When one thinks of innovators who cleared the path for spirited invention, the name Steve Jobs, would likely come to the minds of most people in the world. Steve Jobs who only recently lost his battle against cancer, was only 56 at the time of his death. Jobs was credited in many quarters as having an indelible and ever lasting effect on the computer industry. The California native, along with his two closest friends, Ron Wayne and Steven Wozniak invented the first Apple Computer in his parent’s garage, when he was still a teenager. The rest as they say, is history. People have benefited from the mind of Job’s creative inventions, mourned his loss. People were left speechless at his passing, and wondered out loud, what would now become of the high tech industry. Time will certainly tell. Certainly though Steve Jobs will be fondly remembered as a man that had a hand in the lives of most people’s day to day activities.
Another Great Business leader, is Mark Zuckerberg, the founding force of the social powerhouse, ‘Facebook’. Zuckerberg, at 19, was a student at Harvard University. He was feeling a bit alienated, from his Ivy League peers, wanted to find a way to ‘fit in’. So he developed a computer code for student to student sharing of social information. At first ‘Facebook’ was merely a venue for college students to share pictures and other social information, like where they were going, or who they were dating, etc. Harvard had to be put on a back burner as Zuckerberg dropped out after completing his junior year, and headed west. He along with some of his associates set up shop, in the most logical place, the Silicone Valley, in Northern, California. The native New Yorker currently resides there. Zuckerberg eventually expanded the website to include high school students, and eventually anyone over the age of 13 that had a valid email address was allowed to open a Facebook account. It is now the most widely used social application utilized in the world. It has completely changed the way people communicate and socialize. At last count it had over 600 billion users world wide. Zukerberg at the tender age of 27, is the youngest billionaire in the world. He certainly is thought of as one of the greatest business leaders of our time, and it’s hard to imagine seeing another Zuckerberg in this lifetime.
