Where some might see failure, others might see opportunity for success — and when you're in your twenties, it can be hard to distinguish which is which.
Salesforce founder Marc Benioff made his first $1 million at 25. At the same age, Spanx founder Sara Blakely was a door-to-door office supply salesman.
Both entrepreneurs are now billionaires running game-changing companies that are featured on our first ever edition of the Business Insider 100: The Creators — a nod to some of the most successful and visionary business leaders who are changing the world for the better.
To show that no two success stories are alike, we put together 25 stories of what people from our Creators ranking were doing in their twenties.
SEE ALSO: BI 100: The Creators
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Salman Khan was in business school
By the time Khan graduated the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998, he had three degrees under his belt — two bachelors in mathematics and computer science and a masters in engineering. When he was 25, he was pursuing an MBA at Harvard Business School.
Khan spent the following years as a hedge fund analyst, and it wasn't until he started tutoring his cousin in 2004 that the idea for Khan Academy: online videos aimed to help provide low-income students with free tutoring and test preparation.
Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook was cash positive for the first time and hit 300 million users.
Zuckerberg had been hard at work on Facebook for five years by the time he hit age 25. In that year — 2009 — the company turned cash positive for the first time and hit 300 million users. He was excited at the time, but said it was just the start, writing on Facebook that "the way we think about this is that we're just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone." The next year, he was named "Person of the Year" by Time magazine.
John Lasseter was a newly hired animator at Disney
Right before Pixar was created, Lasseter was a graduate fresh out of the California Institute of Arts. In 1979, when he was 22, he immediately landed a job as an animator for Walt Disney Feature Animation. After a couple of years, he was fired from the company because he, "felt so strongly about computer animation and wouldn't take no for an answer."
Luckily in 1983, he was hired by George Lucas for the Lucasfilm Computer Division. Three years later, the group eventually turned into Pixar when it was purchased by Steve Jobs.
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