My liquidity moment: Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s

Ice-cream man: Ben Cohen

It was 1978, and Ben Cohen, a struggling potter, and his school friend, Jerry Greenfield, who had just failed to get into medical school, were weighing their options.

“Neither of us was getting anywhere, so we decided we might as well start our own business,” Cohen recalls. The pair hatched a plan to find a warm, rural college town and make ice cream. “Unfortunately, all the warm towns already had ice-cream shops, so we ended up in Burlington, Vermont. We fixed up a dilapidated gas station and started making ice cream right there.” Ben & Jerry’s was born.