Success Stories of the Online Business

In the past, people who get rich and become successful are normally older than the present batch of millionaires or even billionaires who make money based on information technologies. The past was known as the industrial age where people make money by conducting brick and mortal businesses, which usually involved substantial start-up capital and needed much longer time to build up the businesses and get rich. The average time to success could be more than 20 years. In the information age, many people become billionaires in their 20’s or 30’s, some even in their teens. The time to success in the information age could be as short as five to ten years.

Henry Ford was 40 years old when he founded the Ford Company, by the time the successful Model-T was introduced in 1908; he was already 45 years old. Dale Carnegie, the famous writer and motivator in the last century, he was 49 years old when his book How to Win friends and Influence people became bestseller in 1937. The pioneer IT Company, IBM or the big blue was founded by Thomas J. Watson in 1924 as he renamed his former company Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation into International Business Machine. He was more than 40 years old when he went on to build IBM into a giant IT company, which is still one of the leaders in the IT sector.

Comparatively, the current richest man in the world, Bill Gates was a 17-year-old teen when he first started a business with Paul Allen, making traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. When he founded Microsoft in 1975, he was only 30 years old. He became the youngest self-made billionaire in American history the following year, and by the year 2000, he became the richest man in the world at the age of 45 with a net worth of $46 billion! The time to become rich was becoming shorter with the advent of the Internet and the web, where more and more businesses are conducted over the Internet. Jerry Young and David Filo founded Yahoo! when they were critical Engineering graduate students at Stanford University in 1994. Within two years, the company was able to raise $33 million through its first initial public offering in 1996. It remains as one of the most successful Internet Company till today. Yang was 28 while David was 30 at that time. However, its success was eclipsed by Google, the biggest search engine in the Internet. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University and it was incorporated as a privately held company in 1998. The company managed to raise $23 billion in market capitalization through its initial public offering in 2004. Both founders were only 31 years old at the time. By the year 2009, its market capitalization reached more than $180 billion, making it one the largest corporation in the world! It is currently ranked 150 in Fortune 500.