A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to go public, startups are new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo-founder. During the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to become successful and influential, such as unicorns.
William Murray "Trip" Hawkins III is an American entrepreneur and founder of Electronic Arts, The 3DO Company, and Digital Chocolate.
Social entrepreneurship is an approach by individuals, groups, start-up companies or entrepreneurs, in which they develop, fund and implement solutions to social, cultural, or environmental issues. This concept may be applied to a wide range of organizations, which vary in size, aims, and beliefs. For-profit entrepreneurs typically measure performance using business metrics like profit, revenues and increases in stock prices. Social entrepreneurs, however, are either non-profits, or they blend for-profit goals with generating a positive "return to society". Therefore, they use different metrics. Social entrepreneurship typically attempts to further broad social, cultural and environmental goals often associated with the voluntary sector in areas such as poverty alleviation, health care and community development.
Jacqueline Novogratz is an American entrepreneur and author. She is the founder and CEO of Acumen, a nonprofit global venture capital fund whose goal is to use entrepreneurial approaches to address global poverty.
Kathryn A. Finney is an American author, researcher, investor, entrepreneur, and businesswoman. She is the founder of Genius Guild, a $20 million dollar venture fund & studio that invests in Black entrepreneurs building scalable businesses that serve Black communities and beyond. She is also founder and Board Chair of The Doonie Fund, a social platform that provides micro-investment to Black women entrepreneurs. Finney first made her mark as a tech entrepreneur when she sold “The Budget Fashionista” after running the site-turned-media company for 11 years.
Heidi Roizen is a Silicon Valley executive, venture capitalist, and entrepreneur.
Jean Case is an American businesswoman, author, and philanthropist who is chair of the board of National Geographic, CEO of Case Impact Network, and CEO of the Case Foundation. She is married to AOL co-founder Steve Case.
Dov Moran is an Israeli businessman, electrical engineer, inventor, investor, and writer. He is best known as the inventor of the USB memory stick, and one of the most prominent Israeli hi-tech leaders.
Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk, and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones.
Julie Marie Meyer is a businesswoman based in the United Kingdom.
Karen A. Linder is an American businesswoman, author and artist. She is CEO and president of Tethon 3D, a 3d printing company, and a principal of Linseed Capital, a private investment firm. Her book, The Women of Berkshire Hathaway, was published in 2012 by John Wiley & Sons.
Ingrid Vanderveldt is an American businesswoman, media personality, and investor. She was the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence for Dell and is the founder and current CEO of the Empowering a Billion Women by 2020 movement. Vanderveldt was the creator and manager of the Dell $100 million credit fund, and a member of the 2013 United Nations' Global Entrepreneurship Council.
Brad Feld is an American entrepreneur, author, blogger, and venture capitalist at Foundry Group in Boulder, Colorado, a firm he started with partners Seth Levine, Ryan McIntyre, and Jason Mendelson.
Boyd Cohen is an urban and climate strategist working in the area of sustainable development and smart cities. Currently he is Dean of Research at EADA Business School and co-founder of IoMob. Cohen received a PhD in Strategy & Entrepreneurship from the University of Colorado (2001). Along with Hunter Lovins, he co-authored Climate Capitalism: Capitalism in the Age of Climate Change in 2011. In recent years, Cohen has become most recognized for his work in smart cities, beginning with his Smart Cities Wheel framework and associated annual rankings of smart cities. In 2016, he published his second book, The Emergence of the Urban Entrepreneur, followed by the publication of his 3rd book, Post-Capitalist Entrepreneurship in 2017.
Vani Kola is an Indian venture capitalist. She is the founder and managing director of Kalaari Capital, an Indian early stage venture capital firm. She was listed as one of the most powerful women in Indian business by Fortune India in 2014.
Ernestine Fu is an American venture capitalist, investor, and author.
Nadya Zhexembayeva is an author, educator and business owner. She has written four and contributed to six books about business, strategy, reinvention and sustainability. In 2009, Dr. Zhexembayeva co-authored the concept of "embedded sustainability", in 2015 introduced the term "Chief Reinvention Officer," and in 2015 introduced the concept of "Titanic Syndrome", which she developed into a book in 2018. Nadya is the author of The Reinvention Method, which as of 2021 consists of nine tools bridging the fields of strategy, foresight, design thinking, SCRUM/Agile, organization development, leadership and change management. She is also a member of the Academic Committee of CEDEP.
Cheryl Sew Hoy is an entrepreneur, speaker and angel investor, best known for being the founding CEO of the Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC), a government-funded agency to support entrepreneurship in Malaysia and ASEAN.
Afua Osei is an entrepreneur, investor and public speaker who co-founded She Leads Africa, a media company for millennial African women.
Carol Elizabeth Reiley is an American business executive, computer scientist, and model. She is a pioneer in teleoperated and autonomous robot systems in surgery, space exploration, disaster rescue, and self-driving cars. Reiley has worked at Intuitive Surgical, Lockheed Martin, and General Electric. She co-founded, invested in, and was president of Drive.ai, and is now CEO of a healthcare startup, a creative advisor for the San Francisco Symphony, and a brand ambassador for Guerlain Cosmetics. She is a published children's book author, the first female engineer on the cover of MAKE magazine, and is ranked by Forbes, Inc, and Quartz as a leading entrepreneur and influential scientist.
