Billionaires Who Built Up from Small Businesses

The world of entrepreneurship loves the tale of a small business startup that grew into a billion-dollar business. The team at Ooma illustrated the biggest names in this world of billionaires with a timeline showing how long it took them to reach their status from a small business start-up to a billion-dollar milestone.

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The graphic features 28 billionaires who built up from a small business. All names were pulled from the Forbes 400 list. While the graphic is stuffed full of details, the most fascinating is the measure of how many years they needed to become billionaires.

The first person to achieve the “self-made” billionaire status was John D. Rockefeller in 1916. The oil tycoon rode the wave of the industrial era to billionaire status. Today, there are almost 3,000 billionaires worldwide. The U.S. is home to the highest number, at 813 billionaires. We can see an industry trend in this graphic, which is that tech dominates. This is no surprise. As Rockefeller benefited from the need for oil, how we worked and what we produced changed completely, and tech has changed every aspect of our lives, so it’s no surprise that these entrepreneurs have reaped the rewards.

Notable examples are Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, who led the way in introducing the personal computer to the general public. Warren Buffett took a different approach. He grew wealth by investing wisely in assets. Elon Musk started his first business with Zip2 in the early days of the Internet.

The Billionaire Journeys

The chart shows us that it took different people vastly different amounts of time to reach their status. Bezos and Zuckerberg were the fastest, becoming billionaires in just four years. Others like Donald Bern and John Menard Jr. had a slow build that took 43 years. Many people land somewhere in between these extremes, emphasizing that successful entrepreneurship takes dedication and persistence. We also see on that chart that there is only one woman, Diane Hendricks. This suggests that entrepreneurship and business are still rife with bias.

The Journeys of the Top 10 Billionaires

This is how long the wealthiest billionaires took to hit their status:

• Jeff Bezos: 4 years
• Mark Zuckerberg: 4 years
• Jan Koum: 5 years
• Larry Page: 6 years
• Sergey Brin: 6 years
• Henry Samueli: 9 years
• Bill Gates: 12 years
• Michael Dell: 12 years
• Steve Cohen: 12 years
• David Tepper: 13 years

Many people on this list transformed their industries, showing that successful entrepreneurs are creative and innovative. They show us that entrepreneurs should look for emerging trends in their industry, leverage new technology, and make strong investments. While a lot depends on love, it’s clear that persistence is key. The list gives us an idea of what kind of industries people can generate billion-dollar businesses in and how long it might take to get there. This chart is a great introduction to these business pioneers, and many of these billionaires have published books and given out advice on how they made their businesses a success.