International Youth Day is a celebration that shines a light on the significant role young people play in shaping the future of our world. Observed annually on August 12th, this day serves as a reminder of the power and potential inherent in the youth population, inspiring society to acknowledge, empower, and invest in the leaders of tomorrow.
The theme of each International Youth Day varies each year, focusing on different aspects of youth empowerment and development. The theme of International Youth Day 2024, is “From Clicks to Progress: Youth Digital Pathways for Sustainable Development”.
Inspiring others with your work is one of the important leadership skills which we rarely see in individuals and being rare is not easy. You need to be different to be rare. There are only a handful of rare leaders who inspire a crowd with their actions. Their dedication, clear vision, mission, commitment, and integrity towards their work give them name and fame and the world finds innovative solutions to their actions. Youth leaders are inspiring agents of change, driving positive social, environmental, and political movements to shape a brighter future for their communities and the world.
One of the primary goals of International Youth Day is to advocate for youth inclusion and participation in decision-making processes at all levels. By involving young people in policy discussions and societal planning, we recognize their right to be heard and respected as active contributors to a better world. Governments, organizations, and communities are encouraged to create platforms that facilitate dialogue between youth and decision-makers, bridging the gap and fostering mutual understanding.
On this occasion, let’s acquaint ourselves with a few inspiring entrepreneurs whom young entrepreneurs can look up to.
Elon Reeve Musk is one of the richest people in the world. Musk is an American entrepreneur who was born in South Africa. He is known for founding X.com (which later became PayPal), Tesla Motors, and SpaceX, and is now CEO of Twitter. After selling his start-up Zip2 to Compaq Computers, Musk became a multimillionaire. He was only in his late 20s at that time. From his early childhood, Musk developed an interest in computers and was only 12 when he sold his creation, the first software: a game called Blastar.
Musk launched his first company, Zip2 Corporation in 1995 in partnership with his brother, Kimbal Musk. The work in the company was to provide content for various websites. Under their list, The New York and the Chicago Tribune were also listed. The Musk brothers later sold the Zip2 and used the money to found X.com, an online financial services/payments company. An X.com led to the creation of PayPal as it is popularly known today. Musk then founded Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, his third company, which was named SpaceX later in 2002. The purpose behind founding the third company was to build spacecraft for commercial travel purposes. Later, with his success in it, NASA awarded the company a contract to handle cargo transport for the International Space Station as well as plans for transporting astronauts in the future.
With experiences and success, Musk grew interested in the field of artificial intelligence and became a co-chair of the nonprofit OpenAI.This research company was launched in late 2015 with the mission of advancing digital intelligence to benefit humanity.
Whitney Wolfe Herd is an American Entrepreneur. She is a co-founder and CEO of Bumble Inc. which is engaged in running two online dating applications, Bumble and Badoo. She launched both in 2014. Whitney Wolfe Herd is the youngest female billionaire in the world.
Whitney was active in social services early in her career. After her graduation, Wolfe Herd spent time living in Southeast Asia where she volunteered at local orphanages. She co-founded Tinder, the world’s most famous dating platform. As the vice president of marketing, Herd worked at Tinder for two years but later resigned from her post at the company for a sexual harassment issue. She then launched her own dating app, Bumble, in 2014 when she was just 24.
Bumble and Badoo, together, run successfully in 150 countries with 45 million monthly active users in 2021.
Facebook is a very common and worldwide used social media platform. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur.
At the age of 12, Zuckerberg created a messaging program named Zucknet that was implemented as an inter-office communication system for his father’s dental practice. Mark’s parents sent him to a computer programming tutor after seeing his curiosity and success in this field despite the fact that it was too early for him to join the tutor. He enrolled in a prep school in New Hampshire. After his graduation from prep school, Zuckerberg went to Harvard. Mark launched facebook.com on February 4 which was later renamed Facebook in 2005.
Facebook, in the beginning, was a platform where fellow Harvard students could enter their information and photos into a template which was later designed into this application. This social media platform gained popularity within two weeks and most of the students signed up for it. Mark was intelligent and excellent in computer programming.
During his second year at Harvard, he had already proved his capability in the programming field by developing two more programs: CourseMatch and FaceMash. Both the programs garnered wild popularity but sadly the university shut both of his programs down after it was considered an inappropriate media platform.
Zuckerberg is also active in the philanthropic sector. By May 2021, Zuckerberg’s net worth was $119 and he has signed the Giving Pledge, which means before he dies he aims to donate at least 50% of his net worth to philanthropic causes for the welfare of others.
Dustin Moskovitz is a prominent American entrepreneur and co-founder of several successful technology companies. Moskovitz is best known as one of the co-founders of Facebook. He attended Harvard University, where he met Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, and Chris Hughes. Together, they played pivotal roles in the early development of Facebook while they were still students at Harvard. In 2004, Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to focus on working full-time on Facebook.
As one of the earliest employees of Facebook, Moskovitz became the company’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Vice President of Engineering. He played a crucial role in the technical architecture and infrastructure of the platform, contributing significantly to its rapid growth and success.
In 2008, along with Facebook’s growth and recognition, Moskovitz decided to leave the company to explore new opportunities. He co-founded Asana, a software company that provides task and project management solutions for businesses and teams. Asana’s platform allows teams to collaborate, organize tasks, and track progress on various projects. Dustin Moskovitz is not only known for his success in the tech industry but also for his philanthropic efforts. In 2011, he and his wife, Cari Tuna, founded Good Ventures, a philanthropic foundation dedicated to making the world a better place through effective altruism and impact-focused giving. Good Ventures supports a wide range of causes, including global health, poverty alleviation, and scientific research.
Eric Yuan is a Chinese-American billionaire businessman, engineer, CEO, and Founder of Zoom Video Communications. While the COVID-19 pandemic was affecting everyone’s life, Eric was busy researching tech giants to build an application that solved the social distancing and isolation issues. Zoom has been a very useful virtual meeting application for many of us during this pandemic time. Also, the users of Zoom in this lockdown time rose as there was a 2000% rise in new accounts. According to Ofcom’s annual Online Nation report 2020, Zoom made excellent growth in the use of its users from 659,000 users in January to 13 million by April.
Eric was born in China and lived there until he was 27. He did his first job as one of the first software engineers at a young company called WebEx. Yuan wanted to rebuild WebEx but couldn’t convince his bosses. So he left it to build the next-generation solution of Zoom. Yuan confided this later in a Forbes interview.
In June 2011, after being with WebEx for 14 years, Yuan left the job to start a competitive business of his own. He incorporated the State of Delaware (originally SaaSbee) into his company in April 2011. Saasbee was successful in raising a total of $3 million as seed funding from people like former WebEx CEO, Subrah Iyar, and Yahoo Co-founder, Jerry. This startup changed its name to Zoom Video Communications, Inc in 2012.
Zoom hired many engineers from his former company WebEx, who helped him to rebuild it. He started Zoom when he was 41 as a solo Founder at Zoom.
Gary Vaynerchuk is a serial entrepreneur. He is the Chairman of VaynerX and the CEO of VaynerMedia.VaynerMedia is part of the VaynerX holding company which also includes VaynerProductions, Gallery Media Group, The Sasha Group, Racer, VaynerSpeakers, VaynerTalent, and VaynerCommerce. Gary is also the co-founder of VaynerSports, Resy, and Empathy Wines.
Besides running various businesses, Gary is also active on his social media channels where he documents his life daily as a CEO. All his social media channels have more than a million followers. He also runs a podcast, The GaryVee Audio Experience, many people like it, and is ranked top globally. He is also a five-time New York Times Best-Selling Author.
Gary was an active businessman at a very young age and supported his family business called Wine Library. It was previously called Shoppers Discount Liquors. Gary helped in growing his father’s company by accelerating sales. He honed his skills in the field of content, e-commerce, email marketing, and Google AdWords.
He also started working on producing original business content as the voice of entrepreneurship online. That is when he first filmed long episodic YouTube videos in 2006 and called them WineLibraryTV. He produced these daily episodes on YouTube for almost 5 years. He also appeared on national television sharing the screen with Ellen Degeneres and Conan O’Brien. Gary then started to invest in well-established companies including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Uber, Snap, and Venmo. Gary’s VaynerMedia has grown rapidly and built capabilities in paid media, strategy, full-service creative, influencer marketing, eCommerce, personal branding, SMB marketing, and in-house consulting.
Gary, today, has more than 12M combined followers across social media and he actively produces daily content on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linked In, Snapchat, and more. And how many of you follow his Podcast? He is currently hosting The #AskGaryVee show. His interesting content on social media, entrepreneurship, startups, and business-related topics and his own lived experiences shared with his followers and listeners are exciting listening. His podcast is available on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud, and many other media platforms. Some of his top podcasts are The Airplane Project, A Fire Reddit Ama, My All Time Episode With Billionaire Investor, Ray Dalio, My Thoughts On Entrepreneurship And The Asian Market, etc.
Drew Houston, Founder of Dropbox is an American-based Internet entrepreneur. In 2007, Drew launched Dropbox together with his classmate Arash Ferdowsi. Dropbox is an online file-sharing and storage service with online backup benefits. It is called one of the best startups in the southern San Francisco area.
Houston grew interested in computers when he was just 2 years old. When Drew’s father bought a computer for him, he began growing curious about it and was fascinated by the way games work from a computer. He learned many things on his own and even discovered security bugs and informed the company. And the company surprisingly invited Houston to join the same company for working when he was just 14 years of age.
Houston graduated in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is today known as a young billionaire and known for his work excellence on the internet. He was named the most talented player in the technology industry by Business Week. Also, he was appraised as a top entrepreneur from Inc.com. He also owned another company named FWD.us that aims to work for immigration reform and educational improvement.
Vitalik Buterin, a successful programmer is known for co-founding Ethereum, a famous cryptocurrency platform. He is also known for founding Bitcoin Magazine. His contribution and dedication to the field of programming honored him with different prestigious awards at a very young age including Thiel Fellowship Award and World Technology Award in the IT Software Category in the year 2014. He was also acknowledged by Fortune in 2016 and Forbes in 2018.
Vitalik at the beginning suffered from cash deficiency which made him work as a writer for a blog and used to earn five Bitcoins per article. This helped in gain experience with Bitcoin. He began doing more research and writing on different economic, technological, and political aspects of cryptocurrency. Later, in 2011, he founded Bitcoin Magazine together with Mihai Alisie, a Romania-based Bitcoin enthusiast. Vitalik worked as head writer for the magazine and at the same time, he also worked part-time for the cryptographer lan Goldberg and took five advanced courses at the University of Waterloo. In May 2013, he attended a Bitcoin-related conference in California and later extended the capabilities of the Bitcoin network. Vitalik officially announced Ethereum in January 2014 and in its core team, he had Mihai Alisie and other fellows. Later he presented Ethereum on stage at a Bitcoin conference in Miami and was awarded a grant amount of $100,000 from Thiel Fellowship. The Ethereum team established the Ethereum Foundation, a non-profit organization based in Switzerland with the raised money. On July 30, 2015, the first publicly available version of Ethereum called ‘Frontier’ was released. With time, the foundation developed and tested several prototypes. Ethereum started growing in the cryptocurrency market. Apart from building decentralized applications, the Ethereum platform enables users to set up and run Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). DAO became the largest crowdfunding project in history. Unfortunately, it got hacked and immediately saw a drop in Ether’s price. So, later an entirely new version of the Ethereum network was created named Ethereum Classic.
Sam Altman is a prominent American entrepreneur, investor, and CEO of OpenAI. He is also well-known for his role as the former president of the startup accelerator and seed-stage venture capital firm Y Combinator (YC). In 2014, Altman was named president of Y Combinator.
OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba, among others. In March 2019, Altman became the CEO of OpenAI, a research organization focused on developing safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence (AGI). As CEO, he played a crucial role in guiding OpenAI’s research and development efforts, including the launch and deployment of the GPT-3 language model. In September 2016, Altman announced his expanded role as president of YC Group, which included Y Combinator and other units.
Altman co-founded Tools For Humanity in 2019, a company building a global iris-based biometric system using cryptocurrency, called Worldcoin. Worldcoin’s aim is to provide a reliable way to authenticate humans online, to counter bots and fake virtual identities facilitated by artificial intelligence. Using a distribution mechanism for its cryptocurrency similar to UBI, Worldcoin attempts to incentivize users to join its network by getting their iris scanned using Worldcoin’s orb-shaped iris scanner.
Zhang Yiming is a Chinese entrepreneur and the co-founder of ByteDance, a technology company known for creating popular social media platforms, including TikTok (known as Douyin in China) and the news aggregator app Toutiao. In 2012, Zhang Yiming co-founded ByteDance, initially focusing on developing Toutiao, a content recommendation platform that uses artificial intelligence algorithms to deliver personalized news feeds to its users. The platform quickly gained popularity in China due to its ability to provide relevant and engaging content tailored to individual interests.
ByteDance’s most well-known product, TikTok (Douyin), was launched in 2016 for the international market. TikTok became a global sensation, particularly among young users, and rapidly gained millions of users worldwide. The app allows users to create and share short-form videos set to music, leading to viral trends and challenges that have captured the attention of a vast audience.
Under Zhang Yiming’s leadership, ByteDance expanded its presence globally and became one of the world’s most valuable startups, with its valuation reaching billions of dollars. The company’s success also brought Zhang Yiming significant recognition, and he became one of the youngest billionaires in the world.
Shou Zi Chew is a Singaporean businessman and technology executive known for his significant contributions to the tech industry. In 2021, Shou Zi Chew took on a new role as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of TikTok, a popular short-form video-sharing app owned by ByteDance. TikTok quickly became a global sensation, particularly among young users, and under Chew’s leadership, the app continued to grow its user base and influence.
He joined Xiaomi Corporation, a leading Chinese electronics and technology company, in 2015. He served as the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and was responsible for overseeing Xiaomi‘s financial operations, strategic investments, and overall financial planning. During his tenure, he played a crucial role in Xiaomi’s global expansion and its initial public offering (IPO) on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Throughout his career, Shou Zi Chew has been recognized for his strategic acumen, financial expertise, and leadership abilities. His contributions to the tech industry and his involvement in high-profile companies like Xiaomi and TikTok have cemented his reputation as an influential figure in the global technology landscape.
Melanie Perkins is an Australian entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Canva, a popular online graphic design platform. Melanie Perkins co-founded Canva in 2007 alongside Cliff Obrecht, her partner in both business and life. The idea for Canva was born out of Perkins’ frustration with the complexity and limitations of traditional graphic design tools while she was teaching design programs at the university. She saw an opportunity to create an intuitive and user-friendly platform that would enable anyone to design professional-quality graphics without the need for extensive technical skills.
Canva officially launched in 2013, and the platform quickly gained popularity due to its simplicity, accessibility, and extensive library of templates, images, and design elements. With Canva, users can create a wide range of visual content, including social media graphics, posters, presentations, flyers, and more.
Under Perkins’ leadership, Canva experienced rapid growth, attracting millions of users worldwide. The company’s user-friendly approach and emphasis on design accessibility have made it a valuable tool for individuals, businesses, and educational institutions alike. In the years following Canva’s launch, the company achieved significant milestones and received substantial funding from investors, resulting in its exponential growth and increased valuation.
Blake Ross is an American software engineer and entrepreneur, best known as one of the co-founders of the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Ross attended Stanford University, where he studied computer science. During his time at Stanford, he became involved in the development of the open-source Mozilla project, particularly the Netscape browser’s codebase. This experience sparked his interest in web browsers and user interface design. In 2002, at the age of 17, Blake Ross and another Mozilla contributor, Dave Hyatt, began working on a new, lightweight, and user-friendly web browser that aimed to challenge the dominance of Internet Explorer. Their efforts led to the creation of Firefox, which was originally named “Phoenix” and later “Firebird” before being renamed to “Firefox.”
Firefox quickly gained popularity for its speed, security, and user-friendly features, attracting millions of users worldwide. It became a significant competitor to Internet Explorer and played a crucial role in promoting open web standards and a more competitive browser landscape.
Beyond his work on Firefox, Blake Ross has been involved in various technology-related projects. He worked at Facebook and later served as Director of Product at Facebook until his departure in 2013. Ross also co-founded Parakey, a startup focused on developing a platform for organizing and sharing personal information, which was later acquired by Facebook.
In addition to his engineering work, Blake Ross has written a book titled “The Book of Mozilla,” which delves into the history of the Mozilla project and the development of Firefox.
Andrew Mason is an American entrepreneur and businessman, best known as the co-founder and former CEO of Groupon, a popular e-commerce platform that offers deals and discounts on a wide range of products and services. In 2006, Andrew Mason co-founded The Point, a social action platform designed to organize collective efforts for charitable and community-based causes. The Point allowed people to come together and take action when a certain number of individuals committed to participating in a specific activity or supporting a particular cause.
In 2008, Mason leveraged the idea behind The Point to create Groupon, a platform that offered daily deals and discounts to consumers. Groupon became a massive success, rapidly expanding its reach to cities around the world and attracting millions of subscribers. The company’s innovative approach to group buying and online deals contributed to its rapid growth and popularity.
After leaving Groupon in 2013, Andrew Mason went on to explore other ventures, including launching a startup called Detour, which focused on providing location-based audio tours and was later acquired by Bose. He also pursued other projects related to technology, entrepreneurship, and music.
Mira Murati presently serves as the chief technology officer for OpenAI, a business that does artificial intelligence research and creates ChatGPT. She is the CTO of OpenAI and the genius brains behind ChatGPT.
In 2011, Murati began her career as an intern at Goldman Sachs. From 2012 to 2013, she worked at Zodiac Aerospace. Before transferring to Magic Leap, she worked at Tesla for three years. In 2018, she joined OpenAI and later rose to the position of chief technical officer, where she oversees the development of ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Codex by the organization. She is in charge of the organization’s research, product, and safety teams.
Murati is the head of technology at OpenAI, which was named Fast Company’s Most Innovative Company of 2023. OpenAI is the company that created ChatGPT, the most sophisticated AI chatbot yet to be made available to a wide audience. Murati, an Albanian-born former employee of Tesla who oversaw the Model X’s development, has been working with OpenAI since 2018. She and her team are concentrated on enhancing OpenAI’s products while the rest of the world gawks at the technology and debates its potential. After all, the success of their technology, which has the potential to be Silicon Valley’s most revolutionary since the iPhone, depends on the receipt of billions of dollars.
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