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These 5 women and men aren’t the Mark Zuckerbergs, Steve Jobs or Evan Williams of the world but they still took everything we knew about the online world and turned it on its ear.
Jessica Mah, inDinero
Mah was born in 1990. A mere 21 years old, and she’s already on her fourth successful business since launching an eBay store when she was 13 years old. She graduated high school at age 15 and while she was studying computer science at UC Berkeley, founded InternshipIN, a place for students to find internships with startups. While she was still an undergrad she built the prototype for inDinero with a UC Berkeley classmate. She’s the youngest tech founder on this list.
Charles Best, DonorsChoose
For five years, Charles Best was a history teacher in the Bronx. His first year on the job, he was frustrated by the fact that his fellow teachers would talk about the things they wished they could procure for their students – art supplies, books, science equipment and resources for field trips. The teachers were spending their own money on basic supplies for the classroom and there was no way they’d ever find money in the budget for these extra expenses. Meanwhile, the parents were in no position to supply them either. The idea for an “eBay for philanthropy” was born out of those teachers’ lounge conversations. He launched Donors Choose out his classroom for the first few years. Then a cold call to Jonathan Alter of Newsweek paid off. His article caught the eye of Oprah and things exploded from there.
Alexa Hirschfeld, Paperless Post
Alexa Hirschfeld had two years in a comfy job at CBS Evening News (as comfortable a job as any in old-school media can be) before jumping into the entrepreneurial waters with her brother and starting Paperless Post. Paperless Post proved you don’t have to be revolutionary to create a revolution. It also proved you can take an online product people are using for free, make it better and then charge people to use it. People keep saying that traditional media can’t start charging for its products online or via mobile apps; no one’s going to buy the cow when they can get the milk for free, after all. Hirschfeld’s company proves that to be a lie. If your product is significantly better than the free alternative, there are people who will happily pay.
Greg Tseng, Tagged
Tseng had a large user base of people making connections with people they didn’t know. He decided to change his focus from social networking to social discovery and was soon on the rise again. Experian Hitwise now ranks Tagged.com as the No. 5 social networking site, after Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Yahoo! Answers. It’s debatable whether YouTube and Yahoo! Answers actually are social networks. Nos. 6 through 10 include LinkedIn, MySpace, MyYearbook, Google+ and Pinterest.
Eileen Gittins, Blurb
Gittins worked for Kodak and helped found several companies, including Personify. Her roots were in photography, though, and she set about taking portraits of 40 people she’d built companies with. She wanted to give them an elegant coffee-table-quality book of the images as a keepsake. Turns out, you couldn’t do that. Book printers weren’t set up to do small runs and self-publishing online was nowhere near the quality of the coffee table book. So despite many people thinking she must be just a little bit out of her mind, she pressed forward and founded Blurb, where people can order even just one copy of their book if they want.
Read the full article here.
Amy Vernon
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