Meet Britain's entrepreneurial elite. Here are the leaders who have managed to create a UK business worth £1bn - and kept going. These are people who have built ventures spanning everything from artificial intelligence and virtual reality to hoodies and craft beer.

You'll find discount retailers and a diamond dealer, bookmakers and the woman behind one of the biggest gambling companies in the world. Some of these founders left school without a qualification, others have PhDs. There are those who toiled away for years and are still in charge of their company after more than half a century.

There are others who have catapulted their way onto this list within just a few years by developing tech for which investors have been willing to write out very large cheques in the hope they are buying into the next Apple, Google or Facebook. One thing unites them all. At one point it was just them, perhaps a co-founder or two, an idea and a desire to try their luck.

The UK needs more of these billion-pound entrepreneurs with the energy and hunger to keep building. It needs more businesses that employ people by the thousand, not by the dozens or hundreds. The profiles may be of truly exceptional people, but their stories have lessons for businesses of every size.