The Olsen twins

Youngest entrepreneurs in Hollywood

Biography

Mary-kate and Ashley Fuller Olsen were born in Sherman Oaks, California. Their parents are David Olsen and Jarnette (Jarnie) Despite being very similar in appearance, they are not identical, but fraternal twins. They have an older brother, Trent, and a younger sister, actress Elizabeth, as well as two half-brothers, Taylor and Jake. The twins' parents divorced in 1995. Taylor and Jake are from their father's second marriage.

Career

Mary-Kate and her sister, Ashley Olsen, were simply the youngest members of the long-running sitcom Full House, which hired them just a year after their birth. Because of U.S. child-labor laws, the girls took turns playing Full House's resident cute baby girl, Michelle Tanner.  Mary-Kate continued her part-time role as Michelle until Full House came to a close in 1995, though she took time out to film several family-oriented straight-to-video releases, including To Grandmother's House We Go (1992), Double, Double, Toil and Trouble (1993), and How the West Was Fun (1994). Luckily for Olsen, the demise of Full House hardly marked the end of her career. Along with her sister, Mary-Kate's success in the family-oriented video market planted the seeds for what would eventually become a multimillion-dollar empire with enough punch to land the twins the 83rd spot in Forbes magazine's list of the world's 100 most powerful celebrities in 2003. 

Mary-Kate and Ashley were popular figures in the preteen market during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their names and likenesses extended to clothes, books, fragrances, magazines, movies and posters, with a market share made up mostly of the teen demographic. Mattel also produced Mary-Kate and Ashley fashion dolls from 2000 to 2005.

The sisters became co-presidents of Dualstar on their 18th birthday in 2004.Upon taking control of the company, Mary-Kate and Ashley made moves to secure the future of the company by releasing products that appealed to the teen market, including home decoration and fragrances. The Dualstar brand has been sold in more than 3,000 stores in the United States and over 5,300 stores worldwide. 

Sam Walton

Sam Walton , the founder of Walmart 

Biography

Samuel Moore "Sam" Walton was born on March 29, 1918 and died in April 5, 1992. He was an American businessman and entrepreneur born in Kingfisher, Oklahombest known for founding the retailers Walmart and Sam's Club. Sam Walton was born to Thomas Gibson Walton and Nancy Lee in Kingfisher, Oklahoma. There, he lived with his parents on their farm until 1923. Sam's father decided farming did not generate enough income on which to raise a family, so he decided to go back to a previous profession of a mortgage man. He and his family moved from Oklahoma to Chesterfield, Missouri. There they moved from one small town to another for several years. Eventually the family landed in Columbia, Missouri. Growing up during the Great Depression, Walton had numerous chores to help make financial ends meet for his family as was common at the time. He milked the family cow, bottled the surplus, and drove it to customers. Afterwards, he would deliver Columbia Daily Tribune newspapers on a paper route. In addition, he also sold magazine subscriptions. Walton joined JC Penney as a management trainee in Des Moines, Iowa three days after graduating from college. This position paid him $75 a month. He resigned in 1942 in anticipation of being inducted into the military for service in World War II.

Career

After leaving the military in 1945, Walton took over management of his first variety store at the age of 26. With the help of a $20,000 loan from his father-in-law, plus $5,000 he had saved from his time in the Army, Walton purchased a Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Arkansas. With the sales volume growing from $80,000 to $225,000 in three years, Walton drew the attention of the landlord, P.K. Holmes, whose family had a history in retail.  Admiring Sam's great success, and desiring to reclaim the store or his son, he refused to renew the lease. The lack of a renewal option, together with the prohibitively high rent of 5% of sales, were early business lessons to Walton. Despite forcing Walton out, Holmes bought the store's inventory and fixtures for $50,000, which Walton called "a fair price". Before he bought the Bentonville store, it was doing $72,000 in sales. After the expansion, and 5 years under Walton, it was doing $250,000 in sales annually. On July 2, 1962, the first true Wal-Mart opened in Rogers, Arkansas. It was called the Wal-Mart Discount City store and located at 719 West Walnut Street. Soon after, the Walton brothers teamed up with the Stefan Dasbach, leading to the first of many stores to come. He launched a determined effort to market American-made products. Included in the effort was a willingness to find American manufacturers who could supply merchandise for the entire Wal-Mart chain at a price low enough to meet the foreign competition.  As another chain store, Meijer, grew it caught the attention of Walton. He acknowledges that his one-stop-shopping centre format was based on Meijer’s innovative concept. Contrary to the prevailing practice of American discount store chains, Walton located stores in smaller towns, not larger cities. To make his model work, he emphasized logistics, particularly locating stores within a day's drive proximity to Wal-Mart's regional warehouses, and distributed through its own trucking service.

Donald Trump

Donald Trump, the founder of The Trump Organization

Biography

Donald John Trump, Sr. was born on June 14, 1946. Trump is a son of Fred Trump a wealthy New York City real-estate developer and his wife, Mary Anne MacLeod, who married in 1936. His mother was born on the Isle of Lewis, off the west coast of Scotland. Donald was one of five children. Trump is an American business magnate, television personality and author. He is the chairman and president of The Trump Organization and the founder of Trump Entertainment Resorts. Trump's extravagant lifestyle, outspoken manner and role on the NBC reality show The Apprentice. Trump attended Fordham University for two years before transferring to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated in 1968 with a Bachelor of Science in economics. He worked for his father's firm, Elizabeth Trump & Son, while attending the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Career

Trump began his career at his father's company, Elizabeth Trump and Son and initially concentrated on his father's preferred field of middle-class rental housing in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island.One of Trump's first projects, while he was still in college, was the revitalization of the foreclosed Swifton Village apartment complex in Cincinnati, Ohio, which his father had purchased for $5.7 million in 1962. Trump became intimately involved in the project, personally flying in for a few days at a time to carry out landscaping and other low-level tasks. After $500,000 investment, Trump successfully turned a 1200-unit complex with a 66 percent vacancy rate to 100 percent occupancy within two years. The Trump Organization sold Swifton Village for $6.75 million in 1972. Trump renovated the Commodore Hotel and created the Grand Hyatt with the Pritzker family. He also renovated the Trump Tower in New York City and several other residential projects. He later bought the Eastern Shuttle routes, and Atlantic City casino business, including acquiring the Taj Mahal Casino in a transaction with Merv Griffin and Resorts International. The late 1990s saw a resurgence in his financial situation and fame. In 2001, he completed Trump World Tower, a 72-story residential tower across from the United Nations Headquarters. Also, he began construction on Trump Place, a multi-building development along the Hudson River. Trump owns commercial space in Trump International Hotel and Tower, a 44-story mixed-use (hotel and condominium) tower on Columbus Circle. By 1989, the effects of the recession left Trump unable to meet loan payments. Trump financed the construction of his third casino, the $1 billion Taj Mahal, primarily with high-interest junk bonds. Although he shored up his businesses with additional loans and postponed interest payments, by 1991 increasing debt brought Trump to business bankruptcy and the brink of personal bankruptcy. On November 2, 1992, the Trump Plaza Hotel was forced to file a pre-packaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection plan after being unable to make its debt payments. Under the plan, Trump agreed to give up a 49 percent stake in the luxury hotel to Citibank and five other lenders. In return Trump would receive more favourable terms on the remaining $550+ million owed to the lenders, and retain his position as chief executive, though he would not be paid and would not have a role in day-to-day operations. By 1994, Trump had eliminated a large portion of his $900 million personal debt and reduced significantly his nearly $3.5 billion in business debt. In May 2005 the company re-emerged from bankruptcy as Trump Entertainment Resorts Holdings.

Fred Smith

Fred Smith, The founder of FedEx

Biography

Frederick Wallace Emma Smith was born on August 11, 1944. Fred Smith is the founder, chairman, president, and CEO of FedEx, originally known as Federal Express, the first overnight express delivery company in the world, and the largest in the United States. Smith was born in Marks, Mississippi, the son of James Frederick Smith dropped his first name, expressing a preference to be known as Fred or Frederick the founder of the Toddle House restaurant chain and the Smith Motor Coach Company (renamed the Dixie Greyhound Lines). Fred Smith, the father, died while Smith the son was only 4, and the boy was raised by his mother and uncles. Smith had a great interest in flying, and became an amateur pilot as a teen. He attended elementary school at Presbyterian Day School and high school at Memphis University School. In 1962, Smith entered Yale University.

Career

While attending Yale University, he wrote a paper on the need for reliable overnight delivery in a computerized information age. His professor found the premise improbable and gave him a grade of C for his effort but then the idea remained with him. After he graduated, he joined the military and served two tours of duty in Vietnam. Lt. Smith made some adjustment to make the realities of the war but cherish an advice from a veteran Marine sergeant “Three thing to remember, shoot, move and communicate”. While in the military, he observed the delivery procedures with an aim towards realizing his dreams of a vast network dedicated to overnight commercial delivery. When he left the service, he started his express transport business in 1971. Fred Smith raised $80 million to launch Federal Express, known as FedEx. The delivery services began modestly with small packages and documents. On the first night of the operations, a fleet of 14 jets took off with 189 packages. The venture lost $27 million in the first two years and on the edge of bankruptcy. He then renegotiates his bank loans and was able to keep the company afloat. In 2001, FedEx made a deal with the United States Post Office, contracting to transport large mails shipments, while installing FedEx drop boxes in U.S Post Offices. FedEx took on international express shipments for the Post Office three years later. Today, FedEx is the world’s leading express transportation provider delivering to over 7.5 packages every business day, to more than 220 countries.

Russell Simmons

Russell Simmons, founder of Def Jam Recording

Biography

Russell Wendell Simmons was born on September 4, 1957. Simmons was raised in Queens, New York. He is the son of Daniel Simmons, Sr., a public school administrator, and Evelyn Simmons, a New York City park administrator. His older brother is abstract expressionist painter Daniel Simmons, Jr., and his younger brother is Rev. Joseph Simmons ("Run" of Run-DMC). He is an American business magnate. Russell along with Rick Rubin founded the pioneering hip-hop label Def Jam. He also created the clothing fashion lines Phat Farm, Argyleculture, and American Classics. Russell Simmons is the third richest figure in hip hop, having a net-worth estimate of $340 million as of April 2011. In November 1992, Simmons met model Kimora Lee Simmons  at New York's fashion week. They dated for four years and married on December 20, 1998 on the French Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy, F.W.I.. Officiating was Russell's brother, the Reverend Run, now an ordained minister. They have 2 daughters together, Ming Lee and Aoki Lee. They were divorced in March 2006.

Career

After a brief time at City College of New York, Russell Simmons left school to promote local musicians, including Kurtis Blow and Run-D.M.C.  In 1984, he and his partner Rick Rubin founded Def Jam Recordings, creating the foundation for the cultural revolution known as hip hop. Def Jam signed the forerunners of the hip hop movement, including the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Public Enemy and Run-D.M.C. An ambitious entrepreneur, Simmons saw Def Jam as just part of his hip hop empire. His Rush Communications firm also included Phat Farm clothing company, television shows, a management company, a magazine and an advertising agency. His movie production house has produced such films as Krush Groove and The Nutty Professor. In 1999, he sold his stake in Def Jam Records to Universal Music Group for $100 million. In 2004, he sold Phat Farm for $140 million.A strict vegan and yoga enthusiast, Simmons is also an active philanthropist. He helped found the Hip Hop Summit Action Network, the Rush Philanthropic Organization and the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding. He actively supports PETA and was named a Goodwill Ambassador to fight war, poverty and HIV/AIDS. He is the author of Do You! 12 Laws To Access The Power In You To Achieve Happiness And Success.

Howard Schultz

Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks

Biography

Howard Mark Schultz was born on July 19, 1953. He is an American businessman and writer. He is the chairman and CEO of Starbucks and a former owner of the Seattle SuperSonics. Howard Mark Schultz was born to a German-Jewish family on July 19, 1953 in Brooklyn, New York. He is the son of ex-US Army trooper and then truck driver Fred Schultz, and his wife Elaine along with his younger sister, Ronnie, and brother, Michael, he grew up in the Canarsie Bayview Houses of the New York City Housing Authority. Schultz's family was poor, he saw an escape in sports such as baseball, football, and basketball. He graduated in 1971 from Canarsie High School . In high school, Schultz excelled at sports and was awarded an athletic scholarship to Northern Michigan University and become the first person in his family to go to college. Schultz was a member of Tau Kappa Epsilon, received his bachelor's degree in Communications in 1975.


Career

As soon as he graduates, he worked as a salesperson for Xerox Corporation. In 1979 he became a general manager for Swedish drip coffee maker manufacturer, Hammarplast. In 1981, Schultz visited a client of Hammarplast, a fledgling coffee-bean shop called Starbucks Coffee Company in Seattle which he joined as the Director of Marketing a year later. On a buying trip to Milan, Italy for Starbucks, Schultz noted that coffee bars existed on practically every street. He learned that they not only served excellent espresso, they also served as meeting places or public squares, they were a big part of Italy's societal glue, and there were 200,000 of them in the country. On his return, he tried to persuade the owners (including Jerry Baldwin) to offer traditional espresso beverages in addition to the whole bean coffee, leaf teas and spices they had long offered. After a successful pilot of the cafe concept, the owners refused to roll it out company-wide, saying they didn't want to get into the restaurant business. Schultz started his own coffee shop in 1985, named 'Il Giornale' after the Milanese newspaper. Two years later, the original Starbucks management decided to focus on Peet's Coffee & Tea and sold its Starbucks retail unit to Schultz and Il Giornale for $3.8 million. Schultz renamed Il Giornale with the Starbucks name, and expanded its reach across the United States. Schultz's keen insight in real estate and his hard-line focus on growth drove him to expand the company rapidly. On January 8, 2008 Schultz regained his status as CEO of Starbucks after an eight-year hiatus. At this time, Schultz was earning a total compensation of $9,740,471, which included a base salary of $1,190,000, and options granted of $7,786,105. 

Estee Lauder

Mrs Estee Lauder, the founder of Estee Lauder

Biography

Estée Lauder was born on July 1, 1906. She was the co-founder, along with her husband, Joseph Lauder, of Estée Lauder Companies, her cosmetics company. She was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Lauder was born as Josephine Esther Mentzer in Corona, Queens in 1906. She was one of nine children born to a Hungarian Jewish mother, Rose Schotz Rosenthal, and a Czechoslovak Jewish father, Max Mentzer.  Much of her childhood was spent trying to make ends meet with most of the nine children helping out at the family's hardware store. Lauder got her first taste of business was when she was working at this store. Her father’s hardware store gave her a better understanding of entrepreneurship and what it takes to be a successful retailer. She graduated from Newtown High School. As Estée grew older she became more interested in her uncle's business than her father's. She agreed to help her uncle, Dr John Schotz, a chemist that owned a company called New Way Laboratories, he sold numerous beauty products. Lauder was fascinated as she watched him create creams, lotions, rouge, and fragrances. Her uncle taught her how to wash her face and do facial massages. After high school, she focused on her uncle's business. She called one of his creams Super Rich All-Purpose Cream and began selling beauty products to her friends. She met Joseph Lauter when she was in her early 20s. On January 15, 1930, they married. The surname was later changed from Lauter to Lauder. The Lauders's first child, Leonard was born March 19, 1933.  They separated in 1939 (when she moved to Florida), but remarried in 1942. They had a second son, Ronald. The couple remained married thereafter until his death in 1982.

Career

The Estée Lauder company was created in 1935. Her older son, Leonard Lauder, was chief executive of Estée Lauder and is now chairman of the board. Her younger son, Ronald, was a Republican political appointee in the Reagan administration. One day, as she was getting her hair done at the House of Ash Blondes, Florence Morris, the salon owner, came up to her. She asked Lauder about her perfect skin. Soon, Lauder came back to the salon and handed out four of her uncle's creams and demonstrated how to use them. Morris was so impressed that she asked Lauder to sell her products at her new salon. In 1948, she persuaded the bosses of New York City department stores to give her counter space at Saks Fifth Avenue. Once in that space, she utilized a personal selling approach that proved as potent as the promise of her skin regimens and perfumes. Even after forty years in business, Estée Lauder would attend every launch of a new cosmetics counter or shop. She would give her famous friends and acquaintances small samples of her products for their handbags, she wanted her brand in the hands of people who were known for having "the best".  In 1953, Lauder introduced her first fragrance, Youth Dew, a bath oil that doubled as a perfume. Instead of using their French perfumes by the drop behind each ear, women were using Youth Dew by the bottle in their bath water. In the first year Youth Dew sold fifty thousand, by 1984, the figure had jumped to one hundred and fifty million. Estee lauder died at the age of 97 of cardiopulmonary arrest on the April 24, 2004 at her home in Manhattan.

David Karp

David Karp , the founder of Tumblr

Biography

David Karp was born on July 6, 1986 is an entrepreneur living in New York City. He is the founder and CEO of the short-form blogging platform, Tumblr. In 2010, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. Karp grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the son of Barbara Ackerman and Michael Karp. He attended The Calhoun Schoolfrom age 3 through 8th grade, where his mother teaches science, until high school when he attended Bronx Science for one year before dropping out at the age of 15 and started homeschooling. 

Career

Karp began as an intern as animation producer Fred Seibert at 14 years old and from there went on to work as a software consultant for UrbanBaby, an online parenting forum. Karp left UrbanBaby in 2006 and began working on Tumblr later that year. Tumblr was launched on April 27, 2007 by David Karp. Marco Arment served as the lead developer but he left the company in 2010 to focus on Instapaper. Within two weeks of its launch, the service had gained 75,000 users. With Tumblr's 2009 acquisition of Tumblerette, an Apple Inc. App Store application created by Jeff Rock and Garrett Ross, the service launched its official iPhone app. The site became available to BlackBerry smart phones on April 17, 2010 via a Mobelux application in the BlackBerry App World. In June 2012, Tumblr released a new version of its iOS app, Tumblr 3.0 allowing support for Spotify, hi-res images and offline access. In early June 2012, Tumblr featured its first major brand advertising campaign in conjunction with Adidas. Adidas launched an official soccer Tumblr blog and bought placements on the user dashboard. Tumblr's original funding came from Karp's earnings as a software consultant at parenting site UrbanBaby. Tumblr has raised funding from Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital,Martín Varsavsky, John Borthwick (Betaworks), Fred Seibert, and Sequoia Capital (among other investors). The company had $800 million valuation in August 2011. In September 2011, the company raised $85 million in a round of funding led by Greylock Partners and Insight Venture Partners.

Naveen Selvadurai

Biography

Naveen Selvadurai (born 1981, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India) is a US internet entrepreneur and co-founder of location-based social networking site Foursquare.com. He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the US, and went to work with Lucent, Sony, Nokia and Sun Microsystems before he started his mobile social networking venture Foursquare.

Career

Naveen founded Foursquare with partner Dennis Crowley to simply help him and also his friends explore more things in New York City. Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball as his graduate thesis project in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. Google bought Dodgeball in 2005 and shut it down in 2009, replacing it with Google Latitude. Dodgeball user interactions were based on SMS technology, rather than an application. Today, Foursquare has become a leader in location based networking, helping to spring numerous other startups looking to capture a similar model. The company has a valuation near $600million with 15million+ users.  Naveen and Dennis’ celebrity has even brought them appearances in Gap advertisements. Prior the founding of foursquare, he was also the Lead Architect of Socialight and Senior Software Architect with Global Digital Business group at Sony Music Entertainment. His joint venture has an estimated value of $600 million. He has recently been listed in the 'World's New Young Millionaires' released by AOL Small Business.

Pierre Omidyar

Biography

Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay was born in Paris, France to Iranian migrants parents on 21^st June 1967. They were sent to Paris, France by his grandparents to attend the university there. His mother was Elahé Mir-Djalali Omidyar.  His father was an Iranian surgeon. When Omidyar was six years old, the family moved to Washington DC. His parents separated when he was only two years old. He stayed with his mother but yet still very close to his father. Omidyar first developed an interest in computing when he was attending St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Maryland. After moving to Hawaii to finish eight and nine, he returned to Washington to finish his high school. Omidyar continued his studies in Computer Science in Tuffs University and graduated his degree with 3.01 GPA. 

Career

When Omidyar was 28 years old, he went on a long holiday to write the original computer code for what eventually became one of the most famous website, the auction side eBay. Ebay’s was launched by 4^th September 1995 which was on “Labor Day” as the Auction web. When his first choice name for the website, ‘echobay’ was approved, Omidyar started to make up the word ‘ebay’. One of the stories about eBay was that it founded to basically help Omidyar fiancée to trade, it was confirmed by eBay through Adam Cohen’s 2002 book.  Later then the website changed its name from Auction Web to eBay. By 1996, Jeffery Skoll joined the company and by March 1998, Meg Whitman was brought in as President and CEO to continue running the company. That was only until she announced her retirement on January 2008. In September 1998, eBay launched a successful public offering that had made both Omidyar and Skoll billionaires. By July 2008, Omidyar’s 178 million eBay shares worth around $4.45 billion. Omidyar launched an online news service in Honolulu called Civil Beat that covers civic affairs in Hawaai in 2010.