BUS 477 - New Venture Planning
Fourth year undergraduate business course at Simon Fraser University
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Entrepreneurs on OprahI was watching Oprah (as usual) on Thursday and the showed featured young entrepreneurs who turned into millionaires almost overnight. Aside from featuring the Olsen twins, there were 2 entrepreneurs, Gurbaksh Chahal & Tony Hsieh, who started their first business online and made big money from selling their business off to Yahoo! or other big corporations. Tony Hsieh is the CEO of Zappos, a company that sells shoes online. He is an interesting case because he is only getting an annual salary of $36,000 US for his CEO position. He's doing his job for "fun" practically because he enjoys it so much. Also, another reason he doesn't seem to "care" about money is because he became filthy rich from selling his first business for $265M. Gurbaksh Chahal dropped out of highschool to pursue his business goals and gave some pretty good insight. He believes that money should not be the ultimate goal when starting a business and that you should be driven to start a business because you are passionate about it. To find out more, feel free to check out the following URLs: More about Tony: http://www.oprah.com/media/20081015_tows_zappos http://www.oprah.com/slideshow/oprahshow/20081015_tows_olsentwins/14 More about Gurbaksh: http://www.oprah.com/slideshow/oprahshow/20081015_tows_olsentwins/10
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Whoa, that's very inspiring
pessimistic
Sorry to sound so pessimistic, but I watched this episode, too. I was excited to see what these young people had accomplished, but was dissappointed to find that each of their successes were made in the 1990's as a result of the tech boom. Money may not have been their motivation, but a hyper-inflated tech boom wrote cheques that would be hard to come by today.
One note about the Olsen twins: they've been working since they were 6 months old and were millionaires by the time they were tweens! This kind of backing would allow any of us to follow our passions, as well :)
"Life's short, so put
"Life's short, so put yourself out there, have fun and do everything that makes you happy."
agree!! but i think luck and able to forsee the opportunity also play a big roll in here..
Wow!
It's inspiring to see how some people who don't care about the money seem to find financial success doing what they love doing. Something to consider when you leave SFU...