Founded in 1982, Adobe Systems is a software company that exhibits the four primary characteristics that define an entrepreneurial venture:
1. Amount of wealth creation: Adobe generated $943 million in profits in 2010.
2. Speed of wealth creation: Adobe took off rapidly, releasing PostScript a year after its inception and Illustrator five years after its inception, both of which are still in extremely wide use today.
3. Risk: Founders John Warnock and Charles Geschke sustained a significant amount of risk by forming a new company in the volatile technology industry.4. Innovation: Adobe’s products are highly innovative. Its products include PostScript, with its radical approach to publishing, the vector program Illustrator, and Photoshop, now an industry standard which has even become part of everyday vocabulary. It continued to innovate with the creation of the PDF, and reacted to the Internet boom with Dreamweaver and Flash – although it was just announced that Flash will no longer be developed for mobile devices.