Harvard Business School Online's Business Insights Blog provides the career insights you need to achieve your goals and gain confidence in your business skills. Entrepreneurship is a risky but potentially rewarding endeavor. According to the online course Entrepreneurship Essentials , 50 percent of startups last five years, and just 25 percent survive Here are four stories of successful entrepreneurs to inspire your entrepreneurial journey.
It was there that Dassler began designing and cobbling shoes and decided he wanted to make the best possible sports shoe for athletes. While there were plenty of shoemakers at the time, Dassler was committed to standing out in the market by gathering feedback from athletes about what they looked for in a shoe, what pain points could be improved on, and how they felt about his early models.
It was that same year the first shoe with the soon-to-become-signature Adidas three stripes was registered.
Since then, Adidas has grown into an international brand known for high-quality athleticwear. After leaving dating app company Tinder and an abusive relationship in , Whitney Wolfe Herd was inspired to create an empowering dating experience for women. What if women made the first move and sent the first message? Wolfe Herd, along with dating app Badoo co-founder Andrey Andreev and former Tinder employees Chris Gulzcynski and Sarah Mick, designed a dating app that requires women to make the first move in heterosexual matches.
The brand took off—largely on college campuses—and the app reached , downloads in its first month. As its user base grows, Wolfe Herd remains a strong advocate for gender equality and sexual harassment prevention, building in-app features that block hate speech and blur inappropriate images. Wolfe Herd and her team also lobbied the state of Texas—where the company is headquartered—to pass a law prohibiting the sending of unsolicited lewd photos, which passed in In , Melanie Perkins was working a part-time job while studying in Perth, Australia, teaching students how to use desktop design software.
