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By Matthew Yohe-

15 famous digital entrepreneurs

Over the years, Entrepreneurs have existed dating back to the days of bartering. However, digital entrepreneurship is a relatively new phenomenon. As society progressed and new technologies emerged, so did the definition of what it meant to be a modern entrepreneur. This is an exciting time to start and grow a business, especially in the online space.

Therefore, a digital entrepreneur uses the internet’s reach and power to sell products and services for a profit. They have all of the characteristics of a traditional entrepreneur-vision, determination, persistence, and creativity-but they also have several other important characteristics. Therefore, this article covers 15 famous digital entrepreneurs you should consider knowing. However, these digital entrepreneurs share several distinct characteristics of digital entrepreneurs. Some of these characteristics include; global vision, technological competence, adaptability, open-mindedness, and effective communication. These entrepreneurs have managed to emerge at the top despite the challenges they face and the evolution of technology. some of the 15 famous digital entrepreneurs include the following;

1. Jeff Bezos

 Jeff Bezos is an all-time most famous digital entrepreneur, who is known to be the founder and CEO of Amazon. Bezos has revolutionized e-commerce, thus making Amazon one of the world’s most valuable companies. The company began as an online bookstore and has since expanded to include a wide range of other e-commerce products and services such as video and audio streaming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. It is now not only the world’s largest online retailer, and the most profitable Internet company but also the largest provider of virtual assistants and cloud infrastructure services through its Amazon Web Services subsidiary.

Due to his business success, he is the most admired business leader in the world. Additionally, according to both Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index and Forbes, he is the third-wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of US$128 billion as of February 2023, and was the wealthiest from 2017 to 2021. His philanthropic efforts were also been recognized worldwide. Jeff Bezos awarded $123 million to organizations working to relocate homeless families to permanent housing on November 22, 2022. Day 1 Families Fund grants in various amounts will be distributed to 40 organizations across the country.

2. Bill Gates (Microsoft)

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3. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is a business magnate and internet entrepreneur from the United States. He is best known for co-founding Facebook and Meta Platforms, which is Facebook’s parent company. He, however, co-founded Facebook with Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes in February 2004, while he was still a student at Harvard. It was influenced by the fact that Mark started using computers at an early age. He first used computers and wrote software in middle school.

Additionally, Zuckerberg has also launched other projects which include Internet.org, i2hub, and the solar sail spacecraft development project Breakthrough Starshot. However, at the age of 23, he became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. According to Forbes Real Time Billionaires, Zuckerberg’s net worth as of March 2023 was $64.9 billion, ranking him 16th in the world.

4.Evan Spiegel (Snapchat)

Evan Spiegel is not only a successful digital entrepreneur but also the co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc. However, Snap Inc is the parent company of the popular social media app Snapchat. Evan has not only been featured in Forbes, Time, and Rolling Stone but has also been named one of the world’s most influential digital entrepreneurs by the Wall Street Journal. However, in 2015, he was the world’s youngest billionaire.
In April 2011, Spiegel proposed an app with ephemeral messaging as a product design class project. Later that year, Spiegel worked with fellow Stanford classmates Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown to launch a prototype of this concept called “Picaboo”, which they later renamed Snapchat. The app’s popularity grew significantly and in 2012, Spiegel left Stanford to focus on Snapchat shortly before completing his degree. By the end of 2012, Spiegel’s Snapchat app had reached 1 million daily active users. He later completed his remaining credits and graduated in 2018.

5. Larry Page (Google)

By Stansfield PL –

Larry Page is not only a famous digital entrepreneur but also an American business tycoon,  and a computer scientist. He is popularly known for being one of the co-founders of Google. However, Larry has played a  huge role in the growth of Google by overseeing its development as one of the billionaire’s successful search engines. Additionally, he has been involved in several other digital ventures. However, he currently serves as CEO of Alphabet, the co-creator and namesake of PageRank. In 2004, he and co-writer Brin were awarded the Marconi Prize. Nevertheless, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Page has a net worth of $93 billion as of February 2023. He was therefore ranked seventh in the world. Larry is also said to be a backer of the flying car startups Kitty Hawk and Opener.

6. Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX)

Elon Reeve Musk FRS is an entrepreneur and investor. He is the founder, CEO, and chief engineer of SpaceX, as well as an angel investor, CEO, and product architect of Tesla, Inc., the owner, and CEO of Twitter, Inc., the founder of The Boring Company, the co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI, and the president of the philanthropic organization The Boring Company Foundation. Musk’s net worth is estimated to be around $196 billion as of February 15, 2023, owing primarily to his ownership stakes in Tesla and SpaceX. Musk is the world’s second-richest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes’ real-time billionaire list.

7. Jack Ma (Alibaba)

Jack Ma Yun is a Chinese business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. However, he is well-known for being not only a co-founder of the multinational technology conglomerate Alibaba Group but also the co-founder of Yunfeng Capital. However, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Ma is the fifth-wealthiest person in China and the 34th wealthiest person as of January 2023, with a net worth of $34.1 billion.
Additionally, he is considered to be one of the world’s most famous digital entrepreneurs but is also widely known as a pioneer of e-commerce in China and is credited with helping to bring the country into the internet age. Forbes not only named Ma to its list of “Asia’s 2019 Heroes of Philanthropy” in 2019 for his humanitarian and philanthropic work but also ranked him ranked 26th on the “2021 Forbes Global Rich List,” with a fortune of $48.4 billion in April 2021.

8. Steve Jobs (Apple)

By Matthew Yohe-

Steven Paul Jobs was an American business magnate, industrial designer, media owner, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a member of The Walt Disney Company’s board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar; and the founder, chairman, and CEO of NeXT. Along with his early business partner and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, he is widely regarded as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.
When he was 23 years old he was worth more than $1 million in 1978, which was equivalent to $4.15 million in 2021. By the age of 25, his net worth was estimated to be $250 million. Additionally, he was one of the youngest “people ever to make the Forbes list of the nation’s richest people. Also in 2022, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously. Jobs died of a tumor-related respiratory arrest.

9. Kevin Systrom (Instagram)

Kevin Systrom is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He and Mike Krieger co-founded Instagram, the world’s largest photo-sharing website.
Instagram became a rapidly growing app under Systrom’s leadership, with 800 million monthly users as of September 2017. On September 24, 2018, he resigned as Instagram’s CEO. In 2012, Meta Platforms  paid $1 billion for Instagram, a large sum at the time for a company with only 13 employees. Instagram now has over one billion users and generates more than $20 billion in annual revenue for Meta Platforms.

When he was chosen as one of twelve students to participate in Stanford University’s Mayfield Fellows Program, he got his first taste of the startup world.  His fellowship led to an internship at Odeo, which later became Twitter. 
However, he was named to the 2016 list of America’s Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40. The fortune arose as a result of the Facebook stock increasing by more than 500%.

10.Brian Chesky (Airbnb)

By Airbnb –

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. As a child, Chesky was passionate about art, drawing replicas of paintings, designing, and redesigning shoes and toys. He later developed an interest in landscape architecture and design. However, Chesky began attending the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999. (RISD). Where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in industrial design in 2004.
During his time at RISD, Chesky met Joe Gebbia, who would later co-found Airbnb with. Chesky was recognized in various ways which include being named one of America’s Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40 by Forbes in 2015. Additionally, he was also named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” for 2015.

11. Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn)

Reid Garrett Hoffman is an internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist, podcaster, and author from the United States. Hoffman co-founded and served as executive chairman of LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network primarily used for professional networking. He is currently a partner at Greylock Partners and a co-founder of Inflection AI. Hoffman was ranked No. 1580 on the Forbes 2021 list of the world’s billionaires, with a net worth of US $1.97 billion.
According to Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, “Reid’s true north is making a positive and lasting impact on the world in a very profound way.” Hoffman currently serves on the boards of Kiva.org, Endeavor Global, and New America. Additionally, Hoffman not only served on the MIT Media Lab’s advisory council and is a supporter and chair of the QuestBridge advisory board but was also the first major funder of Crisis Text Line, a free, 24/7 crisis service via SMS in the US.

12. Satya Nadella (Microsoft)

Satya Narayana Nadella is an Indian-American business executive. He is Microsoft’s executive chairman and CEO, succeeding Steve Ballmer as CEO in 2014 and John W. Thompson as chairman in 2021.  He was the executive vice president of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise group before becoming CEO and was in charge of building and running the company’s computing platforms. 

13.Travis Kalanick (Uber)

By Ministry of Communications (GODL-India),

Travis Cordell Kalanick is an American businessman who is best known as the co-founder and former CEO of Uber. He previously worked for Scour, a peer-to-peer file-sharing application company, and was a co-founder of Red Swoosh, a peer-to-peer content delivery network that was sold to Akamai Technologies in 2007. Uber Technologies, Inc. (Uber), basically offers mobility as a service/ride-hailing, food delivery/package delivery/couriers via Uber Eats and Postmates, and freight transport. Uber sets fares, which vary using a dynamic pricing model based on local supply and demand at the time of the booking and is quoted to the customer in advance, and receives a commission from each booking.

However, he served as Uber’s CEO From 2010 to 2017 and later, he resigned from Uber in 2017 after public reports of the company’s unethical corporate culture mounted.
Afterward, in 2018, Kalanick launched 10100, a venture fund aimed at investing in e-commerce, innovation, and real estate in emerging markets such as China and India. The business runs CloudKitchens, a ghost kitchen startup with a $15 billion valuation as of 2021.

14. Larry Ellison (Oracle)

Larry Ellison is not only an American business magnate, but also a philanthropist, investor, and digital entrepreneur. He s  the co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle Corporation, a multinational computer technology corporation. Elli n  was considered s  one of the world’s wealthiest people with a net worth of $77.7 billion as of 2021. But also the fifth-wealthiest person in the United States and the eleventh-wealthiest in the world. Ellison has been an icon in the tech industry for decades, having co-founded Oracle in 1977 and leading it for decades as its CEO until 2014.
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology company that is the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. It sells database software and technology, cloud-engineered systems, and enterprise software products such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, human capital management (HCM) software, customer relationship management (CRM) software, enterprise performance management (EPM) software, supply chain management (SCM) software. The formation of Oracle was influenced by Edgar F. Codd’s research on relational database design for IBM while Larry was working at Ampex in the early 1970s.

15.Sergey Brin (Google)

By Steve Jurvetson –

Sergey Mikhailovich Brin is an American business magnate, computer scientist, and internet entrepreneur who co-founded Google with Larry Page. Brin served as the president of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., until his resignation on December 3, 2019. He and Page are still co-founders, controlling shareholders, board members, and employees at Alphabet. Brin is the 9th richest person in the world as of February 2023, with an estimated net worth of $89.0 billion. However, according to CNBC, Brin became interested in blockchain technology after building a gaming computer with his son to mine Ethereum. Over the years he has received various awards and accolades.

In the business world, technology has thus changed how ventures conduct and operate their business through digital platforms. Therefore these 15 famous digital entrepreneurs have played a role in society by showing that businesses that are done online.  Most digital ventures now have taken over after the year 2020, COVID-19 affected the whole world and most transactions were done online since human contact was not allowed. 

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