21st Century Entrepreneurs That Built Their Fortunes On The Internet

Entrepreneurship is one of the best paths to building wealth. Creating your own business puts you in control of your own financial future. You can determine how much money you make by how much time, energy, and effort you put into your business. A beginning entrepreneur often learns from the successes of other entrepreneurs.

Let’s take a look at  a few of the billionaires that have found success by starting their own entrepreneurial ventures.

Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg has been in the news recently because of the immensely popular movie The Social Network. Zuckerberg is credited with starting a popular media site in college known as Facebook. The site has allowed Zuckerberg to generate tremendous amounts of revenue by selling information to advertisers. Today, Zuckerberg has an estimated net worth of $4 billion dollars.

Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban is famously known as the owner of the Dallas Mavericks but that is not how he built his fortune. Cuban became a billionaire by broadcasting sporting events live on the Internet. His investment in video and audio content turned out to be a rather profitable one. Cuban and his partner Todd Wagner sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion dollars.

Larry Page

Larry Page is one half of the brains behind the most popular company on the Internet. Page founded Google along with his business partner Sergey Brin at the age of 25. Today, Google is the most used web based search engine in the web. Page is estimated to have a net worth of $17.5 billion dollars. Brin has an equivalent net worth of $17.5 billion dollars.

Peter Thiel

If you have every sent a payment on the Internet then you are probably familiar with Paypal. Peter Thiel was one of the co-founders of Paypal. Ebay bought out the original Paypal investors for a sum of $1.5 billion dollars. Thiel has since invested in a number of different startups including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Friendster. Thiel’s net worth has ballooned to $1.2 billion dollars.

Follow The Example

The lesson that can be learned from these Internet billionaires is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to get wealthy. Your idea doesn’t have to be brand new. You can follow the example of these entrepreneurs and just build upon an existing concept. Before delving into the marketplace, ask yourself the following questions:

- What unmet need is their in the market place? (Paypal filled a need for a payment processor.)
- What product or service can you offer that customers want? (Broadcast.com brought NFL, MLB, NBA games direct to sports fans.)
- Are there any existing businesses whose business model can be improved upon? (Facebook is just a Much Much Much better version of Myspace.)
- Is your business model attractive to potential acquirers? (Many successful businesses like Zappos and Woot.com have been bought out by larger conglomerates.)

Ideas For Future Businesses

- Who will improve upon the terrestial and satellite radio concept? (XM/Sirius are only a launching pad.)
- Who will bring  3-D into the Internet, gaminng, and apps world? (Affordable 3-D apps, and games are the future.)
- Will there ever be a billionaire blogger? (Michael Arrington was the richest bringing in $200,000/month from Techcrunch.)

You never know what idea that you have that could transform you into the next great business mogul.

Photo by: Maria Reyes Davis