I’ve been reading Thomas Friedman’s book, “The World is Flat” lately, which made me wonder today about the people whose entrepreneurial endeavors have revolutionized the internet and how their works helped “flatten” the internet world. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but just a list of the people behind a few well-known internet success stories.

Pierre Omidyar

Pierre Omidyar is credited with writing the original code for eBay when he was 28 years of age. Ebay offered it’s inital public offering (IPO) just 3 short years after inception. eBay opened up online sales to the average internet user and created a new industry. Many individuals have been making their living on eBay for a few years now.

Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis

Founders of Skype, which sold recently to eBay for a sum speculated to be $2.6 billion (potentially $4.1 billion). Skype has made calling international affordable, if not free (depending on calling choices).

Shawn Fanning

Programmer who created Napster, the famous peer-to-peer file sharing application. Filesharing goes back to UseNet days but Napster pushed it into the main stream and stirred a lot of legal debate on the issue.

Reed Hastings

Founder of Netflix and bane of Blockbuster’s existence. Netflix has opened up the movie rental market and has influenced the business policies of market-leader, Blockbuster. Blockbuster has stopped charging late fees for rentals since Netflix has started to infringe on the market-share of movie rentals.

Michael Robertson

Founder of MP3.com, Linspire, Inc., SIPphone.com, Comparesoft and MP3Tunes. Michael Robertson is a successful and prolific entrepreneur who promotes, and has built his career upon, open standards. Where do I start? MP3.com opened the music market to non-corporate musicians, allowing musicians to share and sell their music legally without the traditional support of large music labels.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the founders of Google, which IPO’d in August of 2004. We couldn’t possibly leave these guys off these guys off the list. Google is a great example of a word-of-mouth product and the GoogleAds has opened the internet advertising market by making it easier to advertise online and allowing website owners to more easily create advertising revenue.

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen

Founders of YouTube, an online video upload service. One website claims YouTube which garnered 12.9 million unique visitors in March, which would not be surprising. YouTube reportedly received $3.5M in Funding From Sequoia Capital in November of 2005. Chad Hurley and Steve Chen were also involved in the startup days of Paypal. YouTube is currently the leader in online video sharing.