How to get into Forbes?
Nowadays, a lot of purposeful people are trying to find a use for their abilities and realize their ambitions
It would seem that promising young people for some reason cannot monetize their efforts and perseverance. What are they doing wrong or maybe not there? We will try to understand the examples of young entrepreneurs whose names will forever remain “in the archives” of Forbes.
John Collison: an excellent businessman
Now the youngest billionaire according to Forbes, earned his first $ 1 million before he received a certificate. The guy was born in Ireland. After the ninth grade, together with his older brother Patrick, he founded the company Shuppa. They wanted to make it easier for Internet users to make purchases on eBay. The brothers themselves have been using this platform for a long time and understood that its user interface could be much more convenient. For example, they thought, it would not hurt to have a tool that automatically submits an application in the last seconds of trading so that it does not have time to be interrupted. Or a search engine that takes into account typos.
John and Patrick applied to the Irish Business Development Agency, however, they did not appreciate the idea of young entrepreneurs and refused the grant. But the Collinsons did not give up and turned to Y Combinator, the largest startup incubator in Silicon Valley. That’s where the project was appreciated, $10 thousand was allocated and advised to contact the Kalvir brothers — British of Indian origin, who worked to improve the eBay interface not from users, but from sellers.
The result of the rapid activity was the Auctomatic company, however, the company did not last long on its own and a year later it was bought out by Current Live Media for $5 million in cash and $2 million in Current Live Media shares.
After such a busy year, 17-year-old John Collison returned to school, where he graduated with “excellent” as a millionaire.
In 2010, together with his brother, he opened the Stripe company with the support of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Max Levchin and Sequoia Capital. And in 2016, the Collisons with a fortune of $ 1.1 billion become the youngest billionaires among those who have independently earned their capital.
Evan Spiegel: burn after reading
Evan was born in Los Angeles into a wealthy family of lawyers. Evan had all the attributes of the “golden youth” in his life: yachts, expensive cars, celebrity “hangouts”, but he called it all “life in a bubble”.
After receiving his education at Stanford, Evan Spiegel could not understand for a long time what he wanted to do in life. He worked for a company that was engaged in biomedicine, then became a teacher and even went to South Africa to teach students the basics of management. However, these types of activities did not keep him for a long time.
Evan was interested in programming. At first, he practiced at Scott Cook’s Intuit company. However, his enthusiasm did not allow him to remain under the patronage of someone other than his company for a long time, and already in 2011, together with his partners, the young and enterprising Evan began developing the Picaboo messenger application, where you can exchange photos and videos that are deleted after a certain time. After disagreements with one of the partners, the app had to be renamed Snapchat.
Instagram Facebook Facebook users share photos on Snapchat more often than on facebook or Instagram, which interested Mark Zuckerberg — the owner of Facebook. In 2013, he offered Evan to buy his company for $1 billion, but was refused even when he was ready to give $ 3 billion. Evan Spiegel did not lose with the refusal. In 2015, when the messenger’s audience exceeded 100 million users, the company’s revenue amounted to more than $ 60 million. At that time, the fortune was estimated at $2.1 billion, and now Evan is 28 years old and Forbes estimates his fortune at $2.8 billion.
Wheel of fortune or hard work?
Most of the young billionaires who have received the attention of Forbes are just lucky to be born into billionaire families and inherit a fortune, but the experience of John Collison and Evan Spiegel shows that the road to wealth is not paved with luck alone. Using the example of these two young businessmen and more mature ones, such as Mark Zuckerberg (facebook), Sergey Brin (Google) and others, it can be seen that at the moment the most promising area of development is IT technologies that are based on intellectual capital.
“Finance and business are dangerous waters in which voracious sharks walk in circles in search of prey. In this game, knowledge is the key to strength and power. Spend money to know what you are doing, otherwise someone will “do” you very quickly. Financial illiteracy is a huge problem. People are constantly getting into dangerous situations just because they haven’t prepared properly.” — Donald Trump
Hard work, ingenuity and a great desire to develop yourself and your own company are the main pillars on which the ladder to the “upper world” stands.
“I am convinced that half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from losers is perseverance.” — Steve Jobs
