Today Internet has connected whole world. Internet is only thing which has replaced the practice of reading newspapers and use of letters through websites and email services.
We can watch movies online. We can easily shop, connect to our friends, book our tickets, play games online, we can pay bills online for electricity, telephone or any thing else. But most of us do not know that who is behind this success.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin – Google Inc.
They were, however, creating the internet’s most powerful search engine. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are arguably the world’s most successful Internet entrepreneurs and developers in history. This enabled them to earn billions, while assisting everyone from high school students to particle physicists have an easy time searching for information over the internet.
Google was first launched on Stanford’s website (google.stanford.edu) and then finally on Google.com in 1997. It is estimated that GOOGLE is worth about a staggering $25 billion dollars.
Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook
He founded Facebook, the online social networking website. Zuckerberg launched The Facebook (FaceMatch) from his Harvard dorm room in 2004 and started promoting it to all Ivy League schools and some Boston institutions. Soon, he bought over Facebook.com domain name. Facebook is now a household name with people of all ages, groups and interests, interacting with each other. Its business and pleasure at the same time!
Jimmy Wales – Wikipedia
Jimmy Wales at first started a peer-reviewed, open-content encyclopedia which is Nupedia. He then utilized the ideas of Nupedia with his “wiki” software to form today’s Wikipedia. His work with Wikipedia, which has become the world’s largest encyclopedia, prompted Time magazine to name him in its 2006 list of the world’s most influential people.
Jeff Preston Bezos – Amazon
Jeff Bezos is the founder, chairman of board, president and the chief executive officer of Amazon.com, a major e-commerce company that sells goods through the Internet. His net worth is currently at $18.1 billion dollars.
He was named Time magazine Person of the Year in 1999.
Jack Dorsey – Twitter
Jack Dorsey is an American software architect and businessperson best known as the creator ofTwitter – a free social networking and micro-blogging service. Business Week called him one of technology’s best and brightest.
MIT’s Technology Review named him to the TR35, an outstanding innovator under the age of 35. Dorsey, Stone and Williams co-founded Obvious which then spun off Twitter Inc. As chief executive officer, Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of funding by the venture capitalists who back the company. In October 2008 Williams took over the role of CEO, and Dorsey became chairman of the board.
As the service grew in popularity, Dorsey had to choose improving uptime as top priority— even over creating revenue, which as of 2008, Twitter was not designed to earn.
David Filo and Jerry Yang – Yahoo! Inc.
Yahoo! too is the creation of two Stanford University’s Electrical Engineer graduates, called Jerry Yang and David Filo. Yang started by listing web pages on the Internet and named it “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. Then, he decided to switch it to Yahoo! and the initial URL was at akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo.
In December 1994, that particular website had already received over a million hits. Realizing its potential, David Filo and Jerry Yang got serious and diversified Yahoo! as a web portal.
Chad Hurley and Steve Chen – YouTube
Chad Hurley (aged 28) and Steve Chen (aged 27) became the founders of the popular San Bruno, California-based video sharing website YouTube, one of the biggest providers of videos on the Internet.
Chad Hurley used to work for eBay’s PayPal in the designing department where he designed their logo. Together with PayPal colleagues, Jared Karim and Steve Chen, Chad founded YouTube in 2005.
Google later acquired YouTube at $1.65 billion dollars.
Pierre Omidyar – eBay
Pierre Omidyar is the founder of eBay, an online auctioning marketplace that connects buyers and sellers. With a net worth of about $6.2 billion dollars, Omidyar and his wife Pam, are one of those entrepreneurs that go beyond doing profits, which is by contributing to non-profits organizations and aiding start-ups.
He wrote the source code of eBay when he was 28 years old in 1995. Initially, he decided to name his auction site after his consulting firm, Echo Bay but unfortunately, echobay.com was already taken. To save up his Internet service provider cost, he registered eBay.com.
Matt Mullenweg – WordPress
If it weren’t for Matt Mullenweg creating WordPress, I would not have been here writing at this blog and you all wouldn’t have been reading this article.
At the age of 19, he invented the core of WordPress, and later on when he turned 24, quit his job at CNET to fully focus on developing WordPress – a blogging platform.
He is also the founder of Automattic, the business behind WordPress as well as famous spam fighter, Akismet.