Many companies and brands that are part of our daily lives were founded, back there, by university students. However, the success of these ventures was far from easy. Today successful entrepreneurs, these students of the past faced several problems, and some even dropped out of college to dedicate 100% to their dreams. Are you curious? So check out some great companies founded by university students now.
1. Microsoft – Bill Gates and Paul Allen
Microsoft is one of the key companies in the history of computing and computer development and today is worth billions of dollars. And it was co-founded by two students who met in elementary school. One of them, Bill Gates, went to study for 1 year at Harvard , but convinced by Paul Allen (the other friend), he left the course to dedicate himself totally to the creation of his business. It was a few years of struggle until, in 1981, they experienced the taste of success for the first time by licensing the MS-DOS operating system to IBM.
One of the buildings at the Microsoft complex in Redmond, Washington
2. Yahoo – Jerry Yang and David Filo
These two Stanford graduate students founded Yahoo in 1995, three years before the launch of Google. In the beginning, the idea was to create a directory of your favorite sites, but as you well know, Yahoo has grown and, although it has experienced problems in recent years, it remains one of the largest platforms of its kind in the world.
3. Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg
You can’t talk about big companies founded by university students without mentioning Facebook. You must know this story by now ( there’s even a movie ).
Zuckerberg started Facebook when he was a sophomore at Harvard in 2004, and the intention at first was to connect with other students at the institution on a kind of dating site. However, 7 years later, Facebook has become a giant with almost 1.5 billion active users worldwide.
But it is worth remembering that Zuckerberg was not solely responsible for the creation of Facebook. In fact, he was one of the company’s five co-founders. Among them was the Brazilian Eduardo Saverin, who also studied at the same university.
Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, California
4. Reddit – Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian
Reddit (a social network where users can post links to content on the Web) started as a news site in 2005 at the hands of two recent graduates from the University of Virginia. After a few months of struggle to make the idea work, they got a lot of funding and, about 1 year later, sold the company to Conde Nast, one of the largest international magazine publishing groups.
5. Google – Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Both studied at Stanford University and founded Google in 1998. They struggled to reconcile the start of their professional activities with their studies and even opted to sell the newly created company for $ 1 million to Excite, a pretty web portal. used at the time. Fortunately the deal was declined and the rest is history.
Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California
6. WordPress – Matt Mullenweg
In 2003, Matt Mullenweg, until then a graduate student at the University of Houston, Texas, teamed up with Mike Little and Michel Valdrigh to create this incredible content management system. Today, the platform hosts more than 130,000 websites around the world (and one of them is ours!).
7. Time Magazine – Britton Hadden and Henry Luce
You may not believe it, but Time Magazine, one of the most important of all time, was founded by two Yale students in the distant year of 1923. In its early years it became the country’s number one weekly news magazine. The years passed and the magazine continued to grow, being today one of the largest weekly circulation in the world.
8. Dell – Michael Dell
The graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin created Dell in 1984 with just $ 1,000. After much insisting, he managed to convince his family to invest more money in the project and decided to drop out of college. It worked! Today Dell is the largest supplier of computer monitors in the world and the sixth largest company in the state of Texas in total revenue.
Dell headquarters in Round Rock, Texas
As you can see, all these college students went through several challenges during their journey, but they did not give up on their dreams. And it was all worth it!
So if you are or intend to be a university student and follow this path of creating your own startup , you must be prepared to face any challenges that may arise with a lot of passion and dedication.
