Some of the most successful global companies today were started during economic recessions.



Uncertainty and market volatility creates opportunity.

1) Jan Koum and Brian Acton cofounded WhatsApp in 2009 after both serving as Yahoo executives.

They eventually sold the company to Facebook for $19 billion in 2014.

Fun fact: Jan Koum had applied to work at Facebook and was rejected before starting WhatsApp.

2) Iqram Magdon-Ismail & Andrew Kortina cofounded Venmo in 2009 to create better digital payments.

They sold Venmo to Braintree in 2012 for $26 million, which was a year before Braintree was acquired for $300 million.

Venmo processed $37 billion of payment transactions in Q2 2020.

3) Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger cofounded Instagram in 2010 with a fanatical focus on photos.

They sold the company to Facebook only two years later for $1 billion.

Instagram is thought to be valued at over $100 billion today.?

4) Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp cofounded Uber in 2009 to solve their transportation needs.

They scaled the company internationally over the last decade and today it is a publicly traded company with a market cap of $66 billion.

5) Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra cofounded Pinterest in 2010.

They now have more than 300 million users and the company is valued at $26 billion.

6) Stewart Butterfield, Cal Henderson, Eric Costello, and Serguei Mourachov cofounded Slack in 2009.

It was a spinout of a previous company that didn't gain traction.

They are a publicly traded company valued at $16 billion today.

7) Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey cofounded Square in 2009 to create better merchant payment services.

There are more than 30 million companies using their products today and the company is valued at $75 billion in the public markets.

8)Our own home grown and the biggest pharmaceutical company in West Africa EMZOR was founded in 1984 by Stella Okoli when Nigeria was in throes of recession.

Today EMZOR is a multi billion naira company with presence all over West Africa.

It's flagship product Emzor Paracetamol is the market leader in the segment that it operates.

Recessions can  be incredibly painful for a lot of people.

We shouldn't ignore those struggles, but we must also realize that recessions provide opportunity for entrepreneurs.

If you can survive the hard times, you can thrive during the good times.