Niche College Scholarship

Scholarships.com Blog

search

Top 10 Most Successful College Entrepreneurs

Top 10 Most Successful College Entrepreneurs
6/30/2011
|
Suada Kolovic

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?

Related
We make it simple and match you to college scholarships you qualify for.