Sara Blakey

As the founder of Spanx, Sara Blakey has probably the greatest story of a founder taking $5,000 of her savings and building a bootstraped company. Her success is she was selling the solution to a problem that she had in women’s clothing. She had very little money dedicated to marketing and advertisement. It’s iconic that Spanx is a celebrity favourite and often referred to in pop culture references/music. While Sara was building and growing her company she took very little money from investors. This is unheard of since it is common for founders to raise capital to get their idea rolling. Sara is a phenomenal example of bootstrapping a company.

Naval Ravikant

An entrepreneur and an early investor in Uber, Twitter and Yammer. Naval is a big supporter about finding peace and “success” in life comes from happiness. Real success comes internally, not externally.

His podcast interview with Joe Rogan and his own podcast titled “How to Get Rich” speak about building a life where you don’t need to clock into the typical “9-5” job that makes you unhappy.

Become an expert at an area you’re good at (doesn’t have to be what you like at the start).

Chamath Palihapitiya

Chamath came from a low income family living off of food stamps to now a highly-successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist in the San Francisco Bay area.

Chamath grew up in Canada and attended the University of Waterloo. After working for a year as a derivatives trader at BMO in Toronto he packed up and joined a start-up in Silicon Valley and eventually went on to work at Facebook. After a few years he then started his own fund, The Social Capital.

Codie Sanchez

She’s a force in the world of finance and true entrepreneurial grit. She spent two decades on Wall Street which included Goldman Sachs. Codie talks about how you don’t need to have a million dollar idea to execute on being your own boss.

Codie talks about buying businesses from baby boomers who are about to retire and essentially revamp and grow that business. Laundromats, car washes and flipping real estate and owning air bnb rental properties.

Winston Weinberg

After graduating law school, Winston worked for a year at a major law firm before he teamed up with AI researcher Gabriel Pereyra. They both cofounded Harvey AI to build AI assistants for law firms and lawyer. OpenAI and Sequoia are some of the investors that have poured $26 million into the legal tech startup.

Winston is an example of take what your technical skills and training are in and create a solution (good if its niche) that can have a greater impact. You don’t need to have decades of experience under your belt. Winston started Harvey as early as a first year associate. There’s no better time than now and if you search for the “right time” it may never come, just start now.