When Ford made his first cars, how many farriers did he put out of business? How many children, however, did he help get to school? Without disruption in industries by business leaders, the world we know today wouldn’t be recognizable. The cool part is, we have a front row seat to more disruption and new technology than has ever been made. You may only know some of the names on this list by what they’ve made. But chances are, many of them are on their way to becoming household names.
10. Evan Spiegel
Evan Spiegel has turned heads since emerging from Stanford’s Product Design program with a few friends and iOS’s first “real time picture messaging app.” Snapchat, as the app is appropriately dubbed, has enabled users to share over 65 billion images and messages that “disappear” after a set number of seconds.
Spiegel is shaking things up the most, however, with his actions away from the keyboard. When Mark Zuckerberg, whom many have compared Spiegel to, e-mailed Speigel, hoping to meet with him and broker a deal for the messaging app, Spiegel replied “I’m happy to meet you…if you come to me.” With an excuse for visiting an employee in Los Angeles, Zuckerberg made the trip, only to outline how Facebook’s “Poke” app would debut in a few days and crush Snapchat.
As Zuckerberg predicted, Poke shot to number one in the app store within the following days. All of the publicity, however, was good for Snapchat, and it soon rebounded. Snapchat appeared to be on to something. Younger users had seen the perils of an undeletable internet history, and wanted an alternative. As Poke fell out of the App store top 30 over the coming months, Snapchat retained the first spot, and went on to win the Crunchies “mobile app of 2013″ award.
The story continues when Zuckerberg, realizing that Snapchat was truly onto something (Snapchats average user age is 18, Facebook’s is now 40) offered Spiegel a whopping US$3 billion in cash. US$3 billion in cash is an insane windfall for any young founder - but for an un-monetized app with no plan for monetization, it was unheard of. In typical tech wunderkind fashion, however, Spiegel turned the offer down.
9. Dave Hakkens
Dave Hakkens didn’t turn down an unsolicited offer for US$3 billion. He is, however, at the forefront of disrupting the massive telecommunications industry. Actually, through his PhoneBloks project, Hakkens hopes to steer existing industries away from manufacturing products that are sold and replaced as whole products, and replace them with modular products.
This may be a little abstract, but lets take the example the pushed Hakkens to pursue his idea. The camera on his phone broke, and there was no way to repair it save through an entirely new phone. With the goal of reducing waste, and increasing the life-cycle and level of recyclability of products, Phonebloks was born. Phonebloks doesn’t necessarily aim to create all of these modular products, they do aim to continue and develop the idea of modularity, and get an industry’s attention so that the world can have the best (and most sustainable) mobile phone, for themselves, and for the environment.
8. Sheryl Sandberg
Though her professional achievements, and close to US$1 billion estimated net worth are nothing to sneeze at, it’s Sheryl Sandberg’s work on the role of women in the corporate world that is really shaking things up.
Her main work is this area began with a TED talk in 2010 titled “Why we have too few women leaders.” Through several speeches (notable at Barnard College graduation, and the Class Day ceremony at the Harvard Business School) she continued to hone her message. In 2013, she released her first book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead.
Lean In focuses on the barriers preventing women from taking leadership roles in the workplace, including discrimination, gender based biases, as well as barriers created by women themselves through internalizing gender roles. Lean In has been a best seller since it was released, has spurred furious debate, and has led to the formation of the Lean In organization, an organization that seeks to provide an active and supportive community for women, educational material, and small “circle” meetings.
7. Garrett Camp
Heard of Stumbleupon? Garrett Camp founded the platform in graduate school. He then proceeded to grow the web-discovery site into a community of 25 million registered users. 7 years later, Camp moved on to another project: Uber.
Uber was the first on-demand car service available via an app. The company’s motto “Everyone’s Private Driver” hints at something everyone could use (that’s not a taxi), yet the road to success has been fraught with legal issues. From cities changing laws to make it illegal to use GPS devices as meters, to laws stating that luxury car services must pick up customers more than 30 minutes before departure time, Uber has faced it all, and for now, is undeterred.
Uber has now expanded to over 120 cities in the U.S. and abroad. Uber is disrupting a variety of industries, and astonishingly, is now worth almost as much as Hertz Global Holdings, and Avis Budget Group (rental car giants) combined.
6. Tony Hsieh
As CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh has been shaking things up for years. An initial voicemail from Nick Swinmurn that mentioned “footwear in the US is a US$40 billion market, and 5% of that is already being sold in paper mail order catalogues,” saw Zappos started with US$1.6 million in 2000. By 2001, revenues reached US$1 billion.
Though Zappos has now been acquired by Amazon, they haven’t stopped innovating. One of the most interesting stories of the last few years has been Zappos shift to Holacracy, a flat hierarchy for businesses in which there aren’t managers per se. Yes, Hsieh is in charge of the managers of a company that doesn’t have managers. A second innovative bit of management from Hsieh comes in the form of a bonus paid to employees who quit. Yes, you too could earn US$3,000 just for quitting. This offer, made to every new hire at the company, ensures that people truly want to be at the company. And it supposedly has led to better talent and more motivated team members in the office.
5. Chad Dickerson
Etsy takes an age old idea and gives it a modern platform. It also provides hope for ventures promising to “make the world a better place” by supporting many of its 1 million+ sellers in what it calls the “maker movement.” Goods that are sold on Etsy generally include art, photography, clothing, jewellery, food, bath, and beauty products, quilts, knick-knacks, toys, beads, wire, and jewellery-making tools.
Some items are designated “vintage” and must be over 20 years old. Etsy takes in US$0.20 for every purchase, but sellers get the rest of what was over US$1 billion in total annual transactions last year.
Chad Dickerson has been a large part of this success, nearly tripling their user base in the last 2 years, and growing revenue exponentially. Dickerson has also helped to define the company’s vision in a particularly unique way. According to Dickerson, Etsy is “about real human interaction,” “a platform that provides meaning to people, and an opportunity to validate their art, and craft,” and “existential satisfaction” through getting something real, from a real person (during every transaction).
4. Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi Nakamoto is a massive mover and shaker in business, and no one knows who exactly he is. Nakamoto is the person or group of people who created the Bitcoin protocol, and reference software, Bitcoin Core. According to a P2P Foundation profile, Nakamoto is a 37-year-old male from Japan.
However, other details such as posting history and idioms of speech suggest he was perhaps born in the British commonwealth or currently living in the Central or Eastern American time zones.
In case you don’t know, Bitcoin is the first decentralized crypto currency. That means that Bitcoins aren’t held in a bank like traditional currency, but rather kept track of by a peer-to-peer public ledger that keeps track of how many bitcoins individual (and anonymous users) have. It also means that no central organization creates more bitcoins. Instead, individual users called “miners” use their computers to solve complex computational problems and extend the public ledger in exchange for newly minted bitcoins.
Bitcoins have been a favourite of those in favour of supreme privacy, criminals, and even futures investors. A meteoric rise in value from a fraction of a cent per bitcoin, to nearly US$1100 per bitcoin saw many early adopters become very wealthy, though Bitcoins are not endorsed and even prohibited by several nations. Being perhaps the earliest adopter of Bitcoin, Nakamoto is now a very wealthy man thought to be worth up to US$1.1 billion as of late 2013.
3. Sebastian Thrun
Sebastion Thrun, CEO and co-founder of Udacity is perhaps the most vocal of a small handful of innovators turning education on its head. Udacity has built itself from Stanford University’s free online computer science courses in 2011. Offering MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) in vocational courses for professionals, by 2014, Udacity had 1.6 million users in 12 full courses and 26 freeware courses.
With the recent trends in MOOCs for credit, Udacity has further validated the value of massive online courses. Users can pay to have their identity verified, and their typing signature tracked for certified courses. A masters in computer science from top ranked Georgia Tech is yet another first for massive online education. Vastly cutting down education costs, and opening classes to up to 100,000′s of students, Udacity, led by Sebastian Thrun, is turning education on its head.
2. Astro Teller
Astro Teller has the perfect name for his job. Teller is the Captain of Moonshots at the Google[x] lab, a semi-secret facility run by Google that seeks to “improve technologies by a factor of 10, and develop ‘science fiction sounding solutions’.”
Even if you haven’t heard of Teller’s names, you have probably heard (or heard rumour of) some of the inventions coming out of his lab. Google[x] creates things like Google Glass, Smart Contact Lenses that measure Glucose, and balloons that provide internet access to remote locations.
Teller and Google[x]‘s approach to user interface and technology is thought provoking, and in his own words “anti-technology,” as shown in this video.
1. Elon Musk
Fully electric cars, private space travel, subsonic air commuting vehicles. If any one business leader is going to see us through into a climate changed, intergalactic and sustainable future, it’s Elon Musk. This 42 year old, Canadian-American is currently the CEO & CTO of SpaceX and CEO & Chief Product Architect of Tesla Motors.
Musk started early. As a young boy in South Africa he taught himself to code, and sold the code for a video game named Blastar for US$500 at the age of 12. He attended Queen’s School of Business in Kingston, Ontario, and University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated with degrees in economics and physics. After two days of classes in Stanford’s applied physics PhD, he dropped out. He’s been unstoppable since.
After getting rich on some early, more down to earth businesses such as Zip2, and X.com (an online financial services company that merged with PayPal), Musk started looking at the big picture. In his latest ventures, Musk is seeking to solve perhaps the biggest problem we have: the preservation of the human race.
Sustainability is key in Musk’s interest in companies like SolarCity, the largest provider of solar power systems in the US (he’s the largest shareholder), and Tesla Motors, makers of fully electric cars. In an even more audacious attempt at sustainability, Musk also believes that humanity needs to put men on Mars. He’s putting his money where his mouth is on this, as he’s spent over US$100 million of his own fortune on his company SpaceX. SpaceX is the first private company to use a liquid-fuelled vehicle to put a satellite into Earth’s orbit, and currently holds a contract to deliver cargo to the International Space Station.
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