Top 10 Famous Startups Started in College

There’s a good reason they tell you that your student years are the best time of your life to start a business. It’s not like you have a lot to lose, right? But if your business takes off, you’re in for a high reward! Plus, you have so many campus resources at your disposal:

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Competitions and incubators;
Free Wi-Fi and coworking spaces;
Professors whose brains you can pick;
Like-minded spirits who can become your co-founders.

That’s why you see how many startups founded by college students turned into highly-profitable companies. There’s one thing these founders have in common – they put their venture above everything else. Yes, even above studying.

You don’t have to drop out like Bill Gates, though: You don’t have to choose between graduating and making your venture into a thriving one anymore!

So, let’s break down ten of the most recognized brands created by students.

Facebook

It’s no surprise to see Facebook on this list. Everyone knows its story, in part thanks to The Social Network film. While at Harvard University, then-student Mark Zuckerberg built Facemash. It later evolved into TheFacebook and, eventually, Facebook.

Fast-forward to 2021, and Facebook is a social network with 2.91 billion monthly active users. What’s more, the company now owns Instagram and WhatsApp. In some countries like Myanmar, Facebook has even become synonymous with the internet!

Dell

You’ve seen Dell products – and maybe even used them, too – at least once in your life. It’s well-known mostly for its PCs and laptops. But the company also deals in servers, printers, HDTVs, and computer peripherals.

But what you may not have known is that Michael Dell was enrolled at the University of Texas when he founded the company in 1984. He set up his base of operations in his off-campus dorm. Dell also chose to drop out after his freshman year to, as you can guess, focus on growing the business.

Dropbox

In 2007, two MIT students, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi filed the paperwork to found Evenflow, Inc. If you don’t know, it’s the company behind the cloud storage service Dropbox. Interestingly, Houston got inspired to create the service concept after forgetting his USB flash drive too many times.

Houston and Ferdowsi got their initial funding from Y Combinator – a seed accelerator that invested in Stripe, Airbnb, Twitch, and Reddit. Now, Dropbox can boast more than 700 million registered users in 180 countries and $1.9 billion in revenue (2020).

Google

What later came to be Google – the one search engine – started as a research project of two Stanford University Ph.D. students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They were helped by Scott Hassan, a member of the Computer Science Department staff.

Over a bit more than just two decades, Google grew from a startup into a tech giant – one of the Big Five companies in the tech industry. Its name is now a verb, even: you don’t look for something online, you google.

College is the best place to meet like-minded people – and, sometimes, they can be your roommates. Reddit, for example, was conceived and founded by two roommates who studied at the University of Virginia, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian.

After its initial development in 2005, the two managed to get funding from Y Combinator and grow it into a big enough startup to attract the attention of Condé Nast Publications. The deal reportedly cost the owner of Wired between $10 and $20 million.

Snapchat

Yes, your favorite app for sending ephemeral messages came to be thanks to three Stanford students: Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown. The concept itself was Spiegel’s project for the product design class!

As you well know, Snapchat turned out to be a success – so much so that Forbes named Spiegel the youngest billionaire in 2015. Now, 293 million people send out over 4 billion snaps every day.

WordPress

In case you haven’t heard of WordPress, it’s a CMS that powers a huge chunk of the web (42.8%, to be exact). You can use WordPress to create any website imaginable: LMS, online store, forums – you name it.

But initially, it was conceived and designed to be a blog publishing system. One of the two developers behind it is Matt Mullenweg; he was a student at the University of Houston at the time.

Oculus

Palmer Luckey has always been obsessed with making virtual reality tech convenient and accessible for everyone. He experimented with various headsets for years. One of them – the Rift – was good enough to launch a Kickstarter campaign.

This is how Oculus VR, which was later acquired by Facebook, came to be. Luckey was a student at California State University at the time of that fateful Kickstarter campaign. (He managed to raise 974% of the original campaign goal, by the way – $2.4 million!)

Imgur

Imgur is the creation of Alan Schaaf – a computer science student at Ohio University at the time. At first, it was just a side project – but it quickly grew into a service used by 300 million people monthly.

Alan Schaaf came up with the idea for Imgur after realizing how inconvenient it was to share images on Reddit. And, according to him, “it took off almost immediately”, reaching millions of daily visits per day within the first five months.

Yahoo

In 1994, two graduate students studying electrical engineering at Stanford University, Jerry Yang and David Filo, founded Yahoo. At that time, it was only a web directory – a predecessor of modern search engines.

Yahoo might be the butt of many jokes today, but it used to be a major player in the tech industry in the first decade of its existence. And even now, it remains a company that raked in $7.4 billion in revenue in 2020.

In Conclusion

Got inspired by these ten stories? Great! But remember: inspiration isn’t the only thing they had. Persistence and hard work are what made them. So, if you want to start a business, prepare to work day and night to overcome one challenge over another.

That said, if you have an idea for a product, go ahead and bring it to life while you’re a student. Arguably, you have more chances to succeed now than when you’re 30 and married with two kids!

Author Profile

Adam Regan

Deputy Editor

Features and account management. 3 years media experience. Previously covered features for online and print editions.

Email Adam@MarkMeets.com