Big Break

Big Break

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Life is not easy. If you want something you have to fight for it everyday. Sometimes, just wanting something isn't enough and you have to know what is right for you to do. Sometimes it's by design; sometimes it's just a stroke of luck. But in everyone's career, there is bound to be a moment or decision that will alter the course of their professional lives. When they look back, they'll remember and identify that moment as "My Big Break". Lets find out what was their true calling

01

Sara Blakely

When Sara Blakely was growing up in Florida, she didn't exactly dream of designing ladies undergarments. She actually wanted to be a lawyer. But when she took her LSATs, she failed twice. So after college, she got a job at Disney World as a ride reader. And then, in the early '90s, she got another job. It was selling fax machines door to door.
The idea for Spanx came about in 1998, when Blakely...
02

Mikaila Ulmer

When Mikaila was just four, she was stung by a bee twice in a week and her parents suggested she channel her newfound fear of Bees into a research project, so Mikaila began reading about bees and was soon fascinated by them and started learning all about what they do for the eco system. Around the same time her Great Granny Helen, sent her family a 1940's cookbook, which included her special rec...
03

Tobias Lütke

In 2004, Tobias Lütke was a small business owner, trying to sell snowboards over the Internet. Shopify came about after Mr. Lütke and a partner wanted to set up a shopping cart for the site, Mr. Lütke didn't like what was on the market, so he wrote his own code – and soon realized the real business was in selling the software he'd created for himself. Fast forward to 2015, Shopify ...
04

Jess Lee

Jess Lee, got her start in the tech industry as an associate product manager at Google. While at Google, Lee became an active user of social shopping site Polyvore. An honest e-mail with product suggestions for Polyvore turned into a job offer and is an honorary co-founder.
05

Melanie Joy Perkins

The idea for Canva came about when Melanie Perkins was teaching graphic design programs at university and found students struggled to learn the basics. Partnering with co-founder Cliff Obrecht, the pair launched Fusion Books, an online design tool that made it easy for students and teachers to create their own yearbooks. They soon realized that the technology they'd developed could be used much mo...
06

Ursula Burns

Ursula Burns mother's admonition to speak up brought Burns to the attention of Xerox senior executive Wayland Hicks when she challenged him over the role of women and minorities at the company. By 1990, she was Hicks's top assistant, starting her ascent up the corporate ladder. At the age of 51, almost three decades after joining the company as an intern, she was named CEO.
07

Gary Vaynerchuk

When Gary identified “the internet” as a land-grab opportunity in the late 90’s he transitioned his father’s local liquor store (then named “Shoppers Discount Liquors”) into one of the first e-commerce platforms for alcohol in the country resulting in explosive top-line growth. Renaming the business to “Wine Library,” Gary grew his father’s ...
08

Marc Benioff

Mark first met Steve Jobs in 1984 when Apple Inc. hired him as a summer intern.
He landed this gig in the first place was something of a fluke; as a college student at the University of Southern California, He'd reached out to the company’s Macintosh team to complain about a bug in its software and somehow parlayed that conversation into a job.
09

Brit Morin

Morin's stellar career really started when she answered what she thought was a phony ad from Apple on Craigslist. She didn’t think Apple would ever advertise on Craigslist, but she answered it anyway. And it was real. She got the interview, and then the internship and then went on to work for Apple in the iTunes unit in 2006. She wasn't at Apple long, before she was hired away by Google to ...
10

Robert Hohman

Glassdoor was cofounded in 2007 by Tim Besse, Robert Hohman, who serves as the company’s CEO, and Expedia founder Rich Barton, who serves as the company’s Chairman. The idea came from a brainstorming session between the two of them, when Hohman relayed the story of accidentally leaving the results of an employee survey on the printer while working at Expedia—when the two began...
11

Shahid Khan

Shad Khan worked at the automotive manufacturing company Flex-N-Gate while attending the University of Illinois. When he graduated he was hired as the engineering director for the company. In 1978, he started Bumper Works, which made car bumpers for customized pickup trucks and body shop repairs. The transaction involved a $50,000 loan from the Small Business Administration and $16,000 in his savi...
12

Do Won Chang

Growing up in South Korea, Chang worked in coffee shops. So when he emigrated to California in 1981 at age 18, he figured Hot Cup of Joe would be his ticket to the American dream. Flashy Mercedes-Benz's and BMW's changed his mind. He noticed that the people who drove the nicest cars were all in the garment business. Realizing the potential in garment business, Chang opened and his wife used $11,0...
13

Aneel Bhusri

Bhusri, who also became familiar with cloud computing companies as a venture capitalist with Greylock Partners, made a suggestion to Duffield over brunch at a Truckee diner that they should start a new software-as-a-service company.Bhusri said he believed “someone is going to do what Salesforce is doing, but for HR and finance.”
14

Therese Tucker

Tucker grew up milking cows in rural Illinois, the youngest of four girls. She became the first in her family to go to college, studying business and French. An early Apple programming class sparked her interest in computer programming and she later graduated with a computer science degree.
Tucker went through some tough times before she saw the success. Divorced, parenting two small children ...
15

Katrina Lake

Lake started working on Stitch Fix during her second year at Harvard while doing her academic research on retail industry. In the early days of Stitch Fix, Lake asked friends of friends in the Boston area to fill out style surveys. She’d then go out and buy clothes on her credit card, and drop off a box at people’s homes. They’d write her a personal check for what they wanted ...
16

Marissa Myers

Mayer was born in 1975 in a small Wisconsin town called Wausau. Her father was an engineer and her mother was an art teacher. Mayer developed an early talent for math and science. Mayer applied to 10 schools and got accepted to all of them, including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. She ended up going to Stanford, where she first took premed courses, in hopes of becoming a doctor. But her life perspec...
17

Jim Breyer

After Breyer left for Harvard Business School he was determined to get back to the Valley. He got turned down by Kleiner and Sequoia. He interviewed with Larry Ellison and Tom Siebel at Oracle. Ellison asked him what other jobs he was considering. Breyer said he was seriously thinking about venture capital. Ellison said, “Jim, you come work for me and Oracle for ten years and you’ll b...
18

Stephen Kaufer

TripAdvisor started with a very different business model in mind. In founding TripAdvisor, Steve Kaufer wanted to take his hard core engineering skills and apply them to vertical search in travel that provided a white label search engine for travel sites like Expedia and Travelocity.

After a year and a half, he had no clients and no revenue and was running out of money. Then, 9/11 happened...
19

Ken Lin

Lin has said the inspiration for Credit Karma began in 2006 when he was discouraged by the cost of obtaining his credit score and sought to create an alternative. Credit Karma was established to provide free credit scores and proved to be a hit growing according to the company to over 40 million users by 2015.
20

Lisa Sugar

Lisa Sugar had a passion for celebrity news and blue handbags, and sensed a void in the market for fun, friendly, pop culture content. Her husband Brian had an equal passion for disrupting big industries through technology. In 2005, they shared a vision to modernize the newsstand by bringing readers the latest trending topics in pop culture in real-time.
Over the last ten years, POPSUGAR has g...
21

Bert Jacobs

In 1989 brothers Bert and John Jacobs designed their first T-shirts. They began selling their designs in the streets of Boston and out of an old van at colleges and street fairs along the East Coast of the United States. In 1994, following a not-so-successful road trip, they returned to Boston, unsure of the future of their business. It was their common practice to gather friends at their apartmen...