The Unknown Billionaires

The Billionaire Landscape

…the world’s billionaire population has increased a staggering 1000 percent in only the last 25 years. Almost a century ago – 1916 – the first person to become a billionaire was John D. Rockefeller. If you convert dollars from then to now, he was worth over $500 billion.

S. Daniel Abraham

The irony was that Abraham, who owned a medical company, was not a doctor or even a researcher. In fact, he had no college education at all. He was simply an entrepreneur with a nose for what the public wanted.

…just as Abraham was getting his diet drink division off the ground, a story came out attributing more than 50 deaths to a liquid protein drink. It was discovered that the heart attacks were caused by the lack of vitamins and minerals in the diet drink. In 1976, the FDA outlawed liquid protein diets due to missing amino acids and complex proteins.

It turns out the timing of selling Slim-Fast to Unilever could not have been better. After reaching sales of more than a billion dollars in 2002, Slim-Fast sales nose-dived 21 percent in 2003 as low-carb programs like Atkins and South Beach became the diets du jour.

Andy Beal

“I’m not sure I’d call it taking chances. I think of it as attributing a different level of risk to a problem than the rest of the world attributes to it. I’m not that much of a risk taker. I just take situations that people perceive to be high risk, and I decide that they can be managed to low risk. I’m really very conservative. All the other banks were failing. What better time to start a bank? If everybody else is going broke, that simply means your competition is going away,” Beal reasons.

Not all of Beal’s hunches paid off. For example, his expansion efforts to markets such as Russia and Mexico ultimately failed. As did his venture into outer space. In 1997, Beal started an aerospace company designed to compete with NASA. His original idea was to start a satellite company but the cost of getting them into space was daunting. That gave Beal the idea to provide the rockets that carried communications satellites in orbit. Some of his staunchest business defenders thought the idea was perhaps overly ambitious, even by Beal’s standards. He was aware of the skepticism. “People told me I was crazy. Someone said I was having a midlife crisis,” Beal said shortly after the company opened. “I thought it was a reasoned decision and continue to believe it’s a reasoned decision. It can be managed to very acceptable risk.”

Beal has offered a $1 million prize to anyone able to prove or disprove his own Beal’s Conjecture. (For those interested, his conjecture states that if Ax + By = Cz, where A, B, C, x, y and z are positive integers and x, y and z are all greater than two, then A, B and C must have a common prime factor.) Some billionaires buy islands; Beal enjoys uber brain teasers. But his motivation was to use the prize as a carrot to get young people engaged with math, which he credits with helping him make many of his business decisions.

Shortly after the aerospace company closed, Beal went to the Bellagio Hotel Las Vegas and challenged some of the world’s top poker players. While his skill was debatable, his enthusiasm was unquestioned—as were his deep pockets. Between 2001 and 2004 Beal played a team of professional poker players who anted up a combined $10 million against his $20 million in a series of private matches. Dubbing themselves The Corporation, the pros included Chip Reese, Jennifer Harman, Phil Ivey and several others. Beal’s play ran hot and cold. He lost as much as $9.3 million one day and won $11.7 million another—the latter considered the world’s record.

There’s no real secret to Beal’s formula: he looks for assets, generally packages of loans and bonds, which are worth more than their market prices. What sets him apart, however, is his knack for picking the right assets time and again.

Gary Burrell & Min Kao

Garmin co-founder Gary Burrell has taken privacy to a near Trappist-monk level. It is widely reported that he has never once given an interview and closely guards any details of his personal life from becoming public knowledge. The irony of course is that Burrell became a billionaire by developing a commercial global positioning system (GPS) that can be used to track individuals’ movements or identify their location to within ten feet.

The system was declared operational in April 1989. Burrell and Kao believed that the company should aggressively pursue products based on GPS technology, foreseeing a potentially huge commercial opportunity. Management did not agree. Burrell was unhappy enough with the company’s direction that he left Allied Corp. in 1989. He interviewed for jobs at other companies including Magnavox but nothing felt like a good fit.

Its popularity attracted the attention of Magellan Systems, which had been selling a product called NavPro. Magellan threatened to sue so Burrell and Kao rebranded their company Garmin—a blend of their first names.

Within four years of becoming Garmin, sales reached $105 million.

Worried that potential enemies might use GPS to guide weapons, the U.S. Government limited the precision of the devices to a margin of error of 300 feet. But in 2000, the government lifted that restriction so now devices were able to map a location to within 10 feet—close enough to tell a driver which way to turn.

Having never sought venture capital funding, Burrell and Kao retained nearly half of the equity in Garmin between them. By 2004 both were on the ‘world’s richest people’ lists. In 2002 Burrell stepped down as co-CEO, but continues to serve as the chairman emeritus.

Clive Calder

Nothing is publicly known about his education; only that he entered the music industry at an early age and was known for being intensely ambitious and focused. Although as a musician he was in a milieu associated with partying, he avoided drugs and reportedly got drunk…once.

At that time, the music industry in South Africa was so small that a single company could (and often had to) provide a number of the services instead of focusing on just one area such as management or distribution. This gave Calder a strong competitive edge when he and Simon decided to relocate. An early trip to Europe had shown Calder how industry moguls ran their businesses, and he wanted to recreate this success for himself.

The irony that a white South African man has had such a major role in the massive success of black music, especially in an era when other major labels would not release it, has not gone unnoticed.

Calder ran a tight ship. Very frugal with the company’s money, he refused to splurge on lavish furnishings or to participate in the excesses associated with the industry. According to their company attorney, Gary Stiffelman, “The Jive offices were crummy, cardboard desks. They just really did everything on the cheap.”

Truett Cathy

“You don’t have to be a Christian to work at Chick-fil-A,” then adds, “but we ask you to base your business on biblical principles because they work.” Certainly hiring decisions are based on faith-based criteria. As instituted by Truett, who retired in November 2013 and turned the company over to his eldest son Dan, prospective franchisees are selected based on their loyalty, wholesome values, and willingness to buy into Chick-fil-A’s Christian credo. With an initial franchise fee of just $5,000, both true believers and many a pragmatic are willing—just don’t be single. Cathy wants married workers because he says they are more industrious and productive. It’s not just the operators who are interviewed. Family members of prospective franchise owners, including children, are often interviewed to discern more about the applicant. “If a man can’t manage his own life, he can’t manage a business,” Cathy says. He also says an operator who “has been sinful or done something harmful to their family members” may likely be let go.

“From the day Truett Cathy started the company, he began applying biblically-based principles to managing his business. For example, we believe that closing on Sundays, operating debt-free, and devoting a percentage of our profits back to our communities are what make us a stronger company and Chick-fil-A family. Our mission is simple: to serve great food, provide genuine hospitality, and have a positive influence on all who come in contact with Chick-fil-A.”

Jin Sook & Do Won Chang

Depending on who you talk to, Jin Sook Chang is either a clever marketer or a blatant cheat. More than fifty lawsuits filed by the likes of Express, Anthropologie and Trovata have accused Jin Sook and her husband Do Won, founders of Forever 21, of copyright and trademark infringement and trade dress complaints. None of these cases, though, have gone to trial because Forever 21 has settled them out of court under confidential seal.

Along with her husband Do Won Chang, Jin Sook perfected the fast fashion clothing business model, which produces designer knock-offs that are barely distinguishable from the original items—hence all the copyright suits. Production is conducted at warp speed so that today’s runway looks or magazine cover outfits are on Forever 21 racks within the week.

If their given ages are correct, when they immigrated to the United States in 1981 she was 18 and he was 27.

Sales from Fashion 21’s first year were $35,000; by the end of the next year sales exceeded $700,000.

Once the inventory was sold out, no matter how popular, it would not be replaced. Knowing what was available one week was gone the next, drove customers to buy now rather than later. The flow of merchandise also encouraged customers to come in every week, lest they lose out on the latest must-have garment.

The success of their first store was completely word of mouth. The Changs did not spend money on advertising or marketing. They let their designer-esque, affordable clothes promote the store. The success of the first store led to a second store. They committed to opening a new location every six months.

Forever 21 sent a memo to employees announcing plans to limit hours of some full-time employees to no more than 29.5 hours a week—just below the 30-hour week that would qualify the workers as full-time under the Affordable Care Act. Critics of the company say it is a blatant move to get out of paying for employees’ insurance. According to the letter sent to workers, a significant number of employees will lose holiday and vacation pay as well as insurance. What makes this so stunning to many observers is that Jin Sook and her husband are very vocal about being born-again Christians.

Jim Clark

Hardly anything about Jim Clark’s childhood would anticipate his enormous success.

His father was an alcoholic and survived, barely, with odd jobs, while Clark’s mother worked in a doctor’s office. His parents divorced when he was very young, and along with a brother and sister was raised by his mother on $225 a month. As Clark later told Lewis, “I grew up in black and white. I thought the whole world was shit and I was sitting in the middle of it.”

A trouble maker, he was suspended from school for igniting a…

Clark joined the Navy. But that didn’t go well either. The chain of command didn’t fit well with him, and as a result he was often given the worst chores and received a lot of verbal abuse that he was forced to take. Still, the experience hardened him…

On a whim, Clark took a math exam offered by the Navy and, to his instructors’ shock and awe, scored…

Clark took a job as an associate professor at Stanford University, where, in 1979, he and a few grad students under his direction would develop a revolutionary computer chip, which Clark dubbed the Geometry Engine. The chip was the first to process 3-D images in real time, allowing designers,…

Three years later, in 1982, Clark left Stanford and, with a handful of his graduate students and funding from a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, started Silicon Graphics, which would become the most successful Silicon Valley company at the time. It went…

Clark and his cofounders were forced to sell increasingly larger equity stakes in SGI in order to continue operations, which meant by the time SGI made its first sale, Clark and his engineers owned little of the company they started. The experience left Clark bitter about the workings…

Clark became obsessed with Bill Gates and Microsoft, fearful that it was only a matter of time before the PC had enough processing power to replace the more costly and cumbersome SGI workstations. Clark was unable to convince SGI’s CEO and board to adapt, and now, even angrier, he quit the company in…

Clark’s focus was still TV, but it was Andreessen who is credited with convincing Clark to focus instead on the still burgeoning Internet. Clark coughed up $3 million of his…

This time Clark was determined not to become beholden to venture capitalists, whom he politely…

Within two months of its introduction, Netscape’s Web browser, Netscape Navigator, claimed more than 70 percent of the browser market. A year later, Clark took Netscape public. The decision was considered reckless, to say the least, as the money boys liked to wait for a new business to have four consecutive profitable quarters before an IPO. In 1995 Netscape had zero profits on its balance sheet, and forecasts for future profitability were vague at best. But Clark was convinced that the story alone would create a buzz, and investors would fear missing a…

Clark knew that Netscape’s near monopoly wouldn’t last, given Microsoft’s sudden focus on the internet, even though Internet Explorer commanded only a tiny fraction of the market. Clark had enormous respect for Gates’ tenacity to dominate, and so, like Cuban and Wagner…

Only months after Netscape became a public company, Clark, now a very rich man, founded Healtheon. This ambitious attempt to streamline technology and the Internet to make the system more efficient made sense.

Healtheon attracted plenty of investors during the Internet boom years, and it achieved a market capitalization of more than $1 billion dollars, making Jim Clark the first entrepreneur to create three different multibillion-dollar technology companies.

Netscape fell victim to Microsoft’s dominance with Internet Explorer and was purchased by AOL in 1999. Healtheon failed to attract the numbers of doctors, hospitals, and insurers that Clark had expected. It ended up merging with WebMD in 1999 and Clark, ever impulsive, abruptly resigned as chairman.

In the wake of the dot-com bust in 2000, Clark has received much less attention. He turned to Florida real-estate development, forming Hyperion Development Group in Miami. Back in 2004 Clark told BusinessWeek that he had left Silicon Valley for good. “We’re developers now. We’ve gone back to making money the old-fashioned way.”

Clark’s daughter from his first marriage, Kathy, who is older than Hinze, is married to Youtube co-founder Chad Hurley.

“Set out to build a long lasting company. Focus on the market, not the technology. Use the IPO to raise money, not make money. If you want to build a long lasting, successful company, you’ll have to take the time to do that. If you want to get quick riches, you won’t have a successful company.”

“Clark was keen on things only as they happened, after they had happened he lost interest in them. In this regard he seems to embody the very nature of Silicon Valley.”

Denise Coates

In 2001, when the Internet was out of infancy but still far from mature, she set up Bet365, having purchased the bet365.com domain name a year in advance. Coates had already begun to notice the emergence of gambling websites. It was obvious to her that this was going to be gaming’s ‘next big thing,’ and she wanted to get in early.

…she had approached a number of London-based venture capitalists with her idea. They all turned her down flat. With this borrowed funding, she bet a large portion of her own – and her family’s – assets on her new online venture. It worked.

Growing up, she had worked as a cashier in her father’s betting establishments, so she learned early on how gambling worked.

The family’s betting shops were actually not performing well; in retrospect, she describes them as “a small chain of pretty rubbish betting shops.” However, when presented with the chance to run them, she took it. In 1995, Coates joined as Managing Director and immediately set to work turning the shops around. One way she did this was by keeping costs under control.

Bet365 has been a pioneer with Internet-based sports broadcasting, offering (in 2009) the first English football match (against Ukraine) to be broadcast only online. But Bet365 no longer operates only online: there are now on-course gaming centers at numerous venues around Britain, too.

Unlike many gambling businesses – the online kind in particular – Bet365 pays British taxes. The company is one of the largest private employers in Stoke-on-Trent, with a staff of over 2,600, including 100 in Australia. Bet365 is considered a high-quality employer offering jobs that pay well, giving something back to the community.

As Stoke has traditionally been the base of pottery, mining, and manufacturing-related jobs, the establishment of a company with a major IT component has been seen as a welcome change. Why Stoke, then? Coates’s answer is simple: “It’s where I’m from.” What about the fact that Bet365 could save millions in taxes by moving offshore? Coates is firm on the subject: “The area means a lot to us. We’ve always worked in Stoke; we’ve always had businesses in Stoke. I would never want to spend large parts of my time abroad if I can avoid it.”

Even now, she continues to work on Saturdays because they are the company’s busiest days of the week.

Brunello Cucinelli

Italian designer Brunello Cucinelli, who has made his fortune selling high-end cashmere sweaters, has taken employee morale to a New Age level. In so doing, he has validated his belief that Zen, compassion, and commerce can blend to be a billion dollar business model.

“I was just a good-for-nothing ex-rebel in the late 1960s,” Cucinelli admits. “Then I had an idea: if Benetton made millions of women’s jumpers in ordinary colored wool, I would do the same, but in cashmere. I was and still am convinced that the future will be based on quality, the highest quality.”

He dropped out of school in 1974, set up shop in his parents’ garage, and invested all his savings into creating a workshop and then got a bank loan for $550 to create his first collection of fifty colorful Italian cashmere sweaters designed for women. He took his creations to Trentino-Alto Adige, one of the most affluent regions in Italy, where his collection was quickly bought out. Cucinelli was officially a fashion designer.

Even in those early days of success, Cucinelli approached business from a more ethical perspective than most saying he adopted the philosophy of Saint Benedict to be a demanding teacher and a loving father.

“Towards the end of the 1980s, there was the eruption of ‘the yuppie,’ and along with it the idea that profits are everything, that you need to be successful at any cost, even if that means treating your employees badly and not caring about quality and customers. I thought differently. My models were Socrates, Seneca, Saint Benedict, and Saint Francis. I wanted to maintain a relationship with people. If I make something, if I set up a business, I do it with the aim of improving the quality of life. Man doesn’t own the Earth; he is only its caretaker. It doesn’t make sense to chase after enormous short-term profits. Because everything passes, but the best things are those that one can savor over time.” There are no long sweatshop hours, no difficult working conditions. He encourages employees to spend their ninety minute lunch breaks away from their desks. His New York office has a library on the top floor where workers can go relax and feed their spirit reading. Classical music plays in the state of the art kitchen. And while he expects his employees to work hard during the day, he also encourages a personal life. “I make sure we are all focused during the day, but at 6:00 pm I want all my employees to go home to their families and loved ones because I think this way they will be more satisfied with their life. If I didn’t have time for my family, my adorable baby granddaughter, my friends, my soccer team and the books I love to read…I wouldn’t feel complete.”

It’s easy to have largesse when times are flush, but Cucinelli has stuck to his beliefs even during the 2008 recession. He promised not to lay anyone off during the financial crisis. In return he asked for his employees to commit themselves to more efficient and more creative work.

There is a business reality that the best time to start a company is during bad economic times because start up costs for materials and labor are cheaper.

Garments are still mostly handmade using the highest quality materials. His sweaters, which cost over $2,000 on average, are not meant to be showpieces under protective wraps in a closet. They are not formal wear; they are designed to add a bit of luxury and beauty to people’s everyday life. Cucinelli is living proof that you can treat employees well, pay them above average salaries, provide comfortable, inspiring workplaces, and pursue philanthropy while still maintaining a thriving company.

“There are problems, like in any business. But when this company dies, and it will certainly die because that’s the way things go, there will be people who will say that it was the fault of the model I have followed. But that is not so. Most companies don’t die because their business model is flawed. No, they die when they stop wanting to improve, or stop being aware of the needs of their customers or don’t actively sell their products. Running a business is actually very simple.”

Bernie Ecclestone

…the man who is – and soon to be was – behind the present Formula 1 worldwide phenomenon is 83 year old Bernie Ecclestone. In fact, Ecclestone is almost single-handedly credited with making the sport one of the most popular on the planet. Along the way he has accrued a personal fortune worth over $4 billion, and created a great deal of controversy, gotten into some legal conundrums, and generated a lot of headlines.

He surrounds himself with a small group of fiercely loyal and well-remunerated employees, many of them dating back to the days when he owned the Brabham team in the 1970s and 1980s, who know exactly what makes him tick. “I don’t think democracy is the way to run anything,” he once said. “Whether it’s a company or a country, you need someone who is going to turn the lights on and off.”

If any single event can sum him up, it might be the story about the time when racing legend Mario Andretti was offered $1000 by a rival of Ecclestone’s to push him into a swimming pool. A reticent Andretti mentioned this plot to Ecclestone, who patted him on the back and said, “pay me half and I’m fine with it.”

Charlie Ergen

Dish Network founder Charlie Ergen has adopted the role of the black-hatted gun-slinger with a penchant for card playing, courtroom shoot-outs, and running competitors out of town. But according to Ergen, he’s just a “country boy from Tennessee” whose father William happened to work as a nuclear physicist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he helped develop the first nuclear weapon during World War II.

Ergen decided that Colorado with its notoriously poor reception of what was then over-the-air analogue channels, would be a good place to establish their business. But on the drive there, a gust of wind blew the trailer off the road and destroyed the dish. Fortunately they had the spare and used that to generate interest. They drove in their truck from town to town through rural Colorado. The reception was north of great.

In 1990 Ergen raised $335 million in junk bonds to buy orbital slots for satellites. The FCC granted EchoStar a DBS license in 1992 and assigned the company its own satellite orbit. Three years later in 1995 the company successfully launched EchoStar I from Xichang, China, and that same year EchoStar went public. Dish Network was officially branded in March 1996 when the company started offering subscription television services. After three months Dish was serving 100,000 subscribers, becoming the fastest-growing DBS television service. By the time Ergen launched EchoStar III from Cape Canaveral, Florida in 1997 Dish had one million customers. One of Ergen’s favorite strategies was to give away satellite dishes and receivers to customers in exchange for long-term contracts. He once gave away free dishes to every resident in Boulder, Colorado, to lure subscribers away from a competitor.

“There are only two kinds of employees that I’ve run across in 30 years. There are ones that get results, and ones that make excuses. If you’re in that second camp, you’re not going to like Dish. I like everybody in my company. I like my…

Ergen required employees, whether they knew each other or not, to share hotel rooms, employees are not given paid holidays, and overtime is mandatory. One former executive says, “I didn’t have a life for ten years. I couldn’t even have a dog.” Ergen once screamed at an executive so insultingly she left, and came back only after a board member apologized for Ergen’s behavior and convinced her to return. The executive recalls seeing Ergen and his wife at a restaurant two years after she’d left Dish. When she asked him why he was…

At Dish headquarters near Denver, the company uses fingerprint scanners to check in employees. If a worker is late, an e-mail is promptly sent to human resources, to that…

“And according to a former regional manager, for many years, if an employee expensed a meal where they’d tipped more than 15 percent, the extra amount was then subtracted from his paycheck, even if he’d only gone over by a nickel.” He took pride in brown-bagging…

In the end, though, Ergen’s allegedly prickly managerial style didn’t hurt the company’s bottom line. Dish is currently the second-largest satellite…

“When you deal with change, you have a few choices: you can lead it and make the rules, or you can be a fast follower, or you can be a slow follower. I believe it’s less risky long-term to embrace change.

”If we’re going to take a side, let’s take the side of the consumer.”

Judy Faulkner

Back in 1979 a young, very intelligent woman named Judy Faulkner came up with a user-friendly software program to securely digitize medical records. And Epic Systems was born.

Epic has made Judy Faulkner the United States’ only self-made female IT billionaire. And it would be a safe bet that over 90 percent of Americans have never heard of her. Part of that is Faulkner lives in the berg of Verona, Wisconsin, outside of Madison, not exactly a paparazzi hotbed. Part of it is her chosen field; while medical records are important to everyone, the technology to make them digitized isn’t scintillating reading for most people. Perhaps the biggest part is that Faulkner seems to go out of her way to stay out of the larger public eye.

“The joy of learning, curiosity, speaking up, debate, the honor system, and the trust for people—I took it all from MFS, along with the essential goodness of people, having high expectations and having fun. And I loved to learn math,” she says…

She majored in mathematics, joined the Phi Beta Kappa sorority, and graduated cum laude. She moved to Madison to get her MS in computer science at the University of Wisconsin.

She opted against raising any venture capital, preferring to self-fund the company’s slow growth.

In the end it was Epic’s corporate culture of customer service that won out. “They treated you like a colleague, not a customer,” recalls Jack Cochran, the Permanente Federation’s executive director. “They don’t sell you.” It was a massive project replete with technical challenges, such as needing to increase the number of servers by 1,000 percent so doctors could quickly retrieve a patient’s chart. The cost was equally massive: $4 billion. Kaiser’s then-chief information officer Clifford Dodd asked Epic to cede some equity to Kaiser. Mattison explains, “His view was, given that we’re going to be your market maker and you’re going to acquire tremendous value, we should have equity.” Faulkner’s response was brief and non-negotiable. No. Dodd resigned in 2006, the overhaul was successfully completed, Epic retained all ownership…

“She has amassed her wealth by carefully choosing her customers, and eschewing the sales pitch in a community distrustful of salesmen—1 percent of its 5,200 employees are in sales and marketing. It has exactly five senior salespeople, and no one is paid a commission. At the beginning of each year, Faulkner commands her tiny sales force to select customers based on whether they are fit to work with Epic—making it a privilege.”

She is still adamant the company remain private so she can maintain control. The company is not considering any mergers and acquisitions now or in the future, and does not write the standard three to five year business plans. Faulkner says her company is successful because they are extremely focused on “powering patient centric solutions.

She also believes that a chief executive leads by example, so she drives sensible cars instead of flashy luxury cars.

Faulkner also eschews titles so there are no titles stenciled on company doors. There are also no job descriptions. Employees in the workgroup have no input on hiring. In Faulkner’s experience, “Teams hire people they like. This eventually breeds bad attitudes and ego-protection.” She hires based on skill, not personality. “Beware of the articulate incompetent; a bad weed is a flower in another garden.” She says it takes on average three years for a new employee straight out of college to become an “Epic person.” She also believes in “hiring slow and firing fast.”

What she does not believe in is marketing. That’s why the company has not sent out a press release in decades. The only advertising the company ever sponsored was a local billboard that read: Marketing Sucks…Epic Systems.

”Focus on customer satisfaction, build great products, do good, have fun, and make money.”

Donald & Doris Fisher

If desperation is the mother of invention, frustration is its first cousin. In the mid-1960s Donald Fisher was working as a real estate developer in San Francisco. He ordered some jeans from a Levi’s salesman he had leased a showroom to. When the jeans arrived they didn’t fit. He needed a 34” waist, 31” length. All the pants had 30-inch lengths. The salesman didn’t want to exchange the pants for the correct sizes because of the paperwork involved and suggested Don go to a department store.

Doris coined the name Gap, inspired by the concept of generation gap, a term coined in the 1960s to characterize the dramatically different social, cultural, and political viewpoints between the younger generation and their parents. The Fishers ponied up $63,000 to open their first store on August 21, 1969 – one month after Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon. The jeans were neatly displayed in wall cubicles. Wanting the store to appeal to the college crowd, they also sold albums and tapes. In its first year Gap reported $2 million in sales. In 1970, Gap opened its second store in San Jose, California, and established a corporate headquarters in Burlingame, California, staffed with four employees. By 1973, Gap had expanded to more than 25 locations, including a store in New Jersey.

Richard Hayne

On the other end is Urban Outfitter founder Richard Hayne, a onetime longhaired Vietnam War protester who now supports conservative politicians such as Rick Santorum, defends the use of sweatshops, and doesn’t mind selling clothing emblazoned with potentially offensive racial and ethnic phrases. But Hayne says he never thought of himself as counter-culture, despite his anti-establishment appearance and anti-war activities. “I would never and did not ever characterize myself as a hippie. But it is fair to say we were influenced by the fashion of the times. So if having long hair is equated with hippiedom, then one could make that mistake. But I never called myself a hippie.” He simply acted and lived like one.

Wicks recalls, “Dick really rebelled against authority. He was the first one to grow long hair in my town. He was the first one to speak out against the status quo and say, ‘Hey, the war is wrong.’ That was one of the reasons why I admired him.”

Hayne says calling the store Free People “seemed very appropriate for the time – it was a very political time.

“We were very anti-business, and we felt that big business was the root of the Vietnam War,” Wicks explains. “Our philosophy was to simply make enough to live on modestly, but we wouldn’t accumulate wealth.”

The People’s Store kept growing but the changing political landscape of the 1970s was soon reflected in both Hayne and his customers. Previously, his politics were fueled by his opposition to Vietnam. When the war ended, that driver vanished. He notes that the war “had been incredibly divisive, and there was just this amazing change of mood. People wanted to forget about it. The name Free People had that political connotation and people were growing tired. The store was quickly fading out of fashion. It happened to be the time when we were just putting together the deal to move to a much larger space and felt that, in conjunction with that, we should change our name.” Hayne moved the store to a larger space near the university in 1976 and renamed it Urban Outfitters. Again, business kept growing and over the years Hayne opened more stores, each unique.

Over the years he has added more brand offshoots including Ecote, Free People, Terrain, and Anthropologie.

We just try to give our customers what they want: something to wear on a Friday night that will make the boys look at them – or the girls look at them. We have two rules: it is okay to fail and never look in the rearview mirror.”

…it is my understanding that the only other option those women had to feed their families was selling their bodies. So I don’t want to hear people from the suburbs with their fat American stomachs telling people in other countries how to run their societies.”

“No one has a 5.0 in real life. In fact, when you finish school, the whole notion of a GPA just goes away. “When you’re in school, every little mistake is a permanent crack in your windshield. But in the real world, if you’re not swerving around and hitting the guard rails every now and then, you’re not going fast enough. Your biggest risk isn’t failing, it’s getting too comfortable. “Bill Gates’ first company made software for traffic lights. Steve Jobs’ first company made plastic whistles that let you make free phone calls. Both failed, but it’s hard to imagine they were too upset about it. That’s my favorite thing that changes today. You no longer carry around a number indicating the sum of all your mistakes. From now on, failure doesn’t matter: you only have to be right once.”

James Jannard

Oakley founder James Jannard secured his privacy by living on an island and making his company headquarters a fortress worthy of a Third World despot.

Jannard dropped out of pharmacy school at the height of the counter-cultural revolution that embraced personal expression and independence…

In 1975, Jannard founded Oakley, named after his dog, with a $300 investment to produce cutting-edge motocross handgrips for motorcycles and BMX bikes.

Lacking an advertising budget, Jannard promoted his handgrips at BMX and motocross races, passing them out to riders to raise the product profile.

“I only had $300 to start Oakley. So money was not the primary reason for success. Invention and interesting product was. The Oakley Grip was a cam shaped design and had octopus tread pattern. Traction in 360 degrees. Invention rules. That was the foundation of Oakley.”

The grips led to another product, motorcycle goggles in the late 1970s, followed by ski goggles. While driving from San Diego to Los Angeles on a bright sunny day in 1983, the glare inspired Jannard’s next idea. “I figured, Why not put goggle characteristics like peripheral protection and face fit into sunglasses?” It was this single idea that would transform active eye-wear and Jannard’s life.

From that point on Oakley became all about innovation—according to Jannard: “Inventions wrapped in art. Make a difference. Surprise. Push everything well past what is. Everything can, and will, be made better. It is just a matter of when and by whom.”

“We won’t make more stuff just to sell more stuff. We’ll make more cool stuff because we’re so excited about the possibilities that we can hardly stand it. Becoming a billion-dollar company will be the inevitable result.”

We isolate ourselves to stay away from ordinary thought. If you can understand that, then you could like us. Oakley is a product-driven firm trying to make things that will keep us successful for years, and meanwhile the investors dwell on quarterly results. The remedy isn’t just to grow our business. It’s to grow it in an elegant way.”

Ron Joyce & Tim Horton

Although essentially unknown in the United States, late hockey player Tim Horton was a national icon in Canada during the 1960s as part of the Toronto Maple Leaf team that won four Stanley Cups that decade.

It was on his daily foot patrols as a police officer that Joyce became friends with Tim Horton. Horton was a Canadian hockey legend, who was admired for coming from extreme poverty to the heights of success that he did. Horton was so impacted by his childhood experience that even while he was a hockey legend, he worked on the side doing other jobs to supplement his income. One of those side jobs was a local coffee and donut shop that he had opened, called Tim Horton’s.

Horton wasn’t particularly enthusiastic. He was more interested in opening a hamburger restaurant. So Charade and Horton opened two hamburger joints and they both went bust. Finally, Tim Horton agreed with Charade’s belief that donuts were an idea whose time had come. They called the store Tim Horton’s and when it opened in 1964 it only sold donuts and coffee—but not just traditional donuts. Horton’s takes credit for inventing the apple fritter and the Dutchie, a square donut containing raisins and coated with a sugary glaze. The store was a rousing success so they opened more shops that were mostly run by Charade since Horton was busy much of the year playing hockey. Charade proved to be a better idea man than manager. When Horton returned from a vacation at the end of the 1963-64 hockey season he discovered their half dozen donut shops were near bankruptcy.

Charade sold his house to make the company’s ends meet. It turned out that one of the franchise owners was skimming the profits.

Charade ran into a police officer who operated a nearby Dairy Queen. Charade sensed a kindred spirit and Ronald Joyce became a new franchisee. After a couple of months, the business continued to struggle and in 1966 Charade resigned. Horton assumed a lot of debt and Charade walked away with essentially nothing to show for his great idea.

A few months later Horton and Joyce became partners. Horton became president, Joyce vice-president and Tim Hortons was given a second life. Joyce left the police force to pursue this new business full time.

Together Tim Horton’s began to thrive, so much so that in 1969 Tim considered retiring from hockey. However the Toronto Maple Leafs doubled his salary – end of discussion.

After Horton’s death, his widow Lori sold Joyce her shares in the business—for $1 million and a Cadillac—making Joyce sole owner. It was a decision she later came to regret.

In the late 1980s, Lori Horton sued Joyce to get back half of the doughnut shop company she sold to him in 1975. She also sued the lawyer who had represented her during the transaction with Joyce, alleging he didn’t get enough money for her.

Her testimony did not sway the judge who ruled against her. Horton’s widow also lost her subsequent appeal. What made the trial even more surreal is that Joyce’s son was married to one of Lori and Tim Horton’s daughters.

Joyce was approached by Danny Murphy, who owned a Wendy’s franchise. Murphy suggested they combine their two entities into one store. Intrigued by the idea, Joyce met with Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas and Murphy to discuss the idea. Instead of forming one combined outlet, Wendy’s and Tim Hortons entered into a partnership that proved extremely popular and profitable. The two companies eventually merged in 1995 with Joyce the largest shareholder in the business.

In 1996, Ronald Joyce became only the second person to ever receive the Canadian Franchise Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In April 1999, he was inducted into the Canadian Business Hall of Fame and that same year was also named Entrepreneur of the Year for Ontario and Canada.

Jim Koch

…he quit his steady, high paying, salaried job and started peddling his beer, bar by neighborhood bar, out of the back of his station wagon. This move was even more risky due to the fact that, from the 1930s, following that debilitating decade marked by Prohibition and all the way into the 1980s, there was a steady consolidation of breweries throughout the U.S., which meant small brewers from coast to coast were being swallowed up, or quaffed down, by the hundreds. One of those was owned by the Koch family. The odds of success were slim, at best. “Everyone thought I was crazy, like I was leaving consulting to go make mud pies,” Koch later told Bloomberg News. His initial goals were modest: find a solid local market for a darker beer that was heavier on the hops and malt than every other domestic beer. His original business plan was to be selling $1 million worth of beer in five years, have eight employees, and pay himself a salary of $60,000. By 1990, or only five years later, Koch had exceeded his business plan multiple times. His Boston Brewing Company sold over $21 million in beer that year alone.

“I went from being a high-paid Boston Consulting Group manager to being a beer salesman, and it was a shock, because all of a sudden my three degrees from Harvard did not matter. I was just one more guy walking into a bar making a cold call with a beer that nobody had ever heard of, that had no advertising and kind of a funny name and didn’t taste like anything anybody had ever had before. And it was the most expensive beer in the market.”

James Koch is widely considered the chief catalyst behind the explosion in small craft beers throughout the United States. Since 2007, craft beer has nearly doubled its market share, even as the beer industry as a whole has contracted.

If there was ever any doubt that Koch is in it for the love of beer, and for the challenge of producing the best beer possible, consider his Utopias beer, which he’d been tinkering with since 1993 and finally launched in 2006. It’s not for the faint of heart, costing $100 a bottle and packing an impressive 25 percent alcohol content. Among connoisseurs, however, it has been an enormous hit.

“When you think about starting a business, the chances that it is going to make you rich are very small,” Koch once said. “The chances that it will make you happy are pretty good. So when you go start a business, pick one that is going to make you happy.”

Guy Laliberté

But Laliberté again wanted a bigger stage. Even though the circus ended their second touring season in debt, he booked a space at a Los Angeles art festival. “I bet everything on that one night,” he recalled. “If we failed, there was no cash for gas to come home.”

“Inside every adult there’s still a child that lingers. I think we tend to forget we were children before. We’re happiness merchants – giving people the opportunity to dream like children.”

Committed to making sure his company would sustain and prosper long after his eventual retirement, Laliberté stepped in to right the ship, making Cirque du Soleil more financially and creatively disciplined. “It has to make business sense: Misery is not an option,” he states.

Cirque du Soleil became more than mere entertainment. It was a personal statement and also an avenue to promote Laliberté’s social view. “We are in a position of financial and social power, and we could be agents of change in our society.

Laliberté backs his words up with actions. In 2007 he founded the ONE DROP Foundation that is dedicated to solving the global water crisis through technology, the social arts, and education. “As soon as Cirque du Soleil started making a bit of money we started giving back,” says Laliberté. “Staying true to our origins, being from the street, we created a social program called Cirque du Monde. This program was designed for at-risk youth, using circus skills in workshops aimed at giving them some sort of self-esteem. Cirque du Monde still runs today, and has done workshops in more than fifty countries.”

Jorge Paulo Lemann

He is a teetotaler who has made billions in a hostile takeover of Anheuser Busch, a salad eater whose company purchased Burger King, and a health conscious former athlete who had a heart attack at 54.

He discovered that Harvard archived tests from previous years in the library. He also found “that teachers generally repeated the questions. I took six or seven courses per semester and went from one of the worst students to one of the best.”

“I think one important thing in life is to take some risks, and something that I always thought college doesn’t give is the ability to assess and take risks. It will teach you how to assess risks mathematically or theoretically, but in general it teaches you not to take risks, to be careful.” According to Lemann, it’s essential to take risks in life. “I think the only way you learn to take risks is practicing, practicing. I think a lot of people study hard and think that will solve everything. I think in order to do more, or do exceptional, you have to take risks. Often in my life, after I left Harvard and I started my business, in many situations that I had to face, I more often remembered that wave that I caught in Copacabana than in reality what I had learned in college.”

Each acquired company was introduced to the culture shock of Lemann’s philosophy of profits first to an extreme degree. Burger King employees were forbidden to make color copies without permission. The centuries old tradition at Anheuser Busch to offer free beer to employees was eliminated. A book quoted one of Lemann’s partners saying, “Costs are like fingernails: You have to cut them constantly.”

Perhaps the most telling anecdote about Lemann’s personality occurred in 1999 after assailants tried to kidnap his three young children as their driver was taking them to school. Two cars blocked the children’s car and the kidnapper started shooting. Despite getting shot, the driver got the children to safety. That day, Lemann still sent his children to school and then returned to work with enough time to make all his scheduled meetings. He never said a word about the near-kidnapping of his three children.

Edir Macedo

Religion is big business, and Brazil’s Edir Macedo is one of God’s biggest businessmen.

Dietrich Mateschitz

For most travelers, jetlag results in bags under the eyes, fuzzy brains, and a powerful urge to find the nearest fast food restaurant. For Dietrich Mateschitz, it made him a billionaire. In the summer of 1982, the then-thirty-six-year-old consumer products salesman was flying all over the world peddling items like toothpaste, body lotions, and shampoo. When he landed in Thailand numbingly jetlagged, some locals suggested he buy a tonic called Krating Daeng (Thai for red water buffalo) that was known to improve physical stamina and sharpen mental concentration. Mateschitz discovered it also made his jetlag instantly disappear unlike anything available in Europe. It was his eureka moment.

Mateschitz proposed they become partners to sell the tonic in Europe with one significant alteration: the tonic should be carbonated to better appeal to Western palates and it would be renamed Red Bull. The idea intrigued Yoovidhya so they invested equally and established a partnership of 49 percent each, with the remaining 2 percent going to Yoovidhya’s son.

For the next eighteen months Kastner’s team developed approximately 50 different designs for Red Bull. Mateschitz finally chose the now-distinctive blue-and-silver can featuring two confrontational brawny bulls. But none of the slogans Kastner suggested felt right to Mateschitz, who wanted consumers to know straight off the drink’s effect. “Nothing satisfied him, and I was finally so upset that I told him to find another agency,” Kastner admits. “He asked me to think about it for one more night. And at 3:00 a.m. it came to me: Red Bull Gives You Wings. I called him right then and told him it was the last one I’d suggest. But he said, That’s it!”

By distancing Red Bull from soda products, Mateschitz could market Red Bull as a unique premium drink that sold for a premium price. Mateschitz notes, “If we’d only had a 15 percent price premium, we’d merely be a premium brand among soft drinks, and not a different category altogether.”

He introduced Red Bull first in Austria followed by Hungary, the U.K., and Germany in 1994, where it was an immediate hit selling nearly one million cans a day.

Mateschitz also courted controversy to gain free publicity. “Newspapers asked, Is it a drug? Is it harmless? Is it dangerous?” he says. “That ambivalence is so important. We expected it. It was a part of the strategy from the beginning. The most dangerous thing for a branded product is low interest. We would make the brand interesting enough that people wanted to get their hands on it.”

Notoriously private, his staff nicknamed him the Yeti because of his almost obsessive low profile.

“I don’t believe in 50 friends. I believe in a much smaller number. Nor do I care about society events. It’s the most senseless use of time. When I do go out, from time to time, it’s just to convince myself again that I’m not missing a lot.”

Even though he turned 70 in 2014, Mateschitz remains athletic: riding horses, flying planes, and racing off-road motorcycles.

When asked if the rumors were true that Coca-Cola wanted to buy his company, Mateschitz reiterated he has no plans to either sell or take Red Bull public. “It’s not a question of money; it’s a question of fun,” he stresses. “Not only that, can you imagine me in a shareholders’ meeting?”

Clay Mathile

When he joined Iams, the company had already been in business more than two decades. At that time, Iams had become a regional dog-food company with annual revenues of about $500,000.

From the beginning, Mathile took a hands-on approach, spending weekends at dog shows to hand out samples of Iams products that his children had helped him package. Iams and Eukanuba jointly occupied a unique niche, focusing on pet foods that offered higher levels of protein instead of the unhealthy grain-based ingredients that made up the bulk of competitors’ products. Belief in the company and the importance of nutrition led Mathile to buy half of the business from its founder, Paul Iams, in 1975.

The timing couldn’t have been much worse. A shortage of the high-quality ingredients Iams used had plunged the company into a crisis, aggravated by the petroleum shortages and the soaring cost of transportation. Iams’ survival was by no means assured. Things on the home front were precarious too: Mathile’s children were in college, and he had mortgaged the family home to come up with the $100,000 he paid Paul Iams for half-ownership of the company. “I was scared to death,” Mathile said of the experience.

…helped Iams grow from a half-million-dollar company to one with revenues of more than twelve million, and in 1982, he bought the remaining shares from Paul Iams. In 1980, he had become the company’s president and CEO, but this purchase felt like his biggest step yet. In his memoir, Mathile wrote, “I felt overwhelmed. Owning a company that was making $12.5 million in sales a year, yet was further in debt than I’d ever imagined possible, was daunting.”

Mathile also implemented a new rule: Iams should only hire people who loved pets. “We had people working in the sales area that didn’t like dogs, and they were working dog shows,” he said in an interview with Entrepreneur.

Dean Metropoulos

The name Metropoulos is not a famous one, but Dean, along with his two sons, are the undisputed kings at what they do. Before Twinkies, they came in and bought the old American beer company Pabst Blue Ribbon, and have since repositioned the brand to a new generation of customers – primarily, young hipsters in the States and Asian businessmen – while retaining its die-hard working class Midwestern fans. Over the last few decades Greek immigrant Dean Metropoulos has bought, restructured, revived, and sold a series of packaged food brands, including Chef Boyardee, Vlasic Pickles, Bumblebee Tuna, Aunt Jemima, Duncan Hines, PAM cooking spray, Gulden’s mustard, and Log Cabin. His success has made him a billionaire; he ranks No. 377 on the Forbes 400.

Their firm doesn’t have a corporate website. And they’re not big on the private-equity conference circuit.

Arnon Milchan

His life took a defining turn when he was twenty-one: his father died suddenly and left him the family business, a fertilizer company. This same company had been behind the first sprinklers to irrigate Israel upon its establishment, and there had been a number of military contacts as well. By the time of Milchan’s father’s death, the business was not performing well financially.

“This is a man who made his fortune by screwing with nature,” said a former secretary of Milchan’s. “He’s the Israeli who made the desert bloom. It is amazing when you think about it. He could have retired at the age of twenty-two.”

During the seventies and at least until the mid-eighties, Milchan ran as many as thirty companies in seventeen different countries. Not all of these existed for the purpose of procuring arms for Israel (those deals were worth hundreds of millions of dollars); Milchan had business interests in chemicals, plastics, electronics, and aerospace. Milchan even convinced the then Shah of Iran to award him the contract to build much of the new Tehran airport.

“In Hollywood, they don’t like working with an arms dealer, ideologically,” he said in an interview with the Israeli current-events show Uvda, “…with someone who lives off selling machine guns and killing. Instead of someone talking to me about a script, I had to spend half an hour explaining that I’m not an arms dealer. If people only knew how many times I risked my life, back and forth, again and again, for my country.”

“I’ll say it in my own words. I love Israel, and any way I can help Israel, I will. I’ll do it again and again. If you say I’m an arms dealer, that’s your problem. In Israel, there is practically no business that does not have something to do with defense.”

Henry Nicholas

Nicholas, along with his partner, Dr. Henry Samueli, founded Broadcom back in 1991, each with an investment of $5000. They worked out of Nicholas’s condominium in Redondo Beach. Within ten years, they were both billionaires, following the path of so many others in the 1990s, with a jaw-dropping increase in stock prices following an IPO.

Nicholas was the business man, yet suddenly resigned as CEO in 2003, citing personal issues.

He also had a serious substance abuse problem, and was arrested in 2008 and indicted for drug-trafficking, among other charges, some directly linked to Broadcom cooking the books. But it was this arrest that had the journalists swirling, and forever tarnishing Henry Nicholas.

Marsy, a 21-year-old senior at UC Santa Barbara, was killed, shot in the face by an ex-boyfriend. Devastated, Nicholas and his mother mustered all their strength to fight to keep his sister’s killer in prison, and eventually led the effort to pass California’s Proposition 9, which to this day is known as “Marsy’s Law,” a crime victim’s bill of rights.

The loss of his sister, friends have said, left Nicholas forever scarred. He always said that she was the smarter one and would have done great things.

And in 2002 Stacey filed for divorce. Later that year Nicholas sent her the rambling 1,800-word e-mail in which he admitted doing drugs while Broadcom negotiated to buy chip-design company Mobilink Telecom and that he wanted to leave the company because he was no longer fit to run it. And so, in early 2003 Nicholas stepped down as head of Broadcom, to work on his marriage.

…yet Stacey didn’t file for divorce until 2006, three years after Nicholas had left Broadcom. She claimed that Nicholas had a basement lair where he had orgies, with endless supplies of cocaine and Ecstasy, and prostitutes – and that guests’ drinks were unknowingly spiked with Ecstasy.

Jon Oringer

The early days of the Internet were the Wild West. People used copyrighted material with abandon, the ability to police infringement nonexistent. Slowly traditional media accepted, then embraced, digital media. Departments were established to protect copyright and ferret out infringers.

Oringer first showed up on the radar when he developed the world’s first pop-up blockers while a computer science graduate student at Columbia University. But it was during his efforts to create an effective pop-up blocker that he got his next idea.

So with a couple of thousand dollars in savings and without any formal photography background, Oringer invested in an $800 Canon Digital Rebel and walked the streets of New York City looking for the most mundane and generic images: an tree-fresh apple, the skyline, a cab, a flower, a dog playing in the park, a sunrise. “I started in 2003 by shooting 100,000 images – everything I could find – over about six months,” Oringer says, “I would go all over the world and take pictures. In a day I could easily take thousands. I culled the images down to 30,000.” He set up a website, called it Shutterstock, and posted his images. To generate traffic and users, he advertised his product cheaply using platforms such as Google AdWords.

“At around 50 employees, you get to the point where you can’t see what’s going on all the time. So you start to have weekly check-ins, and you have days that go by without knowing the pertinent details. But you need to be sure that everyone is kind of moving in the right direction and thinking about things the right way. At the end of the day, we found the people we needed to find and we continue to find the people we need for future growth.”

Unlike other top photo stock agencies, Shutterstock does not own its content. The site’s contributors – which include photographers, illustrators, videographers, and artists – retain ownership of their copyrights. The arrangement enabled Shutterstock to keep its capital expenditures low and attract a deep talent pool.

This has made Oringer the first billionaire of the New York tech scene, dubbed Silicon Alley.

Bob Parsons

He grew up in Baltimore’s blue collar inner-city and his family struggled financially. He worked a variety of odds jobs to help make ends meet and to have a little pocket cash.

Parsons enlisted at the height of the countercultural revolution when the anti-Viet Nam War sentiment was at its most heated. At a time when people across the country were protesting America’s foreign policy and an estimated 50,000 young men went to Canada to avoid the draft, Parsons voluntarily became a soldier in the Marines.

Parsons approached college with a completely different attitude than he had in high school. “Maybe because of my Viet Nam experience, maybe it was the thought of returning to the steel mill, or maybe it was just because I matured a little bit, but unlike high school I did quite well in college. I found myself eager to learn and study all kinds of subjects.” He graduated magna cum laude then passed the exam to become a certified public accountant.

“I learned to program a computer quite by accident,” Parsons recalls, saying he was in a bookstore when he happened to see a book on learning to program in BASIC. After reading it he started writing some programs. “At that time I worked for a subsidiary of Control Data Corporation, which had a computer terminal. Eventually I was able to get those first programs to work. Each of them did something that I needed for my job. Then I became hooked.”

“Knowing how to sell software is quite different from knowing how to build software,” he notes. “I went broke twice trying to get this little venture up and running. But the third try was the charm and I finally learned how to sell software.”

“Almost nothing works the first time it’s attempted. Just because what you’re doing does not seem to be working, doesn’t mean it won’t work. It just means that it might not work the way you’re doing it. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and you wouldn’t have an opportunity.”

Parsons opportunistically sold the company to Intuit for $64 million in 1994, right before the dot-com bubble burst. “I saw the writing on the wall for the shrink wrap software business,” he says. “It was going to go away. So I sold the company to Intuit, moved to Arizona and, as per my deal with Intuit, retired for one year. I soon realized that retirement wasn’t for me.”

Parsons says he didn’t start Go Daddy to make money. “I started Go Daddy to have something to do. Throughout the process of building the company – as I have always been the only investor – I came creepy close to going broke.”

His idea to “make a little money from a lot of people” paid off in a huge way. In 2011, Parsons sold two-thirds of Go Daddy for a reported $2.25 billion, $930 million of it in cash.

“I came into the world with nothing. I grew up poor as a church mouse. So, I see no reason why when I move on and my lovely wife Renee moves on, it shouldn’t all go back.”

Kevin Plank

…using synthetics already on the market and popular in athletes’ uniforms, Plank wanted to design T-shirts that would wick water away from the body and keep the wearer dry. It was a simple idea, but at the time, no such product was widely available on the market.

In 1996, Plank founded Under Armour. He was twenty-three then, a senior at U of M working on a bachelor’s degree in business administration, and working out of his grandmother’s basement in Washington DC.

According to Sal Fasciana, the sewing business’s owner, “This young kid had $100,000 worth of product but no place to make it. He was in trouble.”

Plank travelled to Ohio to model his product, and Fasciana advised him on how to handle the pricing. “I showed him what he knows today,” Fasciana has been quoted as saying. For the record, Plank agrees.

Plank travelled up and down the East Coast promoting his product via samples he kept in the trunk of his car. After his first team sale in 1996, which brought in $17,000, Plank began to see the light at the end of the tunnel. As friends of his moved on to careers in professional football, he would send them his T-shirts and ask them to give them to their fellow players. Word of mouth began to spread…

Plank had used $18,000 of his own money, earned from a previous venture selling flowers on campus at the University of Maryland; maxed out five credit cards for another $40,000; and gotten a Small Business Administration loan for $250,000 to start the company. By 2001, the company was financially struggling, so Plank turned to Prudent Capital, a subordinated debt fund based in Washington, DC, for financing. Plank kept the extent of the company’s financial situation to himself, however. “There were some days I sat there and said to myself, ‘I’m totally broke,’” he has been quoted as saying, “I remember one time I really questioned myself, wondering if this was the right idea. But I never told that to anybody else. If anybody ever asked how the company was doing, I was always upbeat.”

Under Armour’s corporate culture is very much a derivative of Plank’s values as an athlete. Meetings are referred to as “huddles,” and workers are expected to “manage the clock,” “know your position,” and “respect your teammates,” among other things. Despite this idiosyncratic approach, Plank commands a great deal of respect.

“Why sell to some weenie and watch them take the company apart?” Plank says when asked about the idea of being acquired. “Then we have to ask someone, ‘Can we leave now?’ “No way.”

J. Joe Ricketts

As of December 31, 2013, Ameritrade had 5,836,000 funded customer accounts, net annual revenue of nearly $3 billion, and client assets of $481 billion. The man behind this juggernaut, the brains behind the operation, who built the business from scratch, is burly J. Joe Ricketts, of Omaha, Nebraska.

…until 1975, when, with $12,500 he and his wife had scrimped and saved for, he opened his own trading firm, First Omaha Securities.

Ricketts was focused squarely on the future, on the belief that Americans would “take investing into their own hands.”

Ricketts took this to the next logical step, assuming that if people were keen to buy generic canned goods, wouldn’t they do the same when it came to brokerage firms?

“the vision” didn’t really strike until 1988, when Ricketts decided to take a technological leap of faith, in defiance of focus groups and his key advisers, and incorporate the touch-tone phone into Ameritrade’s arsenal, allowing the customer to make trades with a push of a button. This had never been done before when it came to trading, anywhere. There was no precedent – and it changed everything.

Until then, the typical Ameritrade customer made about four trades per year, but by bringing in the touch-tone phone this number jumped, at the end of that first fiscal year, to twenty trades per customer, a five-fold increase. Ricketts had always aimed high – always felt that his firm could be the largest discount broker around, to outdo Charles Schwab…

Experts and analysts mark this decision, the one that foresaw that the future of discount trading would be done primarily online, while others scoffed, as the one that put Ameritrade on the path to number one.

Ricketts and his wife kept their personal life very simple, even with Ameritrade’s astronomical growth. “No vacations, no restaurants, no movies – only the bare minimum is what I took out of my salary,” Ricketts remembers. Everything went back into Ameritrade, which to Ricketts was also a family, where he gave all Ameritrade employees a profit-sharing incentive long before the company went public in 1997.

Renzo Rosso

When Goldschmied had had enough, he invited Rosso over to dinner one night in order to fire him. He told Rosso, “I like you, and you definitely have what it takes, but you don’t want to work hard.” Rosso went home that night and came up with a plan to increase production and decrease costs. He came back the next day and presented this plan to Goldschmied, who, impressed, gave him a second chance. Within a week’s time, production had doubled.

“Italy was quite boring,” Rosso said in one interview about his early years. “My dream was America – James Dean, Coca-Cola. The first time I arrived in the United States, I thought, Mama Mia! Italy is too bourgeois!”

“You don’t realize how difficult it was – we were pioneers,” he said. “When I started a ‘vintage’ collection, nobody had heard of it. Today it is easy to talk about ‘vintage’; twenty-five years ago when we did stonewashed jeans, customers sent them back. What guy wanted $99 jeans when $50 was the normal US price? Every style step was very difficult.” The gamble, however, paid off. Their revenues more than tripled in that first year, going from US$2.8 million to $10.8 million.

When he was starting out, denim had come to be a sort of uniform for the masses, but at the same time, it symbolized what he called an “American myth.” To recreate the vintage look he was after, he would hand-scrub the fabric with stones and sandpaper. In other words, he has an artist’s eye and conceptual single-mindedness, an entrepreneur’s dogged perseverance, as well as a businessman’s knack for spotting an opportunity. Unafraid to do things his own way, he has avoided the traditional suit-and-tie approach to business, and this attitude extends to the people who work for him.

Dick & Edward Stack

Dick relayed his frustration to his grandmother. The two were very close, and she asked how much he would need to start his own store. “About 300 dollars,” Dick answered, still despondent. So his grandmother retrieved a cookie jar and handed Dick the money, which amounted to the lion’s share of her life savings, and encouraged him to “go do it yourself.”

Having worked there since he was a kid, Stack rose quickly, from store clerk to merchandising manager, store manager and eventually President, until replacing his father as CEO. Edward Stack has what some refer to as “vision.”

“We didn’t manage the balance sheet as well as we needed to,” Stack admitted in an interview with CNN back in 2010. “We had to go to the banks on bended knee. It was a near-death experience that we never forgot.” The key lesson Stack learned in the early days was that “there’s more to a business than just growing sales.” Since 1994, Dick’s has opened stores at a slower, more conservative rate of about 15 percent a year. Stack recently predicted some 800 stores by 2020. Taking a deliberate approach proved wise for other reasons too. “We’ve grown in concentric circles,” Stack says, moving from upstate New York into Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and the Carolinas. “If you make mistakes, the mistakes are smaller and more localized. You can identify and fix them.”

Stack has clearly set the bar high against his competitors, some of them apparently going to great lengths to unearth the secrets of Dick’s success. In a bizarre and comical twist, on February 20, 2014, Dick’s lodged a formal complaint in Mercer County Court, New Jersey, against Mitch Modell, CEO of NYC-based Modell’s Sporting Goods, for impersonating a Dick’s senior vice president, and brusquely requesting access to the backroom and interrogating management on their business practices. The suit also alleges that Modell claimed to have had a meeting with Stack at the same Princeton, New Jersey store. Modell has never commented on the suit, which has sought to ban Modell, who once appeared on TV’s Undercover Boss, along with any of his staff and associates, from entering any Dick’s Sporting Goods stores.

From a modest family business with two stores in Binghamton, New York, to a nationwide franchise employing over 26,000 people, with revenues exceeding $6 billion annually, Dick’s Sporting Goods is a modern American success story of the highest order, engineered largely by one man, Edward Stack.

Alfred Taubman

In 1983, Taubman bought the prominent British auction house Sotheby’s, stepping in – by invitation – and acting as a “white knight” when the company was facing a hostile takeover. Initial reactions from the art world were contemptuous: Taubman was seen as a “shopping-mall guy,” as he put it at the time. However, he turned out to be an excellent fit. Sotheby’s was in decline; Taubman, by applying lessons he had learned from developing malls that catered to affluent shoppers, managed to reverse the company’s financial slide.

The term Taubman coined was “threshold resistance,” and it meant that whatever barrier – physical or psychological – that might keep people from entering a retail space needed to be minimized or removed altogether.

Hamdi Ulukaya

Ulukaya’s golden egg is Greek yogurt, although he is Turkish. His company is called Chobani, which means “Shepherd” in Turkish, and it accounts for roughly one half of all Greek yogurt sales in the United States…

“I was sitting in the office of my little cheese-making company and saw a small ad on a flyer. There was a fully-equipped yogurt plant for sale. I threw the ad in the garbage can. Half an hour later I picked it out and called. The plant happened to be an hour away. I went to visit, and found a 90-year-old Kraft plant they were closing. There were 55 or 60 people working to close it down. One of the managers gave me a tour. From the price, you could tell it was being sold as junk. When I left there, I don’t know why, but I just wanted to buy it. An advisor of mine asked me if I was nuts. He used some nasty words to convince me not to think about it, because he really cared. He said that there is this humongous company that is getting out of the category, the plant, and the town, and if there were any value to the plant, they would know.” Which begs the question, why would Ulukaya risk it? For years, he had wondered why yogurt in the US was, for want of a better word, terrible. It was thick and sugary, more like a dessert than something nutritious. He also remembered all the tourists who went to Turkey or Greece, and within 15 minutes of their return to the States started telling about how much they preferred the yogurt there. You could find so-called Greek yogurt in the US, but primarily in big cities and almost exclusively in upscale grocery stores. Ulukaya saw a market – a potentially big one – and put all of his efforts into creating such a yogurt with mass appeal. Ulukaya hired everyone that was still at the old Kraft plant, and they’re all still with him and, as stock owners, counting their lucky stars. At first, however, he almost had to beg them to stay. “It was quiet,” Ulukaya remembers. “A closed plant is like a cemetery, it really is. The walls will talk to you; the machines will talk to you if you really listen to them.”

Ulukaya even brought in a “yogurt master” from Turkey. Yes, they exist.

By the end of 2009 Ulukaya knew that his larger rivals were preparing to launch their own Greek varieties – and he was told that he should double his production to 400,000 cases per week to counter. Ulukaya thought for a moment and had a better idea: produce 1,000,000 cases per week.

Mark Vadon

In 1998 he went to Tiffany’s looking for an engagement ring and looking decidedly casual in his shorts and flip-flops. He left empty-handed after feeling patronized by the haughty employees. His experiences at many other stores weren’t much better.

He found a website called Internet Diamonds that provided detailed descriptions of various diamonds and a toll-free number so consumers could call for assistance. Vadon found a great engagement ring at a reasonable price. He was so taken by the experience that he flew to Seattle to meet with Doug Williams, a diamond wholesaler, who owned the web site. During their face-to-face Vadon told Williams he wanted to buy the web site.

Vadon then lined up suppliers and distributors to transform Internet Diamonds into a full-service, user-friendly site targeting bachelors. He also changed the name to Blue Nile.

In its first year Blue Nile earned $14 million. And it kept growing, through the dotcom bust and beyond, eventually expanding into brick and mortar stores where hard sell was forbidden and the salespeople did not work on commission. Fast forward nine years and Blue Nile is selling close to $200 million a year.

Vadon admits he incorporated some of Starbucks’ business philosophy. He recalls one executive saying, “There are one thousand little things that impact the customer where we’re 10 percent better than anybody else.” Vadon took it to heart and stayed focused on all the tiny little details that matter to customers, instead of taking meetings. “I talk to executives who spend a lot of time going to conferences or conferring with ‘industry experts.’ You’ll never see me doing that. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken at an industry event. My team is filled with some of the smartest people in e-commerce. If we listen to our customers and immerse ourselves in the data, the answers are here. Maybe that’s why I don’t listen to consultants. And maybe that’s one of the reasons we survived the dot-com bust.”

Having a true faith is the most difficult thing in the world. Many will try to take it from you. The more we told people that this made sense, the more people thought we were crazy.”

“I couldn’t believe how hard it was to buy stuff. We had to leave Babies R’ Us because I was completely overwhelmed. Then the boutiques were too expensive and really limited.” Mark commiserated with his former Blue Nile president Darrell Cavens, also a new dad, and they agreed the world needed a place to buy affordable baby and young children items so they created an online, e-commerce store to fill that need.

Once again Vadon’s business model bucked conventional wisdom. The company does not take returns, it sells obscure and lesser-known brands, and instead of hiring models he invites parents to bring in their kids to model for free in exchange for getting to keep the pictures.

The company made $700 million in sales in 2013, more than doubling their sales for 2012.

David Walentas

“But I just wanted to be a real estate developer,” Walentas remembers. “I was attracted to the ability to build, to collect rent, to own it.” There was just one problem: he was broke, had no background in real estate, and no chance in hell of getting a bank to back his dreams.

When asked by the New York Times back in 2010 why his shirt cuff read “NO GUTS, NO GLORY,” Walentas answered, with a big grin, “It’s on all my dress shirts. To succeed in life you have to take chances – no risk, no gain. People used to ask me what I do, and I said, I go to battle every day.”

Les Wexner

When he tried to convince his father that sportswear sold best and was what women actually wanted to wear, his father refused to listen, even telling Les that he would “never be a merchant.” The father’s loss was the son’s gain: Wexler borrowed $5000 from an aunt and opened his first store, The Limited. The name came from Wexler’s conviction that the store ought to specialize.

Sales on the first day of business were $473 (quite respectable for that place and time); by the end of The Limited’s first year in operation, the store had sold $160,000 worth of merchandise.

It was Taubman who taught Wexler that for a business like The Limited, location was more important than advertising.

Wexner wanted to branch out, and he saw an opportunity in 1982 with the struggling lingerie company Victoria’s Secret. Founded in 1977 by a Stanford Graduate School of Business alumnus as a place where men ought to feel comfortable shopping for lingerie for their wives, Victoria’s Secret had grown to six stores and was grossing about $6 million annually. However, the company was in trouble. The tunnel-vision focus on male customers began to work against it. Wexner stepped in, bought it for a million dollars, and embarked upon a major overhaul. Under Wexner, Victoria’s Secret became the company that it is today, with its focus on women customers rather than men. Having already spent three decades studying women’s fashion tastes, and successfully marketing clothing to them, Wexner did away with the more burlesque-style undergarments Victoria Secret had been selling. The new brand identity offered a combination of sexiness, comfort, and a bit of European flair. In the famous Victoria’s Secret catalog, Wexler even listed a fake corporate headquarters address in London. They were actually based in Columbus, Ohio.

He was also one of the “pioneers” of open-air shopping malls…

Wilks Brothers

Back in the 1950s, the brothers’ father, Voy Wilks, was a struggling factory worker trying to raise a family of seven in a three-room building that was previously a goat shed.

The family had already decided to make a modest plunge into the fracking business, since they basically lived on or near the land where the boom had begun. Yet when they looked around for a company to provide the mechanical and technical support, they came up short, which led them to found their own firm. Necessity really is a great mother. Frach Tech covered the entire gamut of fracking, from design and construction, to the deployment of the pumper rigs drillers used to blast open shale formations. After the shale gas industry took off, the brothers found themselves riding a wave that continued until 2011, when they sold their share of the company, by then the third-biggest fracking services outfit in the country, for $3.5 billion, to an investment firm based out of Singapore. In under a decade, Frach Tech went from a handful of employees to nearly 4000 people, with their last year’s revenues topping $ 2 billion.

Zhang Xin

Zhang, just 47, was born in Beijing just before Chairman Mao unleashed the Cultural Revolution, which proved a nightmare for university educated people like her parents, who, along with Zhang, were sent to the fields for “re-education.” Untold millions, referred to by Mao as “running dogs,” would pay the highest price. Ironically, in the 1950s, her family had come from Burma, to seek out a new world order and opportunity in Red China, only to be imprisoned by the government. Yet despite the rural hardship, Zhang’s family were fortunate and survived, with Zhang returning to Beijing with her mother, where they lived in a filthy fifth-floor tenement flat, endured poverty and hardship, subsisting largely on canteen rice served out of large iron bowls. “I was born and grew up when the city was very quiet: no cars, no shops, no lights and no machines. People were just on bicycles,” Zhang later told CNN At fourteen, she and her mother were able to move the relative mecca of Hong Kong, where she spent five years in low-paid factory jobs, manufacturing toys, clothes and electronics, under conditions which today would be universally condemned, trying to save enough to go to England for an education.

Yet instead of remaining in her comfortable life on Wall Street, Zhang returned to Beijing, where she met her husband, Pan Shiyi, and together they started SOHO China.

But despite her financial success, Zhang, who practices the Baha’i faith, avoids excessive trappings of wealth, even suggesting her 14-year-old son find a job in McDonald’s or KFC. He tried, but was too young to be accepted.