Yik Yak has become extremely popular not only at Grove City College but around the world. It is an app that allows people to anonymously post within a 1.5 mile radius of users in your area.

Brooks Buffington and Tyler Droll, graduated in 2013 from Furman University in South Carolina. While in school they worked on a few startup ideas together during their senior year and put their careers on hold to build a company after they graduated.

Yik Yak was born in 2013 and quickly became very popular. Buffington and Droll word spread very quickly and they raised $10 million dollars in funding.

According to businessinsider.com, “Since January, the founders say growth has been organic and the app is used heavily (by thousands of students) on about 250 campuses. At some of the schools, as many as 10,000 students are on it and 100 new messages are posted every ten minutes. At smaller schools, the app has penetrated 80% of student bodies.”

The only negative thing about Yik Yak is that some of the users abuse the fact that everyone is anonymously posting. Some bullying is happening on the site but Buffington and Droll hope to bring the bulling to an end in the near future.

By putting their careers on hold, Buffington and Droll accomplished something incredible. It goes to show that with the right idea and an incredible amount of will power one can push through difficult situations to succeed.

Evan Spiegel, 24-year-old co-founder of Snapchat, showcases many exemplary traits that makes him an incredible entrepreneur.

Spiegel grew up in Pacific Palisades, California in a very successful environment because his parents were both outstanding lawyers.

He attended Stanford University, where he studied product design. Spiegel proposed Snapchat as a class project which quickly became a hit. In 2012, he dropped out to focus on Snapchat with only 3 classes left before he could have completed his degree.

On Snapchat.com the description says, “Enjoy fast and fun mobile conversation. Snap a photo or video, add a caption, and send it to a friend. They’ll view it, laugh, and then the Snap disappears form the screen – unless they take a screenshot.” This is not only creative but innovative. Over 700 million Snaps are sent each day.

Spiegel at the age of 23 turned down a $3 billion purchase by Facebook. He is proof that real success comes from taking big risks.

Spiegel is an inspiration to all young entrepreneurs because he demonstrated that if you are passionate about something and you work hard anything is possible.

Instagram is a photo sharing, mobile, and social networking website/app that has become extremely popular. It enables its users to take pictures and videos, make edits, and share them on a variety of different social networking platforms.

Kevin Systrom graduated from Stanford University with a BS in Management Science & Engineering. His first intern experience was through Odeo which later became Twitter.

Mike Krieger also graduated from Stanford University where he studied Symbolic Systems with a focus in Human-Computer Interaction. During his time at Stanford, he interned on Microsoft’s PowerPoint team as a PM and at Foxmarks as a software developer. He also wrote his Master’s thesis on how user interfaces can better support collaboration on a large scale before getting connected with Instagram.

Together Krieger and Systrom (in the picture above) founded Instagram, and launched it in 2010.

Instantly Instagram became a household name with over 200 million active monthly users. Personally, one of my favorite features on Instagram is the ability to edit photos with multiple different filters before you post a picture. This allows people to do all of the editing on Instagram rather than having to use separate apps which was a pain.

Two of the most important things that Instagram has accomplished is its ability to achieve financial support from investors. Without the financial backing of investors, Instagram would have been unable to start up as a company. To truly get a scope of the size of the deal investors made, one must look no further than to the first venture capital firms that put up seed money for Instagram: Andreesen Horowitz’s original $250,000 investment is now worth a whopping $78 million. That is 78 followed by six zeroes. A return of 312 times the initial investment. Secondly, Instagram added hashtags to its site which encouraged users connect with each other and see pictures from all over the world.  This was evolutionary.

Without a doubt, Instagram is going to be around for a long time.

Garrett Gee is somewhat of a digital prophet. While attending Brigham University in 2011 he became interested in creating a better app for scanning barcodes and QR codes. Gee saw that the current apps were clunky and difficult to use and saw an opening in the market for improvement, especially with the upcoming release of the i-Pad 2. He predicted that by the release of the i-Pad 2 there would be a list of the top ten apps to get, and he wanted a spot on that list. From this thought was born Scan.

Gee’s business idea was so convincing, he garnered 1.7 million dollars in seed funding from venture capitalists even before the i-Pad was released. Because of his hard work and keen foresight, Gee’s efforts paid off with crushing success. Within a year Scan had over 10 million downloads; doubling that within the next year, all a the age of 21. While many college graduates are struggling to make ends meet, Garrett Gee was giving his competition a run for their money.

Garrett Gee inspires me because I believe he embodies the two most important traits of an entrepreneur; a readiness to take risks, and an aptitude for reading the market and the demands of the future. Not only was he able to have the guts to go for his plan, he also had the keen sense of how his product would find a place in the market. These two characteristics gave him the jump he needed to outstrip his competition and nail a place in a very ruthless market.