[custom_adv] Founders - Masaru Ibuka, Akio Morita First location - Tokyo, Japan After World War II, Sony founder Masaru Ibuka invented a product to try and serve the millions of homes who had electricity but lacked the appliances to use it. The result was this electric rice cooker. [custom_adv] Founders - Jeff Bezos First location - Bellevue, WA Amazon began as an online bookstore in way back in 1994. Founder Jeff Bezos decided at first to call the bookstore “Cadabra,” He later changed the name to Amazon.com, Inc. a few months later, after a lawyer misheard its original name as "cadaver." [custom_adv] Founders - Fusajiro Yamauchi First location - Kyoto, Japan Nintendo, the video game brand that launched such 1980s and '90s-era franchises as Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Pokemon, is actually one of the older companies on this list. It was founded in 1889 as a playing card company based in Kyoto, Japan. [custom_adv] Founders - Ingvar Kamprad First location - Älmhult, Sweden IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad showed entrepreneurial promise from a young age. At age 5, he began buying matches in bulk from Stockholm and selling them to neighbors for a profit. [custom_adv] Founders - Ole Kirk Christiansen First location - Billund, Denmark The toy brand that’s best known for its plastic, interlocking bricks was founded by a carpenter. [custom_adv] Founders - S.Jobs, S.Wozniak, R.Wayne First location - Cupertino, CA Steve Wozniak originally assembled the microcomputer Apple I in 1975 for a Homebrew Computer Club meeting in Silicon Valley. [custom_adv] Founders - Kiichiro Toyoda First location - Nagoya, Japan Toyota was founded in 1926 as Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, Ltd. by Sakichi Toyoda, the inventor of a series of manual and machine-powered looms. [custom_adv] Founders - Larry Page, Sergey Brin First location - Menlo Park, CA Google has its origins in "BackRub", a research project that was begun in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in Stanford, California. [custom_adv] Samsung was founded as a grocery trading store on March 1, 1938, by Lee Byung-Chull. He started his business in Taegu, Korea, trading noodles and other goods produced in and around the city and exporting them to China and its provinces. [custom_adv] Founders - Richard McDonald, Maurice McDonald First location - San Bernardino, CA In 1937 Patrick McDonald opened "The Airdrome", a food stand, on Huntington Drive (Route 66) near the Monrovia Airport in the Los Angeles County city of Monrovia, California with hot dogs being one of the first items sold. [custom_adv] Founders - Bill Bowerman, Phil Knight First location - Eugene, OR The origins of Nike can be traced back to a school paper for a small-business class. [custom_adv] Founders - Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, Evan Williams First location - San Francisco, CA Twitter started in 2006 when the podcasting company Odeo realized they needed to reinvent themselves and began brainstorming new creative ideas. [custom_adv] Founders - Walt Disney, Roy O. Disney First location - Los Angeles, CA The Alice Comedies are a series of animated cartoons created by Walt Disney in the 1920s, in which a live action little girl named Alice (originally played by Virginia Davis) and an animated cat named Julius have adventures in an animated landscape. [custom_adv] Founders - Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, Gordon Bowker First location - Seattle, WA The first Starbucks was opened in Seattle, Washington, on March 31, 1971, by three partners who met while they were students at the University of San Francisco.
