Hollywood has always spent money in actors from the social network through Steve jobs to girlboss on Netflix, telling them how the roots of businesses that have transformed the world have emerged.
Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs and Ray Kroc are only a few businessmen whose stories will bring you to the edge of your seat. There are eleven businessmen and women who deserve their own film.
GoPro, Nick Woodman
Woodman wanted to go on a surf trip to Australia and Indonesia after starting and struggling two start-ups at 27 and losing millions of investors. To film on the waves, the contractor has built a rig with a rubber strip, a bent surfboard and a Kodak camera.
That was the prototype of the GoPro camera.
Years back, Woodman raised $2.4 billion in net worth in partnerships with the world’s most renowned celebrities, explorers and companies, unveiled his company publicly and received an Emmy. In 2014, he became America’s most widely compensated CEO. Around the same time, he has angered investors who have lost 47% of the company’s earnings, endured GoPro proceedings, named the worst CEO of 2016 and nicknamed the “funny millionaire.”
Brian Acton, Jan Koum, WhatsApp
Jan Koum grew up without clean water in a village on the outskirts of Kiev, Ukraine. At the age of 16 he fled his country’s anti-Semitic and socialist climate and went to a small California home to live in charity with his mother and grandmother.
In the 2000 dot com boom, Brian Acton made a small fortune as an employee of 440 Yahoo!. It lost millions as the bubble exploded.
The two met on Yahoo! and after many years of working together, they were looking for Facebook jobs, but both were refused.
Acton tweeted on August 3, 2009 “Facebook just rejected me. It was a perfect chance to chat with great people. I’m looking forward to the next big life experience.”
Mark Zuckerberg bid them $19 billion for the purchase of WhatsApp six years back.
Spanx, Sarah Blakely
That is the storey of an ex-girl from Disney World who pretended to be a lawyer and sold fax machines door-to-door. One night he looked for some clothing to get a decent figure beneath his shorts and ended up inventing the girdles all Holywood wears. She became the first self-made millionaire in history at the age of 41. What a fantastic tale!
Jerry Greenfield and Ben Cohen, Ben & Jerry’s
The narrative of Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield shares the successes and defeats already known by many entrepreneurs. Yet his storey is more about friendship than anything else.
As kids, they took a course on the preparation of ice cream and opened their first ice cream shop in 1981. As co-founders, they rose from an initial $12,000 contribution to Unilever for $ 326 million in 2001. They have faced scandals, litigation, presidential honours, environmental struggles and public love.
Thirty-six years since the first ice cream salon was opened, Ben and Jerry are still some of the closest friends.
Powell-Peralta, George Powell and Stacy Peralta
In the 1980s, George Powell and Stacy Peralta formed the Bones Brigade skateboard team while searching for a creative means of promoting their skateboarding company.
Powell and Peralta thought that their business was not served by conventional advertisements, and traditional PR outlets. If they had to get closer to “skateboards,” they needed to relate to them authentically by learning about not just technology but their lifestyles.
Then they began to seek stars with a lot of promise but not seen all over the world. These little established figures test the laws of classic skating and learn new tricks to film and submit the photographs to magazines and media.
Who were these entrepreneurs’ athletes playing tricks? Steve Caballero, Tony Hawk, Lance Mountain, and Tommy Guerrero. Almost nobody. Almost nothing.
Also Read: Competition To Entrepreneurs
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