Serial Entrepreneurs – How To Pursue Multiple Opportunities
View(s):We know that entrepreneurs focus on one thing until it becomes a reality. We also know that entrepreneurs recognize business opportunities upon their arrival. These two qualities can be contradicted: to concentrate on one thing and to look for other possibilities contradicts oneself.
For many new entrepreneurs, there is a real dilemma. Do you have to create many companies or should you focus all your life on a company like Zuckerberg?
To answer this question, we collect data on the most successful entrepreneurs in the world: local billionaires who have made money with new businesses. According to Forbes, there are 1426 billionaires in the world this year. 960 of them are made for themselves, while others inherit their wealth. We focused on the 960 story to find out how they make their money. More specifically, these billionaires have left one or more companies. After deciphering the numbers, we found that 830 of them were making more money in more than one company, while 130 of them were taking their assets from a business.
At least that means that most of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs are serial entrepreneurs who have made money with two or more different companies.
But what do we mean by “different” companies?
What is the difference between these people and a company? We found the companies of the five largest entrepreneurs with different backgrounds. If you look at their story, you will see how they looked for an opportunity, but they did not necessarily have a clear plan of billions of dollars from the beginning.
How do we get data from serial entrepreneurs?
We analyzed the profiles of the Forbes billionaires list and found local billionaires who were making money from various sources. From there, we find entrepreneurs with the largest number of companies that are also the most popular in terms of Google Trends. We carefully analyze the biographies of each multimillionaire businessman to create a calendar for his businesses. For Richard Branson, to make room, we only made the most popular companies, since the total number is 400 (the Richard Branson chronology of Ventures on Wikipedia). We also summarized very similar transactions in a company.
The point at which every entrepreneur has billionaire status is discussed. We use data from private sector acquisitions, public offerings and significant share price increases to measure the time elapsed since these entrepreneurs crossed the billion mark:
n Sheldon Adelson became a billionaire after building a casino in Macao, China, and made the company public. Only with this transaction, his fortune multiplied by 14, becoming the third richest American of his time.
n Eric Lefkofsky owned 22% of the Groupon shares for $ 12.8 billion at the time of publication. As a result, Lefkofsky’s net worth was more than US $ 2 billion.
n Mark Cuban was one of the co-founders of Broadcast.com, that Yahoo! a transaction that probably made him a multimillionaire. In 2011, the Cuban ranked 459 on the Forbes list, with a net worth of $ 2.3 billion.
n Elon Musk was recognized for the first time as co-founder of PayPal. When PayPal was sold to eBay for $ 1.5 billion, Musk owned 11.2%, making it a multimillionaire. He then became a multimillionaire when the shares of Tesla Motors, a publicly traded company in 2010, were multiplied by three. It holds a 32% stake in Tesla, which was worth $ 5.82 billion in August 2013.
n Richard Branson has probably become multimillionaire in his airline industry, including Virgin Atlantic (founded in 1984), Virgin Australia (formerly Virgin Blue) and Virgin America. His second largest source of revenue was his record business, which he sold in 1992 for $ 900 million.
A.G.Sonalie Silva