2018
Steve Madden fell in love with the shoe business in the 1970's, when he sold platform shoes at a neighborhood store in Long Island, New York; that was in high s…
For many of us, chicken salad is just another sandwich filling, but Stacy Brown turned it into a $75 million business. In 2007, she was a divorced mother of thr…
Before it became fashionable to start a tech company in your dorm room, Michael Dell did exactly that. In 1983, he began selling upgrade kits for PC's out of hi…
During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, Jimmy Wales was running an internet search company. That's when he began to experiment with the idea of an online enc…
In the early 1980s, Ron Shaich bought a small, struggling Boston bakery chain called Au Bon Pain, and built it out to 250 locations nationwide. Ron then saw an …
After noticing more and more people sign up for yoga in the late 1990s, Chip Wilson bet everything on an athletic apparel company aimed toward young professiona…
Brothers Patrick and John Collison founded and sold their first company before they turned 20. They created software to help eBay users manage inventory online,…
At age 40, Bobby Trussell's promising career in horse racing hit a dead end. With bills to pay and a family to support, he stumbled across a curious product tha…
In 2018, Sharon Chuter left her job at a legacy beauty brand to start UOMA Beauty, a cosmetics company that caters to a wide variety of skin tones. She recently…
After selling their first small business and shuttering their second, former college roommates Niraj Shah and Steve Conine thought about getting "normal" jobs. …
