Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban is a billionaire businessman. He is known for holding the record for largest e-commerce transaction, which made him a billionaire. Like most, he started small. He moved to Pittsburg and found work as a bartender. Later, he was fired and Cuban decided to start his own business. This wasn't a large scale operation, and began simply as a software reselling business. He ran it for a few years, until it was bought for approximately $6 million, $2 million of which Cuban kept after taxes. This served as seed money for his next businesses. He began a small online video hosting business with a former Indiana University alumnus. It started very small, but soon grew in the midst of the dot com bubble. After a while, it was generating $14 million of revenue each quarter, and employed 330 people. It was known as broadcast.com. This was during the dot com bubble, and these companies were often highly overvalued. Yahoo.com offered and eventually did buy broadcast.com for $5.7 billion. This instantly made Mark Cuban a billionaire. He knew, however, that the dot com bubble was just that, a bubble. He diversified his assets in order to keep himself safe in the event of a market crash (which did happen later). Now, he is the proud owner of the Dallas Mavericks and several other businesses and entities. This is a prime example of a young, aspiring entrepreneur that worked hard and paid his bills and had it pay off. Some would say he got lucky because his company was bought during the dot com bubble, making him tons of money, but in reality, he saw an opportunity and took advantage of it.

Microsoft

There may not quite as legendary a startup as Microsoft. Its cofounder and former CEO is the richest man in the world. It produces some of the most widely used and available software on the planet. Its work has simply revolutionized the world in many different aspects. Its operating system, Windows, is far and away the most popular in the world. And it all started with a few pieces of paper. Years ago, there was a computer created that claimed to be the first personal computer, the Altair 8080. For all intents and purposes, it was a personal computer. It wasn't practical, however, as everything was inputted into the machine using switches, with data coded in binary. The results would also be binary coded with a series of light bulbs. It would take about 2 minutes to calculate 2+2, using binary inputs and interpreting the outputs. It was totally impractical.  Gates' friend, Paul Allen, told him that Altair was looking for basic code to run on the machine, to allow it to be controlled with a terminal (monitor and keyboard setup). Bill Gates went to work and wrote a basic code for the machine, which essentially acted as a baseline operating system. Gates didn't have a computer to test any of the code on, so he wrote it completely on paper and debugged it that way. He then converted to code to punch paper so that it could be fed into the machine using a machine called a teletype (read punch cards and converted it to binary to feed to the machine). Paul Allen brought it to the Altair manufacturers and the code was tested for the first time. It was flawless. Allen called up Gates and told him the good news, that the code had functioned without a single error. Both of them were elated. The two decided to team up, and the first Microsoft product was born. The rest is history. Now, both Allen and Gates are multibillionaires. A bit of hard work and a unique product that fits the market can transform the world and change the lives of thousands.

Warren Buffet

When someone mentions the name Warren Buffet, you instantly think of vast riches and knowledge. This is more than a fair assessment, even though he doesn't act like it. Warren Buffet is the third richest man in the world, valued at $71 billion. He did this all through business deals and investment. This is a different approach to success than the usual "small startup takes off an takes over the world," like Apple and Microsoft and Facebook did. Warren Buffet started in 1950 with $10,000 in seed money and grew it to what is now about $358 billion (market cap of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffet's conglomerate). From a young age, Buffet knew that he was destined to be make a lot of money and become rich. He never paused in his mission, and is, to this day, positioned at the head of Berkshire Hathaway, towards the end of his 80s. It is, of course, always necessary to have intelligence if one is expecting to become rich through investing and asset aquisition. What separates rich intelligent people from poor intelligent people is the sheer dedication that money making requires. Buffet always said that his hobby is to make money. This quickly became his life, and he was good at it. Millions of people from around the world listen to him and heed his advice, in the hope that they may one day become half as successful as he is. The lesson that he preaches is that if you wish to be successful, you cannot just wish it. You must work tirelessly to achieve your goals and work towards what will become your destiny.

Richard Branson

Richard Branson, or Sir Richard Branson, is a legend in the business world. He is easily the most eccentric and outgoing billionaires in the world. He is the head of Virgin Group, a multinational conglomerate with scores of entities under its control. Like many billionaires, he started with a little bit of money, some confidence and motivation, and an idea. The first step he took in the business world was opening a record shop and label with his friend, which they named 'Virgin Records.' The idea behind the unusual name was from Branson believing that they were both 'virgins' to business. The company bought an estate in Oxford and set up a studio. The two of them leased out time to local artists and such, and looked for young, aspiring artists. They often picked controversial bands that other companies hesitated on contracting with. Soon, Virgin Records gained popularity, and the company was able to expand. Branson then bought nightclubs, and bid on several small companies to add to his soon to be conglomerate. In 1984, he started Virgin Atlantic Airways for reasons he later explained as: "I wanted a challenge, something seemingly impossible." Since, he has founded Virgin Mobile, a mobile phone provider, Virgin Media and his newest creation, virgin Galactic. Virgin Galactic is his plan for a company that will take paying passengers to space. Through the years, in addition to creating companies, he has aquired companies to add to Virgin Group, and sold companies, such as Virgin Mobile and Virgin Records. He has dabbled in nearly every industry, making him one of the most successful and legendary entrepreneurs on Earth.

Instagram

The project started as many do. Small. Between 2009 and 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger were working on an small but featured HTML project. Their lives were destined to change once they decided to focus that HTML project on mobile photography. The two of them decided that they wanted to do something big, and wanted to start a seed funding campaign to raise some money. Anyone with startup experience knows that, unfortunately, money is often a dictating aspect of a startup. Without money, it may be difficult for your product to be recognized, or even seen by any audience at all. In early 2010, Systrom finished a seed funding project and finished with $500,000. With this money, they accelerated development, and were able to hire three new employees over the course of the next year. The Instagram team then added various features over several updates, including filters, hashtags, borders, etc. The app gained popularity quickly, and soon reached 1 million users, and several milestones beyond. Today, the app has over 300 million registered users. In 2012, Facebook offered to buy the app and the work of its employees for $1 billion cash, as well as stock options for its nine employees. This was a part of Facebook's new diversification strategy, and at the time seemed to be an overestimate of the company's worth. Three years later, however, the app is more popular than it ever has, feeding Facebook copious amounts of revenue. In this case, the small company that two college students founded turned them into multimillionaires in just a few years. This shows that when Silicon Valley inspired projects reach heights, they reach astronomically high heights.

The RFID Card

I don't exactly remember what year in high school it was, but there was a kid in my class, let's call him Scott, that somehow somewhere was able to obtain one of the RFID cards that would get anyone entry into the school. Essentially, an RFID card is a plastic card with a chip inside and a coil. When the card is placed near a sensor, the electromagnetic field that the sensor puts out is inducted through the card's coil, and power is fed to the chip inside. The chip then emits a wireless string of numbers that the sensor receives, and then either accepts or rejects the card. If it accepts the card, the door unlocks. The doors could be opened simply by holding your wallet with the card inside up to the sensor. Getting this card was one hell of an achievement, and came before I ever got the master key. He realized that he now had quite a bit of power, and wanted to sell it. He had no idea how to copy these cards, and so came to me, one of the nerdier kids of the class. I did a bit of research and found that he could buy an Arduino microcontroller and an RFID read/write shield and be able to read, store, copy and write RFID cards. He bought everything he needed, totaling about $70. I helped him write and set up the code, and load it onto the Arduino. After that, we were successful in reading the number emitted by the RFID card, and then store and write that number to writable cards that he had bought with the Arduino. Once we successfully wrote and tested our first card, we felt very accomplished, but also realized that some people could actually do a lot of unnecessary harm to the school, and so I backed out. Scott decided to go on his own and sell the cards himself, leaving me completely out of it, which I was very happy about. He sold a few cards, I don't recall for how much, and apparently made some decent money. As always, though, some people weren't careful enough, and the whole scheme was taken down by the administration. I'm sure that there are still a few people out there that have a card (at least I do), and surely it will come in handy come senior prank time. Scott had an out of school suspension for three days, and was "sentenced" to an extra 30 hours of community service inside the school. At the time, a lot of people were actually expecting him to get kicked out, but he graduated along with me a year or two later. It was a fun time, but that is an example of a failed business startup. That taught me a valuable lesson, if you're going to start a business, at least let it be legal.

The Locker Based Business

At the end of each school year, the office of the Dean of Students would send out a notice letting students that the time has come for requesting lockers. Each grade has its own floor; juniors have the bottom floor, freshmen the second, seniors the third and sophomores the fourth. There were clusters of lockers scattered on each floor, one assigned to each student. When requesting lockers, we could request a part of the floor and a top or bottom locker at that area. Freshman and sophomore year I was given a bottom locker and I was really sick of it by the time junior year came around. I had requested a top locker, but it had apparently been denied as I was given an even numbered locker. I really, really didn't want a bottom locker, and was prepared to fight for one on top. I went to the office of the Dean of Students and complained, but the employees there told me that there was, of course, nothing they could do. I then got my cross country coach, a personal friend of mine, to write a letter to the office explaining that I was injured and my knees were in bad shape, and I shouldn't be kneeling several times a day (there was a morsel of truth to that). The office then later informed me that I was given another locker assignment. It was the locker directly above my older one, which pissed me off because that one had been empty the whole time. Now I had a good locker and then an "extra" right below mine. They never changed the combination, so for a while I enjoyed the space of having two lockers. A friend of mine, let's call him Scott again, said that maybe we should put drinks and food in there and just share it between a few of us; a private food storage locker. I thought that was a great idea, and so we went to Shaw's and picked up Mountain Dew, chips and candy, the bare essentials of course. We enjoyed that for a while, until Scott thought that maybe we could make a bit of money selling what was in my extra locker. I, again, thought that was a great idea, and that was the foundation for our "business." We decided we would sell Monster and Mountain Dew out of there, the drinks high school kids live on. It was surprisingly profitable. We sold Mountain Dew for $1/can, which we bought for about $0.60 . We sold the Monster for $4/can, or $6/2 cans, $9/3 cans, etc. We sold the Monster for $4 for the first, and $3 per each can in "bulk," but made it look like they were getting a deal when really we were completely ripping everybody off. It may seem absurd to buy a single drink for $4, and it is, but the cafeteria didn't offer it and we did. Supply and demand is very very convenient when you're the only supplier. We continued this for no more than a month. It got pretty big and we were supplying the locker with 24-packs every other day. As with all good things, however, it came to an end. The administration of course found out about it, and they weren't happy. They told us that Chartwells, the company that supplies the school with lunches and drinks, were the only ones allowed to sell food and beverages at the school. We declared that it was a monopoly and needed to be destroyed (now we're just screwing with the school). They then told us that we weren't allowed to run businesses on school property, and it would be best if we stopped. We reluctantly agreed.