Blake Ross was raised in Key Biscane, Florida. When he was 10 years old he created his first website through America Online. He then attended  a Miami high school, Gulliver Preparatory School, and while he was in school, he worked for a California based company called Mozilla. While working for Mozilla, Ross co-founded the Mozilla Firefox Project with Dave Hyatt. Ross’s inspiration for creating the Firefox Project was his mother’s frustrated user experience with Internet Explorer. His inspiration also came when he was an intern at Netscape Communications Company at the age of 16. This company recently acquired a different browser after purchasing America Online. He became disenchanted with the browser and the direction that Netscape wanted to take. This fueled Ross to make smaller, easy to use browser. Ross continued to work on Firefox in the fall of of 2003 at Stanford University. In 2004, Firefox began to gain market share and in less than a year of its release, Firefox had over 100 million downloads.

After Firefox’s success, Ross founded a new startup with a different ex-Netscape employee, Joe Hewitt. This startup is called Parakey and it is a new interface that is designed to bridge the gap between the desktop and the web. On July 20, 2007 Ross sold Parakey to Facebook, and in 2013 he left Facebook to pursue his own interests.

Two brothers, John  and Patrick Collison founded a company  in 2010. The company they created was first  called /dev/payments. This name caused much confusion to consumers and potential investors so the brothers decided to name their company Stripe. Stripe is a company that allows different companies to integrate payment processing into their websites without having to register and maintain a merchant account. Their company focuses on fraud prevention, and the banking infrastructure required to create an online payment system. Stripe has known grown to a company that operates in over 25 countries for both business and individuals alike.

Stripe wasn’t built solely on the capital that John and Patrick Collison had; instead they received their first investment in June 2010 from a start-up accelerator called Y Combinator.  The company then went on to receive further investment from venture capitalists Peter Thiel, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz for roughly 2 million dollars. The company then in 2012 received 18 million dollars more from Sequoia Capital  at a 100 million dollar valuation. Stripe has since picked up other notable investors such as Elon Musk.

In 2016, Stripe was ranked the four on the Forbes Cloud 100, a list of companies that engage in cloud computing.  That same year, John and Patrick became the world’s youngest self-made billionaires, and they were worth at least 1.1 billion dollars. This occurred after receiving an investment from CapitalG and General Catalyst that valued the company at 9.2 billion dollars.

Robert Murphy, known as Bobby, was a student at Stanford University with Evan Spiegel and Reggie Brown. While the three were students, they first tried to start a company called Future Freshman, which was a website that was dedicated to helping high school students get advice and getting into to different colleges. This business eventually failed, but Murphy was working on a side project called Picaboo, which was a photo disappearing app. Murphy eventually brought on Spiegel and Brown when he switched the company’s name from Picaboo to Snapchat in 2011. Murphy then graduated from Stanford, and began to work at Revel Systems. Before he would quit Revel Systems and work for Snap Inc. full time, Murphy spent half of his paycheck to pay for Snapchat’s servers. He continues to work for Snapchat, by including the proper coding for its new features such as the new Snapchat Spectacles. In March of this year Snapchat reached a market cap of 34 billion dollars, but more recently in August its market cap was 13 billion dollars.

Murphy has been awarded numerous accolades for creating the world renowned app, Snapchat. In 2014, he was named to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. In 2015, Murphy became the second youngest billionaire in the world. In the same year he was ranked as the 1250th richest person in the world, and was ranked as the 15th richest 40 or under Entrepreneur in the United States. Murphy was ranked 374th on the Forbes 400 twice, once in 2014 and once in 2015. His current net worth is 3.7 billion dollars.

Daniel Ek showcased his entrepreneurial spirit when he started his first business at the age of 14.  He went to college at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, but did not graduate. He formed the company Advertigo which is an advertising company that TradeDoubler acquired. Ek was also a part of  Tradera and Evertigo. He then had a brief stunt as the CEO of utorrent until it was sold to BitTorrent in 2006. He then proceeded to set up Spotify that year. It took him and Marten Lorentzon 2 years to create Spotify, and they eventually launched it in 2008. He currently serves as the CEO of Spotify.

Spotify was the first legal service for music streaming.  You do not have to purchase a song to hear it. Ek’s genius was making the service free, besides the cost of a few advertisements mixed in with one’s songs. If you don’t like advertisements you can purchase Spotify Premium for $9.99 a month. Spotify gained immediate traction, and took over Ek’s home country, Sweden, by storm. Currently Spotify has over 100 million active users, and 40 million subscribers.  Spotify has brought Ek’s net worth to roughly 800 million dollars.

Vlad Tenev is the co-founder and co-CEO of the no-free stock trading app, Robinhood. Tenev received his BS in math at Stanford. While he was at Stanford, his met his future co-founder Baiju Bhatt.  They first started a company called, Chronos Research. This company provided technology for hedge funds and banks to create automated trades. They realized that the hedge funds and banks were using their software to make trades essentially for free. This was the moment when they got the idea for Robinhood.

Robinhood was an immediate success. Once they released their initial website, they had 600 people sign up overnight. Robinhood got featured on Hacker News, which propelled them to receiving over 100,000 signups in a month. After a year a million people signed up. These people signed up when Tenev did not even have a viable app yet. The time between the initial release of the website, and the app release date was one and a half years. Tenev found a way to get over a million people to sign up for his app without creating the it.

Tenev and Bhatt had trouble finding capital to start their business. They were denied by 75 venture capitalists. Although it was a struggle, they eventually secured to proper seed capital. Robinhood now has over 2 million users, and is estimated to be worth 1.3 billion dollars.

Mike Radenbaugh built an electric bike when he was 15 years old in order to travel his 34 mile round trip to school everyday. Radenbaugh decided to make his bike because his trip was too long for him to make on his mountain bike every single day. His  initiation and drive shined through when he joined an online forum to have other people help guide him in the construction of his first electric bike. Radenbaugh’s immense work ethic was seen when it took him about half a year of making multiple prototypes to finally create his first working electric bike. His bike immediately captivated many people in his rural town for its innovation and use of alternative energy. He then put his idea on the back-burner until he went to college. At Humboldt State University, he met Ty Collins and Marimar White-Espin  who helped him found his electric bike company, Rad Power. Rad Power has bikes that can reach speeds of up to 50 MPH. Rad Power has now  grown to a company that employs 28 people, and it is projected to reach 30 million dollars in sales.