College campuses have been the breeding grounds for some of the most successful business in the world. We’re talking Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo! to name a few. Check out who else made Huffington Post’s list of the most successful college entrepreneurs:
- Mark Zuckerberg: In 2004, at the ripe age of 19, Zuckerberg created what would one day become the second most visited website in the world – Facebook.
- Bill Gates: After taking a leave of absence from Harvard, Gates started creating processors and computer interfaces that are still used today. He then founded a little company you might have heard of (Microsoft).
- Michael Dell: Dell was a pre-med student at the University of Texas, Austin in 1984 when he started a small business in his dorm upgrading computers. He went public in 1988 and eventually brought “Dude, you’re getting a Dell!” to the masses.
- Bo Peabody: As a student at Williams College, Peabody, Bretty Hershey and their economics professor designed one of the original social networks in 1992. Today, it is known as Tripod.com.
- Jerry Yang and David Filo: Graduate students at Stanford University, Yang and Filo created Yahoo! as a way to help their Stanford friends locate cool websites.
- Steve Wozniak: In 1975, Wozniak dropped out of the University of California, Berkeley to work with Steve Jobs on circuit board designs and operating systems. These projects eventually evolved into Apple.
- Larry Page and Sergey Brin: In 1996, Page and Brin, who were PhD students at Stanford University at the time, left school to begin working on a new search technology founded on one idea that the order of websites listed on search engines would be based on relevance. From that idea, Google was born.
- Marc Andreessen: While at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Andreessen and Eric Bana began creating a user-friendly browser that integrated graphics and would work on a range of computers. They called it Mosaic, Andreessen eventually started his own software company, Mosaic Netscape.
- Frederick W. Smith: As an undergrad at Yale, Smith wrote a paper outlining a delivery system that would work in a computer-dominated industry. After he graduated, Smith ran with the idea and founded Federal Express.
- Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian: After graduating from the University of Virginia in 2005, Huffman and Ohanian founded the popular social news website Reddit.
What do you think of the individuals that made the list? Any surprises? Do you think it’s problematic that not a single woman made the list?