Adi began Dassler of Adidas: Dassler’s shoemaking career in his mother’s washroom in a small town in Bavaria, Germany. He designed and cobbled shoes and decided he wanted to make the best possible sports shoe for athletes. In 1949, he registered “Adi Dassler Adidas Sportschuhfabrik” and created the first shoe with the soon-to-become-signature Adidas three stripes.
Whitney Wolfe Herd of Bumble: After leaving dating app company Tinder and an abusive relationship in 2014, Wolfe Herd was inspired to create an empowering dating experience for women. She designed a dating app that requires women to make the first move in heterosexual matches. The brand took off and the app reached 100,000 downloads in its first month.
Melanie Perkins of Canva: Perkins was working a part-time job while studying in Perth, Australia, teaching students how to use desktop design software. The software was expensive, complex, and required a semester’s worth of instruction to learn how to use, prompting Perkins to ask, “Is there a way this could be simpler and less expensive?” Perkins’s goal to create an affordable, simple, online design tool was originally turned down by over 100 investors, but she eventually received funding and today 60 million customers use Canva to create designs across 190 countries.
Neil Blumenthal, Dave Gilboa, Andy Hunt, and Jeff Raider of Warby Parker: In 2008, Blumenthal lost his prescription eyeglasses and was reluctant to purchase a new pair because they were so expensive. He also didn’t want to visit an eyeglass store. He emailed three friends and they set to work on an online company to sell prescription glasses at an affordable price. They set to work, and Warby Parker was poised to launch just after the four founders graduated with their MBA degrees in the spring of 2010.
Songe LaRon and Dave Salvant of Squire: LaRon and Salvant are no strangers to the barbershop experience. After working in banking and law, they found themselves drawn to entrepreneurship, and the lack of change in the barbershop experience caught their attention. So began the building of Squire, a barbershop point-of-sales and management system. LaRon and Salvant’s initial idea was a customer-facing app for booking barber appointments.
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