The Early Careers Paths of Top Entrepreneurs of Our Time

- startups

Steve Jobs

  • studied at Reed College and dropped out
  • worked at Atari for 2 years
  • started Apple

Bill Gates

  • + studied CS at Harvard and dropped out
  • + started Microsoft

Mark Zuckerberg

  • studied CS at Harvard and dropped out
  • started Facebook

Larry Page & Sergey Brin

  • studied CS at U. Michigan / studied math+CS at U. Maryland
  • pursued Ph.D. degrees at Stanford and dropped out
  • started Google

Jeff Bezos

  • studied EE and CS at Princeton
  • worked at Fitel
  • worked at Bankers Trust
  • worked at D.E. Shaw
  • started Amazon

Elon Musk

  • studied economics and physics at U. Pennsylvania
  • studied physics and mat. sci. at Stanford and dropped out after 2 days
  • started Zip2
  • started PayPal

Jack Dorsey

  • studied at Missouri U. Science and at NYU and dropped out
  • started a dispatch software company
  • started Twitter

Marc Benioff

  • studied business administration at USC
  • worked at Oracle for 13 years
  • started salesforce

Michael Dell

  • studied pre-med at UT Austin
  • started Dell