In this blog, we present to you a list of the top 10 successful people in 2017. As with most lists, this is subjective. However, we will not deal with already popular people like the Putins and the Bezos of the world, as they’re probably featured in most similar lists anyway.
Instead, we’ve tried to include people who are relatively not that well known and have had a slightly different path to success. So in no particular order, here goes.
Neil Patel- Neil Patel is the archetypal internet based entrepreneur, and has made his mark in the fields of internet marketing, analytics, and blogging. His work essentially deals with helping clients analyse and increase traffic on their websites. He is the founder of QuickSprouts, KISSMetrics, and CrazyEgg, as well as a respected contributor at TechCrunch, Forbes, and Entrepreneur.com. He was recognised as one of the ‘Top 100 Entrepreneurs under 30’ by President Obama.
Daniel Ek- Daniel Ek is the CEO of the popular music streaming company, Spotify. Currently, Spotify has the largest user base of all music streaming services at 140 million active users per month. Its user base and revenue both are expected to increase sharply in the years to come, and it’s gaining enough leverage to slash the royalties it currently pays to music labels. All in all, it is at the top of its game.
Michelle Phan- Michelle Phan is probably the most unconventional person on the list, in the sense that her claim to fame was through YouTube, where she was well known for posting make-up tutorial videos. She ended up being very famous for that, and went on to start her own make-up/cosmetics based company called Ipsy. The company had around 3 million subscribers as of September 2017, and Michelle’s current net worth is estimated to be around $50 million. She moved on from Ipsy in 2017 to start something else.
John Zimmer & Logan Green– They are the co-founders of Lyft, the on-demand transportation company, very similar to Uber. The company had a valuation of $11.5 billion. While 2017 wasn’t very good for Uber, Lyft had grabbed a significant portion of market share from Uber, and is estimated to hold around 61% of the US market.
Elise Mitchell- Elise is best known as the founder and chairman of Mitchell Communications Group, a PR company she headed and started from scratch. The company has been named ‘Agency of th Year’ by PRWeek and The Holmes’ Report. Although she left the company in 2012, under her leadership, it grew by 500% in 5 years. Currently, she is the CEO of the Dentsu Aegis Public Relations Network.
Pei Chun Tsai- Although she may not be very well known, this lady, nicknamed ‘Iron Blooded Princess’, is the CEO of the Pou Chen Group based in Taiwan, which is the largest manufacturer of shoes in the world. This company manufactures footwear for some of the best brands in the business, like Nike, Adidas, Reebok, and Puma.
Michelle Zatlyn- Michelle is the co-founder and COO of Cloudflare, a web security and performance company, which has been recognised as a great internet tech company by the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and the World Economic Forum. Before starting Cloudflare, she has held management positions at top tech companies like Google and Toshiba. She also holds an MBA from Harvard school of business.
Vitalik Buterin- This Russian software developer is the new kid on the block. You may not have heard of him, but you’ve surely heard of his creation – Ethereum, the other big crypto currency apart from Bitcoin. Currently, Ethereum’s value is around $840.
The Collision Brothers- John & Patrick Collision are the co-founders of Stripe, a company which competes with the more widely known PayPal. Like PayPal, it’s a tech company which facilitates payment processing. It has been said that the company has most likely processed at least 1 payment for half the users on the internet! Currently, Stripe has more than 100,000 businesses whose payment systems it supports, and one of them is Amazon. In 2007, it was ranked #1 in the Forbes Cloud 100, which is a list of the top 100 cloud based companies.
Philip Krim- He’s the co-founder and CEO of Casper, which sells quirky sleeping products – mattresses, dog beds, pillows, and sheets. To quote Krim, the company essentially plans to be ‘The Nike of Sleep’! Although the company hasn’t disclosed its 2017 revenues, it’s known that the company made sales worth $200 million in 2016.