Henry Maudslay, who made the first practical screw cutting lathe, bench micrometer, and transformed the world of machine tools. He made a bench micrometer that could measure to the 1/10,000th of an inch in the early 1800s.
Considering some others mentioned here are Elon Musk and Steve Jobs it seems like 'awful personal character' doesn't count for much.
If we completely ignore the Stallman support and take the Stallman report as completely factual and accept it at face value, then I still think the good he has done outweighs the bad.
It's not one particular entrepreneur, but my favorite are the long-term local small business owners, like the guy I met a few months ago that's had a tire shop in town since the 70s. They've found a sustainable way to make a living providing something useful for their local community. That should really be the goal.
I love the typical family-owned small businesses, their runners are the ones that aspired entrepreneurs should listen to their advices instead of bestsellers books of ghouls preaching their bullshit.
Practical, but radical enough to take on IBM when their PC looked unassailable. Being first to the table with a 386 and working with others to make sure micro channel was DOA set the standards for the industry for decades.
Palmer Luckey. Many of the things he discusses, he brings an interesting angle I didn't think of, and has changed my opinion on numerous topics. Great orator.
Richard Branson, he goes against so much convention:
- everyone has so much process to "hire right", but in his books he hired kinda random it seems. And seems to delegate a lot rather than "founder mode"
- the original remote worker: bought a caribbean island for cheap and managed his businesses from there
- random collections of businesses under his brand: airline, telecom, music, ...
was he just like super lucky that everything worked out for him?
We’re just going to ignore Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink to point at something that he said he didn’t even want to do and said other people should try it?
If anyone else had a single one of those companies it would be considered a life-defining achievement. He has multiple at the same time. Not having a 100% unicorn rate doesn’t make someone a failure.
He helped set up the very first machine tool based line for the production of pully blocks for the British Navy. [1] https://todayinsci.com/M/Maudslay_Henry/MaudslayHenry-ToolBu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Central_Kitchen
If we completely ignore the Stallman support and take the Stallman report as completely factual and accept it at face value, then I still think the good he has done outweighs the bad.
Practical, but radical enough to take on IBM when their PC looked unassailable. Being first to the table with a 386 and working with others to make sure micro channel was DOA set the standards for the industry for decades.
Edit: 2nd was Gary Kildall
- everyone has so much process to "hire right", but in his books he hired kinda random it seems. And seems to delegate a lot rather than "founder mode"
- the original remote worker: bought a caribbean island for cheap and managed his businesses from there
- random collections of businesses under his brand: airline, telecom, music, ...
was he just like super lucky that everything worked out for him?
Ok, so he's a bit of a arse, and I really wish he had stayed out of politics, but overall...
If anyone else had a single one of those companies it would be considered a life-defining achievement. He has multiple at the same time. Not having a 100% unicorn rate doesn’t make someone a failure.