5 Incredible Entrepreneurs and What We Can Learn From Them

Ilya Pozin, 

Entrepreneurship is growing at a breakneck pace. And with our technological revolution, businesses are scaling and impacting the world more than ever before. For the United States to remain competitive, innovation and entrepreneurship must remain center stage. After all, entrepreneurship has been the primary engine of job creation in our economy over the last several decades – from 1980 to 2005, new companies (less than 5 years old) were responsible for nearly all net job growth in America.

 

But it is not only jobs and wealth which entrepreneurs create. Oftentimes, business creators bring forth solutions that solve society’s most difficult problems, provide inspiration and brighten our future. To celebrate entrepreneurship and its contributions, here is a list of five truly incredible entrepreneurs and lessons we can learn from them:

1. Bill Drayton, Ashoka

Lesson Learned: Incorporate empathy into your business

Widely considered the “father of social enterprise,” Bill Drayton has extended the idea of entrepreneurship into the spheres of education, health, environment and human rights. He regards empathy as the most powerful factor in forming an organization. The ability to see, understand and feel from the perspective of others, he says, is absolutely key in the process of creating a business that will be helpful and desirable.

Empathy played a role in Drayton’s founding of Ashoka, a global enterprise that identifies and invests in social entrepreneurs across the globe. Ashoka currently operates in over 70 countries and supports the work of over 2,000 social entrepreneurs making important contributions.

2. Oleg Firer, Unified Payments

Lesson Learned: Start young

As the founder of the number one fastest growing business on the Inc. 500 list in 2012, Oleg Firer’s career is a testament to the power of starting young as an entrepreneur. Firer started his first business at 17 and worked hard through successes and failures for the next twelve years, when he founded credit card processing company Unified Payments in 2007.

By 2012, Unified Payments was processing $10 billion worth of transactions for 100,000 merchants a year – with a mind-boggling three-year growth rate of 23,646.3 percent.

Firer undoubtedly achieved his success in large part due to the hard lessons learned from being in business at such a young age.

3. Halle Tecco, Rock Health

Lesson Learned: Pick a specific niche

It seems that accelerators, incubators and other startup-boosting programs are popping up everywhere. So when Halle Tecco graduated from Harvard Business School in 2011 and set out to create an accelerator program, she picked a specific niche to tackle: healthcare technology.

Today, Tecco’s accelerator — known as Rock Health – has provided dozens of health tech startups with millions in collective funding.

Rock Health tripled its revenue last year and has solidified itself as the first accelerator exclusively focused on health startups.

Tecco’s success proves the importance of picking a specific niche and sticking to it. In the words of marketing genius Seth Godin: don’t be a generalist that is pretty good at lots of things, rather be a specialist that is great at one thing.

4. Aaron and Karine Hirschhorn, DogVacay

Lesson Learned: Use personal pain points to inspire your business idea

When husband and wife Aaron and Karine Hirschhorn couldn’t find the right overnight kennel for their dogs, they decided to take matters into their own hands and created a marketplace that pairs traveling pet owners with local pet-sitters. Since being founded last year, LA-based DogVacay has raised over $6 million in venture capital and is increasing revenue 60 percent monthly.

The online service, dubbed “the Airbnb for pets,” has already booked 50,000 nights for pets and has paid over $1 million to pet-sitters signed up with the site.

The Hirschhorns identified a simple pain point in their own lives and created a business that solved the problem. Entrepreneurs should remember that great businesses are often born from observations of and attempts to solve personal pain points.

5. Jake Nickell, Threadless

Lesson Learned: Build a community around your business

Jake Nickell founded Threadless over a decade ago on the premise that a community of individuals would contribute and determine the T-shirt designs his company would print and sell.

More than two million artists have submitted their designs to Threadless and collectively vote on which designs will go to print. The company, which is rumored to be at $30 million or more in annual revenue, sells millions of shirts each year and gives previously unknown artists a spotlight.

Nickell says his goal is to “give the creative minds of the world more opportunities to make and sell great art.” His constant focus on community building and collaboration has been at the heart of Threadless’ success.