TOP Businesses started in College

Most students tend to think that their careers start after they graduate from college -- even though some of the most successful business pioneers got going while they were still in their dorm rooms. Here are some entrepreneurs that didn't need to wait for their diploma to conquer their industries.

GOOGLE, Stanford University

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two very bright computer science grad students at Stanford University in 1996, worked on their Ph.D project, a search engine called "BackRub." After running the site on Stanford servers for a year, Page and Brin renamed it "Google."

TIME Magazine, Yale University

Henry Luce and Briton Hadden first conceived of the newsweekly while they were seniors at Yale. They founded the magazine at the age of 23.

FACEBOOK, Harvard University

Before Facebook became a $3.75 billion-plus social networking corporation, founder Mark Zuckerberg was blogging about girls in his college dorm room as a Harvard sophomore. Evidently, he redirected his energies to starting Facebook -- again, from his dorm room -- in 2004.

FEDEX, Yale University

While Frederick W. Smith was at Yale University, he wrote a term paper on how he dreamed of an overnight delivery service. Legend has it Smith received a 'C' for the paper. Regardless, the service blossomed into a business with upwards of $37 billion in revenue.

MICROSOFT, Harvard University

In 1973, Bill Gates persuaded his friend Paul Allen drop out of Harvard with him to launch their own computer software company, otherwise known as Microsoft. Not too long after, Gates's Harvard pal Steve Ballmer joined them.

DELL INC., University of Texas

Michael Dell didn't waste time fretting about finding a job after college while a student at the University of Texas-Austin. Instead he launched his own company out of his dorm room in 1984, selling IBM PC computers. In as a little as a year, Dell created its own computer called the "Turbo PC." By 1992, Dell was the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

NAPSTER, North Eastern University

Shawn Fanning, a Northeastern University student wanted to share music with friends. So in 1999, he created a file-sharing service he called Napster. He shares the business responsibilities with his uncle and forever changed how music will be sold and consumed.

REDDIT.COM, University of Virginia

In 2005, 22-year old Alexis Ohanian was at the Alderman Library, at the University of Virginia when the phrase "reddit" came to his mind. This became the name of a startup that evolved into a leading social news website. Ohanian teamed up with fellow student Steve Huffman. In 2006, the company was bought out by CondeNast.

INSOMNIA COOKIES, University of Pennsylvania

As a junior at The University of Pennsylvania in 2002, Seth Berkowitz decided to bake cookies to cope with hunger attacks resulting from late-night cram sessions. Soon, word got out about his cookie operation and he decided to turn his extracurricular activity into a business. Insomnia Cookies now exists at campuses around the country.

TRIPOD.COM, Williams College

In 1992, Williams College classmates Bo Peabody and Brett Hershey knew there had to be a business in the newfangled place called the worldwide web. They joined up with their economics professor, Dick Sabot, to sell web server space through a company called Tripod.com. It became one of the first big dot-com companies before the mid-90s boom. In 1998, the site wasbought by the search engine company Lycos for a whopping $58 million.