Great Entrepreneurs Who Started Small: Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and Martha Stewart

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Great Entrepreneurs Who Started Small: Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and Martha Stewart

By Steve Strauss | Inc Magazine | December 1, 2023

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It’s easy to think, when you look at big and successful companies like Apple or Amazon, that they were Apple and Amazon from the start. But of course, they weren’t. Apple started in a garage, as did Amazon. The original owners of Starbucks were content to own four dinky stores until Howard Schultz showed up. What’s important to remember about these types of businesses and entrepreneurs is that they started off small, very small. It took time, patience, and energy for those entrepreneurs and their businesses to become big, very big.

Take Richard Branson of Virgin, for example. Nowadays, The Virgin Group is huge–comprising more than 200 companies, some 71,000 employees, and a value of about $20 billion. What you may not realize however is that Virgin began as a teeny, tiny record company above a shoe shop in London and Branson had to barter for his rent.  One of the keys to Branson’s success is that he paid attention to what the world needed and made a point to fill niches with multiple income streams.

Bill Gates has a similar story. Nowadays, we automatically associate his name with massive wealth and success, but what many people don’t know is that Gates’s first company, started with his good friend, Paul Allen, was a dud. Traf-o-Data was supposed to analyze traffic patterns. It puttered, stalled, and died on the side of the road.  After dropping out of Harvard and moving to New Mexico, Gates and Allen tried again, this time starting Micro-Soft. The first several years of Microsoft weren’t easy. Gates and Allen struggled to make a profit and found themselves in a couple of legal battles as well. With only 25 employees, and losing money in its first few years, Microsoft relocated to outside of Seattle in 1979. It was here that Gates would eventually find success, thanks to his mom.  Gates’s mother, Mary, connected Bill to her IBM colleagues, to whom Gates would eventually sell a product called MS-DOS. But even that was a huge risk–Gates sold IBM on the idea of MS-DOS before he even owned the rights to the program. So yes, before Microsoft got big, even Bill Gates had to rely on family connections to get started.

The lesson? Starting small is what works; actually, it is how it works.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. It’s easy to think, when you look at big and successful companies like Apple or Amazon, that they were Apple and Amazon from the start. But of course, they weren’t. Apple started in a garage, as did Amazon. 
2. What’s important to remember about these types of businesses and entrepreneurs is that they started off small, very small. It took time, patience, and energy for those entrepreneurs and their businesses to become big, very big.
3. The lesson? Starting small is what works; actually, it is how it works.

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Topics:  Entrepreneurship, Startups