First jobs of 11 successful entrepreneurs.

And some of the early lessons learned.

Do you remember your first job? Some of the world’s best known entrepreneurs have reflected on their first gigs and the lessons learned. Here are their stories…

Jeff Bezos: McDonald’s cook

Jeff Bezos worked at a McDonald’s in Miami when he was 16.

It taught him that customer service is hard.

He also learned about speed and efficiency.

Bezos particularly liked the Saturday morning shift. 

“The first thing I would do is get a big bowl and crack 300 eggs into it,” Bezos told Fast Company. 

“One of the things that’s really fun about working at McDonald’s is to get really fast at all of this stuff. See how many eggs you can crack in a period of time and still not get any shell in them.”

Richard Branson: bird breeder

At the age of 11, Richard Branson saw an entrepreneurial opportunity.

“We saw a gap in the market to sell budgies, as they were very popular with kids in school at the time,” Branson said on LinkedIn.

Branson teamed up with his best friend to start breeding parakeets from his countryside home.

The venture taught Branson about the challenges startups can face.

In his case, the birds were multiplying faster than he could sell them.

“My mum opened the cages and set them free!”

Warren Buffett: gum salesman

Buffett had lots of jobs as a kid, including multiple paper routes.

One of his earliest jobs was at age 6!

He sold packs of gum.

He would buy them at his grandfather’s store…then sell them door to door.

Buffett quickly learned how to hold firm too.

"I remember a woman named Virginia Macoubrie saying, 'I'll take one stick of Juicy Fruit,'" Buffett later told biographer Alice Schroeder.

His response? "We don't break up packs of gum."

"I've got my principles," he explained.

Mark Cuban: garbage bag salesman 

Mark Cuban wanted to buy some Converse shoes.

One of his dad’s poker buddies had boxes of garbage bags.

At age 12, Cuban started selling the bags, door to door.

“They’d cost me $3 for a box of 100.  I would sell ‘em for $6,” he later told Bloomberg.

 “I would take them garbage bags every couple of weeks, whenever they needed more — and I was making $20 a week.”

Cuban made enough cash to buy the shoes.

“That taught me to be confident.  That taught me that I could sell.  And that taught me that selling was helping, not convincing,” Cuban added.

“If I could find things people wanted, I could make some money.”

Michael Dell: dishwasher 

Michael Dell wanted to earn money for his stamp collection. 

So when he was 12, he worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant.

“I earned maybe $1 or $1.50 per hour,” Dell later said.  “It wasn’t very much.”

But Dell loved working and was later promoted to busboy.

"The best part was the wisdom of the restaurant owner, which I could capture if I came to work a little early,” Dell later recalled.

“He took great pride in his work and cared about every customer who came through his door."

Daniel Ek: website designer

Spotify founder Daniel Ek started building websites when he was 14.

“People asked me if I could help them do their home page,” Ek later told tech journalist Sarah Lacy.

Ek worked on the sites at home and from his school computer lab.

He quickly learned about the power of pricing.

“Most of the firms that were doing it charged you like $50,000 to create a simple two‑page home page. I said, “Well, I’ll do it for 100 bucks,” just to see if I can get it. The person said, “Yeah, sure,” Ek explained to Lacy.

Eventually, Ek became so successful that he was he was making nearly $50,000 each month.

Reed Hastings: vacuum salesman

Long before Reed Hastings started Netflix, he sold vacuum cleaners.

He’d go door to door in high school. 

He even deferred college for a year to continue selling.

“I loved it, strange as that may sound,” he later said. 

“You get to meet a lot of different people.”

Steve Jobs: assembly line worker

Steve Jobs famously said “Most people never pick up the phone and call. And that’s what separates sometimes the people who do things from the people who just dream about them.”

The phone call that started Jobs on his journey was to HP co-founder Bill Hewlett.

At the age of 12, Jobs found Hewlett’s number in the phone book.

He called Hewlett and asked for spare parts to build a frequency counter.

Not only did Jobs get the parts, he was also given an opportunity.

“He gave me a job that summer at Hewlett-Packard working on the assembly line, putting nuts and bolts together on frequency counters…I was in heaven,” Jobs later recalled.

Jack Ma: tour guide

When he was 12 years old, Jack Ma would wake up at 5 a.m. and ride his bicycle to an international hotel in Hangzhou.

He would wait for tourists to emerge and offer to show them around the city, as a travel guide.

In exchange, Ma asked tourists to help him learn English.

Not only did Ma master the language, it gave him a better understanding of the outside world.

Elon Musk: boiler room cleaner 

Elon Musk is well known for working hard.

You saw some of that of toughness in his early work assignments.

In 1988, Musk moved from South Africa to Canada.

He had a series of odd jobs, including a stint working on his cousin’s farm in Saskatchewan.

He eventually landed in Vancouver and worked as a lumberjack.

Musk learned the job with the highest wage involved cleaning the boiler room at a lumber mill for $18 an hour.

"You have to put on this hazmat suit and then shimmy through this little tunnel that you can barely fit in," Musk outlined in Ashlee Vance’s biography. 

"Then, you have a shovel and you take the sand and goop and other residue, which is still steaming hot, and you have to shovel it through the same hole you came through. There is no escape. Someone else on the other side has to shovel it into a wheelbarrow. If you stay in there for more than thirty minutes, you get too hot and die." 

Oprah Winfrey: grocery store cashier

When Oprah was a teenager in Nashville, she worked at a corner grocery store next to her father’s barber shop.

"I wasn't allowed to talk to the customers, and can you imagine for me?" she later told Oprah.com. "That was very, very, very hard."

So she looked for opportunities she was passionate about.

And at age 16, she landed a job that paid her to talk — reading the news on a local radio station, which she loved.