Larry Ellison (About)

Lawrence “Larry” Joseph Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation, a major enterprise software company. He is currently listed on Forbes list of billionaires as the 14th richest person in the world.

Early life

Ellison was born in New York City to Florence Spellman, a 19-year-old unwed Jewish mother. At his mother’s request, he was given to his mother’s aunt and uncle in Chicago to raise. Lillian Spellman Ellison and Louis Ellison adopted him when he was nine months old. Ellison did not learn the name of his mother or meet her until he was 48; the identity of his father is unknown.

The Ellison home was a two-bedroom apartment in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, populated mostly with lower middle class Jews. Ellison remembers his adoptive mother as warm and loving, in contrast to his austere, unsupportive, and often distant adoptive father, a Russian Jew from the Crimea who adopted the name Ellison to honor his point of entry into the USA, Ellis Island, as well as to conceal his Jewish ancestry. Louis was a modest government employee who had made a small fortune in Chicago real estate, only to lose it during the Great Depression.

Ellison was a bright but inattentive student. He left the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the end of his second year, after not taking his final exams because his adoptive mother had just died. After spending a summer in Northern California where he lived with his friend Chuck Weiss, he attended the University of Chicago for one term, where he first encountered computer programming. At 20 years of age, he moved to northern California permanently.

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Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Ellison

Michael Dell (About)

Michael Saul Dell (born February 23, 1965, in Houston, Texas) is an American businessman and the founder and CEO of Dell, Inc.

Early life and education

The son of an orthodontist, Dell attended Herod Elementary School in Houston, Texas.

Dell had his first encounter with a computer at the age of 15 when he broke down a brand new Apple II computer and rebuilt it, just to see if he could. Dell attended Memorial High School in Houston where he did not excel scholastically. During that time he did however exhibit formidable business instincts selling subscriptions for the Houston Post. Dell found $18,000 in an untapped customer base; those “windfall profits” earned him a BMW and a computer.

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Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Dell

Shel Israel (About)

Shel Israel (born 1944) is an author and U.S. technology advisor for startups on strategic communications issues. He lives in Silicon Valley, California and frequently speaks on social media related topics. He co-authored with Robert Scoble the book Naked Conversations, How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers (John Wiley & Son 2006). He is currently the host of Global Neighbourhoods with Shel Israel, an online video blog series. Until recently, the video blog was produced by FastCompany.tv, covering enterprise and trends in social media.

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Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shel_Israel

Mark Cuban (About)

Mark Cuban (born July 31, 1958 in Pittsburgh) is an American billionaire entrepreneur. He is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, an NBA team, and Chairman of HDNet, an HDTV cable network.

Early life

Mark Cuban (his family’s last name was shortened from Chabenisky when his grandparents, Russians, arrived at Ellis Island) grew up in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania; a suburb of Pittsburgh in a working class family; his father was an automobile upholsterer. Cuban’s first step into the business world occurred at age 12, when he sold garbage bags in order to pay for a pair of expensive basketball shoes. While in school, he held a variety of jobs, including bartending, disco dancing instructor, and party promotion. He paid for college by collecting and selling stamps (Philatelic Investment), and once gained about $1,100 from starting a chain letter.

Rather than attending high school for his senior year, Cuban enrolled as a full time student at the University of Pittsburgh, becoming a member of Pi Lambda Phi International Fraternity. After one year at the University of Pittsburgh, he transferred to Indiana University’s Bloomington, Indiana campus and graduated in 1981 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration. He played rugby union football while at Indiana, taking up the position of number 8.

Bartender to dot-com billionaire

In 1982, Cuban moved to Dallas, Texas. Cuban first found work as a bartender, then as a salesperson for Your Business Software, one of the first PC software retailers in Dallas. He was terminated less than a year later for not opening the store on time while out making a sales call finalizing a large software purchase with a customer.

Cuban started a company, MicroSolutions, with support from his previous customers from Your Business Software. MicroSolutions was initially a system integrator and software reseller. The company was an early proponent of technologies such as Carbon Copy, Lotus Notes, and CompuServe. One of the company’s largest clients was Perot Systems. In 1990, Cuban sold MicroSolutions to Compuserve—then a subsidiary of H&R Block—for $6 million. He netted approximately $2 million after taxes on the deal.

In 1995, Cuban and fellow Indiana University alum Todd Wagner started Audionet, combining their mutual interest in college basketball and webcasting. With a single server and ISDN line, Audionet became Broadcast.com in 1998. By 1999, Broadcast.com had grown to 330 employees and annual revenues near $100 million. In 1999, during the Dot-com boom, Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.9 billion in Yahoo! stock.

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Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Cuban