Vocation : Business : Top executive

Joshua_Kushner

Joshua Kushner (born June 12, 1985) is an American businessman, heir, and investor. He is the founder and managing partner of the venture capital firm Thrive Capital, co-founder of Oscar Health, and the son of real estate developer Charles Kushner. He is the brother of Jared Kushner, son-in-law and former senior advisor to former U.S. President Donald Trump. He is a minority owner of the Memphis Grizzlies.

Harold_Simmons

Harold Clark Simmons (May 13, 1931 – December 29, 2013) was an American businessman, investor, and philanthropist whose banking expertise helped him develop the acquisition concept known as the leveraged buyout (LBO) to acquire various corporations. He was the owner of Contran Corporation and of Valhi, Inc., (a NYSE traded company about 90% controlled by Contran). As of 2006, he controlled five public companies traded on the New York Stock Exchange: NL Industries; Titanium Metals Corporation, the world's largest producer of titanium; Valhi, Inc., a multinational company with operations in the chemicals, component products, Waste Control Specialists (waste management), titanium metals industries; CompX International, manufacturer of ergonomic products, and Kronos Worldwide, leading producer and marketer of titanium dioxide.

Daniel_Meyer_(engineer)

Daniel Meyer (February 6, 1932 – May 16, 1998) was the founder and president Southwest Technical Products Corporation. He was born in New Braunfels, Texas, and raised in San Marcos, Texas, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics in 1957 from Southwest Texas State. After college he married Helen Wentz, moved to San Antonio and became a research engineer in the electrical engineering department of Southwest Research Institute.
He soon started writing hobbyist articles. The first was in Electronics World (May 1960) and later he had a two part cover feature for Radio-Electronics (October, November 1962). The March 1963 issue of Popular Electronics featured his ultrasonic listening device on the cover. The projects would often require a printed circuit board or specialized components that were not available at the local electronics parts store. Readers could purchase them directly from Dan Meyer.Dan Meyer saw the business opportunity in providing circuit boards and parts for the Popular Electronics projects. In January 1964 he left Southwest Research Institute to start an electronics kit company. He continued to write articles and ran the mail order kit business from his home garage in San Antonio, Texas. By 1965 he was providing the kits for other authors such as Lou Garner. In 1967 he sold a kit for Don Lancaster's "IC-67 Metal Locator". In early 1967 Meyer moved his growing business from his home to a new building on a 3-acre (12,000 m2) site in San Antonio. The Daniel E. Meyer Company (DEMCO) became Southwest Technical Products Corporation (SWTPC) that fall.The concept of selling a kit based on a magazine article had been around since the early days of radio. Daniel Meyer perfected the process. In 1967, Popular Electronics had six articles by Dan Meyer and four by Don Lancaster. Seven of that year's cover stories featured kits sold by SWTPC. In the years 1966 to 1971, SWTPC's authors wrote 64 articles and had 25 cover stories in Popular Electronics. (Don Lancaster alone had 23 articles and 10 were cover stories.) The San Antonio Express-News did a feature story on Southwest Technical Products in November 1972. "Meyer built his mail-order business from scratch to more than $1 million in sales in six years." The company was shipping 100 kits a day from 18,000 square feet (1,700 m2) of buildings.In the first ten years, SWTPC's most popular products were audio kits followed by test equipment. There was also typical 1970s products like color organs that would synchronize colored lights with music as well as strobe lights. Dan Meyer developed a series of very low intermodulation (IM) distortion audio power amplifiers known as Tigers, many still in use today. Don Lancaster developed a series of decimal readout counters and voltmeters that used the latest technology.
In mid 1975 Dan Meyer asked one of his engineers, Gary Kay, to design a computer based on the Motorola 6800 design kit. The first deliveries were in November 1975. In June 1976 SWTPC introduced the AC-30 Cassette Interface for data storage and the PR-40 printer. One could now purchase a complete computer system for about $1500.Many of the early hobbyist computer companies were founded by engineers who did not know how to run a business. They would fold in a year or so. SWTPC had been successful in the kit business for over a decade so they could deliver working products.
Floppy Disk systems, full feature terminals, and many peripherals were added in 1977. The bus structure was called the SS-50 and soon many other vendors were making add-in cards and complete systems. In 1979 SWTPC introduced a new line based on the Motorola 6809 processor. These systems were produced until the mid-1980s. By then, the IBM PC was dominating the personal computer world and SWTPC shifted to point of sale (POS) systems.

Michael_Armand_Hammer

Michael Armand Hammer (September 8, 1955 – November 20, 2022) was an American businessman. He was the son of Julian Armand Hammer and the grandson of industrialist Armand Hammer. Best known for his ties to Occidental Petroleum, the company of his late grandfather, Hammer oversaw the Hammer International Foundation, the Armand Hammer Foundation, and owned numerous businesses that included Hammer Galleries, and Hammer Productions, a television and film production company located in Los Angeles, California.
Hammer sat on the board of directors and the executive committee for the Los Angeles Dream Center, and was on the Investment Committee and Board of Reference for Oral Roberts University. Hammer was the owner and chief executive of the Knoedler, an art dealership in New York City, which closed in 2011 after purchasing and reselling $80 million in forged paintings bearing the signature of abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.