50 Fun Facts About Entrepreneurship

Investor Aileen Lee picked which mythical beast in 2013 for a private startup valued at $1B or more?

Unicorn was chosen for its rarity: Lee's TechCrunch article counted just 39 such companies, and by May 2024 CB Insights listed more than 1,200.

Play-Doh began in 1930s Cincinnati as which household product, long before schools used it as clay?

Wallpaper cleaner was the original product: the compound was reworked and marketed to Cincinnati schools in the mid-1950s, becoming a toy only after its cleaning days were over.

Airbnb's founders raised $30,000 in 2008 by selling what, branded after candidates Obama and McCain?

Breakfast cereal named after the two candidates was sold mostly at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, keeping the site then called AirBed & Breakfast afloat.

YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, both ex-PayPal, said their 2005 site was first conceived as what?

A dating service with video profiles was the pitch, influenced by Hot or Not; the idea broadened after Jawed Karim could not find clips of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami online.

Priced out of bagels, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield took a correspondence course in what?

Ice cream making was the fallback after bagels: the Penn State course led to a $12,000 parlour in a renovated Burlington, Vermont, gas station in May 1978.

Ray Kroc was selling what when he visited the McDonald brothers' San Bernardino restaurant in 1954?

Milkshake mixers from Prince Castle were Kroc's line, and the brothers had bought eight of his Multimixers, which is what made him curious enough to visit.

Shopify's founders built their own platform in 2006 after first opening an online store for what?

Snowboards were the stock at Snowdevil, the 2004 shop of Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake; unhappy with existing e-commerce software, Lütke coded his own and that became the product.

Ferruccio Lamborghini started building sports cars in 1963 to rival Ferrari after succeeding with what?

Tractors made his money: Lamborghini Trattori, founded in 1948, still builds them in Pieve di Cento, Italy.

Juicero's $699 juicer collapsed in 2017 after Bloomberg News showed its produce packs could be what?

Squeezed by hand, the packs gave juice nearly indistinguishable from the machine's, and venture capitalist Ben Einstein called the press 'an incredibly complicated piece of engineering'.

What term describes launching a company on internal cash flow alone, with no outside capital?

Bootstrapping means surviving the startup phase on internal cash flow and tight expenses, with a small pot of money set aside at the outset for the process.

Which startup term names the pace, usually stated per month, at which a company consumes its cash?

Burn rate is negative cash flow with a vivid name, typically expressed in monthly terms, and the same phrase describes how fast people spend their own discretionary income.

Whose 2011 book The Lean Startup spread 'pivot' and 'minimum viable product' among founders?

Eric Ries built the book on his blog, citing Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn, who tested demand by photographing local shoe-store stock before building a website or inventory.

Slack, the workplace chat app, grew out of an internal tool at Tiny Speck, a studio developing what?

A massively multiplayer game called Glitch was Tiny Speck's first product, a social MMORPG led by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield; it 'unlaunched' in 2012 and the team's chat tool became the business.

Which crowdfunding site, launched in 2009, hosted Oculus's 2012 campaign for its VR headset?

Kickstarter was started by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler and Charles Adler, and every project page ever launched there stays permanently archived and public.

How much did Facebook pay in 2014 for Oculus, a VR startup that had crowdfunded its headset in 2012?

$2 billion bought a company that had shipped only a development prototype; the first consumer Rift did not arrive until March 2016.

What price did Facebook announce for WhatsApp in February 2014, its largest acquisition to date?

$19 billion broke down as $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares and $3 billion in restricted stock units for WhatsApp's founders.

Whitney Wolfe Herd, aged 31, became the youngest woman to take a company public in 2021 with which app?

Bumble's IPO also made Wolfe Herd the world's youngest female billionaire, and she rang the Nasdaq bell with her 14-month-old son on her hip.

Sara Blakely spent two years and how much in savings developing the hosiery idea that became Spanx?

$5,000 was the entire budget, spent while she still worked at Danka in Atlanta; by 2012 Forbes put her on its cover as the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world.

Yvon Chouinard handed which outdoor-clothing company to a trust and a climate non-profit in 2022?

Patagonia's voting stock went to the Patagonia Purpose Trust and its non-voting stock to the Holdfast Collective, so profits fund climate work and land protection.

Which hair-care entrepreneur does Guinness list as America's first self-made female millionaire?

Madam C. J. Walker may not even have been first — Mary Ellen Pleasant's wealth is less documented — and at her death she was the wealthiest self-made Black woman in America.

Coco Chanel's first licensed Paris business, opened at 21 rue Cambon in 1910, sold only what?

Hats were all she could sell there: the rue Cambon building already housed a clothing business, so the milliner's shop named Chanel Modes stuck to millinery.

Richard Branson's first business venture, started at the age of 16, was a magazine called what?

Student was the title, and the teenage publisher went on to be knighted in March 2000 for 'services to entrepreneurship'.

Roughly how many prototypes did James Dyson build over five years before his 1983 G-Force vacuum?

5,127 was Dyson's own count, made while his wife's salary as an art teacher helped support the family; no UK manufacturer would handle the result.

Jack Ma, later Alibaba's founder, told Charlie Rose which fast-food chain rejected him for a job?

KFC said 'you're no good', Ma recalled, and he also claims Harvard Business School rejected him ten times in a row.

Barbie's inventor Ruth Handler co-founded which toy company with her husband Elliot?

Mattel had Handler as its first president from 1945 to 1975, and Barbie arrived in 1959 with curves that gave dolls an adult shape.

Whose first car venture, the Detroit Automobile Company, folded in 1901 after just twenty vehicles?

Henry Ford attracted twelve backers in 1899, lost them $86,000 and went on to found the Henry Ford Company before the firm that still bears his name.

Laugh-O-Gram, a Kansas City cartoon studio that went bankrupt in 1923, was founded by whom?

Walt Disney sold his camera after the bankruptcy and moved to Hollywood with an unfinished reel of Alice's Wonderland.

Who launched modern retail franchising with an international chain of 500 hair salons?

Martha Matilda Harper franchised the salon model to low-income women, and at its peak her company had more than 500 franchises plus a line of hair-care products.

Which coffee shop did Howard Schultz open after quitting Starbucks in 1985, later merging the two?

Il Giornale came after Schultz visited more than 500 espresso bars in Milan and raised the $400,000 he needed to start it.

Which Irish-French banker's Essai first framed the entrepreneur as a bearer of risk?

Richard Cantillon's Essai Sur La Nature Du Commerce En Général was largely forgotten until William Stanley Jevons rediscovered it in the late 19th century and called it the 'cradle of political economy'.

The investing term 'angel' was borrowed from wealthy backers who rescued failing productions where?

Broadway theatre gave the word to finance: angels funded shows that would otherwise have closed, long before the term reached startup investing.

The 'traitorous eight' who walked out of William Shockley's lab in 1957 founded which chipmaker?

Fairchild Semiconductor became an incubator of Silicon Valley, directly or indirectly spawning dozens of firms including Intel and AMD — the so-called 'Fairchildren'.

Whose 1971 article 'Silicon Valley U.S.A.' in Electronic News is credited with popularising the name?

Don Hoefler's piece ran on January 11, 1971, the first time a journalist had used the name in a news story.

Which startup accelerator did Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston launch in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in March 2005?

Y Combinator has since launched more than 5,000 companies; its program started in Cambridge and Mountain View, moved to San Francisco in 2019 and later ran entirely online for a period.

Techstars, the accelerator David Cohen and Brad Feld founded in 2006, started in which Colorado city?

Boulder hosted the first three-month program, which invested $6,000 to $18,000 in each early-stage company in return for mentorship-heavy support; the firm is now headquartered in New York City.

What does the B stand for in the Certified B Corporation mark awarded by the non-profit B Lab?

Beneficial is the word: B Lab, founded in 2006 in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, certifies for-profit companies on social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency.

Which president signed the Small Business Act of 1953, creating the US Small Business Administration?

Dwight Eisenhower signed the act on July 30, 1953, and the SBA it created is still codified at 15 U.S.C. chapter 14A.

Kongō Gumi, documented as the world's oldest company since AD 578, has worked mainly in what trade?

Temple construction for Japan's millions of Buddhists kept Kongō Gumi going for 14 centuries, until concrete-era competition made it a Takamatsu Construction subsidiary in 2006.

Keiunkan, run in Japan's Yamanashi Prefecture since 705 and perhaps the oldest independent company, is what?

A hot-spring inn founded by Fujiwara no Mahito, Keiunkan is a classic shinise ('long-established business') and arguably the oldest independent company since Kongō Gumi's 2006 takeover.

Which term, from a 1978 Gifford Pinchot III paper, names an employee innovating inside a big company?

Intrapreneur first appeared in the white paper Intra-Corporate Entrepreneurship, and Pinchot later defined intrapreneurs as 'dreamers who do'.

Which pricing model, named after a 2006 Fred Wilson blog post, gives the basic product away?

Freemium was coined in response to Wilson's post summarising the model, in which a no-cost tier draws users who then pay for premium features.

Twitter began in 2006 as an internal tool for staff at which podcasting company?

Odeo employees used the prototype built by Jack Dorsey and contractor Florian Weber before the public version launched on July 15, 2006.

Whose 1985 book Innovation and Entrepreneurship drew on his father's friend Joseph Schumpeter?

Peter Drucker took from Schumpeter the conviction that innovation and entrepreneurship matter, and Innovation and Entrepreneurship appeared in 1985, one of some three dozen books he wrote.

A 2007 article with a mafia-style group photo spread the 'PayPal Mafia' label in which magazine?

Fortune's piece featured the now-iconic photo; Peter Thiel, sometimes called the group's 'don', went on to found Palantir and Founders Fund and was Facebook's first outside investor.

Which state passed America's first limited liability company law in 1977, at an oil company's behest?

Wyoming's statute was a project of the Hamilton Brothers Oil Company, which wanted to run its US business with liability and tax advantages, and the legislature gave LLCs some corporate features without tipping them into corporation status.

An 1885 newspaper campaign that drew 160,000 small donors is cited as early crowdfunding for what?

The Statue of Liberty's pedestal was paid for after government funding failed and publisher Joseph Pulitzer ran a five-month appeal in his newspaper The World.

Which consumer-goods giant bought Dollar Shave Club, launched by a viral 2012 YouTube video, in 2016?

Unilever bought the razor-subscription startup a year after its $75 million Series D; the launch video had brought in 12,000 orders in its first 48 hours.

Which Paris-born Harvard Business School professor is described as the 'father of venture capital'?

Georges Doriot led American Research and Development Corporation, the first venture firm to raise money from institutional investors rather than family wealth.

Who coined 'growth hacker' in a 2010 post, defining one as 'a person whose true north is growth'?

Sean Ellis published the post on July 26, 2010, and the label spread to the whole discipline of fast, experiment-driven user acquisition.

The first business incubator opened in 1959 in a vacant farm-machinery plant in which New York town?

Batavia's industrial center filled a giant Massey-Harris factory, and Joseph Mancuso lured tenants with short leases, shared equipment, business advice and secretarial help.