Most 19 year olds would spend a thousand dollars on a spring break weekend, or a put it toward buying a new car, but Michael Dell spent his $1,000 founding Dell .

The founder and CEO of Dell expanded his company with the idea that ‘technology is about enabling human potential.’ In 1992, he became the youngest chief executive to earn a ranking on Fortune magazine’s ‘Fortune 500′ list. His staff also grew from a one-man operation to 100,000 employees in just eight years.

Today, the company provides information-technology services for global corporations, governments, health care providers, small and medium businesses, education institutions, and home computing users.

Dell is not the only company this CEO has had a hand in creating. Dell founded MSD Capital in 1998 and a year later launched the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, a philanthropic organization for global issues.

Mark Zuckerberg
Position: Founder/CEO, Facebook
Company Value: $100 billion (Recent estimate)

Although Facebook isn’t publicly traded, we can’t leave this chief executive out of a successful college-dropout list-besides you are probably on his site everyday.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, showed an early interest in computers. As a child, he created early communication tools and games from his bedroom. In high school, he created an MP3 program and soon received offers from AOL and Microsoft , which he ignored.

After being accepted at Harvard University, Zuckerberg built a program called Facemash, which showed pictures of students and allowed their peers to vote on who was more attractive.

Eventually, word of Zuckerberg’s talent spread and fellow Harvard students Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss asked him to work on an idea for a social networking site called Harvard Connection. Zuckerberg decided to drop out of the project soon after and began work on a different social networking site, which he originally named TheFacebook.com.

Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard before graduating to put all of his focus on the social networking site, which could be worth as much as $100 billion if Zuckerberg ever takes the company public.

Paul Allen
Position: Co-Founder, Microsoft
Market Cap: $226.2 billion

Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates, his childhood friend, is another chief executive who never got a college degree.

According to Allen’s memoir, ‘Idea Man,’ Allen was inspired to write a coding language when he saw the Altair 8800 computer on the cover of a Popular Electronics magazine. Allen knew Gates and he both had the skills to code a programming language for the Altair and after convincing his friend to collaborate, the pair ushered in a new technological era.

Today, Allen has a multibillion-dollar investment portfolio, which includes multiple technology and media companies, along with a major real estate redevelopment in Seattle.

Allen also owns the Seattle Seahawks football team, the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team, and is part of the primary ownership group for the soccer team Seattle Sounders Football Club. Allen has given away more than $1 billion toward his philanthropic efforts and has said he plans to leave the majority of his estate to charities.

Bill Gates
Position: Co-Founder/Chairman, Microsoft
Market Cap: $226.2 billion

College dropouts such as Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz are not the only successful business founders who attended, and then left, Harvard University. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft , enrolled at Harvard as a freshman in 1973. Gates, who lived down the hall from Microsoft’s current chief executive, Steve Ballmer, created BASIC, a programming language for the first microcomputer, during his first year of college.

Gates dropped out of Harvard in his junior year to concentrate all his efforts on a company he called Micro-soft with his childhood friend Paul Allen. As if founding Microsoft wasn’t enough, Gates went on to found Corbis , one of the world largest resources of visual information. He also earned a seat on the board of directors for Berkshire Hathaway , an investment company engaged in diverse business activity.

Steve Jobs
Position: Founder/CEO, Apple
Market Cap: $362.4 billion

As a young boy, this college dropout showed an early interest in computers. When he was 12, Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple , called Bill Hewlett, co-founder of Hewlett Packard , after finding his number in the phonebook. When Hewlett answered, Jobs said, ‘Hi I’m Steve Jobs. I’m twelve years old and I’m a student in high school. I want to make a frequency counter. I was wondering if you had any spare parts I can have?’

Hewlett gave Jobs the spare parts and hired him that summer to work on the assembly line at his company. During this time, Jobs formed a friendship with Stephen Wozniak, a soon-to-be dropout from the University of California at Berkley.
Jobs enrolled at Reed College after high school, but he later dropped out. He connected once again with Wozniak and the pair quit their jobs to start production on a computer in Jobs’ garage.

There are different versions of how the pair came up with the name for Apple. The best-known story comes from Jobs summer spent working on an apple orchard and his love for the fruit. The bite in the side of the apple is said to be a play on the computer term ‘byte.’

In a biography, Jobs said he was worth more than $1 million when he was 23, $10 million when he was 24, and $100 million when he was 25. Apple went from a garage-based operation to a multi billion-dollar, worldwide corporation, and it all started with two college dropouts tinkering in a garage.

http://www.sify.com/finance/Biggest-businesses-run-by-college-dropouts-imagegallery-others-ligr0gjbcbf.html#galname

“My kids all grew up around the office and were all exposed to computers,” said Dr. Edward Zuckerberg, a dentist. “There are advantages to being exposed to computers early on. That certainly enriched Mark’s interest in technology.”

Zuckerberg said he computerized his offices in 1985. His son Mark Zuckerberg, co founder and CEO of Facebook, was born in 1984 and was raised in the house where his father’s dental offices are located in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., in suburban Westchester.

The dentist spoke for an hour on Westchester station WVOX in an interview with Paul Feiner, supervisor of Greenburgh.

The dentist said his own computer science background was “limited” – he majored in biology in college – but he said he’s “always been technologically oriented in the office” and “always had the latest high-tech toys,” including an early Atari 800. “It came with a disk for programming,” he said. “I thought Mark might be interested and I imparted that knowledge to him. From there it took off.”

He said Mark got a book on programming, but “ultimately his ability to program was self-taught.”

Feiner and a number of callers to the live radio program asked Zuckerberg for advice on parenting.

“Probably the best thing I can say is something that my wife and I have always believed in,” he said. “Rather than impose upon your kids or try and steer their lives in a certain direction, to recognize what their strengths are and support their strengths and support the development of the things they’re passionate about.”

Zuckerberg said he “didn’t believe in physical discipline” but added that certain behaviours require parents to let children know “right there on the spot, this is a behaviour that will not be tolerated. If you impart your dislikes about certain negative behaviours early in their lives, they will learn to understand what your feelings on certain matters are.”

Zuckerberg said he doesn’t want to portray himself as an expert on child rearing, but he said: “I think that extremes in any form in parenting are not good. Children need to be well-rounded. There’s a place for work and a place for play.”

He described Mark as “a good student” with “a special affinity for math and sciences,” as well as a “very quiet guy” who “doesn’t like to boast about his accomplishments.” He said that when Mark was named Time magazine’s person of the year, his famous son remarked that “it must have been a really slow year. He’s very humble.”

“I’m proud of his accomplishments and the accomplishments of all my kids,” he added. Mark’s sister Randi is marketing director for Facebook, his sister Donna is a Ph.D. candidate in classics at Princeton, and the youngest, Arielle, is a senior at Claremont McKenna College with a minor in computer science. Her dad said “she’s doing a job search right now.”

Asked by a caller whether his wife, Karen, worked when their children were young, he said, “My wife was a superwoman. She managed to work and be home. We had a unique situation because my office was in the house. I highly recommend it if it works for your occupation. It did afford the ability to work and be home with the kids at the same time.”

Karen Zuckerberg is a psychiatrist but she helps out in her husband’s office. Zuckerberg said he uses Facebook to promote his dental practice and spends about an hour a day on the site. He also still does Mark’s “routine dental care.”

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