Founders
The people who made the bets. Not hagiography, not takedown. The decisions they made before the shift was obvious, and the patterns they ran more than once.
Netflix
Reed Hastings
A former Peace Corps math teacher who built and sold a software company, then co-founded Netflix in 1997 and ran it through three reinventions.
Co-founder & Executive Chairman
NVIDIA Jensen Huang
Immigrated from Taiwan as a child, worked as a chip engineer, and co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 in a Denny's booth. Has run it ever since.
Co-founder & CEO
Salesforce Marc Benioff
Spent 13 years at Oracle, became its youngest VP, then left to bet that business software would be delivered over the internet like a utility.
Co-founder, Chair & CEO
Amazon Jeff Bezos
Left a senior role at a Wall Street hedge fund to sell books online in 1994, using a regret-minimization framework to justify the leap.
Founder & Executive Chairman