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Scott Cook
Intuit. Cook co-founded Intuit in 1983 after watching his wife struggle to keep the household accounts, and built the company around a habit of studying customers in their own homes and offices. Quicken was followed in 1992 by QuickBooks, which became the standard bookkeeping package for millions of small American firms. He remains on Intuit's board and still argues for testing ideas cheaply with real customers.
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Tom Proulx
Intuit. Proulx was a Stanford student when he co-founded Intuit with Scott Cook in 1983 and wrote the first version of Quicken in his room. He was an early champion of usability testing, watching ordinary people try the software and fixing whatever confused them, and modelled the screen on the cheque book people already used. That task-first approach later carried QuickBooks into small offices. He left Intuit in 1994.
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Graham Wylie
Born
Sage. While studying computing at Newcastle University, Wylie wrote software for David Goldman's local business, and in 1981 the two founded Sage with Paul Muller to sell affordable accounts packages to other small firms. Cheap, dependable and recommended by accountants, Sage became the default bookkeeping software for British small businesses for a generation. Wylie sold his stake and left in 2003 and has since been knighted for business and charity.
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Rod Drury
Xero. Drury founded Xero in Wellington in 2006 with Hamish Edwards, betting that small-business accounts belonged online rather than on one office PC. Automatic bank feeds, a shared ledger for owner and accountant, and an open API that let hundreds of other apps plug in made it a serious rival to desktop packages in New Zealand, Australia and the UK. He stepped down as chief executive in 2018.
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Ben Chestnut
Mailchimp. Chestnut and Dan Kurzius started Mailchimp in Atlanta in 2001 as a side project of their web design agency, after small clients kept asking for an affordable way to send newsletters. They never took venture funding, and the free plan they introduced in 2009 brought email marketing within reach of shops, bands and charities. Intuit bought the company in 2021, and Chestnut stepped down as chief executive in 2022.
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Dan Kurzius
Mailchimp. Kurzius co-founded Mailchimp with Ben Chestnut and ran the customer side of the business, from support to the playful brand voice that made a dull product feel approachable to first-time users. That attention to small customers, rather than large marketing departments, is much of why the company grew without outside investors until its sale to Intuit in 2021.
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Jason Fried
Born
37signals. Fried founded 37signals in 1999 as a web design studio and turned it into a software company with Basecamp in 2004, a project tool deliberately kept simple and sold at a flat price rather than per seat. His books, written with David Heinemeier Hansson, argue for small teams and calm growth. Recent products sold for a one-off payment have pushed the same idea further.
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David Heinemeier Hansson
Born
37signals and Ruby on Rails. Heinemeier Hansson wrote Basecamp's code and in 2004 released the framework underneath it as open-source Ruby on Rails, which let tiny teams build web applications quickly and later underpinned Shopify, GitHub and many small software firms. As co-owner and technical chief of 37signals he champions running software on owned servers to keep costs down. His outspoken views divide people.
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Tobias Lütke
Shopify. Lütke wanted to sell snowboards online in 2004 and, finding the available shop software poor, wrote his own in Ruby on Rails with co-founder Scott Lake. Opened to other merchants in 2006, Shopify let a one-person business run a proper online shop without a developer, and its app store and payments followed. He is still chief executive and remains closely involved in the product.
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Jim McKelvey
Born
Square. McKelvey was a glassblower in St Louis when he lost a sale because he could not take a credit card. With Jack Dorsey he founded Square in 2009 and designed the small reader that plugged into a phone's headphone socket, with flat fees and no merchant account contract. It brought card payments to market stalls, cafés and tradespeople who had been priced out.
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Jack Dorsey
Born
Square. Better known for Twitter, Dorsey co-founded Square with Jim McKelvey and led it, now Block, into a full set of tools for small sellers: tills, invoicing, payroll and small loans based on a business's own takings. He still runs Block. Its growing focus on Bitcoin and its Cash App business has drawn criticism from investors and regulators.
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Patrick Collison
Born
Stripe. Patrick Collison co-founded Stripe in 2010 with his brother John after finding that taking payments online meant weeks of bank paperwork. A few lines of code were enough to start charging cards, which let small developers and start-ups sell from day one, and Atlas later handled incorporating a company. He is chief executive.
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John Collison
Stripe. John Collison co-founded Stripe with Patrick and, as president, has shaped much of its work with businesses and its expansion beyond the United States. Before Stripe the brothers had sold Auctomatic, a tool for small eBay sellers, so the problem of helping a small merchant get paid was one they had already met at first hand.
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Sridhar Vembu
Zoho. Vembu founded the company in 1996 with his brothers and Tony Thomas, and without outside investors built Zoho into a suite of more than fifty business applications priced well below the large vendors, from accounts and invoicing to email and customer records. Many of its staff work from offices in rural Tamil Nadu. He handed over as chief executive in 2025 to concentrate on research as chief scientist.
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Avishai Abrahami
Born
Wix. Abrahami founded Wix in Tel Aviv in 2006 with his brother Nadav and Giora Kaplan, after finding it absurdly hard to build a website for a new venture. Its drag-and-drop editor, templates and booking and shop add-ons let restaurants, salons and sole traders put up a site without hiring a developer. He is still chief executive.
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Matt Mullenweg
Born
WordPress. Mullenweg started WordPress in 2003 with Mike Little as a fork of an abandoned blogging tool, and kept it free and open source. Because anyone can host it and thousands of themes and plug-ins exist, it became the cheapest serious way for a small business to own its website. He leads Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. His 2024 legal fight with the host WP Engine split the WordPress community.
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Brian Halligan
HubSpot. Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, who met at MIT, founded HubSpot in 2006 to help small and mid-sized firms win customers through useful content and search rather than costly advertising. Shah wrote much of the early software, and the free customer-records system they added in 2014 became many small companies' first CRM. Halligan was chief executive until 2021 and later stepped back from day-to-day roles.
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Julia Hartz
Eventbrite. Julia Hartz co-founded Eventbrite in 2006 with Kevin Hartz and Renaud Visage as a self-service way to sell tickets, so a yoga teacher, a comedy night or a local festival could run its own box office for a small fee per ticket. She later led the company as chief executive, including through the pandemic, when live events stopped almost overnight.
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Kevin Hartz
Eventbrite. Kevin Hartz co-founded Eventbrite after earlier starting Xoom, an online money-transfer service, and was its first chief executive. He shaped the model of charging organisers nothing up front and taking a small cut of each ticket, which suited independent organisers with no budget. He has since become a prolific early-stage investor.
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Jack Ma
Born
Alibaba. A former English teacher in Hangzhou, Ma founded Alibaba in 1999 with seventeen others as an online directory linking small Chinese manufacturers with buyers abroad, and its stated mission was to make it easy to do business anywhere. Taobao and the Alipay payment service later did the same for millions of small domestic sellers. He largely withdrew from public life for several years after regulators halted the Ant Group share listing in 2020.
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Marcos Galperin
Born
MercadoLibre. Galperin founded MercadoLibre in 1999 while studying at Stanford, giving small Latin American sellers an online marketplace at a time when few could trust buyers or couriers. Mercado Pago, its payment and lending arm, and its own delivery network grew out of solving those problems for small merchants. He led the company for more than two decades and became executive chairman in 2026.
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Vijay Shekhar Sharma
Born
Paytm. Sharma's Paytm put printed QR codes and, later, small speaker boxes that announce each payment aloud on the counters of millions of Indian street vendors and corner shops, letting them take digital payments with no card terminal. He remains chief executive. In 2024 the central bank stopped Paytm's payments bank taking new deposits over compliance failures, a serious setback for the group.
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Jacob de Geer
iZettle. De Geer co-founded iZettle in Stockholm in 2010 with Magnus Nilsson, offering a small card reader and app that let European market traders, cafés and hairdressers accept cards without a bank terminal contract. It spread across Europe and Latin America before PayPal bought it in 2018, and the reader lives on as PayPal's point-of-sale product.
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Tope Awotona
Born
Calendly. A Nigerian-born salesman in Atlanta, Awotona was fed up with the email back-and-forth needed to book a meeting and in 2013 put his savings into building Calendly. A single link that shows free slots and books itself was simple enough to spread by word of mouth, and its free tier made it a staple for freelancers, consultants and small firms. He is still chief executive.
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