Over the last couple of decades, many startups have done quite well for themselves, thanks to their unique products and services. Not only that, but they have amassed tons of wealth for their founders and top leaders. These companies have disrupted the industry and carved a niche for themselves in the market. They have created new benchmarks for what it means to be extraordinary in business, not just in the country but worldwide.
Google’s inception story began back in 1995. The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two PhD students at Stanford University, as a way “of organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful.” They started by creating a search engine called Backrub and introduced a new algorithm called PageRank. This allowed them to determine the importance of a page based on the number and quality of links pointing back to it. Backrub was later renamed to Google, a word-play on the mathematical term “googol.” It received $1,00,000 in funding from Andy Bechtolsheim, marking the company’s official birth in August 1998.
Today, the company dominates the market by a huge margin and has a valuation of $2.29 trillion, making it one of the most successful start-ups in the world.
Facebook was started as a social networking site called Facemash for Harvard students by Mark Zuckerburg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes in 2004. Over time, this platform became one of the biggest social media networks worldwide, with nearly three billion users reported in 2021.
Although founders kept access to the platform free of charge, they found ways to earn revenue via advertisers and certain premium features. Back in 2021, Facebook announced that it would change the name of its parent company to Meta Platforms, creating the space for advancements in virtual reality technology. Meta currently has a market cap of $1.46 trillion.
Netflix
The popular OTT platform Netflix had rather humble beginnings. The global giant started as a DVD rental service by mail back in 1997, by co-founders Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph.
The company’s popularity seemed to boom with the spread of the internet, as it had amassed over a million subscribers by 2001 and over 6.3 million by 2006. Since its inception, the company has undergone a massive transformation. From its initial focus on recommendation and rental services, the company quickly shifted its focus to streaming services, resulting in its global dominance in the industry. Currently, Netflix has a market capitalization of $326.68 billion.
Airbnb
Airbnb started in 2007 when Brian Chesky and Joe Gabbia were broke and decided to rent out air mattresses in their apartment to travelers since all the hotels in the area were booked. This became the starting point of what would eventually become one of the biggest disruptors of the hospitality industry.
Chesky, Gabbia, and their third founder, Nathan Blecharczyk, today privately own a company with over 3 million lodgings in 200 countries, offering travelers, tourists, and even locals an alternative to traditional hotels. At the time of writing, AirBnB has a market cap of $86.03 billion.
Uber
Everyone has been through the struggle and frustration of having to find cabs on a busy night. This experience led Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, with the assistance of their friends Oscar Salazar and Conrad Whelan, to test and launch Uber as ‘UberCab’ in 2010.
The convenience and ease of use of this application, in comparison to other ride-sharing services, soon propelled Uber to the top. Since then, the company has grown multifold, expanding its business to include units such as food delivery (Uber Eats), self-driving cars, and more. Currently, the company has a market capitalization of $169.04 billion.
Instagram is a photo and video-sharing platform that was started in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Within a day of its launch, the platform bagged 25,000 users. By the end of the week, the application had been downloaded over 100,000 times, and the number scaled to a million users by mid-December. Since then, Instagram has only grown to reach new heights.
It took a couple of years for Instagram to expand to the Android user base, with a version for Android launched in 2012. Today, the popular social media platform has over 2 billion active users every month. In 2012, Facebook (now Meta) acquired Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock.
Co-founded by Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp, and Paul Sciarra in 2010, Pinterest started as a catalog of ideas. It is a rather cool and exciting platform, allowing users to delve deeper into their interests. Today, the platform hosts over 100 billion recipes, life hacks, design ideas, inspiration photos, and a whole lot more from its 250 million users. Instead of acting as a social media platform, Pinterest offers a wonderful and effective way of increasing brand awareness and reaching out to new users. Currently, the company has a market capitalization of $22.60 billion and can be found on the stock market under the symbol “PINS.”.