Famous serial entrEpreneurs

  • Richard Branson: The entrepreneur behind the Virgin Group, the brand behind some 400 enterprises, was only 16 when he started his first business, a magazine called Student. But it was his chain of music stores called Virgin Records, which he opened in 1972, which made Branson’s fortune. But, he didn’t stop there as he subsequently launched an airline, Virgin Atlantic Airways; a phone company, Virgin Mobile; and, most recently, Virgin Galactic, a space tourism company.
  • Mark Cuban: Owner of the National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks,[4] Landmark Theaters, and Magnolia Pictures, and the chairman of the HDTV cable network AXS TV.[5] He is also a "shark investor" on the television series Shark Tank.
  • Sheldon Adelson: Chairman and CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, the parent company of the Venetian Macao Limited which operates The Venetian Resort Hotel Casino and the Sands Expo and Convention Center. He also owns the Israeli daily newspaper Israel HaYom. Adelson, a lifelong donor and philanthropist to a variety of causes, founded with his wife's initiative the Adelson Foundation.
  • Benjamin Franklin: As one of the nation’s founding fathers, he was also one of its first entrepreneurs. He was the inventor of successful products like bifocal glasses, the lightning rod and the Franklin stove (among others) as well as a media magnate where he published several newspapers and his popular Poor Richard’s Almanac, in which Franklin used a fictional character to share his own views on topics like politics and philosophy.
  • Thomas Edison: Considered by most to be the greatest inventor of all time, Edison, known as “The Wizard of Menlo Park,” is credited with some 1,093 U.S. patents for a range of inventions that includes the light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera. Just as importantly, his work on the distribution of electricity led to the world’s first power plant in New York City (though his technology choice, direct current (DC), was eventually surpassed by the alternating current approach (AC) championed by rival inventor, Nikola Tesla).
  • Ted Turner: Turner began building his media empire in 1963 at the age of 24 where he took over running his father’s billboard company. He soon bought a UHF TV station and launched Turner Broadcasting System, which grew popular showing reruns of old TV shows and movies as well as Atlanta Braves’ baseball games (a team Turner had bought). But it was in 1980, when Turner launched CNN, the first 24-hour news channel, that he truly made his mark on the world. More recently, Turner launched Ted’s Montana Grill, a national chain of restaurants that sell buffalo meat.
  • Oprah Winfrey: Widely considered to be one of the most influential people in the world, Winfrey has ridden the popularity of her self-titled daytime TV show to international fame. But Winfrey has also turned her name into a global brand, under which she has launched a magazine, a website, a satellite radio show, a television network called OWN and published five books under her company, Harpo Productions (which is Oprah spelled backwards). Through Harpo, Winfrey has also taken an active role in a variety of movie and theatre productions including Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire and Beloved, which Winfrey also starred in.
  • Henry Kaiser: Few entrepreneurs can match the track record of Henry Kaiser, who, starting in 1914 with a road-paving company, built a series of wildly successful companies in several industries that included: construction, ship building, forging steel and aluminum, car manufacturing and even healthcare, where he created Kaiser Permanente (named for a creek located near one of Kaiser’s cement companies), the first health maintenance organization, or HMO, as a way to provide health care to his thousands of employees.
  • Evan Williams: No list of the world’s most influential entrepreneurs would be complete without Evan Williams, who helped found two of the most influential companies in the Internet era: Blogger (which was eventually bought by Google) and Twitter. Williams, who grew up on a Nebraskan farm and spent his summers irrigating crops, may be an unlikely tech hero, but his foresight into how people use social media is uncanny. (For example, Williams coined the term “blogger.”)
  • Robert Johnson: Born the ninth of the ten children in rural Mississippi, Robert Johnson climbed the ranks of the world’s most wealthy people thanks to his foresight in founding Black Entertainment Television, BET, in 1980. After selling BET to Viacom in 2003 for some $3 billion, Johnson started what he calls his “second act” by launching The RLJ Companies, an asset management and holding company that has stakes in a diverse range of industries including: financial services, real estate, hospitality, professional sports, film production, automotive and gaming.

What is a serial Entrepreneur?

A Serial Entrepreneur is someone who starts multiple successful businesses.

FastForward Ideas

Business Idea Development

 

Potential serial Entrepreneur

Our Tulsa-based potential serial entrepreneur is very much like the person mentioned in the attached article from Fortune Small Business magazine, and has over 30 new business ideas that he currently needs help with:  

(Click below to read this article)

Inside the mind of a crazy (rich) inventor