When it comes to the Internet
everyone is familiar with the three letters WWW. Well today we are going to talk about the
three G’s, since if it weren’t for the Greatest Garage Gurus there would never
have been an Internet in the first place.
A number of startups from Apple to HP got their start in the humble
garage. Some of these made their owners
billionaires. All of them changed the
ways in which the world works. Let’s take a look at the top five garage
businesses:
#1 – Amazon
What sounded like a South
American River turned into a waterfall of profit for Jeff Bezos who founded
Amazon.com in 1994 as an online bookstore in his garage in Bellevue,
Washington. While it took Jeff until
1995 to sell his first book online, he made it book by being one of the
quickest online businesses to go IPO in 1997.
Today, this online e-tail powerhouse has one of the most automated
shipping systems in the business with more than 40,000 robots employed to help
take products to market. Amazon has also
been flirting with using delivery drones to enable them to compete with
retailers who can offer products on the spot.
2015 is shaping up to be the start of the shipping wars as e-tailers and
major retailers duke it out for dominance.
#2 – Apple
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| image courtesy of http://commons.wikimedia.org |
Started in the year of our
Bicentennial, 1976, two Steves by the name of Jobs and Wozniak started a
revolution by bringing personal computing to the masses. One of their first major orders for 50 Apple
I Computers was constructed in Job’s parents garage in Cupertino,
California. Although they had their
battles with everyone from Bill Gates to the Beatles over the Apple trademark name,
the rest is history being that today Apple is the most valuable tech company in
the world.
#3 – Disney
While not technically a tech
company, although their current crop of animated feature films are produced on
computers, the Walt Disney Studio got its start in Walt Disney’s uncle’s
one-car garage in Anaheim, California.
Started with a mouse named Mickey, today Disney is no Mickey Mouse
operation, being the highest-grossing media conglomerate in the world.
#4 – Google
We couldn’t talk tech without
mentioning the 800-pound gorilla in the room named Google. Started by Stanford graduate students Larry
Page and Sergey Brin in Susan Wojcicky’s garage in September 1998, they
unsuccessfully tried to sell the search engine to Excite for $1 million a year
later. Excite’s loss was the college
student’s gain as the company went public in 2001, raising $2.7 billion. Today, Google is the most trafficked search
engine online garnering 80% of all web searches. During the intervening 14 years, Google has
diversified itself into everything from medical research to robotics. It has also bought or developed dozens of
other tech businesses since going public.
#5 – Hewlett Packard
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| http://commons.wikimedia.org |
An oldie but a goodie, HP got
its start in 1939 when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard invested $535 in order to
start building audio oscillators in a garage in Palo Alto, California. One
of their first customers was the Walt
Disney Studios, which purchased eight oscillators in order to augment the sound
system for its animated feature film, “Fantasia.” Widely regarded as the birthplace of Silicon Valley,
Hewlett Packard is today one of the largest and most respected tech companies
in the world.
Making Something from Nothing
Like the story “Stone Soup,”
where an itinerant stranger tricks the town folk into sharing their food, all
of these people literally made something out of nothing. Think about it. When Jeff Bezos started Amazon, major
booksellers didn’t regard him as a threat.
Heck, it took him almost a year to sell his first book. When Jobs and Wozniak tried to sell the Apple
1, it was little more than a computer kit that sold for $666.66 ($2,763 in 2015
dollars.)
What turned these businesses
from a curiosity to an industry were several things, including a little bit of
luck and a ton of pluck. Part
businessmen, part showmen, each and every one of these individuals ― while
regarded as genius innovators today ― had to suffer the slings and arrows not
only of their competitors, but of their peers as well. (“Go on, get out of here
boy, yer botherin’ me!”) Yet persist
they did to become icons of industry, proving the old saw that success is “10%
inspiration and 90% perspiration.”
Today this trend continues as
other tinkerers piece together hardware and software in their garages,
hoping
to be the next tech sensation. While
many of these future Garage Gurus will be products of universities, others can
come out of the blue. Jack Ma, CEO of
Alibaba in China, founded his company in his apartment in 1999. He claims to
have coined the name while sitting in a San Francisco coffee shop. On September 5, 2014 the company went public,
raising more then $20 billion making it the largest IPO in history.
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| Courtesy alibabagroup.com |
Industries to keep an eye on
in 2015 are offering such inventions as 3D Printing, Personal Robotics and
Drones, Wearable Computing, Battery & Power Technology and Cybersecurity
and Robotic Exoskeletons. While the next wave of Garage Gurus could come from
one of these areas, or from some other innovation such as nanotechnology is
anybody’s guess. What is certain is that
some of the most profound changes to society will almost certainly have its
start in the most humble of beginnings … the garage.
Carl Weiss is president of Working the
Web to Win, an
award-winning digital marketing agency based in Jacksonville,
Florida. You can listen to Carl live every Tuesday at 4 p.m. Eastern
on BlogTalkRadio
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