The Web Celebs

LARRY PAGE & SERGE BRIN

Co-founders of Google

Worth: $16 billion each

Google co-founders Larry Page and Russian-American Sergey Brin launched Google in September 1998 while studying for PhDs in computer science at Stanford University. It was their fascination with data mining and the potential of search engines to enable web users to find information that underpinned Google’s development. Since then Google Inc. has grown to more than 10,000 staff worldwide – helping it serve more than 50 million searches per day. Page was founding CEO and co-president with Brin, growing the company to 200-plus employees and profitability before hiring Eric Schmidt as chairman and CEO in 2001. An initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising US$1.67 billion, making it worth US$23 billion.

The pair – who are now Google’s presidents for products and technology and worth about $16.6 billion each – share a vision of making all the world’s information accessible. Google has made several acquisitions: in November 2006 it bought YouTube for US$1.65 billion; before that, in 2004, it bought a company called Keyhole Inc., which owned what has become Google Earth. It has also forged partnerships with MySpace and News Corp. As well, it is introducing products that are becoming must-haves, such as Google Maps. Yet, despite their jaw-dropping success and global dominion, Brin and Page refuse to the rest on their technological laurels and continue to expand their frontiers. Among their many new projects is a philanthropic division, google.org, which is committed to helping solve the world’s energy issues.

PIERRE OMIDYAR

Worth: $8.8 billion

Founder of eBay and Skype

French-born, Iranian-American computer programmer Omidyar, 38, launched online auction site eBay in 1995. Some 14 years later it is estimated to be either a primary or secondary source of income for more than a million people worldwide. With CEO Meg Whitman taking the helm from Omidyar in 1998, eBay sailed through the dot.com storm due to its loyal trading communities. Omidyar once said he founded the company on the idea that people were basically good and if you give them the benefit of the doubt they would be good: “The most important thing of eBay is the human side. In order to do a transaction with someone you have to get to know that person and build a trusting relationship,” he explained. eBay launched a successful public offering in September 1998, making Omidyar a billionaire. He later purchased Skype, comparison-pricing site Shopping.com, and a stake in online classifieds business Craigslist. By late 2008, Omidyar’s 178 million eBay shares were worth around US$3 billion. Through his philanthropic investment outfit Omidyar Network, set up in 2004, the entrepreneur also finances small businesses in developing countries and donates millions to non-profits. “You should pursue your passion,” he once said. “If you’re passionate about something, and you work hard, you’ll be successful.”

JEFF BEZOS

Founder of Amazon.com

Worth: $8.2 billion

Princeton graduate Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com Inc. in 1995, aged just 31. The genesis for the concept came from his conviction that book lovers were willing to shop online, and forgo the tactile – yet more timely – experience of visiting bookstores. He is now the president, CEO and chairman of the board of Amazon.com Inc. A dot-com pioneer, he took the company public and raised US$54 million in 1997, then survived the dot.com meltdown, and expanded from selling books to selling thousands of other products online. The site now has sales of US$14.8 billion and Bezos himself is worth US$8.2 billion. Not bad for a man whose initial start-up capital came from his parents.

“That was a very trusting thing for them to do,” Bezos he once said. “My dad’s first question was ‘What’s the Internet?’ When we launched in July 1995, we were shocked at the customer response. In the first 30 days we had orders from 45 different countries, and we were unprepared from an operational point of view to handle that volume. From there, we quickly expanded.”

Bezos also, critically, allowed other retailers to sell on Amazon.com, which means it earns a commission for each transaction. His company has been turning a profit since fourth quarter 2002. “We have focused on customer experience – that matters online where word of mouth is so very powerful.”

MARK ZUCKERBERG

Founder of Facebook

Worth: $3 billion

Computer programmer Zuckerberg launched Facebook on February 4, 2004 as a 19-year-old Harvard student. Enlisting the help of his dorm-mate Dustin Moskovitz, they spread it to colleges around the US within a few short months, turning on hundreds of thousands of people to social networking. Growing three times as fast as rival MySpace, Facebook signs up more than 150,000 new users daily and has 30 million users. How does it do it? There seems to be three key factors. The first is, of course, its communication ability. “More than half our users use the product every day; it’s a more efficient way for them to communicate with friends,” Zuckerberg once explained. Secondly, Facebook grew sustainably, expanding beyond college campuses only when it had the capacity to do so. A third factor is Facebook Platform, which allows developers who don’t work at the company to develop applications as if they do. “Companies are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application,” Zuckerberg explained. “It’s exciting to users also because it means new services are available.”

In 2006 Facebook Inc. spurned Yahoo’s offer for almost US$1 billion and Viacom’s bid for US$750 million. It eventually sold a 1.6 per cent stake to Microsoft Corp. for US$240 million in October 2007. With an estimated 30 per cent stake in the US$5 billion Facebook Inc. Zuckerberg is the youngest ever self-made billionaire.

STEVE CHEN, CHAD HURLEY & JAWED KARIM

Co-founders of YouTube

Worth: $250 million each

YouTube co-founders Chen, Hurley and Karim created YouTube in February 2005 as an angel-funded venture, including a US$11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital. All three were employees of PayPal at the time. Hurley studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, while Chen and Karim studied computer science at the University of Illinois. Within four years, YouTube had established a mainstream role worldwide, helping to determine presidents and prime ministers, giving people a voice and a global audience, and changing the way broadcasters and the media communicate to audiences. Yet YouTube hasn’t finished defining our lives. “Our goal is to be on every screen: to take it from the PC to the living room and the mobile phone,” Steve Chen once said.

The firm has signed deals with more than 1,000 partners, and more than 150 deals with content providers. In November 2006, Google Inc. bought YouTube LLC for US$1.65 billion in Google stock. Two years later, YouTube reached a deal with several movie studios, music companies and CBS to allow them to post films, music videos and TV shows on the site, accompanied by ads. Advertisers and media companies rubbed their hands with glee – and so, we imagine, did Chen and Hurley (Karim has left the company to study at Stanford University): their net worth now exceeds US$250 million apiece.

RAMU YALAMANCHI

Founder of hi5

Worth: Not available

Indian-American Ramu Yalamanchi is a computer science graduate who launched social networking site, hi5, in 2003 – now in the top 20 most visited sites on the internet with more than 60 million active members. The site is the number one social networking site in Latin American markets. The youthful CEO’s initial start-up funding came from a rolling round, primarily from friends and family, with a target of US$250,000. The first US$10,000 came from Yalamanchi’s father. The company later raised US$35 million, US$20 million in equity and $15 million in debt. Its business model relies heavily on his conviction that to succeed as a social network business, you have to localise. That philosophy extends to partnering with companies around the world, such as Portugal Telecom and ISPs in places like Thailand. It also meant being aware of local differences and keeping it simple.

“Early on in the business we localised the site and provided ways for people to meet locally,” Yalamanchi has said. MySpace at the time was not letting non-US users register. We took the opposite approach.” In December 2008, hi5 launched a virtual gift store and hi5 currency with a payment system handled by a third-party provider. Yalamanchi said the move paved the way for hi5 to introduce paid-for virtual goods for its customers – and help his company secure new streams of revenue beyond advertising.

KEVIN ROSE

Founder of Digg

Worth:  $60 million

While the name of website Digg refers to users ‘digging’ or voting on their favourite media stories and web links, the term could equally be applied to what some predict will be Digg’s ultimate achievement: digging the grave of newspapers. Here, the online community chooses the news – news stories that other users should read, and conversely what stories they shouldn’t. Though Digg was founded by Rose in 2004, he worked closely with peer Gorodetzky and the older Byrne (who has since left the company) to turn it into a reality. Together they went ‘live’ with digg.com in December that same year. Getting the site off the ground cost the San Francisco-based trio US$1,000. In the following February, the company was incorporated, enabling the group to secure angel funding. Jay Adelson was brought on as CEO in late 2005, and Digg has since acquired millions of dollars through multiple rounds of funding. While Digg Inc. has yet to become profitable, the site hosts upwards of 26 million visitors a month and its founder Rose is estimated to have a fortune – on paper at least – in excess of US$60 million based on his 30-40 per cent ownership. Digg Inc. also signed an agreement with Microsoft Corp. in July 2007 for the latter to be the exclusive provider of advertisement content on the site.

EVAN WILLIAMS, JACK DORSEY & BIZ STONE

Founders of Twitter

Worth: Not available

Twitter – a free social media service that allows users to send and read short updates to friends via SMS, RSS, email, Facebook and Twitter applications – was founded by X-gens Williams, Dorsey and Stone in San Francisco in March 2006. CEO Williams has since raised US$22 million in venture capital for the service, including an undisclosed sum from Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos. Last July Twitter bought Summize (again for an undisclosed amount) – an Internet startup that allowed users to search Twitter updates in real-time, and rolled it into their own site. Twitter also announced last year it had created a version of the site for Japanese users. Twitter has been particularly powerful during emergencies because twitterers (people who twitter) have been able to communicate survival information much faster than government emergency services or the media have done. It hasn’t been good news all the time though: in the past Twitter has struggled to cope with demand and the ‘fail whale’ (a picture of a whale heading south that affixed to the website when the system crashed) became a symbol of what was wrong. Though technical enhancements have been made, Twitter has yet to turn a profit. Williams says he is considering many revenue-generating ideas, and not necessarily those involving banner ads. With people like Bezos investing in the project, and US President Barack Obama tweetering, this is one ‘whale’ that might just survive.

JOSHUA SCHACHTER

Founder of Delicious

Worth: Not available

Delicious (which has changed its name from Del.icio.us) is a free website service for bookmarking your favourite internet pages, and having access to other people’s bookmarks (a search by Wealth Creator found bookmarks for such web pages as ’50 sites to find free stock images’ and ‘Six words you should drop from your resume’. Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, 34, has said his website’s roots are in his previous life as an analyst in a Wall Street bank during the early 2000s. Writing blogs in his spare time, Schacter said he was constantly sent web links that he needed to file. From that came a site that was launched in 2003 for users to tap into the “wisdom of the crowd”. Schachter left his job at Morgan Stanley to work full time on it in early 2005, and by December that year had sold it to Yahoo! for an undisclosed sum. Other ‘net entrepreneurs have copied Schachter’s approach, with tagging becaming a de rigueur feature for Web 2.0 start-ups. With more than five million users and 150 million web pages bookmarked, the name ‘Delicious’ seems very fitting indeed.

JIMMY WALES

Founder of Wikipedia

Worth: $1 million

Former options-trader Jimmy ‘Jimbo’ Wales, 42, devised a peer-reviewed, open-content online encyclopedia called Nupedia before hiring Larry Sanger as editor-in chief in 2001. Sanger proposed installing a wiki (a website anyone can create or edit), which Wales did. Sanger named the project Wikipedia and with Wales established an internet-based community of contributors that same year. Today, Wikipedia – a non-profit venture, supported by user donations and offshoot wiki websites that carry adverts – offers open-content encyclopedia information in 100 languages and gets more than two billion page views every month.

“What makes us work is the community behind the site who are in constant communication and monitoring every change,” Wales once said.

Larry Sanger left Wikipedia in 2002 and launched a rival wiki encyclopedia called citizendium.org. While Wales and Sanger may not be in the billionaire bracket (the only available estimate of Wales’ net worth comes from a removed section of his own Wikipedia entry, putting his fortune at less than US$1 million; Sanger’s net worth is equally difficult to confirm), the pair are included here for reasons other than wealth: it’s their influence on how we’ve come to acquire facts and verify
information – and the word we use to describe that.