Founders
People worth studying.
Lessons taken from decisions each of them made that are a matter of public record. These are not summaries of their books, and every page ends with where to go and read the real thing.
Outcomes are the least transferable part. Nobody repeats a company. The decisions underneath one are a different matter, and that is what these pages are about.
- Alex Hormozi Gym Launch, Acquisition.com. Turned around gyms, then productised the turnaround, then bought the businesses.
- Brian Chesky Airbnb. Sold cereal to fund the company and photographed the first listings himself.
- Chris Williamson Modern Wisdom. Went from running club nights in Newcastle to one of the more serious long-form interview shows.
- Patrick and John Collison Stripe. Two brothers from Limerick built the financial plumbing of the internet.
- Daniel Ek Spotify. Chose the hardest opening move on purpose: licensing deals with an industry that hated him.
- Gary Vaynerchuk Wine Library, VaynerMedia. Grew his family's wine shop from roughly three million to sixty, then did it again in media.
- Jeff Bezos Amazon. Less interesting for the scale than for how clearly he wrote about deciding.
- Jensen Huang NVIDIA. Spent thirty years building for a market that did not exist yet.
- Melanie Perkins Canva. Turned down by investors more than a hundred times, from Perth.
- Sara Blakely Spanx. Five thousand dollars, no investors, and she wrote her own patent to save the legal fees.
- Steve Jobs Apple. Came back to a company selling 350 products and left it selling four.
- Steven Bartlett Social Chain, Diary of a CEO. Left university at nineteen and built a social media company out of Manchester.
- Tobi Lütke Shopify. Started a snowboard shop, ended up building the platform underneath everyone else's.