Here are the industries I considered to be "finance":
- Hedge funds and other money management
- Private equity
- Investment banking
- Leveraged buyouts
- Proprietary trading
- Traditional (retail) banking and credit cards
I did not consider heirs with investments to have gotten their money in finance, unless they increased their original sum ten-fold or more (in real dollars). I also did not consider real estate investment/speculation to be finance.
Since the ecosystem of non-bootstrapped startups combine founders and financiers, where do you draw the line? VC firms seem squarely in the financier camp, and founders who do not contribute capital are not, but angels and incubators are more difficult. An honest classification attempt would attribute some of their equity to capital and some to work contribution, but even when there is currently a stable valuation available to calculate the capital contribution to an equity grant, the numbers are often uncertain guesses.
Just fyi, every person you listed above founded the financial company that made them rich. So they are founders and did do a startup - just not a technology startup.
How are you defining "startup"? "Startup" for most people has technology connotations. To quote PG:
"Startups are a comparatively new phenomenon. Fairchild Semiconductor is considered the first VC-backed startup, and they were founded in 1959, less than fifty years ago."
Clearly, he's referring to tech startups specifically. If you consider any small company that becomes big a startup, then Rockefeller and Carnegie made their wealth in startups.
I can't imagine describing either Renaissance (founded by Simon) or DE Shaw as anything but tech companies. They use technology as a competitive advantage in investments, much like Amazon uses technology as it's competitive advantage in retail.
James Simons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Simons) was a mathematician who founded Renaissance Technologies a HFT (High-freq. trading) hedge fund. A lot more of a tech company than a finance company I would say.
You see, while these guys are in Finance, at least 1/3rd of the above have serious hacking skills, not traditional finance skills;
James Simons - math, but closer to hacker than financier
Kenneth Griffin - was financial hacker , not a dealmaker
DE Shaw - another hacker, a computer scientist/compbio
None of the above except Shaw are technology people. Simons is a mathematician, and Griffin seems to have a pure finance background:
"While still at Harvard University, he started two funds from his dorm room, and he claims that in between classes he would make trades. He even installed a special satellite link to his dorm to acquire real-time market data. After graduating with a degree in economics, he won the attention of an investor named Frank C. Meyer, founder of Glenwood Capital [1]. Meyer was amazed at Griffin's success and rate of return with his investments (which at the time were largely based on convertible bonds), and provided a relatively small investment for Griffin to invest ($1 million) [2]. Griffin exceeded Meyer's expectations, and as word of his strong performance spread, investors persuaded to back Griffin. Citadel was officially founded Nov. 1, 1990 with $4.2 million; the name "Citadel" was chosen to suggest strength in times of volatility [3]." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_C._Griffin
