation. A takeaway is to always be innovating and looking for new and interesting ideas to build upon.