The hustlers
Page 2 of 2. Back to the start.
Markus Villig
Founder and CEO of Bolt — the Estonian super-app he started at 19 with ~€5,000 from his parents, becoming Europe’s youngest self-made billionaire at 27.
Bolt (formerly Taxify)
Mian Muhammad Mansha
Chairman of the Nishat Group and MCB Bank; long Pakistan’s richest man. A masterclass in reading — and working — the state in a developing economy.
Nishat Group / MCB Bank
Muhammad Yunus
Founder of Grameen Bank, father of microcredit, Nobel Peace laureate — and, at 84, the head of Bangladesh’s post-revolution interim government.
Grameen Bank
Pallav Nadhani
Founder of FusionCharts — built a bootstrapped, profitable data-visualization product used by Apple, Microsoft and Google, starting as a teenager from Kolkata, and exited to Idera in 2020.
FusionCharts (InfoSoft Global)
Parag Agrawal
Former CEO of Twitter (2021–2022) and longtime CTO; an IIT Bombay and Stanford engineer who ran the platform through Elon Musk’s takeover, was fired the day the deal closed, and now builds web infrastructure for AI agents at Parallel Web Systems.
Parallel Web Systems
Paras Chopra
Founder of Wingify (VWO) — bootstrapped a profitable global SaaS from Delhi without venture capital, sold it for ~$200M while still owning ~71%, and now runs the unfunded AI research lab Lossfunk.
Wingify (VWO)
Patrick Collison
Co-founder and CEO of Stripe — the developer-first payments company that became the financial infrastructure of the internet, valued ~$159B (2026) and processing ~$1.9T a year.
Stripe
Pierre Omidyar
Founder of eBay and one of the defining entrepreneurs of the early internet — then a contested patron of philanthropy and independent journalism.
eBay
Reinhold Würth
At 19 he inherited a two-man screw wholesaler; over seventy years he built it into the Würth Group, the world’s largest distributor of fasteners — a Mittelstand giant with well over €15 billion in revenue.
Würth Group
Saad Mohseni
Founder and CEO of MOBY Group, Afghanistan’s largest media company — the “Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan” who built a media empire in a war-torn country.
MOBY Group
Salman F. Rahman
Co-founder of the Beximco conglomerate and, until 2024, Sheikh Hasina’s private-industry adviser with cabinet rank. The textbook case of a fortune fused to the state.
Beximco Group
Sam Altman
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; former president of Y Combinator. The defining figure of the AI era — and the subject of a recurring question about whether the trust he commands is always earned.
OpenAI
Shahid Khan
Pakistani-American founder of Flex-N-Gate; owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Fulham FC. The immigrant bootstraps myth — and its honest footnotes.
Flex-N-Gate
Shesh Ghale
Co-founder and CEO of Melbourne’s MIT Group and a Nepali-origin billionaire — the diaspora success story Nepal could not keep at home.
MIT Group
Sir Brian Souter
Co-founder of the Stagecoach Group who built a transport empire on Thatcher-era bus deregulation — and drew censure for predatory competition and his "Keep the Clause" campaign.
Stagecoach Group
Sir James Dyson
The art-school engineer who built a global brand on a bagless vacuum after ~5,127 prototypes — and a British manufacturing icon whose Singapore HQ move and pandemic dealings drew scrutiny.
Dyson
Sir Jim Ratcliffe
The grammar-school chemical engineer who built INEOS into one of the world’s largest chemical companies through debt-fuelled buyouts — and a pro-Brexit British-business voice who took tax residence in Monaco.
INEOS
Sridhar Vembu
Co-founder of Zoho Corporation — the IIT-and-Princeton engineer who built a profitable, billion-dollar software company with no venture capital, trains his own engineers out of rural India, and moved his own HQ to a village.
Zoho Corporation
Stef Wertheimer
Self-taught machinist who turned a one-man backyard shop into ISCAR — the carbide-tool multinational Warren Buffett valued above $10 billion — and an apostle of "industry for peace."
ISCAR / IMC Group
Taavet Hinrikus
Skype’s first hired employee and co-founder of Wise (TransferWise) — the Estonian fintech that exposed banks’ hidden FX markups and listed in London at ~$11 billion.
Wise (formerly TransferWise)
Whitney Wolfe Herd
Founder and CEO of Bumble — built a "women make the first move" dating app out of her own ordeal at Tinder, and at 31 became the youngest woman to take a US company public (2021).
Bumble