They excelled in spotting a market opportunity and as a result changed the way people live
Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs
By Philipp Harper
Special to MSNBC.com
How
many entrepreneurs have there been in the history of the world?
Millions, certainly, probably even billions. These are the men and
women who take capital -- their own or somebody else’s -- and use it to
beget more capital. Some fail, some succeed, some excel.
With
so many candidates to choose from, any list of the 10 greatest
entrepreneurs of all time will necessarily be somewhat arbitrary. It
will also be top-heavy with Americans, just as a list of great chefs
would be disproportionately French or of great eccentrics dominated by
the British.
Business is what America does. If that sounds chauvinistic, get over it.
Here, without further ado but with tongue occasionally in cheek, are history’s 10 greatest entrepreneurs.
1. King Croesus. A
pick by our veterans committee, Croesus, who ruled the Asia Minor
kingdom of Lydia in the sixth century B.C., is owed a huge debt of
gratitude for minting the world’s first coinage, thereby creating in a
single stroke the lifeblood of every business: liquidity and cash flow.
Moreover, his opulent lifestyle has given entrepreneurs throughout
history something to shoot for. Is there a greater distinction for the
commercially inclined than to be deemed “as rich as Croesus”?
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Whom would you consider history's "greatest entrepreneur"?
King Croesus
Pope Sixtus IV
Benjamin Franklin
P.T. Barnum
Thomas Edison
Henry Ford
Benjamin Siegel
Ray Kroc
H. Ross Perot
Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak
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2. Pope Sixtus IV. Sixtus
gets the nod for realizing that the “wages of sin” meant more than
unpleasant repercussions. There was money to be made in damnation, and
Sixtus mined it by opening up a new market -- the dead -- for the
indulgences the church had been selling for years. Relatives of the
deceased quickly filled the Vatican’s coffers with payments intended to
lessen the time their loved ones spent in purgatory. In 1478 Sixtus
“grew his market” by authorizing the Spanish Inquisition, which swelled
purgatory’s ranks by 100,000 souls in 15 years. He also was the first
pope to license brothels.
3. Benjamin Franklin. In
a real sense, Franklin was America’s first entrepreneur. Unlike other
of the Founding Fathers -- the hypermoral Washington, the prodigiously
intellectual Jefferson -- whose virtues and attainments are seen today
as anachronisms, Franklin truly was a model of what many of us would
become. Beneath the statesman’s mantle resided a popular author, a
printer, an inventor (the lightning rod, bifocals) and a very savvy
businessman who knew how to commercialize the fruits of his fertile
mind.
4. P.T. Barnum. Americans
have always loved a good scam and Phineas Taylor Barnum took the art to
new heights. He played on our fascination with the bizarre and freakish
with sideshow acts ranging from the midget Tom Thumb to Jumbo the giant
elephant. In between was a host of more dubious curiosities. He created
the Barnum and Bailey Circus as a showcase for all this wonderment, and
dubbed it “the Greatest Show on Earth.” Along the way he invented
modern advertising and became rich. For the record, he never said
“There’s a sucker born every five minutes,” but he left behind plenty
of other bon mots. Among them: “Every crowd has a silver lining.”
5. Thomas Edison.
What do you say about the man who gave the world the electric light,
the phonograph, talking motion pictures and more than 1,300 other
patented inventions? That he was the world’s greatest inventor,
certainly. But he was also able to exploit the profit potential
in his creations, an entrepreneurial bent that asserted itself when
Edison was a teen-ager, printing a newspaper in the baggage car of a
rolling train and then selling copies to passengers. His impact on the
way people live was and is pervasive. As a combination of inventive
genius and entrepreneurial flair, he stands alone.
6. Henry Ford. Ford
also fundamentally changed human lifestyles by making available a
vehicle, the Model T, that vastly extended people’s range of movement.
The automobile would allow America’s masses to fulfill their Manifest
Destiny to populate every corner of the continent. But his more
profound impact was on industry. The moving assembly line he designed
to build his cars was the signal breakthrough of the Industrial Age.
Appropriately, Ford earned the seed capital for his enterprise by
working as an engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit.
7. Benjamin Siegel. Known as “Bugsy” to his friends,Siegel
was a notorious mobster with a touch of the visionary. Legend has it
that he single-handedly invented Las Vegas, and that’s a stretch. But
he was the first to see what the town could become: a lush oasis of
pleasure where gambling was just one of the attractions. He also proved
adept at attracting other people’s money to build his iconic resort,
The Flamingo. Trouble was, some of those other people belonged to an
outfit called Murder Inc., and Siegel was gunned down in 1947 amid
rumors he had stolen from his partners. But give the devil his due:
Before there was the Bellagio, there was Bugsy.
8. Ray Kroc. Nothing
says entrepreneur like persistence, and nothings says persistence like
Ray Kroc, the kitchen wares salesman who in 1954, at age 52 and in poor
health, had his imagination hijacked by a family-run restaurant in the
desert outside Los Angeles. Once he had bought out the McDonald
brothers, Kroc proceeded to take their concept of a limited menu, fast
service and low prices and expand it nationally, in the process
creating the fast-food industry and dramatically affecting America’s
lifestyle and, sadly, collective health.
9. H. Ross Perot. Within
every entrepreneur lurks a touch of the cowboy, and there’s no better
example of the strain than Perot, the diminutive Texan who has become
best known in recent years as a political gadfly. Before that, though,
he was all business, using a $1,000 loan from his wife in 1962 to
launch Electronic Data Systems. Perot’s winning idea was that large
corporations and organizations needed data-processing help if they were
to take full advantage of computer technology. When in the mid-’60s he
won contracts with two new federal health-care programs --
Medicare and Medicaid -- EDS was off and running and Perot was on his
way to being one of America’s richest citizens.
10. Jobs & Wozniak. Apple
Computer’s two Steves weren’t the first Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to
launch a billion-dollar business from a Palo Alto garage -- Hewlett and
Packard were there before them -- but they were the first to
democratize computing by creating a machine whose use was so
wonderfully intuitive that even technophobes embraced it. Combine the
elegance of Wozniak’s operating system design with Jobs’ marketing
savvy (remember Apple’s “1984” ad?) and the result was a true
phenomenon. Yes, the Apple was eclipsed by the PC, but only after
Microsoft (behind the vision of two other notable entrepreneurs, Bill
Gates and Paul Allen) developed Windows to ape its rival’s ease of use.
Philipp Harper is a freelance journalist living in south Georgia.
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