Michael Dubin turned funniness into a Billion dollars. Michael Dubin is the co-founder of Dollar Shave company: a service that’s shaken up the male grooming business. Dollar Shave Club is self-described as “Quality razor blades and grooming products delivered to your door. No hassle. No commitments. No BS” These razors, and other products are sold for extremely low prices: its an innovative idea.  So innovative that Unilever was willing to pay 1,000,000,000 for it – over 5 times the annual revenue of Dollar Shave Club (Michael Dubin is also one heck of a negotiator – the original offer was for a mere 40% of that.) Michael Dubin personally has stared in some of the company’s adverts – which are videos that go viral.  His unique ideas are getting the attention of huge companies – and young entrepreneurs like me.

Casey Neistat is a rising star in new exciting categories, personal narrative video logging and social media influencer. Neistat is a “YouTuber” with over 8 million subscribers, and an extremely large social media following. Neistat used his large following not only to tell stories that get millions of views (and thousands of ad dollars per video) but also is able to seamlessly integrate corporate sponsorship into his postings.  In order to create viral videos, you must innovate, and considering he has many videos over 10 million views, he is certainly an innovator. Casey inspires me as an innovator because he makes creativity seem so attainable. His ability to make innovation seem easy is…. innovative.

Drew Houston is an impressive entrepreneur. Especially when you consider he is only 34 years old and worth over 1 Billion USD. Houston started the well known cloud storage company DropBox . Success  wasn’t immediate for Houston however, he worked on more than a few other start ups before his time at DropBox, including Bit9, Accolade and Hubspot. Dropbox boasts a half billion users, and a unique position by offering cloud hosting abilities to both businesses and individuals.

Houston was named number 19 on Forbes “40 under 40” list, a collection of the most influential innovative young individuals under 40 years old in the business world. The company now boasts a estimated value over 10 billion USD. Houston is an innovator who often sings the praise of creating a inner circle who is supportive and forward thinking. Similar to Steve Jobs, Houston seems to have the skill of collecting a power team that helps build his vision, while also providing invaluable knowledge.

A millennial entrepreneur that I find extremely interesting is one you may not think of as a entrepreneur: Chance the Rapper. He’s a Grammy-winning artist you may say, not a businessman. That’s the point! First, A little background on Chance: he’s a Chicago-born hip hop artist who has interesting take on the music business: he gives away his music for free. Yup, that’s right: you can legally download all his music and not pay a dime. So how does he make any music you ask? He relies solely on money earned on merchandise, streaming revnue and concert ticket sales.

And it works.

With a net worth deep into the 8 digits, it’s clear that giving music away may be the best way to make money in a tightly contested industry. The level of success that Chance is experiencing is due to innovation – both in his music and the way he runs his music “business.” by looking at making a living from a different perspective, he’s been able to capture an audience and profits in an unused manner.

So what’s up with the Grammy wins being special? It’s because he’s the first artist to win without ever selling any physical copies of his music. Thanks to a rule change by the Grammy committee, which attribute most the change due to his overwhelming success, Chance was given the opportunity to be first. His innovation in a unique way, is a reason why I find him one of the most exciting millennial entrepreneurs.