12 Founders of Famous Brands Less Talked About

4Nike – Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman

Listed as the 28th richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of US$30 billion by Forbes, philanthropist, Phil Knight ran tracks under coach Bill Bowerman at the University of Oregon, with whom he co-founded Nike. The Bill Bowerman was looking for ways to enhance his student’s performance and tried improving their shoes in his free time. He tried various combinations but they were not successful. Phil Knight then studying in Stanford University imported shoes from Japan and tried selling them to his coach Bowerman. But as Bowerman was interested to join him they founded the company Blue Ribbon Sports in 1964 later renamed as Nike, the Greek Goddess of victory, in 1971.

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5Uber – Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp

Travis Kalanick, an American businessman, was unable to find a taxi while in Paris to get to a conference. Realizing that this could be an issue faced by countless travelers around the world, he along with Garrett Camp, a Canadian businessman who invented the idea, launched Uber Cabs in 2009. Uber is a ridesharing, food delivery and transportation network company headquartered in California operating in 633 cities worldwide. Uber comes from a German word meaning “above”. 

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6Lego – Ole Kirk Christiansen

Ole Kirk Christiansen was a simple Danish village carpenter who turned his love of whittling and playing with wood into business in 1916 where he produced ladders, iron boards, stools etc. Tragedy hit him and he took a hard decision to use wood to create inexpensive goods that might sell, among them were cheap toys. His love for toys pushed the company ahead even when he limped. He renamed it to reflect its new direction leg godt or ‘play well’ as LEGO in 1934. The Lego began making its famous plastic interlocking blocks in 1949. 

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7Google – Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Larry page was considering Stanford for Graduation school and Sergey Brin was assigned to show him around. Very soon they stuck a partnership and built a search engine from their dark rooms that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on World Wide Web. They named it Backrub which was renamed Google and it caught attention of not only the academic community but Silicon Valley investors. In 1998, Andy Bechtolsheim offered Larry and Sergey $100,000 and Google inc. was born. 

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8Instagram – Kevin Systrom

Kevin Systrom’s mother was early to technology and Systrom was influenced by his mother. His love for photography plus technology led to creation of a photo sharing app named Burbn. But this app was complicated and not successful. He paid attention to how people were using it and along with another programmer Mike Krieger redesigned it. In the year 2010 released a simple photo sharing app renamed as Instagram. He had never thought that he would be selling a company to Facebook for $1 billion. 

Image Source: www.forbes.com