This young entrepreneur from South Africa was just 17 when he thought of DryBath, a product that revolutionizes sanitation in impoverished areas.  This is what got him named as Time Magazine’s “Top 30 under 30 people that are changing the world” in 2013.

The concept for this product is simple.  Quite like hand sanitize for your body, you lather yourself in germ-killing lotion so that you don’t need to shower/bathe.  For the 2.5 billion people worldwide who don’t have ready access to clean water, DryBath is a life saver.

Amazingly, this product idea came about when Marishane’s friend was too lazy to take a shower and said “Why doesn’t someone invent something that you can put on your skin and then you don’t have to bathe?”.

Impressively, just within a year after product ideation at the age of 17, Marishane had written a 40-page business plan, applied for a patent, and launched his startup named HeadBody Industries.  Upon filing his patent, he also became South Africa’s youngest patent filer.  Marishane is currently majoring in Finance and Accounting while holding a Bachelor of Business Science at the University of Cape Town.

Some other notable accomplishments of Marishane is being rated the best student entrepreneur in the world at the Global Champion of the Global Student Entrepreneurs Awards in 2011, and being named one of the 12 brightest young minds in the world by Google in 2011.

This young innovator holds a Bachelor of Business Science, majoring in Finance & Accounting, from the University of Cape Town.

Near to Grove City College, Chad Hurley was born in Reading, Pennsylvania.  Being the middle child in a family of three, Hurley always loved art.  It wasn’t until high school that Hurley became interested in computers and technology.  Hurley was also great at competing, as Hurley would later do in an industry standpoint later in life.  He graduated from Twin Valley High School in 1996 and graduated from IUP or Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1999.

    The large turning point of his seemingly ordinary life was marriage to Kathy Clark.  Kathy Clark is the child of James H. Clark, a very famous and impactful Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur.  Hence the importance of having a good mentor.

    In 2005, Hurley had the opportunity to team up with Steve Chen and Jawed Karim as a co-founder to what now is YouTube.  With a venture capitalist investment total of $11.5 million, YouTube began very solid with its first video being “Me at the zoo”, starring co-founder Karim himself.  Nowadays, Youtube has 300 hours of videos uploaded every hour by users all around the world.

    Hurley’s most recent entrepreneurial venture is MixBit, which he launched with Steve Chen in August 2013.  MixBit is a video-editing service with smartphones.

From Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, Andrew Mason grew up in a Jewish home.  At just the age of 15, Mason showed entrepreneurial greatness with the beginning of his morning delivery service, “Bagel Express”.  Mason graduated from Mount Lebanon High School in 1999, just before the turn of the century.

     After his Pittsburgh days, Mason then went to nearby Chicago for school in the prestigious Northwestern University.  Although not majoring in a business field (in fact, he majored in music), Mason began working in entrepreneurial web design for his partner Eric Lefkosky.  However, Mason’s academic journey did not yet end as he attended the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy through a full scholarship.  Just as many rich successful young entrepreneurs, Mason dropped out.

Mason’s first entrepreneurial venture was The Point, where Lefkosky funded Mason with 1 million dollars to create the web platform in 2006.  Apparently Mason really liked the creation aspect of his job project, as The Point gave way to what now is teh idea and website of Groupon.  Groupon sells is an eCommerce site that sells deals to local businesses.  Since November 2008, Groupon has now sold over six million deals.  This company has now recorded to make 800 million dollars of revenue a year from profiting 50% of deal income.

Since then, Groupon has reached multiple milestones, such as a 6 billion dollar acquisition bid from Google, which Groupon turned down.  Definitely not too bad for a Mount Lebanon boy.

John Ruhlin just started selling knives to a couple of housewives one year in order to have a little money for med school.  Little did he know he would pay off all of his college debt and be CEO of a group and company of ingenious generous individuals.

John Ruhlin is currently the CEO of Ruhlin Group, which is an expert gift-giving service for large companies.  He first had this idea when he sold his first CUTCO order to his girlfriend’s dad.  It was a very large sale, as he convinced his girlfriend’s dad to purchase gifts for his constituents and friends.  This started a gifting “technique” or “strategy” that spearheaded Ruhlin’s ability to sell more CUTCO than anyone else in history.  Pretty impressive.

The Ruhlin Group have done awesome projects such as making high quality speakers for Cub’s fans from the oldest wooden room at Wrigley Field.

John Ruhlin isn’t only an expert gift giver, he is also a pretty good author.  Ruhlin shows that you can have various different profit streams as a CEO entrepreneur.  His award winning books, such as “Giftology”, and “Cutting-Edge Sales”, which I personally very much admire.  Not only a CEO, Entrepreneur, Salesman, author, but John Ruhlin is a Serial Freelancer with his wide array of interest and skills.

From selling knives door-to-door in his teen years, Travis Kalanick has made an incredible empire for himself by being a serial entrepreneur and has a net worth of $5.6 billion.  So how did a regular California kid create one of the largest growing and most prestigious businesses of the century?  It certainly wasn’t immediate.

This all started when he first started selling Cutco at the age of 17.  This job laid the foundation for Kalanick’s communication skills and work ethic.  This job is what made it possible for him to fund and ultimately achieve his goal of owning his own business.  Perhaps at that time in his life, however, even he did not know many times he would achieve that goal.  Kalanick also received some natural business acumen from his mother, a retail adviser.

Kalanick started an SAT preparation course when he was just 18, which combined his brains and his service abilities.  He put the name of “New Way Academy” on his course.

Attending UCLA in for computer science, Kalanick would eventually drop out in 1998 with hopes of success for Scour, a peer-to-peer search engine that he started with his classmates.  What many people don’t know is how Kalanick had to live on unemployment checks while working full time for Scour, and eventually filed for bankruptcy after being sued by several companies for $250 billion dollars.

Next up on the the list of serial ventures is RedSwoosh, which at the time was on the fence of success and failure.  Due to many clashes with the co-founder, legal issues, and employee complaints, RedSwoosh almost failed.  However, the team was able to re cooperate, and successfully sold to Akamai for $23 million dollars.

Kalanick’s most famous development, however, was Uber, in which Kalanick did not create solely but is now the CEO of.  Uber allows individuals to use Uber drivers, which are different than taxi drivers, for transport.  Things are looking fantastic for Kalanick, as Uber’s most recent valuation would make him a multibillionaire.

https://www.uber.com/?exp=home_signup_form