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| I've always been fascinated by the unexpected ways some people succeeded in life. Biggest success stories have frequently an amazing legend behind. Nobody believed in them or tried to shut them down. I compiled here a list of these stories, as a reminder nothing comes easy and when it comes, it happens in most unexpected ways. | ||
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In 2003, Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard sophomore, writes Facemash in his dorm room,
a small website using private photos hacked from nine Harvard clubs, asking users to choose the hotter girl.
Facemash got 22,000 hits in its first four hours online, but Zuckerberg was charged with breach of security,
violating copyrights and individual privacy, and faced expulsion. The site was shut down by the Harvard administration.
The following semester, Zuckerberg writes and launches "Thefacebook", initially restricted to students of Harvard College, and later expanded to other Ivy League schools. Three Harvard seniors will accuse him of stealing their idea, and file lawsuit. The company becomes Facebook, moves to Palo Alto, receives its first investment from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and Sean Parker (creator of Napster) becomes the company's president.
In 2010, Facebook was evalued at almost $50 billion US and has over half a million subscribers.
MS-DOS
When IBM created their first PC in 1980, they needed an operating system and approached Digital Research,
the creator of the successful CP/M, but negotiations with DR founder Gary Kildall went bad.
Bill Gates and the practically unknown little company Microsoft came up
with MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System), adapted from QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System),
a system purchased for only $50,000 from Tim Paterson of Seattle.
PC DOS was the version of MS-DOS intended for IBM only, to sell with their own PCs. But Microsoft licensed their own MS DOS to multiple computer companies, who cloned the IBM PC hardware. This is how Microsoft ended up selling more software licenses than IBM sold PCs.
Michael Dell
Michael Dell, son of a stockbroker, applied to take a high school equivalency exam at age eight,
eager to enter business early. He purchased his first calculator at age seven. At age 15, he got his first computer,
an Apple II, which he disassembled to see how it worked. He invested his earnings from part-time jobs in stocks and precious metals.
In high-school, he earned $18,000 one year, more than the annual income of his history and economics teacher,
by selling subscriptions to the Houston Post in the summer to a target group of customers,
with cold calls to newlyweds and people moving into new homes.
In January 1984, Dell banked on his conviction that the potential cost savings of a manufacturer selling PCs directly had enormous advantages over the conventional indirect retail channel. Operating out of a condominium, the business sold between $50,000 and $80,000 in upgraded PCs, kits, and add-on components. In 1992 at the age of 27, Michael Dell became the youngest CEO to have his company ranked in Fortune magazine's list of the top 500 corporations. He is today one of the richest people in the world, with a net worth estimated by Forbes at US$14 billion in 2010.
Kevin O'Leary
Kevin O'Leary is a Canadian venture capitalist and entrepreneur, a star of Dragons' Den television show.
As a young man, he worked in a Ottawa ice cream parlor, where he was ordered his second day of work to get down on his knees
and scrape gum off the shop floor, as part of his ice cream scooping job. O'Leary refused and was abruptly fired.
On his bicycle on his way home, ashamed and in shock that someone else could have that kind of control over him,
Kevin told to himself he will never, ever in his life work for someone else again.
With $10,000 in seed capital from his mother, he co-founds Softkey International Inc. in the basement of a midtown Toronto house, a software company he sells in 1999 to Mattel for $3.7 billion US.
Yahoo!
In 1994, David Filo and Jerry Yang, two Ph.D. candidates at Stanford,
created as a hobby the "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web", a hierarchical catalog to group
and find information on the Internet. When the "rude, unsophisticated and uncouth" web portal became too popular,
they changed its name in Yahoo!, an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".
Yahoo! was one of the few surviving companies after the dot-com bubble burst, but its stock continued to fall. Once a menace to Microsoft, Google became their own killer competitor. Microsoft tried to buy them in 2008 for $44.6 US billion, but the bid was rejected.
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