Every entrepreneur hopes for success in their business ventures. No one likes to be a failure, and businesspeople especially love to succeed and make money from their plans. While some entrepreneurs resonate with their customer base and get lucky, others seem to have lightning strike twice or even more often, coming up with multiple business ideas. Often, these businesses complement each other and make sense, but sometimes an entrepreneur comes up with businesses that are surprisingly different from each other, so you'd never guess the same person is behind them.
10. The founder of Atari also founded Chuck E. Cheese
Nolan Bushnell clearly loves fun, which seems to be the only common thread linking his two greatest business achievements. In 1972, Bushnell co-founded what can be considered the grandfather of the modern gaming world— Atari. Long before anyone had a PlayStation, Xbox, or even a Nintendo at home, they had an Atari 2600 and played extremely simple games like Asteroids and Pong .
While introducing the concept of home console gaming seems like it should be enough to keep someone hooked for life, that was a long time ago, and the industry was very different. So Bushnell had to keep working, and his next big idea was something of a left turn. He was also the driving force behind Chuck E. Cheese, which he developed at Atari.
Corporate overlords, being what they are, the financiers weren't amused by Bushnell's waste of time and resources while making singing robots. In fact, he was fired from the company in 1978. While he never made such a splash with his later work, his contribution to pop culture is certainly legendary and a little bizarre.
9. Lee Byung-chul founded Samsung, but he started with a company called Dry Good Goods.
Samsung's revenue in 2021 was around 244 billion US dollars . It's clearly one of the largest electronics companies in the world, producing everything from phones to washing machines. This diverse approach has become ingrained in the company, as its roots are further expanded by founder Lee Byung-chul and his desire to sell virtually everything.
This multi-billion dollar empire started at $25 in 1938, when the future founder opened a dry goods store to sell items like dried fish and other groceries. The company sold goods from the city of Daegu and its surrounding areas and employed about 40 employees . Because they sold dried goods, the company prospered during the Korean War in 1950 and expanded. They moved into sugar, then textiles. That worked, too, so they branched out into insurance, retail, and by the 1960s, into electronics manufacturing. They would go on to manufacture ships, telecommunications, and pretty much anything else you can think of.
The family still runs Samsung, and the company is obviously best known for its mobile phones and electronics, but the company probably wouldn't have existed at all without dried fish and noodles nearly a century ago.
8. The founder of Domino's also founded a law school.
We've already seen that Chuck E. Cheese's founder was behind Atari, and it turns out that pizza parlors simply have many different interests. Tom Monaghan, the man behind Domino's, also opened his own. law school . In the late 1990s, he donated $50 million of his own money to the school. The school's mission? To educate lawyers from a Roman Catholic perspective.
Monaghan actually gave up the pizza chain to devote himself to Catholic affairs . He sold Domino's for $1 billion, so he certainly had the resources to follow his dream. And the school was actually built and still exists. He's been sanctioned in the past for low entry requirements and is considered one of the most conservative law schools in the country.
7. The inventor of the lava lamp founded a nudist resort
Did you ever have a lava lamp as a kid? Or, you know, right now? They're very symbolic in most people's minds of the hippie counterculture and the '60s and '70s, though they've experienced a retro revival or two since then.
Lava lamps were invented in 1963 British accountant Edward Craven Walker. Walker was known for only one other thing in his life, and that was his penchant for nudity. He made underwater nude films.
Before the invention of the lamp, Walker made films with titles like "Eve on Skis," featuring naked people doing things nude. One film was presented as an underwater ballet. Water and nudity seemed to truly move him, so much so that, after achieving some success with his films, he bought an entire club and founded his own. own nudist resort . He then tried to ban anyone from attending if they were overweight. He was quoted as saying he was once again a "fat weirdo" and that naturism wasn't for them.
6. Co-founder Paul Mitchell also founded Patron Tequila.
Paul Mitchell, better known as John Paul Mitchell Systems, is a hair care company founded in 1980 with annual revenues of approximately 1 billion dollars . It's safe to say that Paul Mitchell is doing just fine.
The company was founded by two men—Paul Mitchell himself and John Paul DeJoria. Mitchell died of cancer in 1989, and DeJoria has continued to run the company since then, but he's also managed to diversify its portfolio. In addition to the world of hairspray and brushes, DeJoria is also the man behind Patron Tequila, the third best-selling brand of tequila in America. This means that Only in 2021 were sold more 3 million boxes . Of course, DeJoria no longer has to worry about that, as he sold the company in 2018. for more than 5 billion dollars .
5. Avi Arad invented Skip It and was later behind Marvel Studios.
Before Kevin Feige was the man behind the scenes at Marvel, creating the MCU and more or less printing money for the Walt Disney Corporation, there was another man who brought Marvel to the big screen, and that was Avi Arad. He was the producer on most of the non-MCU films of the 90s and early 2000s, such as« X-Men» , «"Blade", "Daredevil", "Punisher"» and so on.
Before Arad gave us the joy of Nic Cage as Ghost Rider , he worked with toys. Specifically, he worked for Tiger Toys and was the inventor of one of the most popular toys in history, the Skip It. It was a small hoop you wore around your ankle, attached to a ball on a string that swung around your ankle, forcing you to skip it, hence the name, with your other foot. Arad, along with two others, filed a patent to his version in 1990. It was a huge success, as was Arad. For a time, this man was considered the biggest toy designer in America. And some of his biggest toys were based on comic books.
He had already served as executive producer on animated films like X-Men and stated that his goal was to "exploit" the Marvel Universe characters in toys, shows, and films. And thus, he launched the world of Marvel films. The MCU might not exist today without Arad and Skip It.
4. The founder of Wikipedia first launched a porn site
Wikipedia is so ubiquitous online these days that it's essentially everyone's go-to resource when they need to know literally everything they don't already know. It's been one of the top ten most visited websites on the internet for ages now. A random sample shows that in November 2021 alone, the site's traffic reached 5.97 billion , making it the fourth most visited site on the Internet after Google, YouTube and Facebook.
While it's not considered a "real" source of information, it's at least a great starting point, and according to Wikipedia itself, it has published more than 57 million pages information.
The site was founded by Jimmy Wales back in 2001. But before that, he launched a site known as Bomis, which published things like "Bomis Babe Report »", which featured galleries of semi-nude women, Babe Engine, which was a search engine for sexy women, and of course, Bomis Premium, which cost $2.95 a month and gave you access to X-rated content.
It was the money Wales earned from Bomis that allowed him to found Wikipedia, and in fact, Wikipedia, in its early years, borrowed bandwidth from Bomis to stay active. He used the money he earned from Bomis to pay for the network's servers. So, while Wikipedia may be a hub of knowledge today, it's built on a foundation of softcore porn with a dash of hardcore.
3. The founder of Toho also founded a railroad
Long before «Godzilla» It became a multi-million-dollar blockbuster in America, and it was a multi-million-dollar blockbuster in Japan, but with less sophisticated special effects. Everyone knows the classic Man in the Godzilla Suit, and Toho still makes Godzilla films in the same vein.
Toho was founded by Ichizo Kobayashi. in 1932 How Tokyo Takarazuka Theater Co. Kobayashi was a man who did just about everything, and in the years before his company created everyone's favorite radioactive lizard, he was involved in things like starting railroad companies and department stores.
It was the railway that inadvertently led to Godzilla , Because Kobayashi wanted more customers on his trains, he created a theater troupe to entertain people. The theater train evolved into a regular theater, and then into a cinema. His company later created not only Godzilla , But и legendary «Seven Samurai» Akira Kurosawa.
2. Donald Duncan got rich on yo-yos and parking meters.
Donald Duncan is considered a serious threat to the wallet because he was all over the place with his business dealings and achieved success on several disparate fronts. Although he once owned a Good Humor Ice Cream franchise, it's not true that he invented the Eskimo pie, as some sources claim. He also made a name for himself with yo-yos and parking meters.
In 1946, Duncan Yo-Yos was produced 3600 yo-yos per hour . In 1962, 45 million of them were sold. And when Duncan wasn't entertaining his children with a simple hobby, he was annoying their parents with parking fees. The Duncan Parking Meter Company was an idea he'd come up with several years earlier, and he managed to convince cities it would be a good way to make money. Although he sold the company in 1959 while still running it, 80% all parking meters In America they were made by Duncan.
1. Gavin McInnes founded Vice Media and the Proud Boys
If you don't know Gavin McInnes, don't worry. His name comes up most often in media circles for his relationship with the media, as he's best known for being on both sides of the media spectrum.
MacInnes founded Vice magazine in 1994, which evolved into Vice Media, which remains an online media company today. The magazine was a sort of Canadian counterculture news magazine, heavily focused on the punk scene, or at least filtering news through a punk perspective. Vice Media is perhaps best known in the mainstream for its documentary-style videos, which aired on HBO and covered a wide range of topics.
In recent years, Vice Media has had to officially state that they are no longer associated with McInnes because his other claim to fame is that he founded the Proud Boys . The Proud Boys are described Encyclopedia Britannica How neo-fascist white nationalist organization , A Anti-Defamation League - as an extremist group pursuing violent goals .