Trader Wales Jimmy is a great trader, but a terrible businessman
Wales Jimmy is a truly unique person. The Wikipedia he created, as well as his brilliant career as a trader, makes him a role model around the world for both webmasters and startups, as well as novice traders.
In fact, perhaps the world would never have seen Wikipedia as it is now if Wales had not made his initial capital in the stock market.
Wales is an example of a successful trader of the new generation who has converted his capital into a global Internet project.
However, Jimmy was not always what he is now, and there were also considerable obstacles on his path to becoming.
Actually, the family budget was saved by my grandmother and mother, since they were the owners of a private school, House of Learning. The private school taught according to the Maria Montessori system, which boiled down to the fact that the child himself chose the profile that interested him and selected the subjects he liked.
This approach to education was popular among wealthy people, since motivated parents could unleash the full potential of their children. If we talk about Jimmy Wales, he preferred reading encyclopedias.
Trader training and career
Wales did not study at a regular school, but received a full-fledged specialized education at his own private school. Upon graduation, Jim enters college at Randolph School, which became a preliminary step for admission to Auburn University.
After Wales received his bachelor's degree, he entered the University of Alabama and began to aim for a doctorate in philosophy in finance. To do this, he taught for a long time at two universities simultaneously, but over time he abandoned this idea.
The turning point in Wales' life came in 1994, when he moved to Chicago. It was in this big city that Jimmy revealed his full financial potential, namely, he became an asset manager at Chicago Options Associates. Trading activity lasted until 2000, and Jimmy earned more than 500 thousand dollars during this period.
First attempts in web business
1994 was the most favorable year for the development of business in the Internet segment, therefore, after the emergence of such giants as Google and Yahoo, in 1996 Jimmy Wales tried to create his own search engine for men. Naturally, this kind of content and the search engine brought the first money, but in the future it left an unpleasant imprint on his career.
In 2000, after retiring as a trader, Jimmy Wales founded the first online encyclopedia, Nupedia. However, filling the site with content was very slow, because before an article was approved, each user was required to send the article for criticism to a professional scientist in this field.
This approach greatly frightened users, so in order to attract the maximum amount of content, Wikipedia was created. Oddly enough, the minor project quickly surpassed the online encyclopedia and began to acquire new users who wanted to add content.
In 2003, Jimmy Wales created the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, through which people could donate funds to develop the site. That is why to this day you will not find on the Wikipedia website - https://www.wikipedia.org/ no advertising.
Later in 2004, Wales created an additional paid service to provide hosting for wiki-based sites. Actually, to this day, Wales lives off grants that amount to more than $15 million.
Many critics call Wales a great man, but at the same time a terrible businessman. For example, Wikipedia, created by him, has more than 50 million visitors per day, and if you place AdWords advertising on the resource ( https://adwords.google.com/) or Yandex Direct (https://direct.yandex.ru) then, with minimal prices for advertising, he could earn more in a week than in 15 years of grants received.
One way or another, Jimmy Wales is a successful established trader and businessman who does not strive for huge amounts of money.