William Henry Gates III is an American business magnate, software developer, investor, author, and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), president and chief software architect, while also being the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. He was a major entrepreneur of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.
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 refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend to become registered, startups refer to new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo founder. At the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to be successful and influential.
Babson College is a private business school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Established in 1919, its central focus is on entrepreneurship education. It was founded by Roger W. Babson as an all-male business institute, but became coeducational in 1970.
Vinod Khosla is an Indian-American businessman and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures. Khosla made his wealth from early venture capital investments in areas such as networking, software, and alternative energy technologies. He is considered one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists.
Peter Andreas Thiel is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. As of May 2022, Thiel had an estimated net worth of $7.19 billion and was ranked 297th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr. is an American billionaire businessman. He is the co-founder, chairman, and co-chief executive officer (CEO) of Netflix, and sits on a number of boards and non-profit organizations. A former member of the California State Board of Education, Hastings is an advocate for education reform through charter schools.
Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. As of 2022, Sequoia's total assets under management were approximately US$85 billion.
Entrepreneur is an American magazine and website that carries news stories about entrepreneurship, small business management, and business. The magazine was first published in 1977. It is published by Entrepreneur Media Inc., headquartered in Irvine, California. The magazine publishes 10 issues annually, available through subscription and on newsstands. It is or has been published under license internationally in Mexico, Russia, India, Hungary, the Philippines, South Africa, and others. Its editor-in-chief is Jason Feifer and its owner is Peter Shea.
Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster.
Reid Garrett Hoffman is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. Hoffman was the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking. He is currently a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners and a co-founder of Inflection AI. On the Forbes 2021 list of the world's billionaires, Hoffman was ranked #1580 with a net worth of US$2.4 billion.
Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) is a global non-profit organization formerly known as Young Entrepreneurs' Organization (YEO). The organization was founded in 1987.
Ivan Misner is the founder and Chief Visionary Officer of the business networking organization BNI.
Tory Burch is an American fashion designer, businesswoman, and philanthropist. She is the Executive Chairman and Chief Creative Officer of her own brand, Tory Burch LLC. She was listed as the 88th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes in 2020.
Daymond Garfield John is an American businessman, investor, and television personality. He is best known as the founder, president, and chief executive officer of FUBU, and appears as an investor on the ABC reality television series Shark Tank. Based in New York City, John is the founder of The Shark Group.
Brian Halligan is an American executive and author. He is the co-founder and executive chairman of HubSpot, a CRM platform for scaling companies based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is also a senior lecturer at MIT. Halligan uses the term inbound marketing to describe the type of marketing he advocates.
Brian Joseph Chesky is an American businessman and industrial designer. He is the co-founder and CEO of the peer-to-peer lodging service Airbnb. Chesky was named one of Time's "100 Most Influential People of 2015".
The Leadership Challenge is a suite of books, training products and assessments based on the book written by James Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, published by Wiley. First published in 1987, the book's sixth edition was released in 2017.
Founders Pledge is a London-based charitable initiative, where entrepreneurs make a commitment to donate a portion of their personal proceeds to charity when they sell their business. Inspired by effective altruism, the mission of Founders Pledge is to "empower entrepreneurs to do immense good".
Byju's is an Indian multinational educational technology company, headquartered in Bangalore. It was founded in 2011 by Byju Raveendran and Divya Gokulnath. As of March 2022, Byju's is valued at US$22 billion and company claims to have over 115 million registered students.
Masters of Scale is a business and finance podcast hosted by Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn. The show is produced and owned by WaitWhat. In each episode, Hoffman introduces a theory on how successful businesses scale, and tests its validity by interviewing founders about their path to scale. Guests have included Facebook founder & CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Starbucks founder and former CEO Howard Schultz, Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings, FCA and Exor Chairman John Elkann and others. Episodes also feature brief "cameo" appearances from other founders and experts in different industries who build on Hoffman's theories.
