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"Since the earliest days of the Internet entrepreneur, there have been vast shifts in ideologies about what makes for a successful online business. These shifts have been predicated by thought leaders who challenge our attitudes about financing, development, business models and the very reason for creating a startup in the first place.\nHere are five investors, developers and entrepreneurs who have changed startup life as we know it.\n1. Paul Graham\n\n\n\n\n\nFounder of the iconic Y Combinator startup accelerator and related aggregator Hacker News, Graham is a hero to masses of would-be startup gods. He's helped launch more than 150 startups throughout his career, and he's done so with a lot less cold, hard capital than you'd imagine. As he told the Harvard Computer Society in 2005, \"You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.\"\nY Combinator gathers large groups of startup teams \u2014 generally a young, developer-heavy crowd \u2014 and infuses them with advice, training and small amounts of seed capital, which let founders keep ramen on the table and prove their passion for the work over the course of a few months.\nThis program has spawned dozens of spin-offs around the country.  More than an incubator and more than a VC fund, Y Combinator has changed how we think about timelines, road maps, the importance of mentorship, and what it means to be a lean startup. The program has also created an elite crew of alumni who still dine out once a week and secure funding for later projects based on their former Y Combinator successes.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nShare and annotate your videos with Omnisio!\n\n2. Jason Calacanis\n\n\n\n\n\nA survivor (barely) of the 1990s dotcom boom, Calacanis is now known as one of the most outspoken, enigmatic figures in the modern startup community. As the quintessential modern investor and the fearless leader of L.A.-based Mahalo, he continues to lead by example, even as he speaks, blogs, judges and podcasts his way through the current tech scene.\nCalacanis is no stranger to controversy and is usually willing to ruffle a few feathers for a good cause. Lately, he has taken a stand against what he feels are exploitative investment practices, particularly groups of angel investors who charge startups for the privilege of pitching them. What we've learned from Calacanis is that passion and conviction trump comfortable complacence every time. \"I try to scare people in the interview,\" he once said to reporters. \"I tell them this is going to be hard. You're going to suffer, but we're going to make great stuff.\"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n3. Gary Vaynerchuk\n\n\n\n\n\nVaynerchuk's evangelizing these days makes ample use of the phrase \"cash in on your passion.\" This wine-loving dynamo created a presence \u2014 and a viable business and huge cult following \u2014 for himself on the web through Wine Library TV. He's a well-known speaker at tech and business conferences, and he's even got himself a book deal.\nVaynerchuk may not have been the first non-technical tech startup founder, but he's inspired, nay, driven countless others to follow in his footsteps through impassioned, expletive-laced speeches, and no-nonsense advice on how to get business done on the Internet. Vaynerchuk strips away the mystery of startup life by insisting that audience members owe it to themselves and the world around them to do what truly inspires them. As he often says, \"I just want people to do things they love.\"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n4. Mark Zuckerberg\n\n\n\n\n\nSteve Jobs showed us you can build an empire from an empty house; Larry Page and Sergey Brin showed us you can do it from a garage. But Zuck, as he is known, proved you can build the world's most powerful social network from a dorm room.\nOne of the 2.0 era's most well-known wunderkinds, Mark Zuckerberg has inspired legions of young folks to pursue their ambitions, whether in college or high school, and to hack away at new and innovative social web ideas of their own. He's also changed how people think about privacy, customization and a slew of other issues surrounding social networking.\nHow do you become a titan of Internet industry without even finishing a college degree? Again, the message remains: Do what you love.  \"Like a lot of college kids,\" Zuck told Newsweek last year, \"we spent a lot of time talking about abstract things that interested us and how things in [the] world would play out, about trends in technology ... I was just building something that would let me and the people around me stay in touch. But then it just kind of grew and grew. The cool irony is that now we are able to have an impact on some of those lofty things we used to discuss in our college dorm room.\"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n5. Rasmus Lerdorf\n\n\n\n\n\nOne of the biggest differences between the dotcom era and the 2.0 era is the bar of entry for building web applications. A new generation of programming languages arose, and they were simpler to understand and quicker to compile and run, making rapid iteration in web development possible like never before. A handful of languages come to mind in this category, including Java, Ruby and Python. But we're going out with PHP's creator, Rasmus Lerdorf, as our fifth startup mastermind.\nLerdorf authored the first two versions of PHP, a language that powers some of the biggest sites of today's web, including Facebook. He also contributed to the Apache HTTP Server and MySQL projects, main components of the popular LAMP stack. Further, he champions the causes of security, optimization and browser excellence. \nIn essence, without developers like Lerdorf, the Internet as we know it would not exist. Yet he remains modest and, we feel, under appreciated by the masses of people who benefit from his work. \"I did not develop the PHP we know today,\" he once said. \"Dozens, if not hundreds of people, developed PHP. I was simply the first developer.\"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nFor more business coverage, follow Mashable Business on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook\n\n\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, Schulteproductions\n[Jason Calacanis image credit: Wikimedia Commons][Rasmus Lerdorf image credit: rlerdorf]"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2010/04/22/startup-masterminds/>