Meet the most disruptive entrepreneurs and leaders who changed their industries thanks to their nonconformity and willingness to take risks.
10 revolutionary entrepreneurs
Steve Jobs
Apple’s godfather destroyed the record industry cartel with iTunes. He may have caused you to close your local record store, but he also changed the way the world enjoys music and communicates.
Herb Kelleher
In 1971, Kelleher did for airlines what Gutenberg did for books: he invited the masses to the party by lowering the price of admission. Today, Southwest Airlines is one of the largest air service providers in the United States in terms of passengers it boards.
john mackey
Mackey co-founded Whole Foods Market, the world’s leading natural and organic foods supermarket. He started in Austin, Texas with 19 employees and proved to the world that organic and whole food was not only good for you, it was delicious and profitable. The chain is currently owned by Amazon.
charles schwab
Before 1973, a stockbroker in the United States was paid in fees and commissions even though he was losing money. Charles Schwab realized that any fool could do the same. His low-cost services empowered millions of investors to take care of their own stuff.
Richard Branson
The millionaire entrepreneur is the founder of a multinational conglomerate: Virgin Group, which has more than 400 companies. When he launched Virgin Atlantic Airlines in 1984, board members had their doubts about whether it would work. How did you convince them? “I owned 51 percent of the stock,” Branson joked at the World Business Forum in New York. He is known for doing things his way and has the knack for recognizing an opportunity and sticking with it. Virgin Atlantic now carries millions of passengers a year.
Jeff Bezos
Young entrepreneurs don’t remember what happened before the Amazon e-commerce platform took off in 1994 with the help of Bezos. For him, leaving a high-paying job to take advantage of a new thing called the Internet might have seemed risky at the time. Now millions of consumers couldn’t imagine shopping any other way.
Reed Hastings
Long before we watched movies on our cell phones, or even on YouTube, we all went to stores (like Blockbuster) to rent tapes and lived in fear of returning them too late. This was until Hastings and Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph came up in 1998 with their idea for a monthly fee rental-by-mail service. Watching movies and TV shows without late fees seemed like a long way off, but it was a revolutionary idea.
mark zuckerberg
It is clear that Zuckerberg did not invent social networks, Friendster and MySpace were already on the scene. But we can’t deny that the billionaire CEO was a complete game changer. This massive social network has changed even the language and you would never have thought to “like” a comment or photo.
ted turner
The media mogul and entrepreneur changed the speed and expectation of news consumption when he founded the first 24-hour cable channel in 1980. Before Twitter and blogs existed, CNN was the go-to medium for which the world got the information.
Bill Gates
He’s been criticized for his business tactics, but his name is synonymous with the computer revolution, and his innovation and dedication not only changed the way the world lives and works, but helped make him one of the richest men. of the world.
What do you think of these entrepreneurs? Do you have another modern leader who inspires you?