Inspiring careers- from STEM to content creation and education

Influencer culture is highly controversial in today’s society. Many argue that it encourages inequality, evokes mental health issues like depression, anxiety and body-image-related illnesses, and further promotes cancel-culture. However, it is also an endless source of knowledge, revolving around innovative trends and novelties of each industry. While it is true that anyone can become an influencer, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there are no people with real talent on social media. Many of the world’s greatest minds decided to establish an online presence, and share inspiring thoughts and educating or entertaining ideas. We all know Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos use Twitter frequently, Tim Cook and Satya Nadela are also quite active. However, now we put together a list of people whose career, content, or personality inspires us, and might have slipped by your attention. Check them out if you’re looking for some external motivation!

1. The Wojcicki girls

Esther Wojcicki, is vice-chair of the Creative Commons advisory council, American journalist and educator. She is also the founder of the Palo Alto High School Media Arts Program in Palo Alto, and Co-Founder of TractLearning, which publishes the website Tract, a peer to peer learning platform for kids 8 years and over. She also wrote a book titled “How to Raise Successful People: Simple Lessons for Radical Results” based on her three daughters. Anne is the CEO of 23andMe, a company she founded that does DNA genetic testing and analysis. Her sister Susan became Google’s employee in 1999. She pushed for Google to purchase YouTube in 2006, and has been running the video platform since 2014. Their sister Janet is an MD and assistant professor in pediatrics at the UCSF School of Medicine. We call this a successful family, to say the least.

2. Fei-Fei Li

Fei-Fei Li is an American computer scientist. She is an elected Member of the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Medicine, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Li was born in Beijing, China, and moved to the U.S. with her mother when she was a teenager. Later she went on to study physics at Princeton and received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Caltech. She is currently a Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and a Co-Director of the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab. The AI pioneer has an impressive Twitter following of over 300 thousand users.

3. Jack Ma

Jack Ma went through many personal and career failures before emerging to be a recognizable leader in technology. He is considered one of the most resilient of all leaders in the field, for his ability to overcome misfortunes and still become the executive chairman to one of the biggest retailers globally, Alibaba. His commitment to success turned into philanthropy, and after he stepped back from his giant company, he pursued solutions to educational and environmental problems.

4. Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr.

Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr. is the co-founder, chairman, and co-chief executive officer of Netflix, and has a seat on a number of boards of non-profit organizations. As a former member of the California State Board of Education, Hastings is an advocate for education reform through charter schools. Besides revolutionizing online entertainment, he is an active supporter of equal opportunities in education. In June 2020 Hastings and his wife Patty donated $120 million dollars to fund scholarships at two historically Black colleges & the United Negro College Fund.

5. Whitney Wolfe Herd

Whitney is a former executive at Tinder, and the founder and CEO of its competitor, Bumble. She resigned from Tinder in April 2014, due to “growing tension” with other company executives. She later expressed that she was sexually harassed at the company, so she filed a lawsuit that resulted in a settlement. She was repeatedly bullied online by supporters of the attackers, so she took her anger out by creating a female-friendly dating app. In February 2021, Bumble topped $13 billion in value after the company was taken to the stock market. In 2021, Herd became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire after taking Bumble public. Forbes estimated her net worth at approximately $1.5 billion.

The internet is full of success stories like these. We hope our article has given you the motivation to look around in the tech field and find inspiration in other people’s ways. All of the businessmen and women mentioned above share insightful information on their social media accounts, we encourage you to join the conversation! You can find IseeQ on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter, make sure to follow us if you don’t want to miss out!