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26 companies you won't be surprised to find out were founded by graduates and dropouts of the top US colleges
By Mara Leighton,
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Birchbox, a monthly subscription service of beauty samples, was founded by two female Harvard Business School grads in 2010.
Birchbox Facebook
Two former RISD roommates started Airbnb (now valued at $25 billion) with an air mattress in the living room to help make San Francisco's steep rent affordable. Princeton alum Jeff Bezos once pedaled books online on a website called "Amazon." You may not realize it, but a surprising amount of landmark companies – and favorite emerging startups – were founded by grads from top US schools.
The opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds in a society – and make connections with other ambitious, brilliant entrepreneurs – is one reason the abysmal admissions rate is worth attempting and the high cost of US tuition can be worth footing.
Below are 26 companies that were born from the top schools in the US, from Ivy League alma maters to prestigious equivalents like MIT and Stanford:
Bonobos – the startup now famous for beginning with one perfectly made pair of pants – was founded by Stanford Business School students Andy Dunn and Brian Spaly in 2007.
The company now makes men's clothes in every category, from suits to socks.
Ministry of Supply
Born at MIT, Ministry of Supply is a workwear startup that takes a scientific approach to design, aiming to redesign the classic wardrobe stables with radically comfortable and harder-working materials.
The company's Apollo 3 dress shirt (now on its third iteration) was designed in collaboration with both MIT and NASA, and the company claims its fabric is 19x more breathable than cotton. Two people have now run marathons in the company's Kinetic Suit as publicity stunts.
Overall, the company's offerings are sweat-proof, high stretch, and easy to care for. We've written reviews about a good amount of the company's offerings (Womens: Kinetic Dress, Kinetic Pants, Easier Than Silk Shirt; Mens: Apollo 3, Kinetic Suit, Momentum Chino Shorts) and we've rarely been disappointed.
Audio tech giant Bose was founded by MIT alumni Amar Bose in 1964, and a majority of the corporation's non-voting shares were given by Amar Bose to his alma mater (and former employer), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2011.
Airbnb, one of the most revolutionary additions to the travel and hospitality industry, was founded in 2008 by Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia. The former RISD schoolmates were having difficulty paying their high San Francisco rent, and came up with the idea to add an air mattress to the living room in exchange for a few bucks. Nathan Blecharczyk, Chesky's former roommate and Harvard alumnus, joined as the Chief Technology Officer and third co-founder of the new venture, which they named AirBed & Breakfast.
The company had its first customers in 2008. Now, the company is said to be worth $25 billion, with over 60 million guests using the service. On May 30, 2018, CEO Brian Chesky said the company "will be ready to IPO next year, but I don't know if we will."
Maelove
Maelove is an affordable skincare startup founded by a team of MIT grads (skincare obsessives, brain and cancer researchers, and chemical engineers) and used research to create formula blueprints.
Using artificial intelligence, they cross-referenced those formulas with millions of self-reported reviews to determine the best ingredients and worst ingredients for users.
The startup has a product line entirely under $30, including this four-time sell out vitamin C serum, The Glow Maker.
StubHub, called "the ticket scalper of the digital age" by ABC is an online ticket exchange company which provides services for buyers and sellers of tickets for just about every event: concerts, sports, theater, and other forms of live entertainment. It was founded in 2000 by Eric Baker, an alumnus of Harvard, and Jeff Fluhr, an alumnus of Stanford and U Penn – both Stanford Business School students and investment bankers.
The company has reportedly grown from the largest secondary-market ticket marketplace in the United States into the world's largest ticket marketplace.
Nike was co-founded by Stanford alumn Phil Knight in 1964 when he and his business partner Bill Bowerman, a track and field coach, had $1,200 in the bank. It was initially named Blue Ribbon Sports and operated as a distributor for the Japanese shoe maker Onitsuka Tiger (now known as Asics), changing to the name Nike in homage to the Greek goddess of victory in 1971. As of 2017, the Nike brand was valued at $29.6 billion.
Apple, the first public U.S. company to be valued at over $1 trillion, was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Ronald Wayne, and Berkeley alumnus Steve Wozniak to develop and sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer.
Today, it's the world's largest information technology company by revenue, and the third-largest mobile phone manufacturer after Samsung and Huawei. It's the world's largest music retailer, and more than 1.3 billion Apple products are said to be actively in use worldwide. In 2017, its worldwide annual revenue totaled $229 billion. It's also repeatedly been ranked as the world's most valuable brand.
Birchbox is the service making samples of new products useful and desirable. For $10 per month, subscribers get a box of four or five curated samples of new makeup or beauty products (think skincare, perfumes, organic-based products, and cosmetics). Founded in 2010 by two Harvard Business School grads, Katia Beauchamp and Hayley Barna, the company had raised a total of almost $90 million in funding as of May 2018.
Stitch Fix
Stitch Fix, if you haven't heard of it, is an online subscription and personal shopping service. It was founded by Katrina Lake, an alumna of Stanford and Harvard Business School, and former J.Crew buyer Erin Morrison Flynn in 2011.
As of November 2017, immediately after its initial offering, Stitch Fix was valued at $1.6 billion, and as of February 2018, the company was valued at approximately $2 billion.
Jet.com
Jet.com, a subsidiary of Walmart as of 2016, was launched publicly in 2015 and has raised $820 million over four venture rounds from firms including Google Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital Ventures, Accel Partners, Alibaba Group, and Fidelity.
The company was founded by Marc Lore, Nate Faust (an alumnus of Harvard and Princeton), and Mike Hanrahan.
Amazon, the now-ubiquitous tech giant, began as Princeton alumnus Jeff Bezos' online bookstore, later diversifying into video downloads and streaming.
Now, Amazon is the largest internet retailer in the world as measured by revenue and market capitalization, and second largest after Alibaba Group in terms of total sales. It's the second most valuable public company in the world (Apple is still first), and the largest employer in the United States after Walmart.
Bezos was named the world's wealthiest person on July 27, 2017 when his estimated net worth topped $90 billion. By July 2018, that net worth had increased to $150 billion – making him the first centi-billionaire on the Forbes wealth index, and being designated as the "wealthiest person in modern history."
Magoosh (a play on the Persian word "magush" for "wise person") is an online test preparation site using video lessons, practice test questions, and app and online email support for the GRE, GMAT, TOEFL, SAT, ACT, LSAT, MCAT, IELTS and Praxis tests.
The company was founded in 2009 by Hansoo Lee, Bhavin Parikh, Pejman Pour-Moezzi and Vikram Shenoy while they were students at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.
Within a couple months they had their first few paying customers. As of today, more than 1.5 million students have reportedly used Magoosh to study for standardized exams.
Gap Facebook
Gap was founded by Donald Fisher, an alumnus of Berkeley, and Doris F. Fisher, an alumna of Stanford, in 1969. The first Gap store opened on Ocean Avenue in San Francisco on August 21, 1969, with its only merchandise being Levi's and LP records to attract teen customers.
Famous for creating the Roomba vacuum cleaner, iRoomba was created by two MIT grads, Colin Angle and Helen Greiner, and MIT professor Rodney Brooks while they worked at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab.
The Roomba cleans your place for you, and it has a few upgrades to ensure it does it well: multi-surface brushes for small particles to large debris, patented dirt detect sensors so it knows to work harder on areas of concentrated dirt, sensors to avoid furniture, and the ability to follow a cleaning schedule you can set up in the iRobot HOME app.
Newman's Own Facebook
Newman's Own is a food company founded by the late actor and Yale alumnus Paul Newman and author A.E. Hotchner in 1982. The company began selling salad dressing and has since expanded to other pantry staples.
The company gives 100% of the after-tax profits from its sales to the Newman's Own Foundation, a private non-profit foundation which gives the money to a host of educational and charitable organizations.
According to the company site, Newman's Own has donated over $530 million total.
The global travel technology company (and Microsoft spin-off) Expedia, was founded by Richard Barton (as were Glassdoor and Zillow), a Stanford alumnus. In 2002, Barton was named as one of the top 100 innovators under 35 by MIT Technology Review.
Book of the Month Club
Book of the Month Facebook
The Book of the Month Club is a subscription-based online service that gives its subscribers a selection of five new hardcover books each month. Books are curated by a panel of judges, and members choose which book they would like to receive.
The club is known and respected for its ability to pick out emerging writers of promise, helping to launch the careers of some of the most beloved authors in American literary history, including Ernest Hemingway ("The Sun Also Rises") and Margaret Mitchell ("Gone with the Wind").
The club has been around since 1926 when it was founded by Penn alumnus Harry Scherman. However, the company paused and relaunched in late 2015 with a new model, which proved to be surprisingly effective – within two years, the club grew its membership to more than 100,000 members, primarily millennial women.
Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to found Microsoft with Paul Allen. The company grew from 1975 on to dominate and define the personal computer operating system market.
Coursera is an online learning platform that offers courses, specializations, and degrees from top universities for a fraction of the cost of attending the schools themselves. It was founded by Stanford professors Andrew Ng, an alumnus of MIT and Berkeley, and Daphne Koller, an alumna of Stanford.
Intuit – known now for Quicken and primarily its merger with TurboTax – was founded in 1983 by Scott Cook and Tom Proulx, alumni of Stanford.
The company may have also been the first to institute usability testing with engineers – recruiting people off the street to test Quicken with a stopwatch in order to improve the program after each test run. The end result truncated a taxing experience for novices and made it into a simple, 15-minute task.
Wayfair, a great one-stop shop for inexpensive home goods, was founded as a two-person company in 2002 by Cornell alumni Niraj Shah and Steve Conine, with Conine's nursery serving as their makeshift headquarters.
The company began selling media stands and storage furniture. Four years later, it was earning $100 million in sales (2006).
Fitbit, Inc., a leading creator of activity trackers and wearable technology, was founded by James Park, who dropped out of Harvard, and Eric Friedman, a Yale alumnus.
Staples Instagram
Staples, the Goliath office supply chain, opened its first store in 1986 in Brighton, MA. It was founded by Leo Kahn, an alumnus of Harvard and Columbia, and Thomas G. Stemberg, an alumnus of Harvard and Harvard Business School.
Saks Fifth Avenue Facebook
A mainstay of luxury and aspirational but semi-accessible fashion, Saks Fifth Avenue was founded by Andrew Saks, an alumnus of Cornell University, in 1867.
Shutterstock/Mr Doomits
Hotels.com was established in 1991 by David Litman and Robert Diener, alumni of Cornell. In 2001, it became part of Expedia, Inc. The company reportedly now has 85 websites in 34 languages and lists over 325,000 hotels in approximately 19,000 locations.
Mara Leighton
Senior Digital Culture Reporter
Mara Leighton is a senior digital culture reporter. If you want to get in touch, please send an email to mleighton@insider.com, or send a DM on twitter to @maraleighton.
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