October 04, 2007

Thursday Trivia 5 - famous dropouts

Bill gates, dropped out of Harvard law college, when he was just 19 years old to start Micro-soft, along with Paul Allen who dropped out in his sophomore years from Washington State University to work as a programmer for Honeywell

Steve Jobs dropped out from Reed College after six months

Blake Ross started as an intern at Netscape Communications when he was a 15-year-old prep school student in Miami. At age 17, he helped created the Firefox Web browser, which has since grown into the biggest threat to Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Richard Branson suffered from dyslexia and dropped out of high school at 16 years of age. when he was 15, he had started two business ventures: growing Christmas trees and raising parrots! When he was 17, Branson opened his first charity and started his first record business. Along with Nik Powell, Branson opened a small record store in London called "Virgin.

Evan Williams Dropped out from college at 20 and sold his pioneer blogging company to Google

Popular web content distribution software, RSS was invented by Swartz when he was just 14. Swartz joined Stanford to graduate in sociology but dropped out to co-found reditt.com

Larry Ellison out his sophomore year at the University of Illinois and then dropped out again after just one quarter at the University of Chicago

Michael Dell, in his dorm at University of Texas Started started to custom-build and sell computers. Dell's computer business actually was so successful that at the age of 19 he dropped out of college to run the business full-time.

Ralp Lauren, Ray kroc, Walt Disney, Albert Einstein, Steve wozniak, Li-Ka- Shing(founder of Hutchison group, this guy is simply amazing), Ted Turner(kicked off from college), Amancio Ortega(son of a railway worker went on to became one of the richest Spaniard) are few more prominent business magnets and inventors who dropped out of college but still succeeded in there endeavors.

Moral of the story - Its all about passion.
Thanks Utsav for helping me out in the post. Will be posting Thursday trivia bi-weekly from now.

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