Founder
Stories
Real lessons from real journeys. I've studied hundreds of founder stories—the wins, the failures, the pivots, the rejections. Here are the ones that shaped how I think about building companies.
These aren't just success stories. They're roadmaps of resilience, strategy, and the unglamorous work that creates extraordinary outcomes.
"Every founder story I read taught me something new. Now I share those lessons with you—so you don't have to make the same mistakes."
ANIS NANAI
Founder, Keep Thinking
26 Founder Stories
Brian Chesky
From Air Mattresses to $100B Empire
Stewart Butterfield
Two Failed Games, Two Billion-Dollar Pivots
Melanie Perkins
100 Rejections to $40B Valuation
Patrick & John Collison
Irish Teenagers Who Rebuilt Internet Payments
Whitney Wolfe Herd
From Tinder Lawsuit to Dating Empire
Sam Altman
From YC President to AI's Most Important CEO
Alexandr Wang
MIT Dropout to Youngest Self-Made Billionaire
Dylan Field
The $20B Acquisition That Never Happened
Vlad Tenev
Bulgarian Immigrant Who Democratized Trading
Gabriel Pereyra
DeepMind Scientist Reinventing Legal Tech
Tracy Young
Construction Worker Who Built an $875M Empire
Apoorva Mehta
20 Failed Startups Before Building a $39B Giant
Julia Hartz
From TV Executive to IPO
Leah Busque
The Dog Food Shortage That Launched the Gig Economy
Suhail Doshi
College Dropout Who Built the Analytics Standard
Mira Murati
From Albanian Refugee to $12B AI Empire Builder
Scott Wu
The Coding Prodigy Who Built the First AI Software Engineer
Michael Truell
MIT Dropout Who Built the Fastest-Growing Dev Tool Ever
Amjad Masad
From Jordanian Internet Cafes to Coding Revolution
Guillermo Rauch
The Argentine Who Built the Web's Future
Aravind Srinivas
The Student Who Failed CS and Built a $20B Google Killer
Lin Qiao
The Woman Who Built PyTorch and Now Powers AI
Jaspar Carmichael-Jack
The 23-Year-Old Who Told SF to Stop Hiring Humans
Lucy Guo
Pokémon Card Hustler to Youngest Self-Made Female Billionaire
Anton Osika
The Swedish Coder Who Built the Fastest-Growing Software Ever
Ilya Sutskever
The OpenAI Co-Founder Who Raised $3B With No Product
Why I Write These Stories
When I started Keep Thinking, I was obsessed with understanding what separates founders who break through from those who don't. The answer wasn't what I expected.
It wasn't about having the best idea. It wasn't about raising the most money. It was about persistence, timing, and the willingness to look foolish while doing things that don't scale.
These stories are my way of distilling those lessons. Each one contains something I wish I knew when I started.
What You'll Learn
- 1How iconic founders turned rejection into fuel
- 2The pivots that created billion-dollar companies
- 3Why timing matters more than perfection
- 4The unglamorous early days behind famous brands
- 5How new-gen founders are building differently
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