To celebrate us college dropouts I thought I would compile a list some of the top entrepreneurs who dropped out of college and then went on to make it big in the business world!
Top 30 College Drop Outs Who Made It Big In Business
Rank | Name | Business | Dropped Out At | Age | Networth |
1 | Henry Ford | Ford Motor Company | 16 | Dead | $188 Billion (in 2009 dollars) |
2 | Bill Gates | Microsoft | 19 | 53 | $59 Billion |
3 | Larry Ellison | Oracle | 20 | 64 | $27 Billion |
4 | Sheldon Adelson | Las Vegas Sands Corp. | 19 | 77 | $26 Billion |
5 | Larry Page | Graduated University of Michigan | 35 | $18.5 Billion | |
6 | Kirk Kerkorian | Tracinda | 12 | 91 | $18 Billion |
7 | Michael Dell | Dell | 19 | 43 | $17.3 Billion |
8 | Paul Allen | Microsoft | 20 | 56 | $16.0 Billion |
9 | David Geffen | Geffen Records | 21 | 65 | $6.5 Billion |
10 | Steve Jobs | Apple | 18 | 53 | $5.4 Billion |
11 | Richard Branson | Virgin | 16 | 58 | $4.4 Billion |
12 | Takafumi Horie | Livedoor | 22 | 35 | $3.6 Billion |
13 | Ralph Lauren | Ralph Lauren | 20 | 69 | $3.6 Billion |
14 | Subhash Chandra Goel | Zee TV | 12 | 58 | $2.3 Billion |
15 | Jerry Yang | Yahoo | Graduated Stanford | 40 | $1.9 Billion |
16 | Mark Zuckerberg | 19 | 23 | $700 Million | |
17 | Russell Simmons | DefJam | 19 | 52 | $340 Million |
18 | Matt Mullenweg | WordPress | 18 | 25 | $200 Million |
19 | Mahesh Murthy | Pinstorm & SeedFund | 19 | 43 | $200 Million |
20 | Jawed Karim | YouTube | 21 | 30 | $64 Million |
21 | Kevin Rose | Digg | 21 | 31 | $60 Million |
22 | Jared Isaacman | United Bank Card | 17 | 26 | $50 Million |
23 | Kevin Sproles | Volusion | 18 | 26 | $17 Million |
24 | Shawn Fanning | Napster | 19 | 28 | $7.5 Million |
25 | Scott Wainner | ResellerRatings | 20 | 26 | $7 Million |
26 | Rob Benwell | Blogging To The Bank | 18 | 23 | $5 Million |
27 | Graham Langdon | Entrecard | 19 | 21 | $3.2 Million |
28 | Kristopher Tate | Zooomr | 17 | 20 | $3 Million |
29 | Aaron Levie | Box.Net | 20 | 23 | $3 Million |
30 | Reed Caldwell | ServInt | 19 | 32 | $2.5 Million |
An Inspiring List Of Entrepreneurs
Interesting and inspiring selection I think you will agree. Not all are complete dropouts – some actually have pretty impressive academic achievements to their name but alas the call of their Entrepreneurial Ventures took them to leave those studies and instead go on to create considerable wealth plus businesses that in some case have touched Billions of people.
Take for example Jerry Yang of Yahoo, who created Yahoo as a graduate student at Stanford University to monitor his personal interests in the early days of the Web. Yang’s official biography even contains the standing joke that he is “currently on a leave of absence from Stanford’s electrical engineering Ph.D. program,”
And there is of course Larry Page of Google – another Stanford doctoral program dropout.
One entrepreneur who in particular impressed me was Michael Dell – who started a computer company called PCs Limited while attending the University of Texas in Austin. It became so successful that Dell dropped out of school to operate it, and the company eventually became Dell, Inc, with revenues of $57.4 billion in 2007. In 2006, Dell and his wife gave a $50 million grant to the University which he attended but never graduated from.
One remarkable fact I noted when compiling this list, was the number of businesses that started of in a garage. Take for example the HP corporation which started life in a tiny 12×18 foot garage. And then there is also Google and Apple who started life in a garage.
And the Most Notable Young Entrepreneurs Of Recent Times?
Well it is Mark Zuckerberg of course.
Facebook Founder, Mark Zuckerberg has an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion and believed by some to be the wealthiest man younger than 25 in the USA. Mark Zuckerberg, like Bill Gates, is a Harvard dropout.
After launching Facebook school-wide from his dorm room at Harvard in February 2004, Zuckerberg began devoting more and more time to his program, gradually spreading it to other schools. By that summer, Zuckerberg and his roommate Dustin Moskovitz had released Facebook to nearly 30 schools, and the website was growing too popular to be run part-time.