Five businesses that started at university
Let’s be fair, it doesn’t really matter which university you attend for a great idea to really take hold. If an idea is good enough, then your education won’t normally factor into whether or not the idea truly takes off.
That being said, it’s important to have a bit of education behind you and to have an idea of the things you’re going to be coming up against in the big wide world and university is a great place to learn those things.
Mark Zuckerberg — Facebook: Harvard University
Barely a day goes by without people being reminded that Mark Zuckerberg started up one of the biggest social media platforms the world has ever seen in his dormitory at Harvard University. Whether it be through the numerous thinkpiece articles splattered all over the internet, seeing Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake and Andrew Garfield in The Social Network or generally seeing articles on staring your own business, Facebook’s meteoric rise is ubiquitous among internet culture.
Facebook started off as a rather vulgar way for students to rate the hotness of female students at Harvard University, before then becoming a large scale social media site that soon began to expand across the country and later the globe.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin — Google: Stanford University
Yep, Google started off at Stanford University! Nowadays, there isn’t a single piece of knowledge that can’t be found on Google. Simply typing in a query into the search engine and you are greeted with more results and matches than you could probably ever need.
What makes Google so utterly unique from other search engines that were around at the time (and still makes it stand apart from the rest) is that Google ranks a website by the importance of its pages with PageRank rather than the number of times a keyword or phrase would appear on a website.
In fact, the name Google is actually a typo! The site was intended to be called Googol, which is a hugely high number. In fact, it’s the number 1 with 100 zeros, shown mainly as 10100 which was intended to be a pun on the amount of results the engine could pull down.
Alexis Ohanian & Steve Huffman — Reddit: University of Virginia
Twitter and Facebook are the social media sites that get most of the glory, and its difficult to argue why, however, for people looking for a place for discussion, breaking news or just pictures of cats, then Reddit is the place for you!
Alexis Ohanian & Steve Huffman’s first idea was for a mobile order service, where people could order food by SMS messages, but it was unsuccessful (probably best not to mention Deliveroo around these guys) and the two decided instead to create “the front page of the internet”.
These days, Reddit is often shrouded in controversy for the subreddits that have appeared on the site, but Reddit remains a hugely popular website and is worth nearly $3bn!
Evan Spiegel, Reggie Brown and Bobby Murphy — Snapchat: Stanford University
At its core, Snapchat seems like a fairly straightforward idea. A mobile-first application that allows users to send images and emojis to each other, but in reality, Snapchat is the results of years of hard work.
The history of Snapchat is, like Facebook, a bloody, mysterious and controversial subject, but the story goes that Reggie Brown brought the idea of an application where pictures would disappear after a short period of time to his friend Evan Spiegel, who then pulled in his close friend Bobby Murphy to code the idea.
Snapchat was and still is seen as the cure for long-lasting social media presence. For many, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter were seen as long-standing digital footprints which could easily be reflected out of context or in a way that may be harmful to the person using it if they were to apply for a job or anything like that – Snapchat was seen as the cure for that.
The idea started at Stanford University and has grown ever since its 2011 release. Snapchat has not been without its controversy outside of its ownership, however. In 2018, Kylie Jenner’s tweet criticising the app’s recent redesign reportedly knocked a staggering $1.3bn off it’s market value!
Matt Mullenweg — WordPress: University of Houston
Rounding off our list is WordPress! WordPress’ rise to industry power has largely flown under the radar compared to others on this list, but WordPress has become the industry standard for so many websites.
WordPress originally was created as an open-source website for people who wanted to make their own websites, providing themes and elements of coding, however, since its inception, WordPress has grown to add SEO and other larger scale business advice for websites.
In its first year, WordPress was powering 2,000 blogs and nowadays is responsible for nearly 15% of the most trafficked websites on the internet.