GrubHub was founded by Matt Maloney and Mike Evans. While working on a job, the pair got hungry and that’s when it hit them that there was no one-stop-shop online for food delivery from local restaurants.
Once the Web grew from a collection of static pages to an interactive platform, Matt Mullenweg knew users would need an open source content management system, so he created WordPress.
After leaving Yahoo, Jan Koum and Brian Acton felt the need for a messaging app with no ads, no games, and no gimmicks. That was the genesis of WhatsApp, which was acquired by Facebook for $19 billion.
Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp founded Uber as an app built on scalable infrastructure to get people rides from one place to another.
Richard Branson created a discount mail-order record store, Virgin Records, because he was frustrated with paying exorbitant prices for music and thought others felt the same way.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple Computer to meet the growing demand for fully assembled personal computers with a display and interface for loading and saving programs. Today, Apple is the most valuable company in the world.
When friends asked for custom PCs, Michael Dell started building them to order out of his Austin, Texas, dorm room. That became Dell Computer.
Fred Smith came up with the idea of using a bank clearing house concept to more efficiently ship packages from one place to another. That’s how Federal Express was born.
Bill Gates loved writing programming languages and customers needed them, so he started Microsoft for just that purpose.
With a billion people and little brick and mortar infrastructure, China had thousands of small merchants with no easy way to reach customers. Jack Ma built Alibaba to meet that need.
