Insights from the Rich & Famous

Being a Billionaire: Gotta feel good!

What can we learn from some of the biggest and most innovative wealth creators of the past ten years?

I wanted to find out more about American Forbes 400 and understand more about Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Sean Parker, Eduardo Saverin of Facebook, Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, Michael Dell of Dell Computers, Pierre Omidyar and Jeffrey Skoll of eBay, Mark Pincus of Zynga, Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, Daniel Gilbert of Quicken, Eric Lefkofsky of Groupon, Peter Thiel of Paypal, David Filo and Jerry Yang of Yahoo!, Reid Hoffman of Linkedin. So today, I did some analysis. Here are some insights:

1. Only about 10% (or to be precise 37) of the 400 Billionaires made their fortune in the past ten years. In other words, these folks went from almost nothing to being billionaires.

2. The three main sources of the billions were:
a. Internet ventures (18)
b. Investments in energy, retail etc. (10)
c. Inheritance (9)

3. The 18 Internet Billionaires were associated with just 12 companies - Amazon, Facebook, Google, Dell, eBay, Zynga, Salesforce.com, Quicken, Groupon, Paypal, Yahoo! and Linkedin. And 11 out of 12 companies focussed on providing a service directly to consumers and later expanded to serve companies. The companies which made lavish use of shares to motivate the core team members are the most successful.

Net-Net: This is a great formula that the world is following - focus on a consumer need, build a product that works and improve it together with a team that can directly benefit from the success of the venture and just follow your path, past all obstacles. What makes us different is that we at Majamba are building a global venture to do good!