8 Examples of Modern Students’ Business Success

College isn’t about academic excellence alone. It’s also the place where creativity and networking can come together and give birth to something amazing. So it’s a good idea to use a professional paper writing service for everyone who is worried about their grades but wants to focus on something bigger than academic assignments. Chances are, some of the greatest student business owners did.

8 Examples of Modern Students’ Business Success

1. Google

Stanford University seems to be one of the leaders when it comes to producing would-be leaders of the tech world. It is the alma mater of Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Brain Acton (WhatsApp), and many more. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the creators of Google, were also students there when they came up with the idea for the world’s largest search engine.

Page and Brin did not achieve instant success; their first office was in a garage. But eventually, Google’s creators’ persistence paid off. Now, Google (or Alphabet Inc.) is the fourth-largest company by market capitalization in the world. Its estimated net worth is over $400 billion.

Also read: 6 Upcoming Business Models In Educational Technology

2. Facebook

There’s hardly anyone who doesn’t know the story of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg found the company while still at Stanford, even though it got him in trouble. Trying to finesse the idea, Zuckerberg and his roommates stole other students’ photos from the university databases. Even the name of the company comes from the term meaning a web directory of student data.

Today’s Facebook, or Meta, is obviously way more advanced than what Zuckerberg and Facebook’s co-founders worked on back then, in 2003. But there’s no denying that one of the world’s most successful tech conglomerates was started from a dorm room by a group of students who weren’t even old enough to buy alcohol.

3. Reddit

The story of Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian proves that Stanford isn’t the only place that produces successful business people. Reddit’s founders were University of Virginia students and roommates when they came up with My Mobile Menu. The idea was unsuccessful, but it gave birth to the seventh-most-visited online platform in the U.S.

Huffman and Ohanian did not have to wait for their success for too long. They started Reddit in 2005. In 2006, Condé Nast, a global media corporation, acquired it for up to $20 million. Back then, it was even more impressive money than today.

4. Snapchat

As is clear from this list, tech enterprises are particularly common among successful companies started by college students. Snapchat is yet another example. What’s more, its founders were also Stanford students. Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown developed the initial idea for the soon-to-be global instant messaging app in 2011-2012.

One of the reasons why Snapchat became an almost immediate success was that its founders developed it for themselves and people like themselves. They wanted a platform for authentic communication with their own friends. Like most ideas that effectively provide value, Snapchat was bound to succeed.

5. WordPress

WordPress (or b2/cafelog at the time of its creation) is one more student-started business created because its founders identified a gap to fill in. Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, who were Houston University students back in 2003, wanted a well-functioning blogging platform that would facilitate meaningful self-expression.

WordPress is more than just another online platform. The content management system revolutionized blogging and made it possible for content creators to make careers out of it. WordPress remains relevant up to this day. Over 40% of the top ten million most popular websites are built using it.

6. DropBox

DropBox is the fifth-most popular file-storage and -sharing service at the moment. It is used to:

• Cloud storage with 2Gb for free.
• File and folder sharing, which is convenient for sending large attachments.
• Assigning various permission levels for file-sharing.
• Cross-platform

Just like the rest of the companies listed here, DropBox was started by college students. Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi were in the middle of their computer science degree at MIT when DropBox was born. Ferdowsi even dropped out to focus on the company. Seeing as DropBox is worth almost $8 billion now, it’s safe to say that the decision worked out for him.

Also read: Top 20 Ways To Earn Money as a Kid

7. iCracked

iCracked isn’t as popular as Google or Snapchat, but it still deserves its place here. It’s a company that offers repair services to Apple and, more recently, Samsung users. iCracked is popular among iOS device owners globally and keeps growing together with Apple.

The company was founded by two California Polytechnic State University students, psychology major AJ Forsythe and technology management major Anthony Martin. Forsythe came up with the idea because he kept breaking his iPhone and was done with losing tons of money at the Apple Store. Once again, iCracked became a successful business because it actually solved a problem that had been unaddressed before.

8. EnvoyNow

Finally, EnvoyNow is the only student-founded company created to address the needs of college students specifically. It is an on-demand service that delivers food from restaurants on campus. Students are notorious for being busy and lacking time for normal meals, so EnvoyNow was a genius idea on its creators’ part.

The service was started by University of Southern California students Anthony Zhang and Chad Massura. Zhang came up with the idea for a food delivery service after being paralyzed because of a diving accident in a swimming pool. He dropped out of USC in 2017 to continue working on EnvoyNow and remains the company’s CEO.

So, is it possible to become a successful entrepreneur while still in college?

As you’ve probably guessed from the stories on this list, one doesn’t need decades of business experience to start a successful enterprise. Some of the highest-valued companies in the world were born in the dorm rooms of universities across the United States. What matters is to come up with an idea that is both innovative and useful. It usually works when the creator develops it based on their personal experiences and needs.