Entrepreneurs Of The Decade: 2000 To 2009

Inc. com has put together their choices for entrepreneurs of the decade.

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook
We don’t have much more to say than this: When the decade started, he was 15. Today, he is CEO of Facebook, a company that has become an indispensable part of the lives of 350 million users worldwide. And just wait for that IPO.

Jack Ma of Alibaba.com
If the great story of the decade is the rise of Chinese capitalism–and the opportunities and perils that China’s economic power presents for American businesses–then Jack Ma is a protagonist for our age. Alibaba.com, the company he started in China in 1999, helps to connect thousands of businesses at every point in the global supply chain with one another. In all of these small transactions, Ma seems something quite huge. “I want to create one million jobs, change China’s social and economic environment, and make it the largest Internet market in the world,” he told Inc. in 2008

Evan Williams and Biz Stone of Twitter
Like Cher or Prince (but with flashy punctuation), @Ev and @Biz have become household names by creating Twitter, the addictive microblogging platform that is already changing the way we communicate. Besides fostering a collective penchant for brevity, the site has become an amazing resource for everyone from marketers in Silicon Valley to democratic activists in Tehran. If you’re not keeping an eye on the day’s trending topics, you’re hopelessly misinformed.

Peter Theil of PayPal
He is best known now for the many businesses he’s invested in, including Facebook, Yelp, and LinkedIn. But we haven’t forgotten that, early in this decade, Theil along with Max Levchin and Elon Musk developed and sold PayPal. The simple, secure online payment system (which is taken for granted today) was not only a great business in its own right; it made e-commerce feasible for hundreds of thousands of start-ups and solo entrepreneurs.

Your choice not listed? Tell us about your entrepreneur in the comments.

Photo by Inc..

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