Ben Kapelushnik liked buying cool shoes. But he realized that in order to buy more, he had to sell some for profit. As time went on he got good at finding high value shoes and selling them. He networked extensively and made deals to get access to popular shoes before other people could. This allowed him to fully commit to his hobby, making it a business. Now he is 16 years old and on track to make $1 million this year. Many of his buyers are athletes and celebrities. He was introduced to DJ Kahled by a mutual friend and he is now a loyal customer. He also featured Ben on many of his snapchats, gaining him immense exposure. He now buys expensive shoes in bulk and sells them on his website. He says that a big motivation is that his parents did not want to fund a hobby of buying shoes, so he was forced to find ways to make money and he decided it would be to sell those shoes.

There are always a few people that people know who will always succeed. No matter what these people do, they will do it well. My friend David is one of these people. He does what he dreams and he dreams big. When we were seniors in high school we both cut lawns as our primary source of income. Except that while I was pushing a lawn mower and transporting it in my dad’s Honda Pilot, he was getting pulled by a $10,000 commercial grade mower and transporting it with his own truck.

David started cutting grass when he was in seventh grade for his neighbors, with his dad’s push mower. He soon realized the potential for cutting grass- High prices for work that doesn’t require very much effort and, if done right, time. So he determined that the best way to increase profits was to cut the grass as quickly as possible and charge by the job, not the hour. He saved up and after his sophomore year he bought a commercial grade zero turn riding mower, trailer, and truck. He built a reputation for doing a better job than the professionals, he had a personal touch and care for his work. The summer after his senior year he went legal and turned it into a business. This meant keeping track of paper work and paying taxes, but it also had three large benefits. The first that he got experience with running a small business, the second was that it looked really good on a resume, and the third is that it allowed him to sell his business.

He knew that he would not be able to cut during college and wanted to focus on internships in the summer. So David asked his clients agree to use whoever he finds as a replacement and so he contacted many local landscaper companies. After some negotiation he was able to sell all his clients and riding mower to a company for around $20,000 and sold his truck separately. With the money he bought a nice sedan for around $12,000 and used the rest to pay off the first year of college.

David is now a mechanical engineer at the University of Akron. He biked across America and built homes while doing it the summer after his freshman year. Then this past summer he bought a motorcycle and drove across america. The isn’t the type of guy that backs down from a challenge. He once got interested in wind boarding so he bought a board and frequently drove up to lake moraine and pursued his new hobby. Even though he has not made a big company and hired a bunch of people, he has all the skills to. He is the exact person that one would want to be like to be an entrepreneur. He is a getter and a leader. People want to follow him because he is confidant in himself and his ability to do well. He is also humble enough to know when he can’t do it and so get the necessary help or go a different route.

When most people think of entrepreneurs, they think of someone who had a good idea and started a business with it. Johnny Ward is not this kind of entrepreneur. He had a calling and did everything he could to not work in a business. Throughout all his childhood, Johnny had an urge to travel the world. Jonny grew up in Northern Ireland then moved to England for college. Just 15 hours after his last exam of senior year he was on a one way flight to New York City. Once he was in America he moved around, worked for a bit, traveled, worked more, traveled more, and repeated. He moved to Australia to work and save and there his website onestep4ward.com was founded. He hated having to to everyday, so he moved to Zimbabwe and really picked up his blogging. He currently lives in Thailand (although he is rarely actually there) and has accumulated over 1.5 million from his blog website and a few other ventures of his.

Now, he says that he is free. Johnny believes that life should not be spent cooped up in an office, saving for retirement, when you’re too old to enjoy it. He encourages everyone to do as he does and travel and share it with the world. He says the best way to work is to play. He shares his life and how wonderful it has been, urging everyone to follow his in adventure, saying that they can even make money like he did. His website is the perfect platform to use to do so. It has become very popular and has changed the way that people travel.

Silk Road was an online marketplace where nearly anything could be brought with complete anonymity. It was a website created to be the ideal free market, but evolved into a den for criminals. It only lasted two years after its launch, due to the arrest of its founder, Ross Ulbritch.

Ross Ulbritch was a brilliant student who graduated from the University of Texas in Dallas with a degree in physics. Then in 2009 he received his masters in material science and engineering at Penn State. Soon after graduating from Penn State, Ross started a charity called Good Wagon Books. His charity collected unwanted books from the owners house and redistributed them. The company literally and figuratively fell apart one day when all the book shelves suddenly collapsed, thus ending his endeavor. Ross was not upset, however because he already had his eyes set on a new company.

Soon after graduating from Penn State Ross became interested in Australian Economics and involved in the Libertarian party. After his charity fell through, he began working on a website called Silk Road, where a truly free market could be exercised. He had no real experience in making websites, but was able to quickly learn by asking friends and posting to forums. The website never would have been possible, had it not been for Tor and Bitcoin. Both Tor and Bitcoin are encrypted and together make it nearly impossible to track who made the transaction. Because of this, anyone can buy and sell whatever they want with no fear of consequences, because no one will no who they are.

Being a libertarian, Ross had no problem with drugs, he thought it was up to the individual to make his own decision. So, he decided to make drug trade the primary force behind his new website; he even started growing his own mushrooms to make the first sales. His site quickly gained immense popularity. Hundreds of different vendors were added and it was used by tens of thousands of people.

Eventually the FBI caught up with Ross and he was arrested and his website shut down. But this does not mean that he was not an entrepreneur. He had incredible ambition to do what he wanted, he displayed this by “Furthering human knowledge” (Ross) in his short career as an engineer, starting his own charity, and then creating a new world wide market. He was very good at finding what he wanted and taking the necessary measures to achieve it. Even though his work was not morally sound, he did many things that aspiring entrepreneurs can learn from.

Logan Paul is a 22 year old internet personality and actor. His fame started in 2010 through a social media app called Vine. Since then, he has created an immensely popular YouTube channel, starred in movies, written and directed movies, starred in tonight shows, and launched his own line of clothing. Not only is he incredibly successful, but his younger brother is equally popular, Jake Paul starred in a Disney show and accumulated over 2.5 billion views on YouTube. Logan Paul displays entrepreneurial characteristics by being very ambitious and is able to recognize opportunity and capitalize on it.

Quickly after Vine started, Logan Paul emerged as a very popular character. Eventually Vine became a thing of the past, but Logan was able to ride off his momentum and moved to Las Angeles to collaborate with other young people in his exact same situation. None of them could have survived on their own. But because most of them moved from all over the county into the same apartment building and helped produce and feature in each others videos, they were able to make great content. Logan took advantage of this popularity to pursue his dream of acting and attained roles in TV shows and movies over his first few years in LA. 

At this time he started to really move ahead. He launched a daily video blog (vlog) which hit one million subscribers in less than two months. From a business viewpoint, this blog was to gain popularity and spread awareness. He has now uploaded a vlog everyday for the past 394 days and has gained over 12 million subscribers, which he calls members of the Logang. Through this massive community, he advertised to millions of people every day for his new movies and shows, his partners’ endeavors, and his new clothing line. Logan Paul often showed video of his pet parrot and one day he decided to make a pair of socks with its picture on it, to sell to his viewers. These socks sold very well so he created a brand called Maverick, named after his bird, and designed dozens of different types of apparel. Through his network with many other young developers, he has been able to make his line very popular .

Although he did not take the traditional course of developing a product and starting a company, Logan Paul certainly is an entrepreneur. He found something that there was high demand for, funny videos, and he satisfied that need. Not only did he do that, but he used that position to achieve his dream and to get himself into roles of acting, producing, and directing. While doing all this, he had the insight to realize he could make a lot of money by selling clothing to all the people who faithfully watch his content and by doing so advertise his name even more.

Matt Mullenweg was on the same path as most college students, he picked a subject field that seemed interesting to him and just went for it. He had no idea what he wanted to do or would end up doing. He studied Political Science, but dropped out of college to work for CNET. He then quit that job to devote his full attention towards his new company, a company that began from unlikely beginnings.

Mullenweg used a website called  b2/cafelog to upload photos from his trip to Washington DC. But he did not like some of the functions concerning the picture editing program. Even though he had no experience with computer programming, he tweaked the program to make it better suit him. He then started working on his own version and a few years later Word Press was born, a program that powers 28% of the internet.

What is incredible about Mullenweg is that he did not do anything extraordinary. He found a product to be unsatisfactory, so he made improvements on it, then he realized that he could do a much better job and made his own business to sell it. In this case his product was the internet. Well, at least the blogs and websites on it. He went to college for Political Science, but had the discernment to realize that he did not need to be tied down to that career path. He is impressive because he recognized that he had a great idea and had the initiative to pursue it.

There are two actions that help describe Mullenweg. The first is that he was able to recruit one of the executives at Yahoo to be his CEO back when he only had four employees. This shows that not only did he have a good idea, but he knew how to market it and make other people think it is a good idea. The second is the organizations that he donates money to. None of them are well known charities and some of them are not what some would consider ‘ordinary’, meaning they do not support ordinary things like poverty, but all of them are important. As he says, “These are the charities or organizations that I support in a way that is significant to me”. He is not afraid of what the norm is. But rather will do what he wants. Both of these are vital traits for an entrepreneur.

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About Matt Mullenweg