Entrepreneurs

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee was born in England in 1955, graduated from Oxford University with a degree in physics, and is generally acknowledged as the originator of the World Wide Web. During his adolescence, he was influenced by Arthur C. Clarke's short story "Dial F for Frankenstein." This possibly influenced his later vision that the web could truly seem alive.

While consulting at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), he created a program called Enquire to master CERN's intricate information system and his own mental associations of information. With this program, he could enter several words in a document, and when the words were clicked, the program would lead him to related documents that provided more information. This is a form of hypertext, a term coined by Ted Nelson in the 1960s to describe text connected by links.

In collaboration with colleagues, Berners-Lee developed the three cornerstones of the web: the language for encoding documents— Hypertext Markup Language (HTML); the system for transmitting documents— Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP); and the scheme for addressing documents— Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

Berners-Lee runs the nonprofit World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that helps set technical standards for the web. Its members come from industry, such as Microsoft, Sun, Apple, and IBM, some universities, and some government research centers, both from the United States and elsewhere, for example, CERN. As of December 2001, W3C had more than 500 members. As director of W3C, he brings members together to negotiate agreement on technical standards. In May 1998, Berners-Lee was awarded one of the prestigious MacArthur "genius" fellowships, freeing him to do just about whatever he wanted for a few years.

Jeff Bezos

Jeff Preston Bezos was born in New Mexico in 1964. He was raised by his mother and his stepfather, Mike Bezos, who had emigrated from Cuba. Bezos became famous for using the Internet as the basis for the Seattle-based bookseller Amazon.com.

After graduating from Princeton summa cum laude in electrical engineering and computer science in 1986, he joined FITEL, a high-tech startup company in New York; two years later, he moved to Bankers Trust Company to develop their computer systems, becoming their youngest vice-president in 1990. He then worked at D. E. Shaw & Co., an investment firm. It was there that he got the idea to start an online company based on the Internet.

In 1994 Bezos left Wall Street to establish Amazon.com. He had no experience in the book-selling business, but, after some research, realized that books were small-price commodities that were easy and relatively inexpensive to ship and well-suited for online commerce. More than three million book titles are in print at any one time throughout the world; more than one million of those are in English. However, even the largest bookstore cannot stock more than 200,000 books, and a catalog for such a large volume of books is too large for a mail-order house to distribute. Bezos had identified a strategic opportunity for selling online.

Amazon.com has continued to extend its product line offerings, which now include a variety of consumer goods, including electronics, software, art and collectibles, housewares, and toys. In December 1999 Time magazine chose Bezos as its Person of the Year.

Bill Gates

As a teenager, William H. Gates (born in 1955 in Seattle, Washington) was a devoted hacker. He knew how to make computers work and make money. Together with his friend, Paul Allen, he designed a scheduling program for their school, Lakeside School, in Seattle. Later, the two designed a program to perform traffic analysis that reportedly earned their company, Traf-O-Data, $20,000.

Gates entered Harvard in 1973, and while there was impressed by an article that Allen had shown him in Popular Electronics about the MITS Altair home computer. He recognized that these computers would need software and that much money could be made writing such programs. He and Allen developed a full-featured BASIC language interpreter that required only 4KB of memory. BASIC made the Altair an instant hit; in 1975, Allen and Gates formed Microsoft Corporation. Much to the disappointment of his parents, Gates dropped out of Harvard to pursue his software development dreams.

Gates's biggest break came when the IBM Corporation decided to enter the personal computer business. He convinced IBM that his small company could write an original operating system that would take advantage of the disk drives and other peripherals that IBM had planned.

By 1998, Gates had turned Microsoft into the largest and most dominant computer software company ever. By the end of fiscal year 2000, Microsoft had revenues of $22.96 billion and employed more than 39,000 people in 60 countries.

Steven Jobs

Orphaned shortly after his birth in California in 1955, Steven Paul Jobs was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs in Mountain View, California, and was raised there and in Los Altos, California. His interest in electronics started in high school. In order to build his projects, he had to beg for parts, going as far as asking William Hewlett, president of Hewlett-Packard, for the parts he needed to build a computer device. His boldness landed him a summer job at Hewlett-Packard where he befriended electronics wizard Stephen Wozniak.

Jobs was thirteen and Wozniak eighteen when they met. They built the prototype of the Apple I in Jobs's garage, and together founded Apple Computer in 1976. They sold their first computers to a local electronics store, one of the first "computer stores." Wozniak eventually left Hewlett-Packard to work at Apple full time.

From the day it opened for business in 1976, Apple prospered, first with the Apple I, and then the Apple II. The introduction of the VisiCalc spreadsheet introduced Apple products to the business world, and in 1982 Jobs made the cover of Time magazine.

When sales of Apple computers dropped off after the introduction of the IBM-PC, Jobs set to work on the design of a new computer, the affordable and hugely successful Apple Macintosh. Jobs left Apple in September 1985, in a dispute over management, to found a new company, NeXT, Inc, which built workstations for university and business environments. However, despite a revenue of $60 million in 1996, NeXT was unsuccessful as a hardware company and was sold to Apple later that year for $400 million. Jobs later returned to Apple and became its chairman.

Mitchell Kapor

Mitch Kapor was born in Brooklyn in 1950 and raised in Freeport, New York, on Long Island. He graduated from Yale University in 1971 with a B.A. in psychology. Kapor spent several years doing odd jobs until 1978, when he became interested in personal computers and purchased an Apple II. Kapor became a serious programmer and created VisiPlot, an applica tion that would plot and graph the results of a spreadsheet, and VisiTrend. Before long, Kapor's royalty checks were running into the six-figure range.

In 1982 Kapor and Jonathan Sachs went on to establish Lotus Corporation to make and market his multipurpose Lotus 1-2-3, a program that combined some of the best features of a then well known and widely used spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, with graphics and database management capabilities.

Lotus 1-2-3 was designed to work on IBM's sixteen-bit processor rather than on the eight-bit processor, which was the standard for other microcomputers. Kapor felt that this new processor would soon become the standard throughout the personal computer industry, giving his program a head start. By the summer of 1986 Kapor left Lotus, and in 1987 he established ON Technology; he later founded Kapor Enterprises, Inc. Lotus was sold to IBM in 1997.

Sandra Kurtzig

Sandra Kurtzig was born in Chicago in 1946. She received a bachelor's degree from UCLA in 1967 and later a master's degree from Stanford University. In 1971 she used $2,000 to found a software company, ASK Computer Systems, Inc., which went public in 1974.

ASK started as a part-time contract software programming business based in her second bedroom. She received __BODY__,200 from her first client, a telecommunications equipment manufacturer that needed programs to track inventory, bills of material, and purchase orders. ASK grew into a company that had $450 million in annual sales in 1992.

Kurtzig could not convince venture capitalists in Silicon Valley to invest in her company, so she launched it on her earnings alone. At one point she needed a computer to run a manufacturing program under development. She managed to gain access to a Hewlett-Packard facility where her colleagues could test the program during off hours. It was here that they developed computer software that was packaged with Hewlett-Packard computers.

In 1994 ASK was purchased by Computer Associates, a software company founded by Charles Wang, Judy Cedeno, and Russ Artzt; Wang and Artzt attended Queens College, in New York, at the same time. The company is based in Long Island, New York, but is a worldwide enterprise.

Kurtzig later became chairperson of the board of E-benefits, a San Francisco insurance and human resources service provider, founded in 1996 by one of her sons. ASK stands for Arie (the name of her ex-husband), Sandy, and Kurtzig.

Pamela Lopker

In 1979 Pamela Lopker founded QAD Inc., a software company which employed more than 1,200 people in 21 countries at last report. Their major product, MFG/PRO, is a software system that helps manufacturing firms track their products from sale order, to manufacturing, to delivery.

These enterprise resource planning (ERP) programs are used by a variety of companies—such as Avon, Coca-Cola, Lucent, and Sun Microsystems—to deliver large quantities of products manufactured and distributed from more than 5,100 sites in some 80 countries.

QAD's 2006 Project was set up by Lopker in 1995. Its goal is to provide an introduction to the Internet to elementary school students in the Santa Barbara South Coast area. In 1998 Lopker was named "Entrepreneur of the Year" for the Los Angeles area. She was also named to the WITI (Women in Technology International) Hall of Fame in 1997.

Pierre Omidyar

Pierre Omidyar is the founder of eBay, the online marketplace where anyone, according to its mission, can buy or sell just about anything. Omidyar was born in Paris in 1968 and lived there until he was six when his family emigrated to the United States. He admits that his interest in computers started in high school and continued in college. He graduated with a bachelor of science in computer science from Tufts University in 1988.

The auction web site eBay, founded in 1995, was not his first venture; in 1991 he was the co-founder of Ink Development Corp., one of the pioneers in online shopping. It was bought by Microsoft in 1996 under the name of eShop.

Omidyar also worked as a developer for Claris, a subsidiary of Apple Computer, and, while he was launching eBay, he was working for General Magic, Inc., a mobile telecommunications company. Omidyar started eBay hoping to provide people with a democratic opportunity to trade goods, and to fulfill the wishes of his wife-to-be to find people who collected and wanted to trade Pez candy dispensers.

By the end of 1999 eBay had a market value of $20 billion and had close to 29.7 million registered users. Currently Omidyar lives in France and spends most of his time on philanthropic projects.

John W. Thompson

John W. Thompson received a bachelor's degree in business administration from Florida A&M University and a master's degree in management science from MIT's Sloan School of Management. Upon graduation he joined the IBM Corporation, where he spent twenty-eight successful years, advancing to general manager of IBM Americas, a 30,000 employee division, where his major responsibilities were in sales and support of IBM's products and services.

In 1999 he left IBM to join Symantec, a world leader of Internet security technology. As chief executive officer of Symantec, Thompson transformed the company from a publisher of software products to a principal provider of Internet security products aimed at individuals as well as large businesses.

Probably, the company's most well known product is their Norton line of security systems, which includes Norton Internet Security 2001, Norton AntiVirus 2001, Norton Personal Firewall 2001, Norton SystemWorks 2001, and Norton Utilities 2001. However, it also provides much needed security to most of the leading corporations.

Jerry Yang

Jerry Yang, born in Taiwan in 1968, emigrated to the United States with his mother when he was ten. He graduated from Stanford in 1990 with a bachelor of science and a master of science degree in electrical engineering in four years. There he met and formed a close friendship with David Filo, who had also earned a master's in electrical engineering at Stanford.

Yang and Filo entered the doctorate program at Stanford and, after Filo discovered Mosaic, they became addicted to surfing the World Wide Web. Their addiction developed into a list of links to their favorite web sites, which was stored on Yang's home page and was called Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web.

Knowledge of Jerry's Guide spread fast and his site began to experience thousands of hits every day. Yang and Filo quickly realized that the guide had market potential and decided to form a company to promote it. The name Yahoo! is a take off on the UNIX program YACC, "Yet Another Compiler Compiler," and stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." The "hierarchical" comes from its categorization scheme of web sites. Yahoo! is one of the few search engines that use the intelligence of human labor to categorize the sites found.

Yahoo! went public in 1996, and in 2001 it was the leading online media company, with more global unique visitors than AOL or Microsoft networks, and, together with them, formed the top three in the United States.

Epilogue

The list of entrepreneurs is never-ending. Others that merit special mention are: Daniel Bricklin and Robert Frankston (VisiCalc), Nolan Bushnell (Atari), Steve Case (AOL), Larry Ellison (Oracle), and Ross Perot (EDS). Who knows, maybe your name will be added to the list.

SEE ALSO DISTANCE LEARNING; E-COMMERCE; EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE; INTERNET: APPLICATIONS.

Ida M. Flynn

Bibliography

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