Drop Outs Who Made It Big

Technology Millionaires/Billionaires [via] 1. Michael Saul Dell, started up his own computer company PC's Limited out of his University of Texas at Austin dorm. It eventually became successful enough that he dropped out and the company eventually became Dell, Inc. [TwinCommas] [via] 2. Bill Gates, known as "Harvard's most successful dropout" dropped out of Harvard only after two years to found Microsoft. He eventually received his degree (an honorary doctorate) from his alma mater. At the commencement, Gates said,

"I'm a bad influence. That's why I was invited to speak at your graduation. If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today." [TIME]

[via] 3. Mark Zuckerberg like Bill Gates, is a Harvard dropout. After launching Facebook school-wide from his dorm room at Harvard in February 2004 and by that summer, Facebook was released to nearly 30 schools, and eventually became so popular he had to drop out to fully devote himself to the social website. He said Bill Gates inspired him to skip school to work on outside projects during a talk Gates gave to one of his computer science classes in 2004.

"He really encouraged all of us to take time off school to work on a project. That's a policy at Harvard - you can take as much time off as you want." [SMH]

[via] 4. Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College just after one semester of college and became the founder of Apple. However, he didn't forget that he went to college, at the 2005 commencement speech he gave at Stanford University, he gave credited  to Reed College for a calligraphy class he took that helped him form the basis for the typography in the first Macintosh 'Mac' computer. [TIME]