3) Michael and Xochi Birch – £350 Million
Husband and wife Michael and Xochi Birch in 2005 founded Bebo, which stands for “Blog Early, Blog Often”. Bebo was especially popular in the United Kingdom getting to unprecedented heights where it became larger than AOL.com, Amazon and the BBC in terms of daily traffic.
On March 13, 2008, Birch sold the social networking site to AOL for £510m. After 5 years; in 2013, the couple announced announced they were buying Bebo back for just £600,000,m a good piece of business. They curerently have a home in San Francisco.
2) Peter Wilkinson – £360 Million
Harrogate-based Wilkinson made £65m from his sale of his company –
Intechnology in November 2013. He also made a profit of £67.6m from the sales of Freeserve and Planet Online, which he started with Paul Sykes.
1) John Roberts – £410 Million
Former kitchen sales manager; John Roberts founded AO.com 16 years ago. This came after he discovered that the supply chain management for convenience goods like washing machines wasn’t effective and was long with this in turn causing an increase in prices paid by consumers for these goods.
AO World business, based in Bolton floated in February with a £1.2bn valuation. This is the value attached to the company including also, its the online retail store.
Roberts cashed in shares is worth around £112m during and after the float. His remaining AO World stake is 26.5% according to the Sunday Times, after tax he is worth £410m. That’s not bad for someone who left school at 17.
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