10 Famous Companies That Were Founded By College Students

Did you know that three of the world class websites were all started by college students? Yes, indeed. That is the power that college students have in the global arena.

However, success does not come cheap. For all these college success stories, a heavy price has been paid whether it’s at the expense of them dropping out of college or facing a number of hurdles along the way. As a college student, if you are looking to take on that path and start your own start-up, you should be prepared to face any challenges that may come your way.

It is not hard to find an idea that you can easily actualize. Do not look for a big idea, instead, concentrate on finding a big problem which you can then go ahead and solve. It might take you a while, but you need to be passionate and dedicated to what you are doing if indeed you dream of launching a successful start-up while still in college.

This piece will look at the infographic by Essaymama titled “10 most valuable startups launched by students” and dig into some of the challenges founders faced as they attempted to realize their dreams and the results they eventually got.

1. Microsoft, Bill Gates and Paul Allen

They were both co-founders of the billion dollar Microsoft enterprise. It all started while in middle and high school when the two programming geniuses met. Bill joined Harvard University, but, after a year, Paul convinced him to drop out, to which he obliged. After struggling during the first few years, they realized success when they licensed MS-DOS to IBM in 1981.

2. Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg

As a Harvard undergrad, Zuckerberg started Facebook as a sophomore to help connect with fellow college students. From what started as a sophomore dating site back in 2004, seven years later became a site with over 1.39 billion active users.

3. Yahoo, Jerry Yang and David Filo

These two Stanford Graduate Students founded Yahoo in 1995. They did it three years before Google was launched. They started Yahoo as a directory of their favorite websites. In as much as the platform struggled for a number of years, it remains one of the largest websites.

4. Reddit, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian

The two grads from the University of Virginia started reddit as a social news site in 2005. After struggling for a few months, they were funded by Y Combinator. It wasn’t until 2006 that Conde Nast Publications acquired the entity.

5. WordPress, Matt Mullenweg

In 2003, the undergrad student of Houston University teamed up with Mike Little and Michel Valdrigh to create this awesome Content Management System. Today, the platform hosts more than 130,000 websites out of the top 1 million websites.

6. Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin

They were both graduates of Stanford University and founders of Google in 1998. They had a hard time juggling between their start-up and their studies and even opted to sell it to Excite for $1 million. Fortunately, Excite declined the offer.

7. Time Magazine, Britton Hadden and Henry Luce

You may not believe it, but these grads from Yale launched Time in 1923, and at that time it was the first weekly news magazine in the United States. The magazine has grown to become one of the world’s largest circulated weekly news magazine.

8. Napster, Shawn Fanning

The grad student from Northeastern University started Napster as a peer-to-peer file sharing network. After just 2 years, the platform was temporarily shut down due to copyright issues. However,  Napster became an online music store and eventually was acquired by Rhapsody.

9. Dell, Michael Dell

The undergrad student of Texas University created Dell in 1984. After struggling at first, he received a $300,000 investment from his family and decided to drop out of college. Now Dell is the #1 shipper of PC monitors in the world and is the sixth largest company in Texas by total revenue.

10. Tripod, Bo Peabody and Brett Hershey

The web hosting service was started by two Williams College students in 1992. The website was initially created for college students and provided such resources and services as resume-writing help and tools for website building. However, later Tripod was bought by Lycos.

Most of these individuals encountered different challenges during their journey but they did not give up on their dream. As college students wishing to pursue their dream, always keep faith and never give up!