Top 10 Most Successful College Dropouts
1. Bill Gates
Dropped out at Age : 19yrs
Age : 55yrs
Net worth : US $56 Billion (2011)
After scoring 1590 in SAT, a shy guy joined the prestigious Harvard University but due to some circumstances, he never completed his degree. Yes, I am talking about Bill Gates and the so called circumstance was “Microsoft.” Bill gates is now a household name and also a live illustration of the fact that great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.
2. Mark Zuckerberg
Dropped out at Age : 19yrs
Age : 26yrs
Net worth : $13.5 billion (2011)
Mark Zuckerberg has always enjoyed developing computer programs, especially communication tools and games. In 1996, he built a software program he called “ZuckNet” which allowed all the computers between the house and his father’s dental office to communicate by pinging each other. The program was considered a “primitive” version of AOL’s Instant Messenger, which came out the following year. He studied psychology and computer science at Harvard University but decided not to continue when his Facebook website grew in popularity. Zuckerberg was recognized by Time magazine as its “Person of the Year” in 2010.
3. Michael Dell
Dropped out at Age : 19yrs
Age : 46yrs
Net worth : US$14.6 billion (2011)
At a young age, Michael Dell is already an entrepreneur. At the age of 15, he earned $18,000 selling subscriptions of the newspaper Houston Post. While a pre-med student at the University of Texas Austin, he started an informal business upgrading computers. He dropped out of college to concentrate on his company, “Dell Computer Corporation,” whose business model was to sell PCs directly to customers rather than indirect retail channels. In 1992 at the age of 27, Dell became the youngest CEO to have his company ranked in the Fortune 500 list of the top corporations.
4. Paul Allen
Dropped out at Age : 20yrs
Age : 59yrs
Net worth : US$13 billion (2011)
Paul Gardner Allen (born January 21, 1953) is an American investor and philanthropist who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates and is one of the wealthiest people in the world with a personal wealth of US$13.5 billion as of 2010. He is the founder and chairman of Vulcan Inc., which manages his business and philanthropic efforts. Allen also has a multi-billion dollar investment portfolio which includes technology companies such as Evri and Gist, real estate holdings, and stakes in other technology, media, and content companies. Allen also owns two professional sports teams, the Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League (NFL), and the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association (NBA). He is also part-owner of the Seattle Sounders FC, which joined Major League Soccer (MLS) in 2009.
5. Steve Jobs
Dropped out at Age : 18yrs
Age : 56yrs
Net worth : $8.3 billion (2011)
Apple Inc. founder and CEO Steve Jobs completed high school in Cupertino, California then enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon to study physics, literature and poetry. He dropped out after only one term. In 1976, at the age of 21, he and Steve Wozniak started their own business, the Apple Computer Company. The company became so successful such that by the age of 25, Jobs was already worth $165 million. After being fired from Apple in 1985 and re-hired in 1996, he remains today as Apple Inc. Chairman and CEO, with net worth of $8.3 billion.
6. Richard Branson
Dropped out at Age : 16yrs
Age : 60yrs
Net worth : $4.2 billion (2011)
Sir Richard Branson is known for his Virgin Group of Companies which is comprised of more than 400 firms. His first successful business venture was a magazine called Student, which he published and distributed at the age of 16. In 1972, he opened a chain of record stores, Virgin Records, later known as Virgin Megastores. The Virgin brand grew rapidly during the 1980?s as he set up Virgin Atlantic Airways and expanded the Virgin Records music label. Branson suffered from dyslexia and due to poor academic performance as a student, he did not finish high school.
7. Matt Mullenweg
Dropped out at Age : 18yrs
Age : 27yrs
Net worth : $250 Million (approx.)
Matthew Charles Mullenweg (born January 11, 1984 in Houston, Texas) is an entrepreneur living in San Francisco, California.
He is the founding developer of the popular open-source blogging software WordPress and writes a popular blog ma.tt, a domain hack. After quitting his job at CNET, he has devoted the majority of his time to developing a number of open source projects and is a frequent speaker at conferences, such as Canada’s Northern Voice and the WordCamp events organized around WordPress software.
8. Jawed Karim
Dropped out at Age : 21yrs
Age : 31yrs
Net worth : $66 million
He is a co-founder of the popular video sharing website YouTube. Many of the core components of PayPal, including its real-time anti-fraud system, were also designed and implemented by Karim.
9. Kevin Rose
Dropped out at Age : 21yrs
Age : 34yrs
Net worth : $60 Million
Kevin Rose is an American Internet entrepreneur who was a production assistant and temporary co-host at TechTV’s The Screen Savers, co-founded Revision3, Digg, Pownce, and Milk.
10. Shawn Fanning
Dropped out at Age : 19yrs
Age : 30yrs
Net worth : US$7.5 million (2009).
Shawn Fanning is an American computer programmer, serial entrepreneur, and angel investor. He is famous for developing Napster, one of the first popular peer-to-peer (“P2P”) file sharing platforms, in 1998. The popularity of Napster was widespread and Fanning was featured on the cover of Time magazine. The site in its initial free P2P incarnation was shut down in 2001 after the company’s unsuccessful appeal of court orders arising from its encouraging the illegal sharing of copyrighted material. A paid subscription version of the site followed, and remains the current format. Following his involvement with Napster, he joined, and invested in, a number of early-stage technology startup companies.
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