99 Fun Facts About Entrepreneurship

Investor Aileen Lee picked which mythical beast in 2013 for a private startup valued at $1B or more?

Unicorn was chosen for its rarity: Lee's TechCrunch article found just 39 such companies, about 0.07 percent of the software startups funded in the same decade.

Which children's toy began in 1930s Cincinnati as a compound for cleaning coal soot off wallpaper?

Play-Doh was saved by a nursery-school teacher: Kay Zufall saw her pupils loved modelling with the fading cleaner and urged her brother-in-law's firm to sell it as a toy.

Which startup's founders raised about $30,000 in 2008 by selling breakfast cereal named after Obama and McCain?

Airbnb was then AirBed & Breakfast and deep in debt: its founders repackaged a thousand boxes as Obama O's and Cap'n McCains, and the sales paid off most of what they owed.

Which website launched in 2005 as a video dating service under the slogan 'Tune In, Hook Up'?

YouTube's founders advertised on Craigslist, offering women money to upload dating videos; when almost nobody did, they opened the site to clips of any kind.

Which ice cream company's founders, priced out of opening a bagel shop, learned the trade from a Penn State correspondence course?

Ben & Jerry's opened in 1978 in a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont; Ben Cohen can barely smell, so he kept adding bigger chunks for texture, and they became the brand's trademark.

Ray Kroc was selling what when he visited the McDonald brothers' San Bernardino restaurant in 1954?

Milkshake mixers from Prince Castle were Kroc's line, and the brothers had bought eight of his Multimixers, which is what made him curious enough to visit.

Which e-commerce platform grew out of Snowdevil, an online snowboard store its founders launched in 2004?

Shopify exists because Tobias Lütke, a programmer, disliked the store software on sale: he wrote his own for Snowdevil, and in 2006 the founders launched that software as the product.

Which Italian sports-car maker was founded in 1963 by a man who had grown rich building tractors?

Lamborghini's founder Ferruccio built his first tractors from surplus military vehicles after the war; the profits bought him Ferraris, which he judged too noisy and rough for the road.

Juicero, maker of a juicer launched at $699, collapsed in 2017 after Bloomberg News showed its produce packs could be what?

Squeezed by hand, the packs gave up their juice about as well as the machine did; widely mocked, Juicero offered refunds and shut down less than five months after the report.

What term describes launching a company on internal cash flow alone, with no outside capital?

Bootstrapping borrows from 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps', a phrase that originally described an impossible feat and only later came to mean getting ahead with no outside help.

Which startup term names the pace, usually stated per month, at which a company consumes its cash?

Burn rate tells a startup its 'runway': divide the cash in the bank by the monthly burn and you get the months left before it must turn a profit, raise more money or close.

Whose 2011 book The Lean Startup spread 'pivot' and 'minimum viable product' among founders?

Eric Ries first set out the method on his blog in 2008; his book cites Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn, who posted photos of local shoe-store stock and bought each pair only after it sold.

Which chat app began as an internal tool at Tiny Speck, the studio behind the failed online game Glitch?

Slack was Stewart Butterfield's second accidental hit: his earlier attempt at an online game had also failed, leaving behind the photo-sharing site Flickr.

Which crowdfunding site, launched in 2009, hosted the Pebble smartwatch's record-breaking campaign in 2012?

Kickstarter backers stepped in where investors had not: unable to raise more money the usual way, Pebble's founder asked the public for $100,000 and got it within two hours.

Which crowdfunded startup did Facebook buy for $2 billion in 2014, before it had shipped a consumer product?

Oculus began with a teenager in a garage: Palmer Luckey finished his first headset prototype at 17, and the company had released only developer kits when Facebook bought it.

Which messaging app did Facebook agree to buy for $19 billion in February 2014?

WhatsApp's founders, Jan Koum and Brian Acton, had both applied for jobs at Facebook a few years earlier and been turned down.

Whitney Wolfe Herd, at 31, became the youngest woman to take a US company public in 2021 with which app?

Bumble grew out of a break with Tinder: Wolfe Herd resigned in 2014, settled a sexual-harassment suit against the company, and launched a rival app on which women sent the first message.

Sara Blakely spent two years and how much in savings developing the hosiery idea that became Spanx?

$5,000 was the entire budget, spent while she still worked at Danka in Atlanta; by 2012 Forbes put her on its cover as the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world.

Yvon Chouinard handed which outdoor-clothing company to a trust and a climate non-profit in 2022?

Patagonia's voting stock went to the Patagonia Purpose Trust and its non-voting stock to the Holdfast Collective, so profits fund climate work and land protection.

Which hair-care entrepreneur does Guinness World Records list as the first self-made female millionaire?

Madam C. J. Walker denied being a millionaire in her lifetime: the record rests on her estate at her death in 1919, and earlier fortunes such as Mary Ellen Pleasant's are simply less documented.

Which fashion designer's first Paris boutique, opened at 21 rue Cambon in 1910, sold only hats?

Coco Chanel called the shop Chanel Modes, and well-known actresses of the day wore her hats, which built the reputation she later carried into clothes.

Which British entrepreneur launched a magazine called Student at 16, then a mail-order record business?

Richard Branson's headmaster told him on his last day at school that he would end up either in prison or a millionaire; the mail-order records became Virgin.

Roughly how many prototypes did James Dyson build over five years before his first bagless vacuum, the G-Force?

5,127 was Dyson's own count of five years' work in a shed; vacuum makers who profited from selling dust bags turned the cleaner down, so it first went on sale in Japan.

Jack Ma, later Alibaba's founder, told Charlie Rose which fast-food chain rejected him for a job?

KFC hired 23 of the 24 people who applied when it came to his city, Ma said, leaving him the only one turned away; he also says Harvard Business School rejected him ten times.

Barbie's inventor Ruth Handler co-founded which toy company with her husband Elliot?

Mattel blends the names of Harold 'Matt' Matson and Elliot Handler; Ruth was left out of the name, yet she went on to run the company as its president.

Whose first car venture, the Detroit Automobile Company, folded in 1901 after just twenty vehicles?

Henry Ford lost his twelve backers $86,000, then walked out of his second firm, the Henry Ford Company, which carried on without him under a new name: Cadillac.

Laugh-O-Gram, a Kansas City cartoon studio that went bankrupt in 1923, was founded by whom?

Walt Disney left Kansas City for Hollywood after the bankruptcy with $40 and a reel of Alice's Wonderland; that film won him the distribution deal that launched the Disney studio.

Martha Matilda Harper, a former servant, grew her 1888 Rochester hair salon into 500 shops by pioneering which business model?

Franchising, in Harper's version, began with women like her: the first hundred salons went only to poor women, whom she trained and whose shops she inspected herself.

Which coffee chain was bought by a former employee who had quit to run his own espresso bar, Il Giornale?

Starbucks then mainly sold beans, and its founders did not want a chain of cafés, so Howard Schultz left to prove the idea, bought them out and put their name on his own bars.

Which Irish-French banker's Essai first framed the entrepreneur as a bearer of risk?

Richard Cantillon's Essai Sur La Nature Du Commerce En Général was largely forgotten until William Stanley Jevons rediscovered it in the late 19th century and called it the 'cradle of political economy'.

The investing term 'angel' was borrowed from wealthy backers who rescued failing productions where?

Broadway theatre gave finance the word: the backer who kept a show from closing was its angel, and in 1978 University of New Hampshire professor William Wetzel borrowed it for the individuals he found funding young companies.

The 'traitorous eight' who walked out of William Shockley's lab in 1957 founded which chipmaker?

Fairchild Semiconductor seeded Silicon Valley: its alumni went on to start dozens of firms, Intel and AMD among them, that became known as the 'Fairchildren'.

Which company began in a Palo Alto garage that California lists as a landmark, the 'Birthplace of Silicon Valley'?

Hewlett-Packard began there in 1938 with $538, building an audio oscillator; a coin toss the next year decided whose name would come first.

Which startup accelerator did Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston launch in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in March 2005?

Y Combinator began as a summer experiment: Graham funded a whole batch of student startups at once because, he wrote, the partners wanted to learn how to be investors.

Techstars, the accelerator David Cohen and Brad Feld founded in 2006, started in which Colorado city?

Boulder was home to investor Brad Feld, who set aside 'random days' for quick meetings he would not otherwise take; Cohen used one to pitch his idea, and Feld signed on within minutes.

Which president signed the Small Business Act of 1953, creating the US Small Business Administration?

Dwight Eisenhower's act did two things at once: it wound up the Depression-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation and set up the new agency to carry on lending to small firms.

Kongō Gumi, documented as the world's oldest company since AD 578, has worked mainly in what trade?

Temple construction kept Kongō Gumi under one family for more than 1,400 years, until a cash crisis ended that run and Takamatsu Construction took the business over in 2006.

Keiunkan, in business in Japan's Yamanashi Prefecture since the year 705, is which kind of company?

A hot-spring inn: a court noble out hunting in 705 is said to have found the spring gushing from river rocks, and in 2011 Guinness named Keiunkan the world's oldest hotel.

Which term, from a 1978 Gifford Pinchot III paper, names an employee who acts like a startup founder?

Intrapreneur soon had a famous user: in 1985 Steve Jobs told Newsweek the Macintosh team was intrapreneurship, 'a group of people going, in essence, back to the garage, but in a large company'.

Which pricing model, named in reply to a 2006 Fred Wilson blog post, gives the basic product away?

Freemium got its name from a reader: Wilson described the model on his blog and asked what to call it, and Jarid Lukin, who worked at one of his portfolio companies, suggested the word.

Which social network began in 2006 as an internal messaging tool at Odeo, a struggling podcasting startup?

Twitter came out of a daylong brainstorm at Odeo, where Jack Dorsey pitched status updates by text message; that March he posted the first one, 'just setting up my twttr'.

Whose 1985 book Innovation and Entrepreneurship drew on his father's friend Joseph Schumpeter?

Peter Drucker argued that successful entrepreneurs share no special personality, only a commitment to practising innovation systematically; Schumpeter had been a guest at his parents' evening salons.

Which company's former staff, founders of LinkedIn, Yelp and Palantir among them, did Fortune picture as a 'Mafia' in 2007?

PayPal's alumni posed for Fortune dressed as gangsters, though Elon Musk missed the shoot: he was in Chicago collecting an innovator-of-the-year award.

Wyoming passed special legislation in 1977 creating which now-common form of American business?

Limited liability company: Wyoming's new entity paired a corporation's shield from personal liability with a partnership's tax treatment, and by 1996 every other state had copied it.

An 1885 newspaper appeal for small donations is often cited as early crowdfunding for what?

The Statue of Liberty's pedestal was paid for after Joseph Pulitzer promised to print every donor's name in his newspaper The World, however small the gift; most gave a dollar or less.

Unilever paid about $1 billion in 2016 for which startup, launched four years earlier with a viral video?

Dollar Shave Club's launch video, starring founder Michael Dubin, crashed the site's server and still brought in 12,000 orders within days.

Georges Doriot, a Harvard professor who led the investment firm ARDC, is called the father of what?

Venture capital's landmark early win was his: in 1957 Doriot's firm put $70,000 into the young Digital Equipment Corporation, a stake later worth $355 million.

Which job title did Sean Ellis coin in 2010 for a marketer who lives by rapid experiments to win new users?

Growth hacker spread beyond Ellis's blog two years later, when Andrew Chen's essay 'Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing' brought the term to a wider audience.

A vacant Batavia, New York, factory filled with small firms in 1959 became the first what?

Business incubator: with the city's biggest employer gone, Joseph Mancuso won tenants for the huge plant by offering short leases, shared equipment, business advice and secretarial help.

Ronald Wayne sold his 10% founding stake in which company for $800, days after co-founding it in 1976?

Apple's third co-founder, Ronald Wayne, pulled out because he alone owned assets that creditors could seize if the partnership failed. He also drew its first logo.

Carolyn Davidson was paid $35 in 1971, while at Portland State, to design which sportswear company's logo?

Nike later thanked Carolyn Davidson with a diamond Swoosh ring and 500 shares of its stock. The firm was still trading as Blue Ribbon Sports when she drew the logo.

Which video rental chain turned down a chance to buy the fledgling Netflix for $50 million in 2000?

Blockbuster passed on the deal and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2010, while the DVD-by-mail startup it had rejected grew into a streaming giant.

Which search engine began in 1996 as BackRub, a research project by two Stanford PhD students?

Google takes its name from a misspelling of googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, picked to signal how much information the engine was meant to handle.

James Monaghan traded his half of which pizza chain to his brother Tom for a Volkswagen Beetle?

Domino's was a single Ypsilanti, Michigan, shop called DomiNick's when Jim Monaghan swapped his share, eight months after the brothers took it over in 1960.

Arthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease in 1759 on a brewery at St. James's Gate in which city?

Dublin's St. James's Gate site cost Arthur Guinness just £45 a year under the lease; ten years later he shipped his first six and a half barrels to England.

Which video game company did Fusajiro Yamauchi found in Kyoto in 1889 to make hanafuda playing cards?

Nintendo rode a quirk of the law: Japan banned most gambling in 1882 but tolerated hanafuda, and the firm became the leading producer within a few years.

Which cash-strapped delivery company's founder once topped up its funds with $27,000 won at blackjack in Las Vegas?

Federal Express had just been refused funding when Fred Smith flew to Las Vegas; the winnings tided the firm over for a few more days, and he later raised fresh capital.

Which online retailer was incorporated in 1994 as Cadabra, Inc., and first run from a Bellevue garage?

Amazon dropped the Cadabra name within months because a lawyer misheard it as 'cadaver'; Jeff Bezos picked the world's biggest river to match his plans for the store.

Which carmaker did Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning incorporate in 2003, before its most famous backer invested?

Tesla gained Elon Musk in February 2004, when he led its first funding round and became chairman; a 2009 lawsuit settlement lets five people call themselves co-founders.

Which toy company did carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen found in 1932, at first making wooden toys?

Lego comes from the Danish words leg godt, meaning play well; its founder turned to toys after the Great Depression hurt his trade in household goods.

A falling-out between brothers Adolf and Rudolf Dassler in 1948 split their shoe firm into Adidas and which rival?

Puma was first registered as Ruda, built from Rudolf Dassler's name just as his brother's company was built from Adi Dassler's.

Which tyre maker began publishing a free guide for French motorists in 1900, hoping to boost demand for cars?

Michelin launched it when France had fewer than 3,000 cars, and the guide did not award restaurant stars until 1926.

Which sandwich chain began in 1965 when 17-year-old Fred DeLuca borrowed $1,000 from family friend Peter Buck?

Subway opened in Bridgeport, Connecticut, as Pete's Super Submarine Sandwiches; Peter Buck, a nuclear physicist, suggested the shop as a way to pay for college.

Which burger chain did Dave Thomas found in Columbus, Ohio, in 1969 and name after one of his five children?

Wendy's borrowed the family nickname of his daughter Melinda Lou, a choice Dave Thomas later wrote that he regretted because the chain's fame cost her some of her privacy.

Which soft drink did pharmacist John Pemberton create in Atlanta in 1886 after prohibition hit his wine-based tonic?

Coca-Cola did not stay with John Pemberton for long: he sold the rights in 1888 to businessman Asa Candler, whose marketing tactics made it a global brand.

Which app began development in San Francisco as Burbn, a mobile check-in tool by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger?

Instagram was born when its makers judged Burbn too close to an existing check-in app and rebuilt it around photo-sharing, a feature that had become popular with users.

Which marketplace, launched in 1995 as AuctionWeb, made its first sale on a broken laser pointer for $14.83?

eBay founder Pierre Omidyar wrote to the winning bidder to check he knew the pointer did not work, and was told the man collected broken laser pointers.

Which record label did Berry Gordy start in Detroit in 1959 with $800 borrowed from a family savings fund?

Motown first traded as Tamla Records, and the loan paid to release a single regionally; Berry Gordy's relatives debated before agreeing to lend the money.

Which blood-testing startup reached a $9 billion valuation before founder Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of fraud?

Theranos was started by a 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, who dropped out of Stanford to run it, and its name blends the words therapy and diagnosis.

Which computer maker began in 1984 as PC's Limited, run from a University of Texas freshman's dormitory room?

Dell founder Michael Dell left college at the end of that first year to run the firm full-time, with about $1,000 of expansion capital from his family.

Which animation studio did Steve Jobs bankroll in 1986, paying George Lucas $5 million for its technology rights?

Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group inside Lucasfilm and sold imaging computers for years before making Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature film.

Which San Francisco merchant shared an 1873 patent with Reno tailor Jacob Davis for riveted work trousers?

Levi Strauss was a dry-goods wholesaler, not a tailor: Jacob Davis, one of his customers, came up with the rivets and asked him to help apply for the patent.

Which household appliance did Josephine Cochrane patent in 1886 and then sell mainly to hotels and restaurants?

Dishwasher design became her project after heirloom dishes were chipped during hand-washing following a dinner party; her company later became part of KitchenAid.

Which energy drink did Dietrich Mateschitz adapt from Krating Daeng, a Thai tonic he said cured his jet lag?

Red Bull is a carbonated version reworked for Western tastes, made in partnership with Chaleo Yoovidhya, who had launched the Thai original in 1976.

Which fashion chain did Amancio Ortega first call Zorba, until a nearby bar of the same name forced a rethink?

Zara was the fallback after its founders, fans of the 1964 film Zorba the Greek, learned a bar two blocks from their first A Coruña shop already had the name.

Which electronics giant did Lee Byung-chul start in 1938 as a trading company dealing in dried fish and noodles?

Samsung, whose name means three stars, moved through food processing, textiles and insurance and only entered the electronics industry in the late 1960s.

Which British show became in 2005 the first overseas remake of the Japanese format America calls Shark Tank?

Dragons' Den kept the habit of naming investors after fearsome animals: the 2001 Japanese original called them tigers, and later versions chose lions or sharks.

Small Business Saturday, created by American Express in 2010, falls on the Saturday after which American holiday?

Thanksgiving weekend already had Black Friday for big-box chains and Cyber Monday for online stores, so the new day was pitched as the local shops' turn.

The word entrepreneur comes from the Old French verb entreprendre, which means to do what?

Undertake is the root sense: when entrepreneur was reborrowed into English in 1828 it meant the promoter of a stage production, and the business meaning followed in 1852.

Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975 in which city, home of their first customer, MITS?

Albuquerque was where MITS built the Altair computer that ran their first software; the firm left for Bellevue, Washington, in 1979 because top programmers were hard to recruit.

Sam Walton opened the first Walmart discount store in 1962 on Walnut Street in Rogers, a town in which state?

Arkansas also holds Walmart's headquarters, in nearby Bentonville, where Sam Walton had earlier opened a variety store he named Walton's Five and Dime.

Which cosmetics founder bought a Cadillac in 1968 and had it repainted pink to match a compact she carried?

Mary Kay Ash used the car as a rolling advertisement, then made it a prize: a pink Cadillac became the top reward for her company's best-selling consultants.

Which confectioner sold his Lancaster caramel business for $1 million to gamble on mass-produced milk chocolate?

Milton Hershey bet that milk chocolate, until then a luxury, could be made cheaply at scale; he had learned to make caramels with fresh milk while working in Denver.

Whose steel company did J. P. Morgan buy in 1901, forming the basis of U.S. Steel?

Andrew Carnegie spent the rest of his life giving the money away, above all on local libraries, repaying a colonel who had opened his book collection to working boys.

Which company was broken up by a 1911 Supreme Court ruling that left its co-founder the richest man in the world?

Standard Oil's shareholders gained from the split: John D. Rockefeller owned a quarter of the shares in the successor companies, and their values mostly doubled.

Which industrial giant was created in 1892 by merging Thomas Edison's company with its rival Thomson-Houston?

General Electric was a consolidation conceived and orchestrated by the financier J. P. Morgan, and the merged firm's new name left the inventor's surname out.

A coin toss decided whose name came first at which company, started in a one-car Palo Alto garage in 1939?

Hewlett-Packard could as easily have been Packard-Hewlett; the garage where the pair began with $538 of capital is now a California Historical Landmark.

Which Japanese company began in 1946 in a tiny shack, fitting war-surplus generator engines to bicycles?

Honda was funded by its founder selling the salvageable remains of his piston-ring business to Toyota; it went on to become the world's largest motorcycle manufacturer.

Which dot-com retailer, known for a sock puppet mascot, announced its liquidation months after going public in 2000?

Pets.com paid $1.2 million for a Super Bowl ad in January 2000 and raised $82.5 million by going public a month later, yet the site had shut down by that November.

Which phrase did economist Joseph Schumpeter popularise in 1942 for innovation that wipes out older industries?

Creative destruction is also known as Schumpeter's gale; he developed the idea in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy out of a careful reading of Karl Marx.

Which Harvard professor's 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma popularised the theory of disruptive innovation?

Clayton Christensen showed how well-run firms can do everything right and still be overtaken, and urged big companies to keep small, nimble divisions of their own.

Which PayPal co-founder turned a startup class he taught at Stanford in 2012 into the book Zero to One?

Peter Thiel's co-author Blake Masters had sat in that class himself, and the book condenses the popular online notes he took there.

Which Indian IT giant did seven engineers found in Pune in 1981 with seed money from one founder's wife?

Infosys got its seed money from Sudha Murty, the wife of co-founder N. R. Narayana Murthy, who went on to lead the company for its first 21 years.

Which Silicon Valley street name has become shorthand for the venture capital firms clustered along it in Menlo Park?

Sand Hill Road's standing in venture capital has been compared to Wall Street's in the stock market, and nearly every top local company took early funding from firms on it.

Steve Jobs dropped out of which liberal arts college after one semester but kept auditing its calligraphy course?

Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, was a place he left without telling his parents; the calligraphy course he went on auditing was taught by Robert Palladino.

Which saleswoman persuaded Earl Tupper to pull Tupperware from stores and sell it only through home parties?

Brownie Wise had learned the party plan selling Stanley Home Products; she ran Tupperware's home-party arm from 1951 until its founder fired her in 1958.

Which English potter of the 1700s is credited with pioneering money-back guarantees and illustrated catalogues?

Josiah Wedgwood also kept only a few of his jasper pieces on display at any one time, a deliberate tactic to make customers feel his goods were rare.

Which Chicago merchant launched a mail-order business in 1872 with a catalogue listing just 163 products?

Montgomery Ward's catalogue was burned in public by rural retailers, while customers fondly called it the Wish Book; Sears did not mail a wide-ranging catalogue until 1896.

Skype was founded in 2003 by a Swede and a Dane, but its software was written by four developers from which country?

Estonia's Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, Jaan Tallinn and Toivo Annus wrote the software, and by 2011 most of the development team worked in Tallinn and Tartu.