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 Avery Rockefeller Jr. was an American businessman and financier. Rockefeller was a co-founder of Standard Oil along with his elder brother John Davison Rockefeller. He was also a part owner of Anaconda Copper, which was the fourth-largest company in the world by the late 1920s. Rockefeller started his business career as a clerk at 16. In 1867, he joined his brother's company, Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler, which later became Standard Oil. The company was eventually split up by the Supreme Court in 1911. Rockefeller also had a significant involvement in the copper industry. In 1899, Rockefeller and Standard Oil principal Henry H. Rogers joined with Anaconda Company founder Marcus Daly to create the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company, which later returned to the name Anaconda Copper.
Vinod Khosla is an Indian-American billionaire 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. Khosla was named the top venture capitalist on the Forbes Midas List in 2001 and has been listed multiple times since that time. As of August 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth at US$7.2 billion.
Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, scale of operations, etc. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing start-ups in the hopes that some of the companies they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. Start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and often come from high technology industries such as information technology (IT) or biotechnology.
Stephen McConnell Case is an American businessman, investor, and philanthropist best known as the former chief executive officer and chairman of America Online (AOL). Case joined AOL's predecessor company, Quantum Computer Services, as a marketing vice-president in 1985, became CEO of the company in 1991, and, at the height of the dot-com bubble in 2000, orchestrated with Gerald M. Levin the merger that created AOL Time Warner, described as "the biggest train wreck in the history of corporate America."
Peter Andreas Thiel is an American 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 July 2024, Thiel had an estimated net worth of US$11.2 billion and was ranked 212th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered, pay-as-you-go basis. Clients will often use this in combination with autoscaling. These cloud computing web services provide various services related to networking, compute, storage, middleware, IoT and other processing capacity, as well as software tools via AWS server farms. This frees clients from managing, scaling, and patching hardware and operating systems. One of the foundational services is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which allows users to have at their disposal a virtual cluster of computers, with extremely high availability, which can be interacted with over the internet via REST APIs, a CLI or the AWS console. AWS's virtual computers emulate most of the attributes of a real computer, including hardware central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) for processing; local/RAM memory; hard-disk (HDD)/SSD storage; a choice of operating systems; networking; and pre-loaded application software such as web servers, databases, and customer relationship management (CRM).
Entrepreneur is an American magazine and website that carries news stories about entrepreneurship, small business management, and business. 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 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 a podcaster, American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, and author.
Reid Garrett Hoffman is an American internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author. Hoffman is the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network used primarily for professional networking. He is also chairman of venture capital firm Village Global and a co-founder of Inflection AI.
Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) is a global non-profit organization formerly known as the Young Entrepreneurs' Organization (YEO), that was founded in 1987.
Gary Vaynerchuk is an American businessman, author, speaker, and internet personality. He is a co-founder of the restaurant reservation software company Resy and Empathy Wines. First known as a wine critic who expanded his family's wine business, Vaynerchuk is now more known for his work in digital marketing and social media as the chairman of New York–based communications company VaynerX, and as CEO of VaynerX subsidiary VaynerMedia.
Nancy Lublin is an American nonprofit executive and businesswoman who was the founder and former CEO of Crisis Text Line and the founder of Dress for Success. She was also the CEO of Do Something Inc., a company that mobilizes youth to participate in social change, from 2003 to 2015.
Sherry Coutu CBE is a Canadian-born entrepreneur, angel investor and non-executive director based in Cambridge, UK.
Squarespace, Inc. is an American website building and hosting company based in New York City. It provides software as a service for website building and hosting, and allows users to use pre-built website templates and drag-and-drop elements to create and modify webpages.
A scaleup company or just scaleup is a company that already has a profitable and scalable business model and grows above 20% in either turnover or number of employees over a three-year period. A scaleup can be identified as being in the "growth phase" life-cycle in the Millers and Friesen life cycle theorem, or the "Direction phase" in the Greiner growth curve.
Adam Lyons is an American entrepreneur. He founded The Zebra, an insurance comparison website and REALLY Wireless, a telecommunications company.
Masters of Scale is a business podcast and media brand owned and produced by WaitWhat, the media company founded and led by former TED executives June Cohen and Deron Triff. In 2017, Masters of Scale launched as a business and leadership podcast hosted by Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock Partners. Masters of Scale aims to “democratize entrepreneurship” and has since extended into multiple podcasts, a learning app, a book., and events, including the Masters of Scale Summit.
Benjamin David Francis is a British businessman. He is the co-founder, CEO and majority owner of Gymshark, a fitness apparel and accessories company founded in 2012.
Tony Xu is a Chinese American billionaire businessman and the co-founder and CEO of DoorDash. Xu was born in Nanjing and immigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of four. He earned degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Early in his career, Xu interned at Square, Inc., and worked for McKinsey & Company, eBay, and PayPal. He was included in Fortune's 40 Under 40 in 2020.
