Great Entrepreneurs At the Start

What Great Entrepreneurs

Looked Like When They

Started Their First Company

Henry Ford (Ford Motor Co.)

•Formed Ford & Malcomson in 1902 (age 39).

•Fun fact: Ford became an apprentice machinist in Detroit at the age of 16.

Photo: “Barney Oldfield & Henry Ford,” The History Channel

Mary Kay Ash (Mary Kay®)

•Opened her first store in 1963 (age 45).

•Fun fact: Ash quit her sales job in 1963 after being passed over for a promotion by a man she had trained.

Photo: Corbis for Inc. Magazine

Steve Jobs (Apple)

•Founded Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976 (age 21).

•Fun fact: After dropping out of Reed College after one semester, Steve Jobs worked as a technician with Atari.

Photo: Silvermac.com

Debbi Fields (Mrs. Fields®)

•Founded Mrs. Fields Cookies in 1977 (age 21).

•Fun fact: Fields used money from her childhood job as a “ball girl” for the Oakland Athletics to buy ingredients for baking cookies.

Photo: mrsfields.com

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield (Ben and Jerry’s®)

•Opened their first Ben & Jerry’s ice cream parlor in 1978 in a renovated gas station in Vermont, using $8,000 of their own and $4,000 they borrowed (ages: 27).•Fun fact: Boyhood friends, Cohen and Greenfield wanted to do something that was “fun” and decided to start a food business. After realizing bagel equipment was too expensive, they took a correspondence course in ice-cream making.

Source: Star Magazine

Oprah Winfrey•Launched her own production company, Harpo Studios, in 1988 (age: 34).

•Fun fact: Winfrey started out in rural Mississippi, where her grandmother said she used to interview her corncob doll.

Source: AP

Pierre Omidyar (eBay™)

•Launched “Auction Web,” now eBay, in 1995 (age:28).

•Fun fact: he wrote the basics of eBay over labor day weekend in 1995 to help his fiancée trade PEZ candy dispensers.

Wendy Kopp (Teach for America)

•Kopp founded Teach for America in 1989 (age: 22).

•Kopp described her idea of Teach for America in her college undergraduate thesis.

Source: Echoing Green