Donna Matthews from a band called Elastica in the early/mid '90s.
I was living on the streets as I turned 20, and a chance encounter led me to hang out with the band at one of their early gigs. Donna made me feel pretty welcome and off I went on tour with them.
During the tour I started a fanzine to make money and help keep me alive. That fanzine was assisted by her (providing material) and I sold it to the fans.
The bit where it became more was after the tour had finished. How now to find money for food? I still had the fanzine but Elastica were on the cover and Elastica were not playing. I removed the cover, and would make a new cover according to whoever was in town headlining that night. Having the band on the cover is the difference between selling 20 copies and selling 150 copies.
Something about that first transformation from being on the streets to earning a decent wage off my own back has pretty much influenced every action since: I won't go back to the street, and there are always new ways to approach existing problems.
I could cite many more that are related to what we do, are more recent, are more obvious, etc... but none provided an epiphany greater than that first one.
When I was in grade 8, I took a mandatory "shop" class -- woodworking, metalworking, and electronics. One day in class the teacher observed that Leonardo da Vinci, while he had lots of ideas, rarely built anything, and as a result of this he never discovered that his plans were flawed.
This one remark transformed me from being someone who was content to work entirely with theory to being someone who went out and built systems -- because however confident I was with my theory, I wanted the confirmation offered by seeing it work.
This doesn't have much to do with entrepreneurialism, but it's certainly something which changed my life. :-)
Manual labor and craftsmanship were not really popular with higher society in that day and age. I've mentioned this before here, but it's a fun anecdote: Galileo taught at the University of Padova, and to honor him, his students built him a lectern themselves, rather than pay to have it built, which they could have easily afforded. Instead of some find work of art from the time period, you can tell from a mile away that it's really bad work - sloppily put together and rough looking. You can tell they had no idea what they were doing.
I've never met either of them. I kind of grew up without a father, so both functioned as surrogates who lovingly fostered two things I've dedicated a lot of my time to -- writing and understanding intelligence.
Thanks for being awesome, if either of you read this.
Three people, all of whom I met in my first year at university.
The first was a guy I met on my first weekend, who lived in a house next door to mine on campus, and later became one of my best friends. He was/is working on a social networking site in PHP and MySQL, and taught me the basics of those two languages. Originally I planned to help him out, but soon realised I knew enough to start my own projects.
The second was a fourth year Engineering student who was starting his own humanitarian aid agency. He's also started a business when he was 16 (IIRC, it provided ICT recovery to companies, eg, carting IBM servers and emergency generators when their systems went down). Meeting someone doing something so balls-to-the-wall ambitious, but realising they don't seem much smarter than you, inspires you as to what is possible.
The third was a Nigerian postgrad student, who told me that he was trying to encourage his country-people to get rich through entrepreneurship rather than fraud, and also wanted to encourage a startup hub at my own university (he's pretty involved in the UK startup scene). Somehow I've found myself in charge of a campus society to bring together those working on web applications and businesses. The community is still small, but I've already found meeting other people working on web projects has motivated me to work harder on my own.
Eliezer Yudkowski, Robin Hanson, Nick Szabo, Paul Graham, Adam Smith, Ludwig Von Mises, a few dozen sci-fi authors. I haven't met any of them.
PG is probably the biggest since it was due to him saying "if you don't know how to code, learn to" that caused me to switch from mechanical engineering to CS.
as cliched and toadlike it may sound.. for me it was actually PG. And what scares me was that it was completely random. I was just googling for entrepreneurship (more specifically on how to be an ISV) and stumbled upon PG's essays. Man that was an eye-opener. Ive always wanted to be entrepreneur (atleast since I was 12) but I never did anything beyond coding and PG's essays kind of opened me to the bigger picture. I wish I found them when I was in my teens, but could have been worse!
I agree. When I was in high school my Dad gave me an old computer and a Debian CD. I taught myself PHP and wrote a blog. That's what got me interested in programming.
Its not really a single person who influenced my thinking.. But every time i read about youngsters in early 20's doing what they love and making it big so that world can use ...It just keeps me going...
Sir Clive Sinclair. I wrote a letter to him with an idea that I had for a way to interface a joystick to the ZX-81 and he sent me a personal reply of encouragement.
Two Swedish guys called Jonas Ridderstrale and Kjell Nordström wrote a book called "Funky Business: Talent Makes Capital Dance". They coined the term "Fucking and Shopping" for the first time in Academic text. For the creatives it is now money or sex. The learnings from the book still keep my on the edge.
Also Peter Schwarz a futurist had a massive effect on my optimism towards the future of the world.
He was so far ahead of his time, you probably never heard of him. He was agile, hashed, and object-oriented in 1965!
When I discovered this technology, an entire world opened up to me in an instant. I've been thinking outside the polygon and making things happen ever since.
I know I may catch flack for that, but the guy didn't attend an Ivy League or Stanford level school, didn't live in the valley, but also started two successful tech companies without VC money. His methods and marketing are different, but he's bound to break convention as he grew up so far from the web/software conventions of the day.
Richard Feynman. I majored in physics because I was inspired by his intellectual curiosity. "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman" is a great collection of his memoirs: http://tenniselbow.org/scott/feyn_surely.pdf
The question specifically refers to people you've met.
From an entrepreneurial point of view, I'm sure that the fact that my best friend (and cofounder on my first business) had been running businesses successfully for years was a major influence in convincing me that it makes sense to make that leap.
There is no ONE individual who inspired me. There are a lot of them.
The story of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs was my first fascination I guess. I read a lot on and off the web and I guess I have seen a lot of fantastic articles, lectures and advices that helped me a lot.
PG indeed in last couple of years.
His changed my thoughts about startups. I am about to start my startup and most of the inspiration guidance come from PG's essays. Although some of his thoughts are apply for startup in India.
If I have to face something like he did, and I can handle it with even half the style and grace that exhibited, I will consider myself to have done well. He was an amazing example of how to live.
Dean Kamen for sure. I thought I wanted to be a business major, and then I started doing FIRST (Dean Kamen's high school robotics competition). Now I'm a CS student about to go to grad school.
I was living on the streets as I turned 20, and a chance encounter led me to hang out with the band at one of their early gigs. Donna made me feel pretty welcome and off I went on tour with them.
During the tour I started a fanzine to make money and help keep me alive. That fanzine was assisted by her (providing material) and I sold it to the fans.
The bit where it became more was after the tour had finished. How now to find money for food? I still had the fanzine but Elastica were on the cover and Elastica were not playing. I removed the cover, and would make a new cover according to whoever was in town headlining that night. Having the band on the cover is the difference between selling 20 copies and selling 150 copies.
Something about that first transformation from being on the streets to earning a decent wage off my own back has pretty much influenced every action since: I won't go back to the street, and there are always new ways to approach existing problems.
I could cite many more that are related to what we do, are more recent, are more obvious, etc... but none provided an epiphany greater than that first one.