The world wasn’t always beautiful and luxurious.
Today, if you want to learn or have a question, you simply go on Google, type the query, and boom!…you have the answer in seconds. If you want to publish your book, you simply create an Amazon account and publish the book in just a few minutes or hours. If you want to rent your house or villa, you simply go on Airbnb and list your property in just a few clicks. And if you want to start your own online e-commerce store, you simply create a Shopify account, and in just a few steps, you have a working e-commerce online store ready.
But guess what? It wasn’t always like that.
The early adopters of the internet had struggled doing things online. Not too long ago, it was impossible to self-publish a book online, to create an online store, or to store your data on the internet. Creative people experienced it, or saw an opportunity, and built a product around the problem.
Today, those products are being used by millions or billions of people worldwide. So in this story, I will show you 10 unicorn (valued at over $1 billion) tech companies that started out of necessity but now run the world.
These are the 10 unicorn tech companies I’m talking about:
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, PhD students at Stanford University — met during a campus tour in 1995. Since both shared similar interests they shortly became good friends.
At that time, information on the internet was a total disaster, it was hard to find the right and exact information you’d look for. Why? Because search engines like AltaVista and Yahoo weren’t designed that way.
Experiencing this, Larry and Sergey Brin were disappointed.
So in 1996, they started building a new search engine that they would call BackRub, which would allow users to find relevant articles not based on keywords, but based on how valuable the article is — looking at how many backlinks it has.
And guess what? It worked.
In 1998, after seeing some success, Larry Page and Sergey Brin renamed the company from BackRub to Google, which became widely successful.
This was the birth of Google, which today is being used by billions of people all around the world. The company’s market cap is over 2 trillion dollars— making it one of the most valuable companies in the world.
In 2007, Brian and Joe, the co-founders of Airbnb couldn’t afford rent in San Francisco. But they saw an opportunity — During the conferences, most hotels would get booked too early, so many attendees would struggle to find rooms for them.
They came up with this genius idea of renting their living room with air mattresses and offering breakfast — hoping to make enough money so they could pay their rent.
They created a simple website and called it “AirBed and Breakfast.”
Guess what? It worked so well.
Now all they had to do was scale the business to the next level, which they did with the help of investors. Though it wasn’t all easy when they first approached this idea of “People can live in someone else’s house as a guest” to a few investors, they didn’t believe it would work out.
But as they say “Adversity breeds innovation.”
Today Airbnb is one of the world’s most successful companies in the world.
Before Shopify, it was hard to create an e-commerce store.
In 2004, Tobias Lütke and his co-founder of Shopify struggled to find a platform where they could sell their snowboarding equipment. Sadly, there weren’t any good platforms that could help them build an e-commerce store online.
But Tobias Lütke was a programmer, so he decided to build a platform that would allow users to sell their stuff online in one place. In 2006, they started building an e-commerce store and called it “Shopify.”
“We need to make it easier for people to sell online; everyone should be able to build their own store.” — Tobi.
Today, Shopify is a go-to platform when it comes to building an e-commerce website. Millions of people use it every day, and now the company is worth over $100 billion.
In 2007, an MIT student Drew Houston was on a busy trip, but he realized, he had forgotten to bring the USB Drive with him. He screamed, “Why isn’t there an easier way to store and access files from anywhere?”
He decided to build a cloud-based storage service where people would be able to store files, documents, and databases without needing to have a USB drive.
After building the product, which he called “Dropbox” he filmed a nice, really useful, video showing how the tool works. Unexpectedly, the video went viral in tech forums and communities.
One Reddit user commented, “This is exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
This momentum helped Drew and his team to find early investors for the company and scale it to its fullest potential. Today, Dropbox is one of the most used software when it comes to storing and saving data online, and the company is worth over $8.4 billion in total market cap.
Eric Yuan, originally from China, was working at WebEx, a video conferencing company. When Cisco acquired WebEx in 2007, Eric became the VP of engineering in the company.
While working there, Eric saw significant flaws in the software, the WebEx video conferencing experience for users wasn’t that good. Because the software was clunky, unreliable, and often provided poor user experience.
Eric would often travel back and forth from China to the USA, so he wanted to have a better video conferencing service so he could have a video chat with teams, family members, friends, and co-workers.
But there wasn’t any good video conference service.
So in 2011, Eric left the corporate world and decided to build his own software company that he would later call “Zoom.” His goal was simple: Build a simple, easy-to-use, high-quality video conferencing software for personal and professional work.
His idea worked and now Zoom is one of the leading software for using video conferences online. Zoom now has a total market cap of over $21 billion — making it one of the most successful companies in the world.
Before WhatsApp, sending SMS was expensive.
The only dominant way to send messages, at that time, was through the traditional SMS system. But it was way more expensive for people, especially if you wanted to send the message internationally.
Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who were former employees of Yahoo, saw this downside of the traditional message system and were frustrated with it. They wanted to have a platform where sending SMS would be as cheap as possible while it could be done via wifi or data networks.
In 2009, Koum and Acton started building WhatsApp after seeing the demand for mobile apps. But they didn’t just want to build a messaging app. They wanted to have features for sending videos, photos, files, etc.
Their idea worked and the app, which they called “ WhatsApp” got so popular that Facebook acquired it for $19 billion in February 2014.
Ever since Canva was introduced in the market, designing has become so much simpler and easier, isn't it?
Before Canva, people had to learn complicated software like Adobe Photoshop or Figma, which isn’t a good experience for a beginner designer.
It may take you months, maybe years to really get good at them. But Canva? It’s so easy to use. And let’s face it, for simple designs like logos, social media posts, or banners, you aren’t going to learn and spend hours tinkering on Figma and Adobe Photoshop, right?
Someone knew this needed to change.
An Australian designer, Melanie Perkins, noticed this pain while he was teaching a design curriculum to her students — she found that her students faced problems learning complex designing tools, and she was frustrated with that experience.
So after realizing it, Melanie Perkins spent a few years building software that she would call “Canva,” and finally launched it in 2012. It soon became one of the best designing tools for designers and artists.
Now the company is valued at over $40 billion!
What if I told you that Slack accidentally became a billion-dollar communication company?
In the early 2010s, Stewart Butterfield and his team were building a video game app called Glitch, and the way they used to communicate to build the gaming app — was through Slack, which they had built for themselves.
Unfortunately, the video gaming app didn’t succeed. But it sparked an idea.
The idea of scaling Slack.
See, Slack was already working, all they needed to do was, add a few more features, refine it, and make the design professional and a simple, user-friendly communication software ready.
Stewart Butterfield did the same — he focused on refining Slack and making it a professional communication platform for businesses and professionals.
The plan worked out and Slack became a leading platform for businesses to communicate with their teams. In 2021 Salesforce acquired Slack for $27.7 billion.
Now Slack was direct communication, but what if you want to communicate on Code — to exchange and improve upon it?
That’s when GitHub was born.
In 2007, Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett were working as developers and struggling with the complexities of collaborative coding and version control using Git. They realized there wasn’t an easy way for developers to share, review, and contribute to each other’s codebases using Git.
The existing tools required a deep understanding of Git’s command-line interface, which posed a learning curve for developers, especially when working in teams.
The founders wanted to build something that would allow developers to easily share code, collaborate on projects efficiently, track changes, and manage versions of the software.
In 2008, they launched GitHub, and now it is the go-to platform for sharing code, collaborating on projects, and managing the versions of software.
In 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.8 billion. Though Microsoft hasn’t publicly revealed its total valuation as of 2024 — making it hard for me to say anything about the current valuation.
Before Stripe, businesses had to navigate a maze of bank regulations, merchant accounts, and payment gateways, which were so complex to receive payments online for businesses and individuals.
After selling the first venture Auctomatic, Patrick and John Collison, the founders of Stripe, knew how hard it is to run an online business since the online payment system wasn’t any good.
They already knew the problem, and they wanted to have a platform where businesses, enterprises, and individuals could have a ready-to-use payment gateway working within just a few lines of code.
This was the birth of Stripe in 2010.
Patrick and John knew that as more businesses were moving online, there would require a platform or software that could handle all the online payments for businesses, professionals, and individuals in just a few lines of code with no financial hurdles.
The idea worked, and now Stripe is the leading company in accepting, managing, and tracking online payments for businesses, enterprises, and professionals. Stripe is now worth over $70 billion — making it one of the most valuable and successful companies in the world.
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