5 Startup Businesses That Became Successful

Here in the U.S., we have a proud history of people reaching the American dream through hard work and grit. In the business world, many companies that are very recognizable today wouldn’t even be on our radar if not for the help of venture capitalists such as Charles Phillips.

Here are five examples of companies who made it big thanks to the help of investors who believed in them, and the hard work that these businesses put in to get themselves on the map.

1. Groupon

Groupon has scaled to be in 45 countries and has recently received an evaluation of being worth at least $1 billion dollars! Groupon was originally called The Point, which was a social network that connected users who wanted to rally behind a very specific cause.

This planted the seed for Groupon as founder Eric Lefkofsky saw users banding together to buy items in bulk in order to receive a discount. This hatched the idea after the economic collapse of 2008 to launch Groupon locally in Chicago, and the rest is basically history. 

2. Github

In the development world, everyone knows about Github. Before Github became the billion-dollar company that it is today, founders Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett were building websites for CNET. One of the issues they ran into was the frustration and difficulty of changing open source code. Because of this, they build their own repository, working nights and weekends on it. Today, Github has over 20 million users and have used hundreds of millions of venture capital to make Github one of the most recognized and well-used repositories in the world for open source code!

3. HubSpot

Founder Dharmesh Shah stated a little blog while he was pursuing other opportunities. However, writing about his journey struck a chord with people and this blog started blowing up. HubSpot now has become much more than just a blog as it offers marketing software and tools to help people get the most out of their content marketing to help launch their business into the public eye online. 

Today, Hubspot is publicly traded and is worth approximately 2 billion dollars.

4. Twitter

Once a side project created by the podcasting platform Odeo during a company hackathon, Twitter started as a small outlet with a few employees with investors not really caring about it at the onset. Today, it’s one of the most popular forms of communication between presidents, CEO’s and other public figured to share their message and thoughts with the world.

5. Oculus

Oculus started in a garage as founder Palmer Luckey worked tirelessly to build the world of virtual reality. Oculus to this day remains as one of the largest kickstarted campaigns ever, and Oculus eventually was sold to Facebook for $2 billion before there was even a consumer product being sold. 

As you can see, with some grit and determination, a successful company can seemingly come out of nothing when you have the right idea and the right capital partners on board.