SULEMAN ALI

Suleman Ali, 26, is a Co-Founder & CEO at Esgut. He is a former Microsoft employee, sold Esgut, his portfolio of Facebook applications, for seven figures in April of 2008. He founded Esgut within months of Facebook’s developer platform being launched.

On a whim, he wrote an application for Facebook, the social networking Web site, called Superlatives, which lets visitors rate their friends as the smartest, best-looking and such. It immediately caught fire.

“He basically started building it out of boredom, and people started noticing it three days after I launched it,” says Ali. So did interested suitors: Nine months later, the 26-year-old sold his hobby-cum-enterprise, called Esgut, to Palo Alto, Calif.-based Social Gaming Network for “several million dollars” (he’s not allowed to share the exact purchase price).

He have found calling Suleman Ali in life: making something where there was nothing before using software. I love it. I love reading about it, thinking about it, writing about it, talking about it, and doing it.

Suleman Ali was estimated to have hit $1 million in revenue in its first year of operation.