A dyslexic accountant who launched a beer brand from the back of a car
Born in India and diagnosed with dyslexia as a child, he moved to Britain, qualified as an accountant despite the difficulty reading gave him, and…
Trained as a brewer, refused work as one, and started a biotech company in a garage
No Indian brewery would give a woman a job, so in 1978 she began making enzymes in a rented garage with 10,000 rupees. Banks would not lend to her…
Apprenticed at nine, he founded Panasonic in a tenement and refused to sack a single worker in the Depression
His father lost the family’s money speculating on rice, so he was sent to Osaka to work at nine. He started making light sockets with his wife and…
Started printing tea towels on her kitchen table in a Pimlico flat and dressed a generation
A secretary from Merthyr Tydfil, she began with a silkscreen her husband built and £10 of materials. Within thirty years the prints from her kitchen…
Built a company that paid the world’s poorest people for digital work, and died at 37
The daughter of Indian immigrants, she taught in Ghana at 17 and later founded Samasource to bring data work to slums and refugee camps instead of…
Sang his way through Dragons’ Den with a hot sauce made in his Brixton kitchen
Raised by his grandmother in Jamaica, he could not read when he joined his parents in London at eleven. After years as a reggae musician and time in…
A Bavarian immigrant peddler whose tent-cloth trousers became the world's most copied garment
Born to a Jewish family in Bavaria, he emigrated to New York as a teenager after his father's death, worked as a peddler, and later built a San…
A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who built a catalogue empire from a wedding gift of two thousand dollars
Fleeing Nazi persecution as a child, her family emigrated first to Amsterdam and then to the United States, and as a young pregnant housewife she…
Pushed for years to be allowed to run a Saudi company in an economy that assumed she could not
She joined her family's Saudi conglomerate as a young graduate and spent decades working her way to chief executive of Olayan Financing Company,…
Started as a teenage shop assistant in her aunt's store and built it into a national retail chain
She began working behind the counter of a small family shop in the Brazilian interior as a teenager and, decades later, led Magazine Luiza from a…
Born to formerly enslaved parents, she became the first self-made female millionaire in America
Orphaned at seven and widowed at 20, she worked as a laundress for 18 years before building a haircare empire that employed thousands of Black women…
Widowed at 27, she took over a failing wine house and made champagne a global business
When her husband died in 1805 she was expected to sell up. Instead she ran the champagne house herself through war and blockade, invented a way to…
The daughter of a washerwoman who became the first Black woman to found a bank in America
In segregated Richmond, Virginia, she took a struggling mutual-aid society and built from it a bank, a newspaper and a department store, so that…
An illiterate Irish orphan who became the bread woman of New Orleans
Orphaned as a child and widowed young, she could not read or write, yet built a dairy and then one of the largest bakeries in the American South, and…
Grew up without running water in a Rio favela and rose to run one of the world's biggest oil companies
Raised in poverty in Rio de Janeiro's Gramacho favela, she worked her way through a chemical engineering degree and thirty years at Petrobras to…
Passed over for promotion by a man she had trained, she quit and started her own company at 45
After 25 years in direct sales, she was replaced by a man on twice her salary and retired to write a book. Her husband died a month before the launch…
The son of Korean immigrants in Japan who was told to hide his name and built SoftBank instead
Born to an ethnic Korean family in Japan at a time of open discrimination against Koreans, he adopted a Japanese name as a child, later studied in…
A refugee pedlar with no English whose market stall became Marks & Spencer
He arrived in Leeds in the early 1880s with almost no money and no English, sold from a tray around the villages, and in 1884 took a market stall…
Never left his small Piedmont town, and turned his father's hazelnut paste into Nutella
He took over his family's small confectionery shop in Alba, Italy, after the war, refined a cheap hazelnut and cocoa paste born of wartime chocolate…
Went bankrupt twice making sweets, then built a chocolate town and left it all to orphans
With a fourth-grade education and two failed businesses behind him, he finally succeeded with caramels, then gambled everything on milk chocolate.…
Built mobile networks across Africa without paying a bribe, then funded a prize for honest leaders
A Sudanese engineer who left a corporate job in Britain to found Celtel, which connected millions of Africans by mobile phone in countries investors…
Lent 27 dollars to 42 village women and invented banking for the poor
An economics professor during the 1974 famine, he found his theories said nothing to the people starving outside his classroom. Grameen Bank, which…
Borrowed ten thousand rupees from his wife to start a software company from a rented flat
The son of a schoolteacher, he worked as a junior engineer and briefly ran a failed company before co-founding Infosys in 1981 with borrowed savings,…
A teenage single mother who sold yoghurt from a cart before building Kenya's first internet company
She left school after falling pregnant at seventeen and worked a string of small trading ventures before co-founding Wananchi Online in 1999,…
