Bite-Dose

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg and his social networking site is one of those things that just had to be on the list. Zuckerberg created Facebook with fellow Harvard students Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes though there has been some controversy concerning the originality of the idea. Irrelevant of who had the idea first, it was the AEPi member’s company that took off and has now become the site that every college student must obsessively check daily.

Napster

Shawn Fanning just started out as a nice roommate at Northeastern. His buddy was having trouble accessing MP3 files he wanted, so Faning began writing a program that would make downloading music easy. Since then Napster has faced some trouble with the law, but Fanning shouldn’t care too much. He had a cameo in The Italian Job, in which Seth Green’s character accuses Fanning of stealing the idea for Napster from him. When you appear with Seth Green, that’s how you know you’ve made it.

Insomnia Cookies

Sick of greasy pizza for late-night beer munchies (cramming food too, I suppose), Seth Berkowitz and Jared Barnett, juniors at UPenn at the time, started baking. They then handed out their cookies to friends and then friends of friends until they were delivering cookies and milk all over campus. Insomnia Cookies was born and expanded to other campuses. So now college students who are up late studying or “studying,” can have a light bite delivered to their door.

Microsoft

After scoring a measly 1590 on his SATs, Bill Gates headed to Harvard. Even though he was at school, Gates kept in contact with a high school friend and fellow tech fanatic Paul Allen. As one of the most famous dropouts, we all know Gates eventually left Harvard, teaming up with Allen to form “Micro-Soft.” Fortunately, the hyphen got left behind and the company flourished.

Collegeboxes

Scott Neuberger and Josh Kowitt worked together at Wash U to create a college shipping, storage and refrigerator-rental company. After graduation, the pair sold the company to some classmates and relocated to Boston where they opened a similar company. Later, they bought back the original, making one mega Collegeboxes servicing colleges around the country. Moving college students’ crap around may not seem glamorous, but it is when it comes with $1.6 million in revenue.

Dell

Michael Dell founded PC’s Limited from his dorm room at the University of Texas at Austin. When his computer-components business started making $80,000 a month, Dell was ready to drop his pre-med major and college all together. PC’s Limited became Dell Computer Corporation which became Dell, Inc. and no one’s sad that there isn’t a Dr. Michael Dell running around.

While a student at Yale, the story goes that Fred Smith wrote a term paper about the need for reliable overnight delivery in a computerized information age and received a C (Though, since then, Smith has said that he doesn’t really remember the actual grade). Upon graduating from Yale, Smith enlisted in the Marines, but after he picked back up with his idea and raised $80 million to start FedEx. Fun Wikipedia fact: The sample package in all the print ads had a Yale return address.

Tripod

This web-hosting site was started in 1992 by two Williams College classmates, Bo Peabody and Brett Hershey, with their economics professor Dick Sabot. However, the original plan included a magazine, Tools for Life, and advice on practical issues facing college students. A side feature, web-hosting, soon became the main draw and it was eventually bought by Lycos.

TerraCycle

Tom Szaky developed his idea for a natural fertilizer company while a student at Princeton. Only a college student could continuously convince judges at business-plan competitions to buy into a plan based on “worm poop.” Today, his product can be found at retail giants Wal-Mart and Home Dept. and that recycled “poop” is set to make $5 million next year. Oh and shove it Zuckerberg, Szaky beat out the Facebook guy for the number one spot in Inc.’s “CEO’s Under Thirty” in 2006.

How could we leave off a member of our very own company? Our parent company, theU, was created by our CEO Doug Imbruce from his Columbia University dorm room. Thanks to him prospective students can get college-selection advice from theU.com, you all can read the great content on CollegeOTR, and I can be employed. Everyone wins.