7 Tech Companies That Started In a Garage, Dorm Room, or Home Office
August 12, 2008 · Print This Article
When companies first start out, it might seem like big success is a million miles away. You’re plugging away every day in some humble location, be it your home office, dorm room, garage or parents’ basement. The idea of becoming a successful business may seem like nothing but a dream at this point, but it’s what drives you. It’s also closer than you think, if you work hard enough. Here are 7 examples of companies that started in places that didn’t exactly foretell the prosperity that the owners would later enjoy.
Hewlett Packard – Every year, a humble wooden garage in Palo Alto, California is visited by 40,000 people paying homage to the birthplace of Hewlett Packard. It contains the original drill press that Bill Hewlett and David Packard used for 20 years and has a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. It all started way back in 1938, when Hewlett and Packard began making an oscillator to test sound equipment. The low cost of operating here helped them undercut their competition and rise to the top of the budding industry.
Google – It’s well known that this multi-billion-dollar company started in a college dorm room by then-students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They clashed at first, but the gregarious Brin brought knowledge and assistance to the shy Page’s research project, ‘BackRub’, which explored the problem of figuring out which web pages linked to a given page. Their concept gave birth to the PageRank algorithm, which formed the basis of their new search engine platform. Google, Inc., was officially formed in 1997 at a friend’s garage in Menlo Park, California, and in just a few short years catapulted them to international renown and fame.
Apple – Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were a couple of computer dorks in school, so absorbed in mathematical problems that they barely registered the world outside. In 1975, Wozniak began attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, which led him on a quest to design his own computer. 21-year-old Wozniak and 16-year-old Jobs assembled the Apple I and got a local computer store to agree to buy 50 of the machines for $500 each. From that income came the Apple II, of which millions were sold in the 1980’s. As they say, the rest is history, and Apple is now one of the world’s most successful computer companies.
Microsoft – When Paul Allen was on his way to visit friend and fellow hacker Bill Gates at his dorm room at Harvard University in 1974, he stopped and grabbed a copy of Popular Electronics, which featured the Altair 8080 microcomputer on the cover. It was just the inspiration they needed to get started on the project that would lead to the inception of Microsoft, Inc. Within days, the duo began working feverishly on a BASIC (a family of high-level programming languages) that could be used on the Altair, and 8 weeks later Allen flew to Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) to show off their creation. The demonstration was a success, and MITS bought the rights to their BASIC. Within a year, Gates dropped out of Harvard to form Microsoft.
Dell – In yet another example of great things rising from a humble dorm room, Dell founder Michael Dell first founded the company (in the form of PC’s Limited) as a student at the University of Texas at Austin in 1984. With just $1,000 in capital, Dell sold IBM-compatible computers built from stock components. He eventually dropped out of school to begin working full-time on his business with the help of $300,000 from family. By 1992, Dell was a Fortune 500 company.
Facebook – Yet another Harvard student (and later dropout), Mark Zuckerberg, began what would later make him a millionaire in his dorm room as a hobby. Originally called ‘thefacebook’, Zuckerberg’s project spread quickly across the dorms at Harvard and later extended to Stanford and Yale. Soon, two fellow Harvard students, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, helped Zuckerberg bring Facebook to the next level. It is now one of the most prominent and successful social networks.
TechCrunch – This is a great example of a company still on its way up, and founder Michael Arrington – one of TIME Magazine’s Top 100 Builders & Titans of 2008 - still runs it out of his home to this day. TechCrunch is a group-run blog that profiles and reviews new Internet products and companies. Check out this video of Loren Feldman crashing at Arrington’s pad:
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