Most of us are familiar with Mark Zuckerberg’s story — brilliant Harvard student who dropped out sophomore year to create Facebook, a move that changed the face of social media entirely. What a mouthful, right?
However, the dropout entrepreneur archetype didn’t start with Zuckerberg. In fact, many entrepreneurs carry surprisingly limited higher education credentials. Their accomplishments go beyond degrees, and can instead be measured by the global impacts they have made. The visionaries shown in the slideshow are recognized for their million dollar ideas, and had the nerve, talent, and skill, to bring them to life.
All of the entrepreneurs in our list have taken the gutsy and lesser-taken path, forsaking degrees and choosing to bank on their own ideas. However, what was once a risky move has come to be seen as a formula, and some are trying to reproduce similar results by attempting to test out the formula.
In 2012, billionaire and venture capitalist Peter Thiel funded 20 promising young talents, paying them each $100,000 to drop out of college for at least two years to become a “Thiel Fellow.” So is success really as easy as giving bright minds the money to fuel their ambition? The verdict is still out on that one.
In the meantime, check out the wildly successful entrepreneur dropouts that struck gold.
Rob Kalin, Founder of Etsy
Flickr
At the age of 25, Rob Kalin was a high-school dropout-turned-furniture designer just hoping to make a living selling his goods online. After hours of surfing the net, Kalin had an epiphany. He envisioned a community marketplace in which artisans could sell their wares and people could purchase handcrafted items online directly. With the help of two techies and $50,000 investor, Etsy went live in 2005, and become a hit immediately.
As of 2010 Etsy was valued at $300 million. Though Kalin stepped down as CEO in 2011, he is still seen today as the visionary of Etsy. Kalin had dabbled in half a dozen colleges before finally graduating from New York University with a major in the classics.
Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter
Vivian Giang / Business Insider
Jack Dorsey, the creator of Twitter and founder and CEO of Square, a mobile payments company, dropped out of New York University and hopped between jobs before landing at Odeo,the forerunner of Twitter.
In 2008 he was named as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35 by MIT Technology Review.
Last year he was given the "Innovator of the Year Award" for technology by The Wall Street Journal.
Dean Kamen, Inventor of the Segway
Inventor of the Segway, Dean Kamen attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute for two years before dropping out.
He now holds more than 80 U.S. patents, and has become famous for his Segway PT, an electric, self-balancing human transporter complete with a computer-controlled gyroscopic stabilization and control system.
He is also an illustrator for many EC Comics publications, including Mad and Weird Science.
In a morbidly ironic twist, 62-year-old millionaire and Segway Inc. owner, Jimi Heselden, died in a Segway-related accident in 2010 when he accidentally drove the electric scooter off a cliff and into a river.
David Karp, Founder of Tumblr
REUTERS/Stephen Chernin
Twenty-seven year old web developer and entrepreneur David Karp created Tumblr, the 9th-most visited site in the United States, in 2007, despite never graduating high school.
Karp had held an interest in tumbleblogs (short-form blogs) for some time, and after a year of waiting for other established blogging platforms to introduce their own tumbleblogging platform, he decided to start one of his own with engineer Marco Ament. Within two weeks of the site's induction, the service had gained 75,000 users.
As of May 20, 2013 Yahoo! announced it was to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion, with Karp remaining as CEO of the company.
Jack Taylor, Enterprise Rent-A-Car
Enterprise Rent-A-Car
American businessman and billionaire Jack Taylor never finished college. As a youth, he enrolled in the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis in 1940, but left to join the U.S. Navy.
Once the war ended, Taylor returned to St. Louis and started a delivery service company. In 1957, he went on to develop a successful car leasing business at the Lindberg Cadillac dealership.
As the business grew, he changed the name of the company to Enterprise, later to become Enterprise Rent-A-Car, named after the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier he served on in World War II.
By 1995 the company had reached $2 billion in revenues. His son currently serves as the CEO and chairman.
Jerry Yang | Co-founder of Yahoo! Inc.
Jerry Yang, billionaire co-founder and former CEO of Yahoo! left his Stanford University PhD program to create Yahoo!.
Yang moved from Taipei, Taiwan at the age of ten to San Jose, California with his mother and brother. He went on to earn a Bachelor of Science, as well as a Master of Science in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
While Yang studied electrical engineering at Stanford, he teamed up with friend David Filo to create an Internet website called "Jerry and Dave's Guide to the World Wide Web", which consisted of a directory of other sites. It was later renamed Yahoo!. When the site exploded, Yang and Filo realized the business' potential and both postponed their doctoral programs.
Matt Mullenweg, Founder of Wordpress
Automattic
Matt Mullenweg creator of WordPress, cofounder Automattic
Matt Mullenweg, an online social media entrepreneur and web developer, developed the free and open-source software WordPress, which currently powers 16 percent of the web.
Mullenweg dropped out of the University of Houston in 2004, a safe move given that he had already begun developing the beginnings of WordPress by age 20, and was being fielded with job offers from tech companies.
While he left to work for CNET in San Francisco, he left to found Automattic, the company responsible for WordPress. Wordpress gets 140 million visits a year, and all of Automattic's sites are visited by nearly half a billion visitors.
Arash Ferdowsi, Co-Founder of DropBox
Arash Ferdowsi, an Iranian-American entrepreneur, dropped out in his last year of school at MIT to focus on his business, Dropbox.
Estimated as having a net worth of $400 million, 26-year old Ferdowsi is the CTO and co-founder of Dropbox. Ferdowsi and partner Drew Houston began Dropbox as a simple college project, which they later realized had big potential.
Dropbox gained 45 million users in under four years as a free service that allows access to your photos, docs, and videos anywhere, as well as being able to share them easily. The service advertises never having to email yourself a file again. Brilliant, but simple.
Daniel Ek, Founder of Spotify
Twenty-nine year old Swedish entrepreneur Daniel Ek founded the popular music streaming service, Spotify, in 2008. Never having graduated college, he enrolled at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology but did not complete his degree.
The company is rumored to be worth $4 billion, with Ek's net worth being estimated at $310 million.
Ek created his first company when he was 14 years old in 1997. In the past he's served as CEO for Bit Torrent giant, µTorrent, which he then followed by collaborating with the co-founder of Trade Double, Martin Lorentzon, to build Spotify.
You've seen some amazing entrepreneurs
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