Paul Van Doren is one of the founders of Vans. Vans is a footwear company that makes shoes for some extreme sports like skateboarding, snowboarding, and surfing. Van Doren started the company with his brother and their friends in 1966. They had to build the first building themselves from the ground up. The company was initially called the Van Doren Rubber Company. On opening day 17 people showed up. Van Doren believed in making the most durable shoes. He thought that people would want to show off their tough shoes to their friends. He started to market to skateboarders. He would start to sponsor skateboarders by giving them free shoes. Paul ran the company until 1976 when his brother James took over. Vans continued to grow as a character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The character wore the classic checkered slip-on. Vans went bankrupt in the 1980s but was able to pay off its debt. Vans was bought in 1988 by a group of investors for 60 million. Vans fell into a slump and started to focus more on marketing and began putting on warped tours and it became a hit. Vans started to sponsor all types of extreme sports events and athletes and started selling apparel. Now, after 50 years of business, the company is selling $400m worth of shoes a year. Vans are my favorite shoes to wear. I personally own 5 pairs of vans at the moment and have been wearing them for a very long time.

GOAT is an app/website where you can buy and sell shoes. Eddy Lu and Daishin Sugano were two college friends that were sick of their boring mundane corporate jobs. They quit their jobs on the same day to begin working on GOAT. it would be many years, and many failed business ventures, before the duo found the right formula by tapping into the passionate ranks of sneakerheads. GOAT is one of the biggest marketplaces for sneakerheads. I have used GOAT on many occasions and have always been satisfied. GOAT has become the main app that I use to buy sneakers. A few of their early business endeavors that never stuck included an import/export business, a golf apparel company, and an online tea business. They also built countless 99-cent gaming apps for iPhone users, but nothing stuck. One day the two wandered into a Beard Papa’s restaurant in LA, loved the food, and decided to franchise the Japanese chain for some “passive income” while they worked on their projects. However, this was during the 2008 financial crisis and as a result, kept them looking for new ideas. They moved to Chicago in hopes to grow the Beard Papa’s restaurant. While being in a new city they saw how hard it was to meet new people, so they created the app GrubWithUs. GrubWithUs is an app that you could use to meet people to eat with. Eventually that startup fizzled out. One day Sugano, who is a big sneakerhead received a fake pair of Jordans. After this he complained to Lu that the sneaker market had no good authentication process. After that moment the two created GOAT in July of 2015. Ever since Goat has been one of the top marketplaces for sneakers and is widely trusted for authentication. 

Blake Ross is an American software developer and the co-creator of Mozilla Firefox. Ross grew up in a Jewish family in Florida. When he was 10 years old, he created his first website. Ross started interning at Netscape communications organization at the age of 16. After having troubles with the browser, he was working on, ross and Dave Hyatt, the other co-founder of Mozilla Firefox, Thought of an idea. They envisioned a smaller, easy-to-use browser that could have mass appeal. That idea was the birth of Firefox. Firefox was released in November of 2004 when ross was just 19.  Firefox quickly grabbed market share with 100 million downloads in less than a year. Ross and Hewitt worked on creating Parakey, a new user interface designed to bridge the gap between the desktop and the web. On July 20, 2007, Facebook purchased Parakey. In early 2013, Ross left Facebook to pursue other interests. Ross suffers from aphantasia, a rare condition preventing a person from visualizing things in their mind. Ross wrote about his experience in a blog post. I have never visualized anything in my entire life. I can’t “see” my father’s face or a bouncing blue ball, my childhood bedroom or the run I went on ten minutes ago. I thought “counting sheep” was a metaphor. I’m 30 years old and I never knew a human could do any of this.

Kanye West is a musician, Fashion designer and much more. West started as a producer back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. He was signed to Rock-A-Fella records as a producer. Kanye started producing for Jay-Z. After getting recognized for producing good albums he started working on his own music. Kanye is most notably a rapper. He has become the biggest rapper in the world and continues to create music. West is not only a rapper though. Kanye has made very good business decisions and has become one of the richest celebrities in the world. Kanye started his own record label and production company in 2004 called GOOD music. He signed young talent who became great and high selling artists. Kanye also started working in the fashion industry. He has collaborated with a lot of companies to make different fashion products. Kanye has most recently worked with Adidas and GAP. Kanye has had a lot of other business ventures and has also done a lot for his community around him like founding a foundation in 2003 with his mother. Kanye also had a stunt in politics when he ran for president back in 2020. Kanye has become the richest black man in the world. He is worth over 1 billion dollars. Kanye has truly done so many things it’s hard to keep track of. He has been very successful during all the doubts he has had throughout the years.

Kevin Systrom is a co-founder of Instagram and is an American entrepreneur. After graduating from Sandford, Kevin worked at Google for two years before leaving out of frustration because he was not given the position he wanted. After that he went on to create the prototype which later on became Burbn. Burbn is a photo editing he created after his girlfriend did not want to post her photos because they didn’t have a filter. After coming up with idea he was able to receive 500,000 dollars in seed money from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. After further developing Burbn Systrom and Instagram’s other cofounder Mike Kreiger found that Burbn had to many features. People do not like things that are too complicated and so they decided to focus on one thing and that was photo sharing. Instagram was that idea that was developed into an app. Within the first month of launching the social media platform it had already gained a million users. The next year that followed Instagram had gained 10 million users. In 2012 Instagram was purchased by Facebook for 1 billion dollars. It is really crazy how rapidly the company took off. They were sold for that much after only 2 years of business.

Matt Mullenweg is the creator of a few things. One of those things is WordPress which we are using to write and view all of these blogs. When he was a freshman in college at the university of Houston he co-created the company. He co-founded the Global Multimedia Protocols Group. With fellow WordPress developers, they created Ping-O-Matic, Which notifies blog search engines like Technorati when there are updates to blogs. Later that year he would drop out of college and work for CNET. He is older now but he was a very young guy when he started his career as an entrepreneur. This story is pretty cool because he did this all in college. He was 19 and a freshman and he was creating a company with a successful product behind it. When I see examples of people innovating and creating a life for themselves so young it really makes me feel like I am behind. I think using him as an example is also super cool because I am using his platform he created to make a blog post. He has gone on to do more things and excel at them. Mullenweg eventually quit his job with CNET to create his own company. Automattic is the company that Mullenweg created after leaving CNET. Automattic is an internet company that has several smaller companies underneath it including WordPress. Mullenweg is a innovative person and his story makes a person like me want to innovate.