Founders & Entrepreneurs

Builders, visionaries and cautionary tales of ambition.

Entries in this category (14)

• Steve Jobs — Co-founder of Apple; architect of the iPhone era
• Elizabeth Holmes — Theranos founder whose $9B blood-testing empire was built on fiction
• Acorn Computers — The Cambridge firm that won the BBC's schools contract, built a processor nobody asked for, and died — while that processor ended up in most of the world's phones
• Anker — The Chinese accessories maker that sold straight to Amazon shoppers, then built soundcore into a genuine audio brand — while fighting recalls and congressional scrutiny
• Aw Boon Haw — The Tiger Balm founder who turned a family remedy into a global brand — and lent his fortune to a city (Haw Par Villa)
• David Tran — The Vietnamese-born founder of Huy Fong Foods — the man who gave the world the rooster-label Sriracha
• FiiO — A Guangzhou company founded by ex-BBK engineers that took the top five portable-player slots in Japan's biggest audio retailer — and is pushing into cassette and CD players while everyone else abandons them
• Jamie Dimon — The bank executive who got thrown out of the family business — and came back to save Wall Street
• John F. Kennedy Jr. — The son of President Kennedy who became 'America's Prince' — and died in a 1999 plane crash
• Ranbaxy Laboratories — The "Indian Pfizer" that built a generic-drug empire on fabricated data — and paid a record $500 million fine
• Sam Walton — The dime-store detective who built the largest retail empire in human history on nickel-and-dime discipline
• Sim Wong Hoo — The kampung-born inventor who gave computers their voice — and took Apple to court for US$100 million
• Sinclair Research — The Cambridge company that sold Britain its first computer under £100, then lost the business to Amstrad — while the machines it put in bedrooms ended up as Microsoft, EA and Rockstar
• Zong Qinghou — The "cloth-shoe richest man" who dropped out of school, sold ice from a bicycle and built China's biggest drinks empire — and whose family went to court over it within a year of his death