These three success stories of entrepreneurs are bound to inspire you

Being an entrepreneur is no easy task- infact it is the most difficult and the most fulfilling job in the world.

Granted, you make millions once your startup takes off and we mostly seem to focus on that, but what we forget to acknowledge is the years of hard work and perseverance that went behind making that success story.

And, we present to you three of the most inspiring success stories of entrepreneurs that’s bound to leave you inspired.

1. Jack Ma: Jack Ma, who founded Alibaba and is its Executive Chairman was rejected from as many as 30 jobs, including a job at KFC before he became the richest man in China. His e-commerce company, Alibaba attracts 100 million shoppers a day and his real time net-worth is a whopping $21.9 billion. But, being the richest person in China didn’t come easy to Ma. He went through a lot of rejection before seeing all the unprecedented success.

For starters, Ma revealed in a recent interview that he failed a college entrance exam three times. Unfortunately, it didn’t just end there. Ma faced more obstacles when he founded Alibaba in 1998. The brand didn't turn profitable for the first three years, and Ma had to get creative.
One of the company's main challenges was that it had no way to do payments and no banks would work with him. This is when he decided to start his own payment program called Alipay. The program transfers payments of different currencies between international buyers and sellers.

"So many people I talked to at that time about Alipay, they said, 'this is the stupidest idea you've ever had,'" he said. "I didn't care if it was stupid as long as people could use it."

Today, 800 million people use Alipay.

2. Dhirubhai Ambani: Dhirubhai Hirachand Ambani, the founder of Reliance Industries came from a family of moderate means. He started his entrepreneurial career by selling "pakora" to pilgrims in Mount Girnar over the weekends. When he was 16 years old, he moved to Aden, Yemen. He worked with A. Besse & Co. for a salary of Rs.300. Two years later, A. Besse & Co. became the distributors for Shell products, and Dhirubhai was promoted to manage the company’s filling station at the port of Aden.

In 1962, he returned to India and started the Reliance Commercial Corporation with a capital of Rs.15,000. The primary business of Reliance Commercial Corporation was to import polyester yarn and export spices. During this period, Dhirubhai and his family used to stay in one bedroom apartment at the Jaihind Estate in Bhuleshwar, Mumbai. In 1968, he moved to an upmarket apartment at Altamount Road in South Mumbai. Ambani's net worth was estimated at about Rs.1 million by late 1960s.

Ambani's greatest achievement was that he showed Indians what was possible. With no Oxford or Yale degree and no family capital, he achieved to build an ultramodern, profitable, global enterprise in India itself. What's more, ‘he enlisted four million Indians, a generation weaned on nanny-state socialism, in an adventure in can-do capitalism, convincing them to load up on Reliance stock’.

3. Kevin Systrom: Instagram’s CEO Kevin Systrom will go down history as one of the greatest Silicon Valley success stories of this generation. Systrom who was responsible for introducing the photo-sharing app to the world had infact no formal engineering training. While working in the marketing department at Nextstop, which Facebook acquired in 2010, he would spend his evenings learning to program. According to Systrom, small projects included combining elements of Foursquare with Mafia Wars.

Image credit: Indiatimes