A lot of people these days are familiar with the top people at the top of each list of billionaires all over the world, which is updated every year. However, not many people are familiar with the fact that the list is quite long and has people on it from all over the world. A lot of the people on it managed to land their names on the list because their companies operate in various landscapes of the tech industry.
Whether it’s dating, semiconductors, marketing, or music streaming, these are some tech company founders that could be billuonaires:
Whitney Wolfe Herd
The American entrepreneur and co-founder of Bumble, the online dating platform, Whitney Wolfe Herd created the dating app while working with Andrey Andreev, a Russian billionaire, back in 2014. She became the youngest self-made woman billionaire after the company went public back in February 2021. She is also a partial owner of the dating app Badoo, which was originally founded by Andreev back in 2020, and both of the apps together operate in over 100 countries all over the world and have over 40 million monthly active users. In fact, Bumble has become the second-most popular dating app in the US, right after Tinder. She also co-founded the dating app Tinder in 2012, and worked there as the vice president of marketing, however, she left the company later, and decided to create a brand new platform, which would be a women’s social media platform instead of a dating app, focused on allowing users to find platonic friends. However, the platform also developed as a great dating app where people could seek out romantic partners as well, with more and more features being added to it each year.
David A. Steinberg
Founder and chief executive officer of Zeta Global, David A. Steinberg, is the head of a number of incredibly successful companies that he has also created. As for Zeta Global specifically, the company is an artificial intelligence and data-driven marketing company that has managed to integrate technology, data, as well as marketing technology to help other businesses reach, acquire and retain customers and grow. Steinberg himself has been an entrepreneur for a long time and has managed to build a few different companies that are now worth over a billion dollars and generate over $100 million in sales annually. He is also the co-chairman of Caivis Investment corporation and On Demand Pharmaceuticals. He started his first company back in 1993, called Sterling Cellular Inc, selling cell phones, in the basement of his home by using a parental loan and credit cards, and managed to generate over $1 million in sales in the first year of operating the business. He founded Zeta Global, originally known as XL Marketing Corp, with John Sculley back in 2011, by pairing together several different companies that specialized in various aspects of digital marketing turning all of them into a single full-service brand in the marketing industry. Zeta Global went public in 2021 on the New York Stock Exchange, with a valuation of over a billion dollars.
His net worth is estimated at $900 Million Dollars.
Karin Schick
Back in 1983, Gerhard Schick founded the company Bechtle Ag, and Karin Schick inherited a stake in it in. The company operates in the tech industry, covering multiple areas and niches from management services that are able to take over the full operation of a company’s systems to providing expert strategic advice to other businesses. Bechtle has also managed to acquire numerous other companies in the tech and IT landscape, with over 100 acquisitions in the last three decades alone. Karin Schick herself actually decided to step down from her position on the advisory board on Bechtle back in 2017, so that she could focus more time on various social projects that were developed through her family foundation. One of those projects was founded back in 2012 when the foundation decided to develop the Community Knowledge Center in Tanzania so that people of all ages in the country could take computer courses and have access to the internet.
Zhang Fan
Zhang Fan is the CEO and general manager of Shenzhen Goodix Technology. Goodix is in the industry of manufacturing semiconductor components, more specifically, developing, producing, and distributing capacitive touch controller chips, fingerprint identification chips, and other components for touch screens which are practically everywhere these days. The company was founded back in 2002, as an IC design house in order to develop multifunctional chips for phones, and in 2005 became a leading provider in the industry, partnering with many leading Chinese phone manufacturers. Since then, the company has been working on developing various semiconductor components for other industries including automotive, smart apparel, and smart peripherals, becoming a biometric authentication provider, and more. The way that Goodix has managed to generate so much success and achieve so much growth is through product diversification, which constantly creates new space for more growth in the industry.
Daniel Ek
The co-founder and CEO of the digital music streaming platform, Spotify, Daniel Ek, first got into the tech industry by developing websites for clients when he was 13, in his parent’s home. He started charging his clients and eventually managed to expand his operations enough to recruit other students from his class to work for him in exchange for video games in the school computer lab. By the time he turned 18, he managed a team of over 20 people, and later on, managed to serve in a senior role at Tradera, a Nordic auction company that was acquired by eBay. He co-founded Spotify with Martin Lorentzon in 2006, after looking for a way to provide music to people online without them having to purchase the songs, while still compensating the music industry, after Napster shut down. These days, the platform has nearly 200 million subscribers and even more monthly active users on the free tier of the platform. The company’s initial public offering was in 2018 and had a market value of nearly $30 billion.