Founders

People who started familiar companies.

People in Founders

53 profiles

Entrepreneur

Mark Zuckerberg

Co-founding Facebook.

Entrepreneur

Steve Jobs

Co-founding Apple and leading the launch of the iPhone.

Showman

P. T. Barnum

Building an entertainment empire of museums, publicity and circus shows.

Industrialist

Henry Ford

Making the Model T affordable through mass production.

Entrepreneur

Henri Nestlé

Developing the infant food that began Nestlé.

Entrepreneur

Bill Gates

Co-founding Microsoft and helping make personal-computer software a mass-market business.

Activist

Simon Dixon

Speaking out against Zionism and supporting Palestinian rights, alongside a career in Bitcoin investing and banking reform.

Entrepreneur

Elon Musk

Building SpaceX and leading Tesla’s expansion in electric vehicles.

Entrepreneur

Jeff Bezos

Founding Amazon and expanding it from an online bookstore into a technology business.

Entrepreneur

Jack Ma

Co-founding Alibaba and helping expand online commerce in China.

Entrepreneur

Aliko Dangote

Building the Dangote Group into a major African industrial business.

Entrepreneur

Madam C. J. Walker

Building a hair-care business that created economic opportunities for Black women.

Entrepreneur

Richard Branson

Building the Virgin brand across music, airlines and other businesses.

Entrepreneur

Estée Lauder

Building the Estée Lauder cosmetics business through personal selling and department stores.

Entrepreneur

Folorunso Alakija

Building businesses in fashion and oil through Supreme Stitches and Famfa.

Entrepreneur

Soichiro Honda

Building Honda into a major motorcycle and car manufacturer.

Entrepreneur

Sara Blakely

Founding Spanx and building a shapewear business from a personal clothing problem.

Entrepreneur

Dhirubhai Ambani

Founding Reliance and expanding from textiles into major industry.

Entrepreneur

Mo Ibrahim

Building Celtel’s African mobile networks and establishing a governance foundation.

Entrepreneur

Akio Morita

Co-founding Sony and helping take Japanese consumer electronics worldwide.

Entrepreneur

Larry Page

Co-founding Google and helping develop PageRank.

Entrepreneur

N. R. Narayana Murthy

Co-founding Infosys and helping build India’s global software-services industry.

Industrialist

John D. Rockefeller

Building Standard Oil into an oil-industry giant and using his fortune to fund medical research and education.

Industrialist

Andrew Carnegie

Building a vast American steel business and funding thousands of public libraries with the proceeds.

Industrialist

Jamsetji Tata

Founding the Tata enterprise and laying plans for Indian steelmaking, scientific education and hydroelectric power.

Entrepreneur

Cher Wang

Co-founding HTC, a major early smartphone maker that later developed the Vive virtual-reality business.

Entrepreneur

Strive Masiyiwa

Building Econet after challenging Zimbabwe’s telecoms monopoly and expanding African communications infrastructure.

Entrepreneur

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

Building Biocon from an industrial-enzyme start-up into a major biotechnology company.

Entrepreneur

Morris Chang

Founding TSMC and pioneering a business devoted to manufacturing other companies’ chips.

Entrepreneur

Masayoshi Son

Founding SoftBank and making large technology investments, including an early stake in Alibaba.

Entrepreneur

Pierre Omidyar

Founding eBay and helping establish online person-to-person commerce.

Entrepreneur

Patrice Motsepe

Building African Rainbow Minerals and leading African football’s governing body.

Industrialist

Cornelius Vanderbilt

The shipping and railroad magnate who built a transport empire around New York.

Industrialist

Kōnosuke Matsushita

The founder of the company that became Panasonic, whose electrical products reached households around the world.

Business executive

Marc Benioff

Co-founding Salesforce and helping popularise business software delivered through the cloud.

Business executive

Scott McNealy

Co-founding Sun Microsystems and leading its growth in networked computing.

Business executive

Isabel dos Santos

Building major Angolan business interests that later became the subject of corruption investigations and sanctions.

Entrepreneur

Martha Stewart

Building a lifestyle business around cooking, decorating and practical household skills.

Entrepreneur

Ingvar Kamprad

Founding IKEA and building a global business around affordable, self-assembled furniture.

Industrialist

Jamnalal Bajaj

Founding the Bajaj business group while supporting Gandhi’s independence and social-reform campaigns.

Entrepreneur

Pony Ma

Co-founding Tencent, the company behind QQ and WeChat.

Fashion designer

Ralph Lauren

Building Polo into a global fashion brand around a recognisable vision of American style.

Entrepreneur

Amancio Ortega

Building Zara and the Inditex fashion group.

Industrialist

G. D. Birla

Expanding the Birla industrial businesses and supporting India’s independence movement.

Entrepreneur

Robin Li

Co-founding Baidu and developing technology for ranking web search results.

Entrepreneur

Phil Knight

Co-founding Nike with running coach Bill Bowerman.

Entrepreneur

Shiv Nadar

Co-founding HCL and helping build India’s computing industry.

Entrepreneur

Lei Jun

Building Xiaomi into a global consumer technology brand.

Entrepreneur

Yvon Chouinard

Founding Patagonia and directing its ownership towards environmental protection.

Entrepreneur

Sergey Brin

Co-founding Google with Larry Page.

Entrepreneur

Ren Zhengfei

Founding Huawei and developing its telecommunications equipment business.

Entrepreneur

Anita Roddick

Building The Body Shop around campaigning and ethical consumerism.

Entrepreneur

Falguni Nayar

Founding the Indian beauty retailer Nykaa.