3. Instagram
Instagram, the globally famous photo app, was founded by Stanford University graduate, Kevin Systrom who was born in a very common family and was a tech genius.
He was in school when he was introduced to tech and used to learn coding by himself at night. He started working on an app which was more or less a cross between Foresquare and Flickr.
Very few people know that Mark Zuckerburg wanted to hire him while he was undergraduate but he denied the offer as he wanted to complete his degree. Kevin, along with his friend Mike, spent eight weeks aggressively on developing this app And finally on the night of October 6, 2010, they pushed the launch button!
Only after two hours of Instagram going LIVE, its servers started falling down because of rush of traffic and within 24 hours it became #1 app on iOS. Within nine months, Instagram had a record-breaking 7 million users, which also included some of the highly-influential tech-loving celebrities like Justin Bieber and Ryan Seacrest.
4. Pinterest
Pinterest's success story is one of the most inspiring one because its founder, Ben Silbermann held onto the idea and struggled with it even after 90 per cent of people didn't like it. Within four months of the launch, it only had 900 users. It was a flop and not funded for a very long time.
Ben was raised by doctors and was following the same path as them. He got into Yale and that's when he knew he didn't want to be a doctor. He graduated and joined Google in sales and support.
Being a non-engineer in Google, he didn't quite like the culture and felt out of place. That's when he started working on his start-up, Pinterest. Since, it didn't do that well, he was labelled as a failure for a really long time before Pinterest finally took off after a famous blogger recommended it.
5. Uber
Uber was born out of the situation when its founder Travis Kalanick couldn't find a cab in Paris to get to a conference. He envisioned it as a way to lower the cost of black-car service at the touch of a button.
After two previous failed start up ventures, it was difficult for Kalanick to convince the investors to believe in him but as soon as Ubercab launched in San Francisco, it became a huge hit! After SF, they went on to expand Uber to other US cities and internationally, first country being Paris.
Uber is currently valued at USD 69 billion, making it the most valuable privately held tech company in the world.
All of these stories have different timings and circumstances but one common lesson, Hold onto your dreams, you always start small!