Hall of Fame
Editorial retellings of how iconic startups began, drawn from public accounts — written by our editorial desk, not by the founders themselves. Your story belongs next to these: tell it here.
Hall of Fame · editorial
In 2005, Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell tried an experiment: fund a batch of very young founders with small checks, all at…
Hall of Fame · editorial
Whitney Wolfe Herd left Tinder in 2014 after a painful, public departure — and turned the worst year of her life into Bumble, the dating app where women message…
Hall of Fame · editorial
On a bus from Boston to New York in 2006, Drew Houston opened his laptop to work and realized he'd left his USB drive at home. Instead of fuming, he started wri…
Hall of Fame · editorial
In mid-2000s Sweden — the home of The Pirate Bay — Daniel Ek concluded you could never out-lawsuit piracy; you could only out-product it. Spotify's founding bet…
Hall of Fame · editorial
OpenAI began in December 2015 as a nonprofit research lab co-founded by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever and others, pledging to build safe…
Hall of Fame · editorial
Luis von Ahn grew up in Guatemala watching people pay for English classes they couldn't afford. After inventing CAPTCHA and selling reCAPTCHA to Google, he co-c…
Hall of Fame · editorial
Jan Koum immigrated from Soviet Ukraine at sixteen, swept grocery store floors, and once lived on food stamps. In 2009, rejected by Facebook for a job, he built…
Hall of Fame · editorial
Ivan Zhao's first version of Notion was failing — wrong technology, dwindling money. In 2015 he and Simon Last laid off the team, moved to Kyoto where they knew…
Hall of Fame · editorial
Dylan Field dropped out of Brown at twenty with a Thiel Fellowship and a heretical idea: professional design tools should run in a browser tab, multiplayer, lik…
Hall of Fame · editorial
Tobi Lütke wanted to sell snowboards online in 2004. The e-commerce software was so bad that the German programmer built his own store from scratch — then reali…
Hall of Fame · editorial
Melanie Perkins was a nineteen-year-old teaching design software in Perth when she decided the tools themselves were the problem. It took a yearbook business, m…
Hall of Fame · editorial
Patrick and John Collison were Irish teenagers who had already built and sold a startup before founding Stripe in 2010. Their insight was embarrassingly simple:…
Hall of Fame · editorial
In October 2007, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia couldn't make rent on their San Francisco apartment. A sold-out design conference gave them an idea: inflate three…
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