10 Successful Online Businesses

By: Gustavo Higareda

Ebay
Business makes Yearly: $8,590,000,000
Who started the business: Pierre Odiyar
an Iranian-American computer
programmer.
How and Why did the business start: Odiyar built a site to sell his broken laser
point. It was sold for $14.83 to a broken laser point collector. He later continued to use
his site to help his fiance trade Ped candy dispensers. Suddenly he started getting
more website visitors which caused him to expand his site. This lead to hiring
employees.

Amazon
Business makes Yearly:
$107,000,000,000
Who started the business: Jeff Bezo is an
American technology Entrepreneur.
How and Why did the business start: Shaw & Co., a Wall Street firm, and moved
to Seattle. It was firstly influenced off the rising of online businesses. He quit his job
to produce books and be sold on online. He began to work on a business plan for
what would eventually become Amazon.com. Jeff Bezos incorporated the company
as "Cadabra" on July 5, 1994. Bezos changed the name to Amazon a year later
after a lawyer misheard its original name as "cadaver".

Wilson
Business makes Yearly: $930,000,000
Who started the business:Thomas E.Wilson
A worker who worked his way up the ranks.
How and Why did the business start: The company was started with the
mission of making high quality equipment and also making sporting supplies to
help the athlete play at his top performance. It firstly started off by making tennis
rackets out of violin strings. Eventually expanding itself to making baseball shoes
and etc.

Facebook
Business makes Yearly: $17,930,000,000
Who started the business: Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew
McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes
How and Why did the business start: It was started by Harvard students
wanting to play the hot or not game. Then it gradually became popular.

Paypal
Business makes Yearly: $9,248,000,000
Who started the business: Peter Thiel, Yu
Pan, Luke Nosek, Elon Musk, Ken Howery,
Max Levchin

How and Why did the business start: PayPal was established in December
1998 as Cofinity, a company that developed security software for handheld
devices founded by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek and Ken Howery,
PayPal was developed and launched as a money transfer service at Cofinity in
1999, funded by John Malloy from BlueRun Ventures.

Google
Business makes Yearly:$74,980,000,000
Who started the business: Larry Page
and Sergey Bin

How and Why did the business start: Google was started a research project of
stanford students. Then people wanted in with different professions and helped
make it to what it is today.

Netflix
Business makes Yearly: $6,800,000,000
Who started the business: Reed Hastings,
Marc Randolph
How and Why did the business start: Netflix was originally a single rental service
because they did not want to have to buy dvds so they could stream online.

Hulu
Business makes Yearly: $1,000,000,000
Who started the business: Beth Comstock,
Jason Kilar

How and Why did the business start: Hulu was made by
fox for people to watch the airing of a fox show the next day.

Groupon
Business makes Yearly: $3,100,000,000
Who started the business: Eric Lefkofsky,
Brad Keywell, Andrew Mason
How and Why did the business start:The idea that would eventually become
Groupon was born out of founder Andrew Mason's frustration trying to cancel a
cell phone contract in 2006. Mason thought that there must be some way to
leverage large number of people's collective bargaining power. In 2007 Mason
launched The Point, a web platform based on the "tipping point" principle that
would utilize social media to get people together to accomplish a goal. The Point
was intended to organize people around some sort of cause or goal. It gained
only modest traction in Chicago, until a group of users decided their cause
would be saving money. They wanted to round up people to buy the same
product in order to receive a group discount. Founder Eric Lefkofsky wanted the
company to pivot in order to focus entirely on group buying. Born from The
Point, Groupon was launched in November 2008.

Youtube
Business makes Yearly:
$4,980,000,000
Who started the business: Jerry Yang,
David Filo
How and Why did the business start: YouTube began when PayPal employees
started to create a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and
view content. The Internet domain name www.youtube.com was activated on
Monday, February 14, 2005 at 9:13PM.