The Dorm Room Entrepreneurs

Here’s a brief run-through of dorm room entrepreneurs who made it big.

• Microsoft

Only a few companies can claim to have dramatically changed the way that the world does business. Microsoft, being the software giant certainly can. Created by Bill Gates in the dorm rooms of Harvard in 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for Altair 8800. It gained ground in the home market in 1980s with Xenix which although a corporate failure was one of the vital innovations of required for creation of MS-DOS, the company’s biggest success till date. With computer revolution, the company grew hugely in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Windows 95 in mid-90s launched Microsoft to forefront of the computer software industry. The company’s success continued in 2000s, with commercial successes such as Windows XP and X-Box. Microsoft’s vision is “A computer on every desk and Microsoft software on every computer.” Being an ambitious person, Bill’s hard work and competitiveness has led to Microsoft’s oligopoly in the industry.

• Facebook

Facebook has the most eminent formation story when college-bred companies are taken into account. Today, it’s the most celebrated social networking site. The abstraction behind Facebook was quite elementary and started right out of Harvard’s dorm room. It enclosed a lot of melodrama. The site was initially just meant for Harvard students. It gained popularity so fast that within days, over half of the college used Facebook as a virtual portrayal of college social experience. Pretty soon, the site grew and it incorporated more schools, colleges then general public and now has become the multi-billion dollar enterprise. Today it’s one of the most visited website.

• Dell

When asked by a bold student at University of Texas, “You’ve got so much money. Why don’t you just sell out, buy a boat and sail off to the Caribbean?” Dell replied, “Sailing’s boring. Do you have any idea how much fun it is to run a billion dollar company?”

For years the Dell name was apposite with innovation. Dell had the fastest personal computer ever made just two years after it was founded. The company’s rise to the apical of the computing world was fast however its origin was astonishingly simple. It was founded by Michael Dell while attending the University of Texas in Austin, in 1984, with a 1000 dollars capital and headquarters in his university dorm room. Dell is the living example that you don’t need an enormous start-up fund to create a profitable enterprise. Today, Dell is a billion dollar organisation. He did it by being firmly focussed on doing business as opposed to making money. Dell has managed to build a world-class company, enrich thousands of employees and shareholders along with himself. For a college drop-out that’s not too shabby!

• Google

“Basically, our goal is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

-Larry Page

Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, developed the idea for a more powerful and effective search engine while working together as PhD students in Stanford. The duo started working together on Page’s BackRub research project which explored backlinks-links on other sites that allude back to a given webpage and named this technology as PageRank, which dogged a website’s relevance by the number and importance of pages that linked back to the original site. The domain name ‘google’ was registered in ’97. They started in a rented garage and bagged their first funding of $100,000 in 1999. Google’s IPO took place in 2004 and since then it has become one of the most valuable multi-billion dollar brand. In fact, we might find the word ‘searching’ replaced by ‘googling’ in the years to come!

• Napster

While it may no longer be the household name it was once, this peer to peer file sharing service used to be the one of the most popular programs in the world. It was started by a group of college students Shawn Fanning, Sean Parker and John Fanning in 1999 at Northeastern University. It destroyed the market for CDs, but gave friends and strangers an ability to share music. Free MP3 downloads were damaging to artists, issues of pirating and copyright infringement eventually closed the company. However, at its peak, it had more than 80 million users in just two years. It officially revolutionised the way the world would download and access music.

• WordPress

Can we imagine the blogging world without WordPress? It has immensely changed not only the blogging world but also people’s ability to develop websites. WordPress succeeded b2 or cafelog. WordPress first appeared in 2003, founded by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little while studying at the University of Houston. This open source project has been a game changer in the field of Internet. These college freshmen started a simple idea in their dorm rooms which now is so huge that hundreds of millions of people view pages created on WordPress every week.

Arguably, successful entrepreneurship is more about bringing good ideas to materialisation rather than venture capital. College provides us with a fertile ground for expanding as well as developing some pretty husky business ideas and manifesting them.

Also Read:Lessons to learn from Elon Musk