A Few Famous Entrepreneurs You Should Know To learn to succeed, you must study success. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, read books on other entrepreneurs and try to soak up as much of their success as possible. Entrepreneurs who’ve “made it” often write books or give interviews not because they need the money, but because they want to help people like you succeed. Here are a few famous entrepreneurs you should know about, and what you can learn from them. #1: The Young Entrepreneurs Who Started MySpace In the history of online marketing, people often consider MySpace a failure. It’s true - The site did crash and burn and eventually get taken over by Facebook. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that the founders sold the company for $600 million dollars to Fox Interactive. The founding of MySpace was also much more deliberate than the founding of Facebook. MySpace founders essentially copied every successful business model they could find online. MySpace was just one of a dozen ideas they were trying at the time. They systematically found successful business ideas and scaled them out. Get more about what is an entrepreneur here. #2: The Story of How eBay Recognized Talent The founding of eBay is quite an interesting story. Unlike many other tech startups at the time, eBay didn’t start off losing money. It was profitable more or less from the very beginning. But Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, realized early on that he didn’t have the experience necessary to run the company. He took on venture capital money and sold a part of his company. He didn’t do this because he needed the money, but because he wanted experienced partners to help him run it. Those partners then helped convince Meg Whitman, who was a high level executive at Hasbro, to come and work for them at eBay. Omidyar was not only smart enough to bring on experienced partners, but he was willing to let go of his ego and let go of the CEO title. Because of that, Meg Whitman was able to take eBay to the Fortune 500s. #3: On Sergey Brin and Larry Page
The founding of Google is a case study in the power of product. It’s something that VCs pay attention to a lot. Many of the unsuccessful founders that go looking for investment have their focus on marketing. But the most successful founders of all are ultimately product focused founders. This was the case with Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t set out to create a better marketed search engine. That was what other search engines at the time, like Go.com or AltaVista were trying to do. Instead, they set out to build a better search engine. Using his unique PageRank method, Larry Page created a system that used hyperlinks as “votes” for other pages on the internet. What people don’t realize is that it took time for Google to become well known - And even more time before Google figured out a way to make money. But in the end, the entrepreneur who focuses on creating a high quality product often wins out.