If you’re looking for entrepreneurial inspiration, or are just curious to know how some of the nation’s most successful startups came up with their money-making ideas, the video below is pretty awesome.
YouTube user Tim Finnigan put together a compilation of 50 startup founders — from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to Zillow’s Rich Barton to Tinder’s Sean Rad — explaining the original idea for each of their companies.
Here are a few examples:
“I worked in dispatch for a long time. A majority of my career has been about real-time, low latency, high-transaction systems around moving information. And it comes down to this very simple concept, which is, someone broadcasts a message and those interested in it, follow it. That’s it. Ambulances constantly broadcast where they are and what they’re doing and dispatchers and call centers follow where those ambulances are. It’s really, really simple.” — Jack Dorsey, Twitter.
“The motivating force behind why we founded Zillow was really based on consumer empowerment. Power to the people. Give the regular consumer the tools and information and wherewithal to make better and smarter decisions about buying and selling homes and mortgages. … The other side of the marketplace is when consumers are shopping for homes and mortgages, they really need to talk to the right professional with the right information and at Zillow we’ve worked really hard to build a set of tools where professionals can participate inside of the marketplace and connect with consumers and help them get answers and help drive business for them as well.” — Rich Barton, Zillow.
“It started because we couldn’t afford to make rent one weekend. This international design conference was coming to San Francisco. I had $1,000 in the bank. Joe, my roommate, tells me the rent is $1,150. I realized I have a math problem here. What am I going to do? This international design conference is coming to San Francisco. We said, what if we turn our house into a bed and breakfast for conference. I didn’t have any beds, but Joe had some air beds so we pulled some air beds out of the closet and we called it the air bed and breakfast.” — Brian Chesky, Airbnb.
