From Rags to Riches Trivia Quiz

Answer: Wisconsin

Growing up, Diane Hendricks did not have much. She was the daughter of Wisconsin dairy farmers and learned the value of hard work early on. When she met her husband, Ken Hendricks, she was selling homes. He was a roofer and general contractor. Together, in 1982 they pooled their credit and secured a loan to start a business selling supplies to other contractors, and ABC Supply took off! Expanding to most of the United States by 2021, the net worth of the company was in the billions around the turn of the century. Ken Hendricks passed away in 2007 after falling through an area under construction in his own house and onto the concrete floor of his garage. Diane Hendricks, a widow with seven children, inherited all of their shared wealth.

Answer: Advertising

At the age of 19, Lynda Resnick (then Harris) was already hard at work. She started her own advertising firm, Lynda Limited, after working for a while for Sunset House in their advertising department. After protesting against the Vietnam War, and very nearly getting thrown in jail for publicizing some very secret papers, Resnick moved on to owning some very good companies and making them better.

Some of the companies she and her husband were involved in are Fiji Water, POM Wonderful, and Wonderful Pistachios, and Wonderful Halos, but the company that made her leave advertising was Teleflora, a company they purchased in 1979.

Answer: Oracle

Safra Catz was born into a large family in Holon, Israel, and they did not have much except for each other. However, at a very young age Safra emigrated to the United States in the hopes that the family fortunes would turn. Catz studied law and got her J.D. but turned to the investment banking world first, moving up in leadership positions in Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. She then turned to the software world by moving to Oracle, the world's number two software company in 1999.

Since then, Safra Catz moved up all the way to CFO under company founder Larry Ellison. When he stepped down, Catz became a co-CEO with Mark Hurd, and then took the position on her own when Hurd passed away in 2019. She was already recognized at that time as being the highest-paid female executive in the world as well as one of the most influential businesswomen worldwide. In 2021, Forbes calculated her net worth at around $1.6 billion USD. Indeed, rags to riches.

Answer: Google

Susan Wojcicki is an American businesswoman with both Polish and Jewish roots. She studied both literature and history at Harvard before switching her focus to economics. After toying with the idea of going for her PhD, she instead opted to go into the technology world, first working for Intel. In 1998, she and her friends Larry Page and Sergei Brin set up office in her garage as she became the first marketing director for Google.

When Susan Wojcicki noticed in 2006 that a small company was competing with the Google video service, she was the first to float the idea that buying them out would be a better solution than to fight them. She oversaw the $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube and also the $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, a company that handled much of the Internet's advertising. IN 2014, she became the CEO of YouTube. In 2021, her own personal net worth was calculated to be $815 million USD.

Answer: Little Caesars

Marian Ilitch was born to Macedonian immigrants to the United States, so, she really didn't have much as a child. However, when she met her husband, Mike Ilitch, also the son of Macedonian immigrants, they decided together to start a pizza shop. When the first Little Caesars suddenly became really successful, the couple started franchising. and then business boomed. In 2020, Little Caesars was the third-largest pizza chain in the United States and it also had a strong international presence.

The Ilitches didn't stop at pizza, however. They expanded into gambling, hospitality, and sports teams. Her holdings company owns the Detroit Tigers, an MLB baseball team, as well as the Detroit Red Wings, an NHL ice hockey team. In 2021, Marian Ilitch was valued at over $4.4 billion USD.

Answer: Facebook

Sheryl Sandberg is a business executive who went from a modest Washington DC girl to a billionaire and one of the most powerful women in the world. In 2007 she was a vice president at Google when she met Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, at a party. She left such a positive impression on him that he created the role of COO (Chief Operating Officer) for her, even though he wasn't really looking for one. She left Google and joined Facebook formally in March, 2008.

Sandberg has served and serves on the board for many known companies such as Starbucks, Disney, Facebook, Women for Women International, Ad Council, V-Day, and many others. In addition, she is an avid philanthropist and started LeanIn.org, an organization that helps women get empowered in a variety of ways. She also served as the Chief of Staff for the United States Secretary of the Treasury, Lawrence Henry Summers, from 1999 to 2001. In 2021, she was valued at over $1.9 billion USD, a true rags-to-riches success.

Answer: Aerospace

When Eren Ozmen came from Turkey to the United States in the early 1980s, she was rich with hopes and dreams as she pursued her studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. She didn't have much else. Nevertheless, she and her husband managed to find jobs at the Sierra Nevada Corporation, a small aerospace company. In 1994, when the two of them bought the company, it had 20 employees. In 2019, the SNC had over 4000 employees and had 33 locations in four countries. Eren Ozmen became the president of the company, having her net worth valued by Forbes to be over $1 billion USD in 2021.

The SNC makes products like the landing gear for the Predator drone, and the Dream Chaser low-Earth-orbit cargo plane.

Answer: Oprah

Oprah was born Orpah Gail Winfrey, named for the character from the biblical Book of Ruth. However, her family could not really pronounce her name very well and they transposed the 'P' and the 'R' giving her the name 'Oprah', which stuck. She was born in poverty in Mississippi and moved around the United States for a while before landing in Chicago. At a young age, Oprah got involved in radio and, from there, her career in the media took off.

Oprah has launched both her own network, the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), as well as her own production company, Harpo Productions. Even though she has amassed great wealth, she is a very active philanthropist. As a self-made woman, she was valued in 2014 to be worth $2.9 billion USD.

Answer: China

Dai Weili was born in Shanghai, China, and made her way to the United States to study in college. Getting a degree in computer science from UC Berkeley helped, but, even more so was her innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. She, along with her husband, Sehat Sutardja, founded the Marvell Technology Group, a semiconductor company.

She really struck gold with this company, but also faced some controversies. All the while, Dai Weili continued to advocate for more support for females in STEM topics and spearheaded initiatives to help the underprivileged.

In 2021, Forbes valued her at over $1.3 billion USD! That's a real rags to riches story.

Answer: Rihanna

Born in Saint Michael, Barbados, into a blended family where her father dealt with his addictions by abusing his family, Robyn Rihanna Fenty had a difficult childhood and adolescence. She ended up joining military school instead of finishing high school but opted to pursue a career in music. Despite having no formal musical training, she was discovered by Jay-Z and signed a record deal with his label resulting in her rise to fame.

As a businesswoman, Rihanna has many ventures. She started in perfumes and branched out into fashion, music streaming, lingerie, and cosmetics. In 2020, Forbes listed her wealth as $1.7 billion USD. Now that's a real rags to riches story!