Tech Kids Who Found the American Dream
If it feels like the American Dream is dead, that’s only because you aren’t in the tech biz. You still have a shot at getting rich– relatively quickly– and all you have to do is be brilliant. These guys all invented, built and sold their products and companies before the age of 40 for big time “American Dream” cash.
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Chad Hurley Made $345 Million with YouTube.
While working for PayPal, Chad met Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, and together the three of them developed an idea for a better way to share small videos with friends. That idea soon became YouTube, which they launched in 2006. They developed the site in an office above a pizzeria with investment money, and soon after, the site began receiving 65,000 new uploads per day. Hurley stepped down as chief executive to take on an advisory role but not before raking in $345 million at the age of 30. Not bad money for a site filled with clips of cats and people unboxing electronics.
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Kevin Systrom Sells Instagram for $400 Million
The key to the future of photography is to make everything smaller and mobile. Systrom, a former Google employee, realized this and used $500,000 in funding to develop Instagram. Instagram quickly became one of the most popular photo sharing apps available. After being downloaded and rated four and one million times respectively, the site was easily able to secure funding which gave it a valuation of $500 million. Facebook jumped at the chance to invest in the rapidly growing company and acquired the company for $1 billion in April, 2012. Critics of the deal claimed that Facebook vastly overpaid for a company with lots of buzz and no business plan. Systrom laughed at his critics all the way to bank after collecting nearly $400 million in the deal, before his 29th birthday.
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Tom Anderson, Mr. Myspace, and Chris DeWolfe Sell Facebook for $580 Million
MySpace, a social networking website with a focus on music and TyPiiNg LiiK3 tHii$, was founded by Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson in 2003. The pair sold Myspace in 2005 for $580 million to News Corp, leaving them untouched by MySpace’s later demise. In 2011, Justin Timberlake and Specific Media Group purchased the company for $35 million, which must have been painful for News Corp., but DeWolfe and Anderson didn’t feel a thing.
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Elon Musk Gets Over $300 Million For Zip2
Elon Musk started his career with humble beginnings, selling his first commercial software for $500 at age 12. His first business venture after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania was Zip2, an online news publishing software that he created with his brother. Musk sold the company in 1999 to AltaVista for $307 million in cash plus $34 million in stock options. Yeah, he was 28 at the time. And he’s not done yet. Since then he founded SpaceX, a company that develops and manufactures space launch vehicles, and co-founded Tesla Motors and PayPal (which was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in stock), and serves as chairman of the board for SolarCity, the largest supplier of solar power systems in the U.S. He’s also the chairman of the Musk Foundation, which advocates better science education in schools, cleaner renewable energies, and improved pediatric medicine. He has a cameo in Iron Man 2. Oh, and his net worth is $4.5 billion.
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David Karp Earns $200 Million for the Sale of Tumblr
David Karp, 26, is founder and CEO of the blogging site Tumblr. Karp grew up in New York City and knew what he wanted his career to be when he discovered the internet and code writing on AOL. He interned for animation producer Fred Seibert when he was 14, and dropped out of the Bronx School of Science when he was 15 years old because there were no opportunities to learn about computer sciences. Home schooled, without a high school diploma, Karp worked as a software consultant for UrbanBaby, an internet forum for parents, until the company was bought out in 2006. Out of a job, he decided to start an applications development company, Davidville, to provide a creative platform for pictures, articles, and anything else he could think of. That became blogging platform Tumblr. He sold it to Yahoo in 2013 for a $1 billion dollars, he pocketed $200 million off the sale personally.
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Nicholas Woodman Invents GoPro, Becomes a Billionaire
Nicholas Woodman, 37, created the portable mounted camera GoPro. A visual arts graduate from the University of California San Diego, he started a marketing company (funBag) that quickly failed. He found himself unemployed at the age of 26 and decided to go to Australia and Indonesia to surf. While on his surfboard he wanted to capture action images up close, so he strapped a camera to his hand with a rubber band. Using a loan from his mother, he funded his idea for a durable band which could hold a camera in place while a person is in motion. In 2004 a Japanese company ordered 100 units at a tradeshow and GoPro began. Woodman began creating his own quality cameras, mounts, and add-ons which continue to capture real-time images and video. Foxxconn bought nearly 9 percent of the company for $200 million dollars, setting a market value of $2.5 billion for the company, making Woodman a billionaire.
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Scott Belsky Sells Behance for $100 Million
In the mid-2000s Scott Belsky was a young entrepreneur with an undergraduate degree from Cornell, an MBA from Harvard and a dream to change the way artists and creative individuals interact with the professional world: The result of Belsky’s dream was Behance. Behance is an online professional network, similar to LinkedIn, for graphic designers, photographers, artists, fashion designers and creative advertisers. In 2012, Belsky sold Behance to Adobe for roughly $100 Million Dollars when he was only 32. After the merger Belsky stayed on to become the Vice President of Adobe’s Creative Community.
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Nick D’Aloisio, 17, Sells Summly for $30 Million
Nick D’Aloisio is the founder and CEO of Summly, a mobile application dedicated towards delivering online news to iPhones across the world. D’Aloisio’s idea was an immediate success, garnering him attention from some of the world’s largest media minds, including Rupert Murdoch. The success of Summly can be directly attributed to D’Aloisio’s efforts. Earlier this year, Summly was sold to Yahoo! for $30 Million dollars, making D’Aloisio the youngest self-made millionaire ever; Nick D’Aloisio is only seventeen years old.
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