
Programmers who turned their skills into successful companies
Many self-made millionaires are coming up everyday especially from the technology sector. This field has seen many brilliant and innovative minds that have developed systems and applications that have changed the way things work. While many of these tech professionals have gone to institutions of higher learning to acquire skills, some are self-taught. In fact, some of them do not have a technology background. Some of the business minded programmers have gone ahead to establish their business ventures that have ended up to successful multinational corporations.
The figure below shows high demand skills that all programmers who want to remain relevant on the market should learn.
The following examples show famous developers who have used their skills to venture into business.
David Karp
David Karp is an American web developer and entrepreneur. He is the founder of the short-form blogging platform Tumblr, a tech company that was sold to Yahoo at $1.1 Billion. Mr. Karp was a silent young man during his days back in high school. He spent most of his teenage time glued to his computer.
From that time, Mr. Karp never went back to high school, neither did he join college. Before founding his company, he played a great role in other technology startups within his region. After selling his company to Yahoo, he made a lot of millions that saw him join the league of top millionaires under the age of 30.
Jan Koum & Brian Action (co-founders of WhatsApp)
Jan Koum is a co-founder of WhatsApp; he was born in a small village near Kiev in Ukraine. He led a life full of hardships; he struggled so much to make the ends meet. Due to violence and political unrest, he moved to Mountain View together with his mother. By the age of 18, he learned computer networking all by himself with the help of manuals from a used book store. He later joined San Jose State University then worked as a security tester. This is the time he met with Brian Acton.
They applied for jobs in Facebook and Twitter, but they were rejected. From that point, they began to figure out about starting their company. Koum purchased an iPhone that made him think of an instant messaging application that could be the next big thing. His idea was centered towards getting people across the world to network on a single platform effortlessly. It took him a lot of effort to come up with a code that could make this idea come to a reality. He tried several times with phones of his Russian friends, and he, later on, released it as Whatsapp 2.0 that reached top 20 apps in the US app store. The number of users has increased tremendously since then.
Bill Gates
Bill Gates is the co-founder of Microsoft Company together with Paul Allen; he is an American business person, entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. Today, Microsoft is the largest PC software company worldwide. Gates showed an interest in programming at an early age. Later on while on campus, he made different innovations like coming up with an algorithm for sorting pancakes as a solution to one of the problems that was facing the institution. His programming skills made him start building what is now Microsoft in 1975.
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg is the co-founder and the CEO of Facebook, one of the largest social networking websites in the world. He left Harvard after his sophomore year to concentrate on the site, the user base of which has grown to more than 250 million people around the globe, making him a billionaire.