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Source:Community curated
Updated:3/6/2026
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Company↕ | Founded↕ | Founders↕ | Origin Story↕ | Peak Valuation↕ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Apple | 1976 | Jobs, Wozniak, Wayne | Started in a garage, Lisa flopped, fired Jobs, brought him back, iPod → iPhone → $3T company | $3.5 trillion |
Google | 1998 | Larry Page & Sergey Brin | Stanford PhD project, PageRank paper, 'Don't be evil', organized world's information, became Alphabet | $2 trillion |
Amazon | 1994 | Jeff Bezos | Online bookstore in Bellevue garage, 'regret minimization framework', AWS became the real business | $2 trillion |
Meta (Facebook) | 2004 | Mark Zuckerberg et al. | Harvard dorm room, Facemash controversy, 'The Social Network' movie, pivot to metaverse, pivot to AI | $1.5 trillion |
Tesla | 2003 | Eberhard, Tarpenning (Musk joined 2004) | Electric car skeptics everywhere, near-bankruptcy in 2008, Model S changed everything, Musk slept on factory floor | $1.2 trillion |
Netflix | 1997 | Reed Hastings & Marc Randolph | $40 Blockbuster late fee (maybe apocryphal), DVD by mail, streaming pivot, original content empire | $300 billion |
Spotify | 2006 | Daniel Ek & Martin Lorentzon | Swedish piracy alternative, freemium model, convinced labels to license, 600M+ users, still barely profitable | $80 billion |
Airbnb | 2008 | Chesky, Gebbia, Blecharczyk | Couldn't afford rent, inflated air mattresses for conference attendees, cereal boxes funded early days | $113 billion |
Stripe | 2010 | Patrick & John Collison | Irish teenage brothers, 7 lines of code to accept payments, YC backed, $95B valuation, developer-first API | $95 billion |
Uber | 2009 | Kalanick & Camp | Couldn't get a cab in Paris, Travis's aggressive growth, regulatory warfare worldwide, Dara calmed it down | $120 billion |
SpaceX | 2002 | Elon Musk | Three rockets exploded, fourth succeeded with last money, now catches rockets with chopsticks, Starlink everywhere | $350 billion |
Shopify | 2006 | Tobias Lütke | Built a snowboard shop, hated existing e-commerce tools, built his own, Ruby on Rails, powered 4M+ stores | $200 billion |
Slack | 2013 | Stewart Butterfield | Internal chat tool for a failed game studio (Glitch), pivoted, killed email at work, sold to Salesforce for $27.7B | $27.7 billion (acquisition) |
OpenAI | 2015 | Altman, Musk, Sutskever, et al. | Non-profit → capped-profit, GPT-3 moment, ChatGPT broke every growth record, Musk left angrily, $150B valuation | $150 billion |
Notion | 2013 | Ivan Zhao & Simon Last | Nearly died twice, moved to Kyoto to rewrite from scratch, minimalist workspace tool, cult following, $10B | $10 billion |
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