Comparing Entrepreneurs from Different Industries essay
Basing on module literature, in particular, Stokes et al. (2010), Bornstein(2004), and Zimmerer and Scarborough (2005), entrepreneurship can be defined from different perspectives, such as: 1) activities aimed at maximizing profits; 2) proactive activities of citizens on producing goods and services aimed at making a profit; 3) direct function of the realization of property, its main production function; 4) organizational innovation process aimed at making a profit; 5) actions aimed at increasing the capital, developing the production and appropriation of profit; and 6) a specific type of activity aimed at a relentless search for changes in the existing forms of life of enterprises and society, continued implementation of these changes. As Wickham (2006) reasonably notes, most practitioners and researchers focus on making a profit, considering it as the ultimate goal of business. However, the ultimate goal of business is not so much profit as the continuity of the production process associated with the reproduction of demand and satisfaction of the ever-changing, ever-increasing needs of the individual or social group, and society as a whole.
In this context, entrepreneurship can be more properly defined as a process of continuous search for changes in needs, the end-user demand for products and services, meeting this need by organizing production, sales, marketing, logistics, and management focused on the best innovations that bring maximum performance in each of the stages of the reproduction process. We thus consider entrepreneurship to be not just a business, but a style of management based on the principles of innovation, anti-bureaucracy, constant initiative, focus on innovations in production processes, marketing, distribution and consumption of goods and services. To fit this understanding of entrepreneurship, our final project focuses on two outstanding innovators Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the leaders of vehicle production and e-commence industries respectively.
Justifying the Choice
On a whole, we see entrepreneur as a true creator, who comes up with new products, opens new niches, and knows how to make money where others would pass by. In this regard, Elon Musk, the creator of PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla Motors, is worth recognition due to the unusual combination of energy, innovation and unswerving desire to produce a quality product in all the areas of business he is engaged into. Investing funds into incredible, inspiring projects, Musk is totally changing our world with challenging ideas, like the mass production of electric vehicles, the project of commercial suborbital flights, the global system of satellite Internet, the introduction of solar stations, or transport capsule system Hyperloop. For instance, Musk’s Tesla Motors has become a real discovery, and its shares have risen by more than 300% during 2013 (Storm, 2014). To a certain extent, we can say that investors were willing to endow not only to the company, but also to the personality of its CEO, who has recently received the title of the CEO of the year by MarketWatch.
In his turn, Jeff Bezos who started his business in a garage, stands out as a leader for transforming a trading company Amazon.com into a truly high-tech multi-sector hypermarket and bring it up to the value of $100 billion. Today Amazon.com is the best known, most popular, and most visited online store in the world, while its creator is acknowledged as a top executive in accordance with according to Forbes ranking. Indeed, Bezos has an exceptional entrepreneurial talent: having faced the Internet for the first time, he saw the opportunities that almost no one saw, i.e. its future in commerce. Obviously, there were others who had a premonition of something similar (e.g, Pierre Omidyar of eBay), but Bezos’ vision was so clear and Amazon.com website so attractive that it has become a symbol of e-commerce almost since the first day.
Therefore, we believe that the experience and talent of these two entrepreneurs could have a valuable effect of our perception of various business processes.
Elon Musk Profile
Elon Reeve Musk is a Canadian-American engineer, entrepreneur, inventor and investor of the South African origin; billionaire founder, owner and CEO of SpaceX, Tesla Motors, PayPal, and several other successful companies, as well as the chief designer of Chief Product Architect, and the head of the board of directors at SolarCity, who has achieved considerable success in the field of information technology, rocket and car production.
Musk got his first profit at 12, when he sold Blast Star, a video game he developed in the style of Space Invaders, and invested the gained $500 in the shares of a pharmaceutical company (Pauline, 2012). One of Musk’s first projects was the Zip2 service which specializes in software for news companies. In 1999 Compaq bought Zip2 for $307 million, of which Musk received 7% and invested in the creation of his second startup, X.com. After the merger with Confinity, X.com turned into a well-known online payment service PayPal. In 2002, PayPal was sold to online auction site eBay for $1.5 billion, of which Elon Musk personally received $165 million. At the moment, about 140 million people use the services of PayPal (Pauline, 2012; Storm, 2014).
Before the moment the sale of PayPal company was completed, Musk pondered over how much would it cost to organize an expedition to Mars, and decided that he could reduce the cost of rocket launch by 10 times. Musk invested $100 million into his new company SpaceX, but a few trial launches of the rocket Falcon 1, including the one with an army satellite on board, ended in a catastrophe (Storm, 2014). Nevertheless, Elon Musk and his team did not give up, and eventually they managed to build several quite functional and prospective spacecraft, such as Falcon 9 launch vehicle, Falcon 9 Heavy and a space shuttle Dragon SpaceX. NASA estimated that creation of Falcon 9 was supposed to cost $3.9 billion, but SpaceX fit in $300 million (Pauline, 2012). Musk’s company also offers the lowest rates in the world for the delivery of cargo into orbit. Today SpaceX has contracts for $4 billion with only a third coming from NASA and the rest accounted to private companies (Elon Musk Official Website, 2014). By May 2014, Falcon 9 carried out 9 launches.
Along the way, in 2003, Musk became a co-founder of the company producing electric vehicles Tesla Motors. In 2008, Tesla Roadster was the first all-electric car in serial production costing $110 thousand, and in 2012 Tesla started selling sedan Model S targeted at a wider audience at the price of $50 thousand. As a result, Tesla Model S has become the main achievement of the company, has received numerous Car of the Year awards and has completely changed the situation on the market of sedans. In June 2010, Tesla Motors conducts IPO, the first IPO of an automotive company in the US since 1956, when Ford entered the stock market. Tesla Motors turnover increased from $413.3 million in 2012 to $2.013 billion in 2013 (Storm, 2014). In the last quarter, the sales of electric vehicles exceeded 5.5 thousand pieces, which is a serious market share of luxury-class cars (Elon Musk Official Website, 2014).
Despite the fact that Tesla Motors and SpaceX were close to bankruptcy in 2007-2008, each of these companies is now changing the face of the industry, while Elon Musk is one of the world’s most successful businessmen. Last year, Fortune Magazine named him the businessman of the year, and The Wall Street Journal called Musk the CEO of the year.
Jeff Bezos Profile
Jeffrey Preston ‘Jeff’ Bezos is an American businessman, head and founder of Amazon.com, the world’s largest company selling goods and services via the Internet, as well as the owner of The Washington Post publishing house.
After graduating from Princeton University in 1986, Bezos worked on Wall Street in the field of computer programming (Stone, 2014). Due to the network for financial transactions that Jeff developed for the Fitel Company, he was noticed by David Shaw, president of D. E. Shaw & Co. His duties of the vice president now included coming to work only when inspiration occurred and thinking about new areas of business and insurance, software and, finally, a little-known Internet. That was when analyzing the possible undeveloped sales market, Bezos came to the conclusion that of all the goods sold by mailing books were the least popular, as there were no major catalogues (Stone, 2014).
In 1994 Bezos left Shaw’s company, invested his parents’ $300 thousand, and became the founder and CEO of his own company Amazon.com, which would sell books through the Internet. The site was launched July 16, 1995, although at that time it was not completed, for example one could order a negative number of books on the website, and employees had to pack the book standing on their knees on the concrete floor of a small basement. However, despite the fact that at first glance Amazon seemed to be pathetic amateur business, the site has grown rapidly since the first day. In October, sales for the first time reached a hundred of books a day. Less than a year later Amazon was selling a hundred books per hour (Amazon.com Official Website, 2014).
Besides the fact that Bezos was the first to create an online store, he was the first to post links to his store on other sites, and for that he paid the site owners a percent from each purchase made after transition from their website (Rossman, 2014). Other innovations of Bezos include the possibility for readers to post their own reviews and evaluate them, as well as a customized selection of a “showcase.” Amazon.com was soon successfully competing with the largest bookselling company of the US – Barnes & Noble, who sold their books in the traditional way. In 1997, Amazon.com entered the IPO, and already in 1999 the shares of Amazon.com grew five times in price (Stone, 2014).
Currently, Amazon.com offers to purchase not only books: the service covers 34 categories of goods, including movies, video games, consumer electronics, toys, food, household goods, furniture, sporting goods and more (Amazon.com Official Website, 2014). Over the past five years, Amazon shares rose by 397% and now the company with annual revenues of $48 billion is estimated at $100 billion; the businessman himself with the capital of around $25 billion belongs to the 20 richest people in the world (Stone, 2014; Rossman, 2014).
Comparing Entrepreneurs from Different Industries essay part 2
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