1. 10 Most Successful College Entrepreneurs
Here are ten modern success stories that began in college:
(1) Mark Zuckerberg
He created the social networking site Facebook with three classmates while at
Harvard. Like several successful billionaires before him, he later dropped out. That
didn’t stop Time Magazine from naming him the 2010 Person of the Year.
Zuckerberg’s current net worth is estimated at $13.5 billion.
(2) Bill Gates
Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates developed an algorithm at Harvard
to solve a problem in one of his math courses; it was later published as an
academic paper in collaboration with one of the Harvard computer scientists. His
other early projects included starting a computer software company with high
school classmate Paul Allen, and later collaborating with IBM. Forbes listed him
as the world’s richest person every year from 1995 to 2007.
(3) Michael Dell
Dell was already a successful businessperson in high school, selling newspaper
subscriptions and investing his earnings. Before he dropped out of the University
of Texas at Austin, he started a computer upgrading business that later became
Dell, Inc. His current net worth is approximately $14.6 billion.
(4) Bo Peabody
In 1992, Peabody co-founded Tripod, Inc., featuring the free web hosting service
Tripod.com, with a Williams College classmate and a professor. Tripod is now
owned by Lycos, and Peabody has founded several other companies and is
currently the Managing General Partner of Village Ventures.
(5) Jerry Yang and David Filo
This pair co-founded Yahoo! Inc. in 1995 while studying Electrical Engineering at
Stanford University. They created a popular web site directory, later renamed
“Yahoo!” They both dropped out of the doctoral program to pursue the venture,
which is currently one of the nation’s largest Web portals.

2. (6) Steve Wozniack
With Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne, Wozniack co-founded Apple Computer while
at the University of California, Berkeley. He and Jobs invented “blue boxes,”
devices that permitted people to make free long-distance phone calls. He later
dropped out of college, and the pair began building circuit boards and operating
systems. They are credited with launching the personal computer industry.
Wozniack left Apple in 1985 and started his own company, WoZ.
(7) Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Currently worth about $19.8 billion each, Page and Brin co-founded Google, Inc.,
the world’s largest Internet company, in 1998. They met at Stanford University and
developed the original search engine on computers in their dorm room. Eventually,
they postponed their doctoral study to launch Google as a business.
(8) Marc Andreessen
While at the University of Illinois, Andreessen and a co-worker at the school’s
National Center for Supercomputing Applications created the Mosaic browser in
1992. His most notable work has taken place after his graduation, however, since
he is better known today as the co-founder of Netscape and Ning, among other
technology ventures.
(9) Frederick W. Smith
Smith founded Federal Express (now known as the FedEx Corporation) in 1971
after graduating from Yale, where he had written a paper about the need for a
centralized overnight delivery service. The assignment reportedly received a
lukewarm reception from his professor, yet the idea took off and it began
operations in 1973.
(10) Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian
Roommates at the University of Virginia, this duo founded the popular social news
site reddit in 2005. Huffman eventually left reddit and co-founded hipmunk.com, a
travel information and search site. Conde Nast acquired reddit in 2006.