John Collison (born August 6, 1990) is an Irish billionaire entrepreneur and the co-founder and President of Stripe which he co-founded in 2010 with his brother Patrick.  After dropping out of college, John Collison and his brother went on to found Stripe in 2010, with the goal of revolutionizing the digital payment business.  Collison’s first major money maker was a company called Auctomatic.  Auctomatic was a software company that built tools for the eBay platform.^] The company was also funded by Chris Sacca.  Auctomatic was acquired for $5 million in March 2008, when Collison was 17.  In 2009, Collison (having returned to finish secondary school at Castletroy College) received 8 A1 and 2 A2 grades in the Irish Leading Certificate examination. He continued to study at Harvard University, commencing his studies in September 2009.  In 2010, Collison co-founded Stripe with his brother Patrick.  After receiving seed funding from venture capital investors such as Elon Musk, Stripe has rapidly grown into one of the largest mobile payment processing companies, boasting clients such as Lyft and Shopify along with partnerships with Visa, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter.  By 2016 the Collison brothers had become the youngest self-made billionaires in the world. As of 2018 Stripe was valued at over $19 billion.  John Collison is a great example of an entrepreneur who saw an area where innovation was possible and absolutely made the most of it.  Online payment processing is a massive industry which he entered nearly flawlessly.  Collison’s story is especially inspiring because he founded his company at such a young age and did it with his brother while still managing to acquire generational wealth.

Ross is one of the founding creators of the popular web browser Firefox.  Blake Ross was born to a Jewish family in Miami Florida in 1985.  His mother was a psychologist, and his father was a lawyer.  Ross created his first website at the age of just 10.  By middle school he had put together some rudimentary video games, these were born out or an interest for the game sim city.  He graduated from Gulliver Preparatory School and graduated in 2003 while also working for Mozilla in California.  Ross is most known for co-founding the Mozilla Firefox project with Dave Hyatt.  Ross discovered Netscape soon after it open sourced and began to contribute.  The story goes that the driving factor for his contribution was the difficulty that his mother experienced while using the site.  He worked as an intern at Netscape Communications Corporation at the age of just 16.  While interning, he lost some love for the browser he was working on and imagined something smaller and easier to use, at this time he was also enrolled in Stanford University.  In 2004, Ross and Hyatt launched Firefox, it was backed by almost all Mozilla’s resources and quickly gained market share.  Firefox had more than 100 million downloads in just the first year.  He is now worth over 150 million dollars.  Ross is yet another prime example of someone who saw a problem in everyday life and used his unique skill to solve it in a way that creates positive impact.  His creation that was born out of a dissatisfaction felt by his mother is still over by over 150 million people who prefer and trust it over the larger browsers like google and safari.

David Karp is an entrepreneur and web developer, he’s best known for creating the blogging site Tumblr.  He grew up in Manhattan and is the oldest of two children.  His parents were a teacher and a composer.  He showed interest in technology and programming from an early age.  At 15 he left the Bronx High School of Science.  He began homeschooling with his mother in order to pursue an internship with an animation company.  Through his internship, he secured a position doing web development for UrbanBaby.  The site used message boards to allow parents to ask each other questions about raising children.  Karp did most of his work remotely and as a result was able to move to Japan at age 17 to immerse himself in the culture and technology.  When he came back to New York he became chief technology officer of UrbanBaby.  When the company was sold, he built up capital and invested in his own consultancy, Davidville.  During some downtime with Davidville, Karp and his programmer, Marco Arment, worked on building the Tumblr site.  The site was launched as a private beta in 2006 and went public in 2007.  Five years after its debut, Tumblr employed over 100 people and had over 70 million blog posts.  In 2013, Yahoo purchased Tumblr for $1 billion.  Although Tumblr would later be devalued and made a subsidiary of a different company, Karp was able to resign with a net worth of over 200 million dollars.  Karp is a great example of an entrepreneur who immersed himself in culture and then found a problem, parents wanting to find answers, and offered a way to help.

Adelle Archer

Adelle Archer is the CEO of Eterneva.  Her company’s innovation is next level in creativity.  It fills a hole by creating a whole new market.  The term no pain no sale takes on a whole new meaning.  The business caters to people with loves ones who have passed away.  Her service is to take the ashes of the deceased and turn them into a diamond.  Her purely unique service allows her customers to have a way to remember their loved ones in a special way that was never seen before.  After someone passes away, the entire process of laying a loved one to rest is painful and sad.  Her way of preserving someone’s memory in a beautiful and lasting way is a perfect contrast to the usual series of events.  Adelle Archer received her MBA in Entrepreneurship from Action School of Business.  At only 23 years old she graduated as the valedictorian of her class.  Archer said that her goal was to change the stigma around grief.  She also hopes to create open lines of communication with people who are currently grieving in order to keep them from feeling isolated and being misunderstood.  She also said that one of her goals is for people to be remembered for who they were and not how they died.  The brilliant nature of her business captured the attention of Shark Tank, she drew investment from Mark Cuban on the show.  Archer’s ability to create a whole new section in the death care community is a prime example of innovation.

Mark Cuban

Although he isn’t young now, Mark Cuban has a great story of innovation and exploring a new underserved area.  Today Cuban is known primarily as an investor on the hit show shark tank and as the owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team.  Although he’s worth about 4.5 billion, he didn’t start with massive investments.  In a way, Cuban came from a history of entrepreneurs.  His grandfather immigrated from Russian and sold goods out of the back of a truck to feed his family.  At the age of 12, Mark Cuban sold garbage bags so he could buy a pair of shoes he liked.  Cuban enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh but transferred to Indiana after his freshman year.  After graduating in 1981, Cuban moved back to his hometown of Pittsburgh and took a job at Mellon Bank.  He immersed himself in the understanding of computers and networking and in 1982 he moved from Pittsburgh to Dallas.  Cubans first large scale profit came in 1990 when he sold his consulting company MicroSolutions to CompuServe for 6 million dollars.  In 1995 he and his business partner, Todd Wagner, started a company called AudioNet.  The service was created to stream Indiana Hoosiers basketball games while in Texas.  The company went public in 1998 and soon saw shares reach $200.  A year later the two men sold the business to Yahoo for almost $6 billion.  In 2000, Cuban bought the Mavericks for $285 million.  Today the Mavericks are worth over 2.45 billion dollars.  Today Cuban uses his knowledge of business to invest in startups on shark tank, he’s also regarded as one of the best owners in the NBA.

Fraser Doherty

Doherty began his business career at the age of just 14.  He started with making jam from his grandmother’s recipe and selling door to door.  Next, he sold his jams at farmers markets and would bike to deliver products.  Soon he was receiving more orders than he could handle.  He understood that his business could be very profitable.  His next step was to drop out of school and renting a factory a few days each month to develop and produce his products.  In 2007 he was approached by a high-end supermarket called Waitrose.  He got his products on their shelves in the UK and Europe.  Eventually he marketed his products to Korea and Japan and sold over a million British pounds worth of product in his first hour on a Korean shopping site.  This business was called SuperJam.  Doherty was even awarded a medal for service to business from the late queen Elizabeth.  He also created a charitable organization called SuperJam tea parties.  This program has hosted over 100 tea parties in Scotland, England, and Wales.  These events are primarily for elderly people who live alone or in nursing homes.  The events consist of dancing and live music and could attract as many as 500 guests.  He is also the co-founder of Beer52, the worlds largest craft beer club.  The company has over 200,000 subscribers and over 100 employees, the company also produces the worlds top craft beer magazine.  From his beginnings at the tender age of 14, to where he is now at the age of 34, Fraser Doherty has been a perfect example of an entrepreneur.  Seeing his ability to provide a simple product at a high level and marketing it well is the perfect model for a young entrepreneur.