After receiving great response from my recent article about early emails and forum posts from successful tech founders, I thought you guys would like this too. Here’s a list of early interviews, talks, and documentaries of famous tech founders who created billion-dollar companies.

Jack Ma (Alibaba) – 1999

In a small apartment, Jack Ma delivers his vision and plan for Alibaba to his friends. He said “our competitors are not in China, but in America’s Silicon Valley.” 15 years later, Alibaba is already bigger than Amazon, Facebook, and IBM.

Bill Gates & Steve Jobs (Microsoft) – 1983

Steve Jobs hosted a “Macintosh Software Dating Game”, asking questions about software development to decide which “software magnate” that impresses him the most. Steve Jobs referred Bill Gates as “software CEO number 3”. 1 month later, Microsoft presented Windows 1.0 and Steve Jobs accused him for stealing Apple’s GUI elements and ideas. 2 years later (1985), Steve Jobs was fired and Microsoft officially released Windows 1.0, which started the Windows era.

Larry Page & Sergey Brin (Google) – 1999

TGIF is Google’s weekly all-staff meeting, according to Douglas Edwards. Google office and culture is already awesome back then.

Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, & Evan Williams (Twitter) – 2006

This is an interview and demo about Twitter, which was filmed 2 months after launch. Apparently Twitter had a nudge feature in the early days. Hey Jack, if you see this, I would love to have an auto-refresh feature too.

Elon Musk (Zip2) – 1999

Elon Musk was featured in a documentary about millionaires. He got his McLaren F1 delivered but crashed it 1 year later. He just sold his first company, Zip2 with 400 million cash and was working on X.com at that time.

Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) – 2005

Mark Zuckerberg delivers a guest lecture at Harvard one year after Facebook was launched. He started the lecture with a “Yo”. Look at the number of students in the lecture compared to now.

Jawed Karim (YouTube) – 2005

The famous first video on YouTube. Test video confirmed.

Jeff Bezos (Amazon) – 1997

In the interview, Jeff Bezos foresee the huge potential of e-commerce before most people did. He started Amazon as an online bookstore because “there are more items in the book category than any other category by far”.