Inc. Magazine Celebrates 30 Years of Entrepreneurism

Technology Innovators Lead the List of Agenda Setters for the Last Three Decades

In 1979 publisher Bernie Goldhirsh, founder of a handful of sailing magazines, was searching the business press for information that would be useful to an entrepreneur.  Finding nothing, he seized on the opportunity to fill this void and launched Inc. Magazine.  Inc., which bills itself as “The Handbook of the American Entrepreneur,” marks its 30^th year with a special anniversary issue in April 2009.  

The issue chronicles a number of milestones of entrepreneurism over the last three decades, and includes a list of the 30 (give or take) most interesting entrepreneurs of that time period. The list was compiled by asking six opinion leaders, including business management author Tom Peters, Carl Schramm, president and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Paul Graham, co-founder of venture capital firm Y Combinator and others, to submit their list of five agenda-setting entrepreneurs of the past 30 years.  Upon reviewing the list, it’s apparent that these innovators were recognized as much for their contributions to changing the paradigms of business and the world at large, as they were for the companies, products and services they launched.  

Due to a number of duplications, the list actually came down to 19 ventures.  Of those, more than half (10) were involved in the high-tech sector.  These included:

Robert Swanson & Herbert Boyer, Genetech, for spawning the biotech sector through the development of genetic engineering.

Gary Burrell & Min Kao, Garmin, for adapting military technology to create a new consumer electronics segment – GPS.

Steve Jobs, Apple, not only for his contribution to the personal computer industry but also to the music distribution industry and now the mobile device industry.

Larry Page & Sergey Brin, Google, again not just for their contribution to search, but for the corporate culture and management style the company has adopted.

N.R. Narayana Murthy, Infosys, for launching a company form scratch and turning it into a huge values-based institution.

Bill Gates, Microsoft, for changing the nature of sharing an d accessing information and the nature of collaboration, and now through philanthropy, finding a way to use his entrepreneurial instincts and methods to make the world a better place.

Pierre Omidyar & Meg Whitman, eBay, for using the power of an online community to create a whole new class of businesses and business people. 

T.J. Rodgers, Cypress Semiconductors, for being what Paul Graham calls the best writer among Silicon Valley CEOs.

Sam Altman, Loopt, for combining GPS and wireless technologies to take social networking to the ultimate level by allowing users to actually locate one another via their cell phones.

Craig Benson, Cabletron Systems, as co-founder of one of the early networking companies, Benson applied his entrepreneurial principles to government when he served as Governor of New Hampshire from 2003-2005.   

Some of the non-tech agenda setters who made the list included Fred Smith, FedEx, Herb Kelleher, Southwest Airlines, Howard Schultz, Starbucks and Oprah.

For full details, the April issue is on newsstands now.

For an interactive timeline of some of the milestones in entrepreneurism over the last 30 years:  http://www.inc.com/30years/timeline.html