ENTREPRENEURS bring progress to society and make impact in their lifetime by undertaking responsibilities and overtaking possibilities. Personally, I love entrepreneurs for a number of reasons.
Entrepreneurs model responsibility and inspire creativity. When I think of my innate desire to dream more and do more, I think of myself as being influenced by super-achievers who perpetually make impact and make the world a better place. One can not think of entrepreneurial leaders like Mark Elliot Zuckerberg and not be inspired to make a mark. You think of Steve Jobs and you are inspired to create jobs. Entrepreneurs like Richard Branson inspire a rich mindset.
Everybody loves inspiration, everybody loves progress. An average entrepreneur is a carrier of inspiration, the entrepreneurial career is inspiration-driven. What electricity is to industrialization is what inspiration is to progress.
Everybody loves creativity, everybody loves problem solving. An entrepreneur is an innovator who applies creative solutions to problems and to opportunities to enhance and enrich people’s lives. What the internet is to information technology is what creativity is to the intellect.
Everybody loves result, everybody loves harvest. Entrepreneurs invest resources to harvest a corresponding result. They undertake responsibilities and take calculated risks to exploit business opportunities.
Everybody loves beauty, everybody loves prosperity. Entrepreneurs help modernize society and transform the economy through innovation and job creation respectively.
Not everybody loves stories, but most definitely, everybody loves success stories. Entrepreneurs have beautiful success stories to tell – the good, the bad and the ugly. Their lives inspire us to be courageous, tenacious, optimistic and focused.
Success stories
Born in the then-Soviet Union, Jan Koum moved with his mother and grandmother to California in 1992, where a social support programme initiated by the state allowed the family to receive a small apartment. At the age of 16, the young entrepreneur took a cleaning job at a grocery store to help support his mother. After teaching himself how to code, he then spent nine years at Yahoo! as an infrastructure engineer.
However, Koum’s eureka moment came in 2009 when he realised the potential of Apple’s then-fledgeling app store. The mastermind created WhatsApp a week later, utilising the ability to push notification apps on iPhones and establishing the app as an alternative to traditional SMS messaging. In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg became interested, with Facebook acquiring WhatsApp for $19 billion (£13.9 billion) and appointing Koum to its board of directors.
Although Koum stepped down from his role in April 2018, forfeiting an estimated $1 billion (£733.1 million) of stock in the process, he is estimated to have personally amassed over $9 billion (£6.6 billion) from his exploits.
No list of startup inspiration stories would be complete without the inclusion of Richard Branson, who has seemingly (and successfully) tried his hand at every possible line of investment across the last 40 years. Not bad for a man who performed poorly at school, was diagnosed with dyslexia and then bestowed the unfortunate title of Virgin on his first enterprise (supposedly due to his then-status as a ‘virgin at business’).
Luckily, that first venture was the hugely profitable importing and reselling of music records during the 1960s, alongside the management of the popular Student magazine; as a result, Branson was able to open a dedicated record store in London in 1971. He used the profits from this project to then establish Virgin Records, working with many of the artists that he’d previously interviewed for Student, such as the Rolling Stones.
From there, Branson has created and developed market-leading products and services in aviation, media, beverages and rail transport. among many others. His personal net worth is estimated to be around $4.9 billion (£3.6 billion), as he constantly seeks to invest his profits from one venture into another.
Inspiration to many female entrepreneurs and fashion followers, Sophia Amoruso is the founder of Nasty Gal. She began her empire by scouring the racks at second-hand stores and selling her vintage finds on eBay. She used the money from her sales to move her stock into a warehouse and used MySpace and other social media platforms to attract customers. In 2016, her net worth was $280 million. But life wasn’t always an entrepreneurial journey. As a young adult, Amoruso lived a nomadic lifestyle, hitchhiking on the West Coast and grabbing food from bins to make ends meet. More recently, Amaroso has lost half of her fortune but her star is still rising. She continues to evolve her personal brand, focusing on a best-selling memoir, a coffee table book and a binge-worthy Netflix series about her past, Girlboss. Her advice? “Everyone has a different personality in the workplace,” Amoruso told CNBC.com. “By bringing your best self and not letting the small things sway you, that will allow you to keep rolling ahead in work and in life.”
Everybody loves entrepreneurs, everybody loves stories of wisdom, success, fortune, etc. The journey of an entrepreneur does not begin with money, neither does it begin with many; the journey of an entrepreneur begins with a meaning. Meaning attracts money and money attracts many. Everybody loves money. But money always disguises itself as a viable entrepreneurial idea.
Entrepreneurs are loved when ideas turn to impact, meaning turns to money and formula turns to fortune. Finally, everybody loves success. Entrepreneurial success is not a function of nationality, it is a product of intentionality. Everybody loves successful entrepreneurs.
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