Worlds Top 10 Best Entrepreneurs

There have been millions of entrepreneurs in history but only several of them stand out because they have changed the way we use and see things.

1.  King Croesus. Croesus had ruled the Asia Minor kingdom of Lydia in the sixth century BC, and had owed a lot of debt of gratitude for minting the world's first coinage, creating in a single stroke the lifeblood of every business, liquidity, and cash flow. Additionally, his opulent lifestyle has given all of the future entrepreneurs something to aim for.

2.  Pope Sixtus IV.   He gets the nod for realizing the wages of sin meant more than the unpleasant repercussions. There was some cash to be made in damnation, and Sixtus had took that opportunity by opening up a new market - The Dead - for thei ndulegences the church had been selling for years. The relatives of the deceased had quickly filled the Vatican's coffers with payments to lessen the time that their loved ones spent in purgatory. In 1478 Sixtus "grew his market" by authorizing the Spanish Inquisition that swelled purgatory's ranks by 100,000 souls in 15 years. And he was the first pope to license brothels.

3.  Benjamin Franklin. He was the first entrepreneur in America and stands out from the Founding Fathers - the hypermora Washington, Jefferson - that had virtues and attainments that are seen now as anachronisms, Franklink really was a true model of what a lot of us want to achieve. He was a popular author, printer, inventor, and a good businessman that knew how to commercialize the fruits of his mind.

4.  P.T. Barnum.  This person had played on our fascination with the bizarre and freakish with slideshow acts ranging from the midget Tom Thumb to Jumbo the giant elephant. He had created the Barnum and Baily Circus as a showcase for all this wonderment and dubbed it "The Greatest Show on Earth." He had also invented modern advertising and became wealthy.

5.  Thomas Edison. This man gave the world the electric light, phonograph, talking motion pictures and more than 1,300 other patented inventions. He was literally the world's greatest inventor of all time. He exploited profit potential in his creations. He stands alone for his inventive genius and entrepreneurial flair.

6.  Henry Ford. Ford had changed human lifestyles by making the vehicle, the Model T, which had extended people's range of movement. This automobile had allowed America's masses to fulfill their Manifest Destiny to populate every corner of the continent. He had impacted the industry. His moving assembly line that he designed to build cars was the breakthrough of the Industrial Age. Ford had earned the seed capital for his enterprise by working as an engineer at the Edison Illuminating Company in Detroit.

7.  Benjamin Siegel. AKA Bugsy. He was a notorious mobster with a touch of the visionary. It is known that he created Las Vegas. He was the first to see what the town could become: An oasis of pleasure, where gambling was his first attraction. He proved adept at attracting other people's money to build his iconic resort, The Flamingo. But some of these other people belonged to an outfit caled Murder Inc and Siegel was gunned down in 1947 and rumors say that he had stolen from his partners.

8.  Ray Kroc. He had the persistence, this kitchen wares salesman who in 1954, at the age of 52 was in poor health and had his imagination stolen by a family run restaurant in the desert near Los Angeles. At one point he bought out the McDonald brothers, Kroc had proceeded to take their concept of a limited menu, fast service and cheap prices and expand it nationally, by creating the fast food industry and affecting America's lifestyle and killing our health.

9.  H. Ross Perot. He was known for his recent years as a political gadfly. Just before that he was all business, using a 1k loan from his wife in 1962 to create Electronic Data Systems. Perot's winning idea was that large corporations and organizations needed data processing help if they wanted to take full advantage of the technology of the computer. In the mid 60's he wont contracts with two new federal health care programs - Medicare and Medicaid - EDS was just off and running and Perot was on his journey to becoming one of America's wealthiest citizens.

10.  Jobs & Wozniak. The two Steves of Apple were not the first Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to launch a billion dollar business from a Palo Alto garage. HP were there way before them but they were the first to democratize computing by inventing a machine that was so intuitive that even technophobes embraced it. True phenomenon had occurred if you combine the elegance of Wozniak's OS design with Job's marketing techniques. The Apple was a competitor against PC, only after Microsoft had created their very own operating system of Windows.

This post was written by: Franklin Manuel

Franklin Manuel is a professional blogger, web designer and front end web developer. Follow him on Twitter