Internet entrepreneur - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

An Internet entrepreneur is an entrepreneur

Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur is an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative.The term was originally a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to a person who is willing to...

that applies innovation to create new businesses on the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

.

Internet entrepreneurs are part of the more general category of digital entrepreneurs. Digital entrepreneurship takes advantage of computing geniuses in general to innovate and create new ventures.

Most famous Internet entrepreneurs

Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates III is an American business magnate, investor, philanthropist, and author. Gates is the former CEO and current chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen...

and Paul Allen
Paul Allen
Paul Gardner Allen is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates...

(passed down to Ray Ozzie
Ray Ozzie
Raymond "Ray" Ozzie is an American software industry entrepreneur who held the positions of Chief Technical Officer and Chief Software Architect at Microsoft between 2005 and 2010...

and Craig Mundie
Craig Mundie
Craig James Mundie is chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft. He started in its consumer platforms division in 1992, managing the production of Windows CE for hand-held and automotive systems and early console games. In 1997, Mundie oversaw the acquisition of WebTV Networks...

from Bill Gates) - Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

- MSN
MSN
MSN is a collection of Internet sites and services provided by Microsoft. The Microsoft Network debuted as an online service and Internet service provider on August 24, 1995, to coincide with the release of the Windows 95 operating system.The range of services offered by MSN has changed since its...
Sergey Brin
Sergey Brin
Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin is a Russian-born American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who, with Larry Page, co-founded Google, one of the largest internet companies. , his personal wealth is estimated to be $16.7 billion....

& Larry Page
Larry Page
Lawrence "Larry" Page is an American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who, with Sergey Brin, is best known as the co-founder of Google. As of April 4, 2011, he is also the chief executive of Google, as announced on January 20, 2011...

- Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
Chad Hurley
Chad Hurley
Chad Meredith Hurley is an American co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer of the popular video sharing website YouTube. In June 2006, he was voted 28th on Business 2.0's "50 People Who Matter Now" list...

, Steve Chen (YouTube)
Steve Chen (YouTube)
Steven Shih "Steve" Chen is a Chinese Taiwanese American and a co-founder and previous Chief Technology Officer of the popular video sharing website YouTube.- Early years and education :...

and Jawed Karim
Jawed Karim
Jawed Karim is a Bangladeshi German American technologist and co-founder of the popular video sharing website YouTube...

- YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-creating the social networking site Facebook, of which he is chief executive and president...

- Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Omidyar
Pierre Morad Omidyar is a French-Iranian American entrepreneur and philanthropist/economist, and the founder/chairman of the eBay auction site...

and John Donahoe
John Donahoe
John Donahoe is an American businessman and the President and CEO of eBay Inc. since March 31, 2008, succeeding Meg Whitman, who stepped down from the role after 10 years, and who continues to serve on the company's Board of Directors....

- eBay
EBay
eBay Inc. is an American internet consumer-to-consumer corporation that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide...
Tom
Tom Anderson (MySpace)
-External links:* on * * on...

and Chris DeWolfe
Chris DeWolfe
Chris DeWolfe is an American entrepreneur, and one of the creators of Myspace , of which he is also the former CEO. He has the sixth account ever made on the site. During DeWolfe's tenure, MySpace became the top social network, with over 135 million worldwide unique visitors a month...

- Myspace
Myspace
Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....

- Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos
Jeffrey Preston "Jeff" Bezos is the founder, president, chief executive officer , and chairman of the board of Amazon.com.-Early life and background:...

- Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
Craig Newmark
Craig Newmark
Craig Alexander Newmark is an Internet entrepreneur best known for being the founder of the San Francisco-based international website Craigslist.-Biography:...

- Craigslist
Craigslist
Craigslist is a centralized network of online communities featuring free online classified advertisements, with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, services, community, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums....
Jerry Yang and David Filo
David Filo
David Filo is an American businessman and the co-founder of Yahoo! with Jerry Yang.Until the company decided to switch to PHP, his Filo Server Program, written in the C programming language, was the server-side scripting software used to dynamically serve variable web pages, called Filo Server...

- Yahoo
Max Levchin
Max Levchin
Max Rafael Levchin is a Ukrainian-born American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur widely known as one of the co-founders and for his role as the former chief technology officer of PayPal....

, Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel
Peter Andreas Thiel is an American business magnate, venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager. With Elon Musk and Max Levchin, Thiel co-founded PayPal and was its CEO...

, Elon Musk
Elon Musk
Elon Musk is an American engineer and entrepreneur heritage best known for co-founding PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla Motors. He is currently the CEO and CTO of SpaceX, CEO and Product Architect of Tesla Motors and Chairman of SolarCity...

, and Luke Nosek
Luke Nosek
Luke Nosek is an American entrepreneur of Polish descent.Nosek received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During college in the summer of 1995, he cofounded SponsorNet New Media, Inc., along with fellow UIUC students Max Levchin and Scott Banister...

- Paypal
PayPal
PayPal is an American-based global e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. Online money transfers serve as electronic alternatives to paying with traditional paper methods, such as checks and money orders....
Caterina Fake
Caterina Fake
Caterina Fake is an American businesswoman and internet entrepreneur.Fake was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall, attended Smith College, and graduated from Vassar College in 1991....

and Stewart Butterfield
Stewart Butterfield
Stewart Butterfield is a Canadian-born entrepreneur and businessman. He co-founded the photo sharing website Flickr and its parent company Ludicorp with then-wife Caterina Fake. In March 2005 Ludicorp was acquired by Yahoo!, where Butterfield continued as the General Manager of Flickr until he...

-Flickr
Flickr
Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...
Reed Hastings
Reed Hastings
Wilmot Reed Hastings, Jr. is an entrepreneur and education philanthropist. He is the CEO of Netflix, and on the boards of Microsoft, Facebook, and numerous non-profit organizations.- Early life and education :...

- Netflix
Netflix
Netflix, Inc., is an American provider of on-demand internet streaming media in the United States, Canada, and Latin America and flat rate DVD-by-mail in the United States. The company was established in 1997 and is headquartered in Los Gatos, California...
Jack Dorsey - Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
Kevin Rose
Kevin Rose
Kevin Rose is an American Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Revision3, Digg, Pownce, and Milk...

- Digg
Digg
Digg is a social news website. Prior to Digg v4, its cornerstone function consisted of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems...
James H. Clark
James H. Clark
James H. Clark is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist. He founded several notable Silicon Valley technology companies, including Silicon Graphics, Inc., Netscape Communications Corporation, myCFO and Healtheon...

and Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, software engineer, and multi-millionaire best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard...

- Netscape
Netscape
Netscape Communications is a US computer services company, best known for Netscape Navigator, its web browser. When it was an independent company, its headquarters were in Mountain View, California...
Joshua Schachter
Joshua Schachter
Joshua Schachter is the creator of Delicious, creator of GeoURL, and co-creator of Memepool. He has a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh....

- del.icio.us
Del.icio.us
Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, and by the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs...
Shawn Fanning
Shawn Fanning
Shawn Fanning is an American computer programmer, serial entrepreneur, and angel investor. He developed Napster, one of the first popular peer-to-peer file sharing platforms, in 1998. The popularity of Napster was widespread and Fanning was featured on the cover of Time magazine...

- Napster
Napster
Napster is an online music store and a Best Buy company. It was originally founded as a pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing Internet service that emphasized sharing audio files that were typically digitally encoded music as MP3 format files...
Sky Dayton
Sky Dayton
Sky Dylan Dayton is an American entrepreneur.Dayton is the founder of EarthLink, co-founder of eCompanies, founder and chairman of Boingo.-Early life:...

- EarthLink
EarthLink
EarthLink , is an Internet service provider headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. It claims 1.94 million subscribers.- Business :EarthLink provides a variety of Internet connection types, including dial-up, DSL, satellite, and cable. Both dial-up and high speed Internet access are available...
Bob Parsons
Bob Parsons
Bob Parsons is an American entrepreneur. He is the CEO and founder of The Go Daddy Group, Inc., a family of companies comprising three ICANN-accredited domain name registrars, including flagship registrar GoDaddy.com, reseller registrar Wild West Domains and Blue Razor Domains...

- Go Daddy
Go Daddy
Go Daddy is an Internet domain registrar and Web hosting company that also sells e-business related software and services. In 2010, it reached more than 45 million domain names under management. Go Daddy is currently the largest ICANN-accredited registrar in the world, and is four times the size of...
Tom Fulp
Tom Fulp
Thomas Michael "Tom" Fulp is the co-owner of video game company The Behemoth, and the creator and administrator of Newgrounds, a popular website for sharing Flash files...

- Newgrounds
Newgrounds
Newgrounds is an American entertainment and social media website. Founded on July 6, 1995 by Tom Fulp, the site primarily hosts Adobe Flash animations and games, but also features a music-oriented page, along with an art portal...
Todd Wagner
Todd Wagner
Todd R. Wagner co-founded Broadcast.com and now co-owns 2929 Entertainment with Mark Cuban, along with other entertainment properties and has also founded the Todd Wagner Foundation.- Early life :...

and Mark Cuban
Mark Cuban
Mark Cuban is an American business magnate and investor. He is the owner of the National Basketball Association's Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theatres, and Magnolia Pictures, and the chairman of the HDTV cable network HDNet....

- Broadcast.com
Broadcast.com
Broadcast.com was a web radio company founded as "AudioNet" in September 1995 by Chris Jaeb. Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban later led the organization to hugely capitalize on the Dot-com bubble and be sold to Yahoo.com.-History:...
Michael Arrington
Michael Arrington
J. Michael Arrington is the founder and former co-editor of TechCrunch, a blog covering the Silicon Valley technology start-up communities and the wider technology field in USA and elsewhere...

- TechCrunch
TechCrunch
TechCrunch is a web publication that offers technology news and analysis, as well as profiling of startup companies, products, and websites. It was founded by Michael Arrington in 2005, and was first published on June 11, 2005....
Chris Pirillo
Chris Pirillo
Christopher Joseph Pirillo is the founder and maintainer of Lockergnome, which is a network of blogs, web forums, mailing lists, and online communities. He spent two years hosting the TechTV television program Call for Help, where he also hosted the first annual Call-for-Help-a-Thon...

- Lockergnome
Arvind A. Raichur
Arvind A. Raichur
Arvind A. Raichur is an American lawyer and entrepreneur; he is the president and founder of AllLaw.com, Inc. Raichur graduated with a double B.A. in economics and political science from the University of New Mexico where he was a CLEO Fellow and member of the ASUNM student senate...

- AllLaw.com, Inc.
Steffan Sondermark Fallesen
Steffan Sondermark Fallesen
Steffan Søndermark Fallesen is an Internet entrepreneur. He is the founder of Servage Hosting which he initiated immediately after moving to Flensburg...

- Servage Hosting
Servage Hosting
Servage GmbH is a German web hosting provider headquartered in Flensburg, Germany. The company is doing business as Servage Hosting. The company is a subsidiary to the Swedish company Servage AB . The corporate name Servage resulted from the words "Serve" and "Age", that when combined spells out...
Christopher Poole
Christopher Poole
Christopher Poole is an American internet entrepreneur from New York City, noted for founding the websites 4chan and Canvas. He originally started 4chan anonymously, under the pseudonym moot .-Impact and activity:...

(moot) - 4chan.org
Zach Klein
Zach Klein
Zach Klein is an American Internet entrepreneur best known for co-founding and designing Vimeo in 2004. He also co-founded the on-line shopping site Svpply and assisted in the development of CollegeHumor and BustedTees...

- Vimeo
Vimeo
Vimeo is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos. It was founded by Zach Klein and Jake Lodwick in November 2004...
Ashwin Navin
Ashwin Navin
Ashwin Navin was the President and Co-Founder of BitTorrent, Inc. He joined Bram Cohen, the inventor of BitTorrent, in 2004 and reportedly handled business and company-related matters while Cohen focused on engineering and product development...

- BitTorrent
BitTorrent
BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used for distributing large amounts of data over the Internet. BitTorrent is one of the most common protocols for transferring large files, and it has been estimated that it accounted for roughly 43% to 70% of all Internet traffic .Programmer...

Most famous Internet entrepreneurs

Further reading