Top 10 Inspirational Tech Entrepreneurs to Follow 

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, March Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, are now household names. Even our boomer parents know about them, thanks to their services that are a part of our lives today. If you are looking for inspiration, there are a ton of other tech entrepreneurs with inspiring journeys to learn more. Let’s check their names, shall we?

1: Elon Musk

Mr. Musk is always in the news for either Tesla or something else. A true visionary and serial entrepreneur who is relentless is my favorite. He was also the co-founder of Paypal and sold it to eBay. He invested this money into Tesla and SpaceX. The genius went through a lot of financial troubles. Musk even had to take loans from friends to meet his daily expenses. But tough times didn’t stop him from perusing his passion. What truly inspired me was the film “Elon Musk: The Real Life Iron Man”, which I managed to watch at home thanks to my Spectrum WiFi plans! Musk is also called the Real-Life Iron Man, and in case you haven’t noticed, he had a cameo appearance in Iron Man 2 as well. Musk is worth $5 billion, and his Tesla car S model has a rating of 99 out of 100.

2: Steve Huffman

Next on the list is the founder and CEO of Reddit, Mr. Steve Huffman. He created this website with his college roommates Aaron Swartz and Alexis Ohanian in 2005 and sold it in 2006. Huffman didn’t stop there. He is also the co-founder of Hipmunk, an airfare search engine site. Now, he is one of the board of advisers for the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Technology and Society. Huffman was a techie from a young age. When he was a kid, he used to write calculators, and when he grew up, he used programming to solve challenges. His wife was passionate about Sudoku, and he thought it’s a waste of time. So, he wrote a program to solve all Sudokus for her!

3: Jack Dorsey

Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, was a popular visionary and tech entrepreneur of his age. Currently, he is working on a new startup called Square to make payments less complicated. He is heralded to be the apparent heir to Steve Jobs! No doubt through Twitter, he has played a significant role in transforming the way people communicate. Elon Musk is his favorite Twitter user since his tweets focus on thinking openly or solve existential problems. He doesn’t seem to care about looking like a traditional CEO. He re-introduced the nose-ring for men and grew a beard.

4: Travis Kalanick

The former CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, did a great job combing the power of smart tech, geolocation, and cloud computing to create the most successful ride-hailing app. when the company was launched in 2009, it offered 3 cars for hire. 3 years later, they expanded to 66 countries and 360+ cities. Kalanick has resigned from Uber, and now, he is a venture capitalist and probably working on another cool startup!

5: Brian Chesky

Not many people know Brian Chesky like they know other tech entrepreneurs on the list, but he enjoys a great reputation. An Internet entrepreneur and CEO of Airbnb, Chesky had a wild journey. Initially, Airbnb revolved around airbeds and rents. Chesky and his roommate Joe Gebbia were simply looking for means to make extra cash. Cash strapped, he and his busy decided to rent out their apartment, and from there stemmed the idea.  They did stumble upon a great idea, but it took a while to take it to another level.

6: Tony Robbins

Everyone knows Tony Robbins. He is an American author, top business leader, and number 1 life and business strategist. He is also a motivational speaker. Whenever you find yourself in the middle of an entrepreneurial breakdown, which you will, check out Robbins’s videos, podcasts, read one of his books, or simply check his Instagram posts and you will find lots of inspiration. He started off as a broke janitor. He saved some of his pay to attend Jim Rohn’s seminar and developed a coaching style that got him fame in his mid-twenties and the rest was history.

7: Sadaf Monajemi

Medicine is one of the hardest industries to innovate since it’s so complex but Sadaf Monajemi has made history. She launched See-mode technologies in 2017, a medicine tech startup helping doctors and medical professionals in predicting strokes who were at risk without conducting rigorous tests which are considered expensive.

8: Susan Wojcicki

You might know Susan but she was the one to push Google for acquiring YouTube in 2016 and run this video platform. She was the first marketing manager of Google and found novel ways of generating revenue from the search engine. She got her big break in the year 2000 when AdWords was debuted. Wojcicki was promoted to the position of senior vice president in Google in 2012 and then was moved to YouTube. Later in 2014, she became the CEO of YouTube and claimed more than one billion users.

9: Reed Hastings

The Co-founder of Netflix, Reed Hastings has an inspiring journey. He felt like he was a good product person but not a good CEO. Before creating Netlfix, he was the CEO of Pure Software and was constantly struggling with his role. Did you know the idea of Netflix stemmed from a math problem about the bandwidth of a station wagon carrying tapes? The problem was to figure out how many tapes can fit inside this vehicle. Similarly, Spectrum deals became much more popular after people understood the value of bundled deals. This led him to think about how much data a DVD can hold. Before he and his partner could settle on the idea of starting a video streaming subscription service, they went through a lot of variations.

10: Larry Ellison

Ellison was a college drop-out as well. The founder of Oracle has a remarkable rags-to-riches story. His adoptive father used to tell him he’s good for nothing and Larry has proven him wrong. What’s so great about him is that he never took a computer science class in his life. He was mostly self-taught. He learned programming from books. Best of all, he never had the goal to become a billionaire. He just wanted to create an environment where he would enjoy working. Now that he is rich, he has plans of giving billions from his wealth to charity.

Conclusion

There is no shortage of inspiring and industry-leading tech entrepreneurs. These tech visionaries have changed the way a company is built and managed. Most of all, they have shaped the way we travel, communicate, and so much more. Read more about the stories of these entrepreneurs and be prepared to get inspired.