Sara Blakely

She cold-called every hosiery mill in the United States with a patent she'd written herself, a product nobody thought existed, and a name she'd made up in the back of a car. Twenty-one years later, she hadn't taken a single dollar of outside capital. What separates Blakely from every other consumer brand founder of her era is not the idea — it is the duration of the conviction, held without institutional validation for two decades.