Top Most Successful Student Entrepreneurs

There was a time when young people went to college with only one hope in mind: to graduate with good grades and get a stable job. In the past few decades, however, a new trend has started to take shape. Now more and more students are turning into successful young entrepreneurs while they are in college. A university student now knows that to succeed in life, they don’t have just one option. They can come up with a brand-new idea, apply for some venture capital, and launch their startup when they graduate. And a lot of the time, they even start their business while studying.

Young Entrepreneurs Who Started When They Were Students

To motivate young entrepreneurs to dive into their dream of working for themselves, the following list of companies started by the most successful student entrepreneurs has been compiled. Going through this list, you will be able to see that it is a good idea to start working on acquiring venture capital funding and advertising revenue for your new company right from college. When you do so, you’ll be in a strong position to kick off your business swiftly and efficiently.

·       Google

When you think about internet business, Google has to be one of the first names to come up. This massive search engine was started all the way back in 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford. The original name of their search engine was BackRub. When investors in Silicon Valley got wind of their product, they invested $100,000 in the students’ business, and that was how Google really kicked off.

Starting from an office in a garage, Google has now become much more than just a search engine. This is an excellent example of why some venture capital funding is often the key for a business to take off strongly and develop into a multi-billion-dollar endeavor.

·       Facebook

As far as young entrepreneurs who got their break in college go, Mark Zuckerberg is perhaps the most famous one in today’s time. Along with his friends, he started Facebook in 2004 as a way for Harvard students to connect with each other. The original service, known as Facemash, allowed the students to decide who was more attractive than others after comparing photos. This, however, was shut down by the university’s administration as the photos being used were stolen from the university’s network.

After Facemash, the idea was turned into TheFacebook, which helped students get in touch with each other. Soon after its creation, the service was opened to other Ivy League colleges and then expanded further to more institutions before becoming a public social media website. Facebook is a very good example of businesses started by students that didn’t have a million in venture funding to become extremely popular on a global scale.

·       Snapchat

In 2011, a group of three Stanford students, including Evan Spiegel, came up with the idea for Snapchat. Spiegel had presented the idea as part of his product design class. The trio then decided to take it forward as they wanted to create an app that allowed people to share awkward moments with friends without having to worry about manually deleting them later on. Spiegel wanted people to communicate with each other using the full range of human emotion’, which is not possible with still images.

Snapchat turned out to be one of the biggest social media apps used by young people all around the world. It just goes to show that the best real estate for an office and huge amounts of venture capital funding is not always needed to kick off a business. Sometimes, it’s just a combination of hard work and a good idea.

·       FedEx

A student of Yale, Frederick W. Smith, came up with the idea for this overnight shipping service in 1971. He believed that a company that specialized in airfreight could be very profitable and successful. To bring his idea to fruition, Smith used $4 million of his inheritance money in combination with a whopping $91 million in venture capital. While he lost a very high amount of money in the first 26 months of business, he soon started seeing his hard work pay off. Today, FedEx Express is the largest express shipping company in the whole world.

·       WordPress

When a popular blogging program known as b2/cafelog stopped working back in 2003, two students at the University of Houston who had used this program decided to come up with their own platform. Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little developed the new platform while using the original software as the basis. Over time, this platform really took off, and many developers, scientists, developers, and bloggers started using it. Today, WordPress is being used by more than half of all the websites you see on the internet. Just an example of how young entrepreneurs can be highly successful when they put their hard work into action.

Conclusion

If you are a university student and you have a good idea, don’t wait on it. There have been plenty of students who have turned into successful entrepreneurs just because they decided to give their ideas a fair shot. Not all of them had advertising revenue or capital funding either. Rather, they used their hard work to develop their products and put them out there for the world to see. These days, using platforms like Facebook and Instagram, it’s easier for students to market their business without any advertising revenue. So, whenever you have a good idea for a product or service you think will work, use the platforms created by successful young entrepreneurs before you market your work. There is a lot that students can do while they’re studying, and starting a successful business is one such thing.