The Spirit of Entrepreneurship: Five Famous Startup Founders

At UFOStart, we're on the cutting edge of helping startups arrange the funding and achieving the entrepreneurship skills they need to become tomorrow's Fortune 500 companies.

Speaking of those companies, many of them were once startups themselves. Here are five of today's most famous entrepreneurs. When we look at them, we're reminded of how a clever business idea, gumption and a willingness to work can reap rich rewards:

Steve Jobs famously started Apple computers in the garage of his parents' Los Altos, California, home in 1976. Although he was partnered with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in the early days of the company, it was Jobs who became the face and spirit of the company. Around the turn of this century, he began introducing the products that would revitalize the aging brand, like the iMac, iPhone, iPod and iTunes.

These days, everyone knows Martha Stewart as a domestic icon. However, she was once a caterer with nearly no name recognition. After finding some success first as a model and then as a stockbroker, she founded a catering company in 1976. The venture was a quick success, and Stewart began writing about entertaining, decorating and other home and lifestyle hobbies that, at the time, had fallen out of fashion. Books, her namesake magazine, a television show and several lines of Martha Stewart-branded products followed. In 2010, the latest year for which statistics are available, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia had annual revenues of around $231 million.

The story of Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook was dramatized in the 2010 film "The Social Network." That movie certainly contained its Hollywood touches, but the gist of it is right: In just a matter of years, Zuckerberg turned a fledgling time-waster for college students into social media's largest company -- in fact, Facebook is largely responsible for the term 'social media' being coined. 

Elon Musk is known for his attention-grabbing stunts and business proposals, like his Hyperloop idea for high-speed personal transportation. The reason people listen to him, though, is that he has business savvy to match his maverick streak. He founded PayPal, which helped revolutionize e-commerce. And while his automobile company, Tesla Motors, isn't exactly Ford or General Motors, its pricey cars are esteemed by wealthy automobile fans.

In 1963, Mary Kay Ash founded Mary Kay as a door-to-door cosmetics sales company. Using her vast knowledge of beauty products and harnessing the social interconnectedness that marks female friendships, she turned her company into one of the beauty industry's largest firms. In 2011, its revenues were estimated to be around $2.9 billion.

If you're interested in learning more about the work we do with entrepreneurs and startups, feel free to contact us.