Student Uprising

Tweet

Cisco Systems: With sales of some $3.2 billion in the last four quarters and about 6,100 employees worldwide, Cisco Systems is one of the most conspicuous networking superstars; $10,000 invested in the company's February 1990 initial public offering has appreciated to more than $900,000 today. The company was founded by husband-and-wife team Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, academics at Stanford University who supervised computer networks for the school's computer-science department and business school, respectively. The couple figured out how to get their networks to communicate with each other through a device Bosack developed, called a router. Bosack and Lerner quit their jobs, mortgaged their house for seed capital, borrowed against their credit cards, and converted their living room into Cisco's first research-and-development center. One key to Cisco's success: its "customer-advocacy department," which Lerner created. The couple retained 35% of Cisco's shares at the IPO; Cisco's market capitalization now stands at nearly $31 billion, give or take a few hundred million dollars.

Microsoft: It was a magazine article -- Popular Electronics' report on the MITS Altair 8800 minicomputer kit -- that helped persuade Microsoft founder Bill Gates to drop out of Harvard in 1974. Together with his childhood friend Paul Allen, who was getting bored at Washington State University, he created a programming language for the new "hobbyist" computer, which they persuaded MITS to sell a few months later. When MITS offered Allen a job in Albuquerque, he and Gates set up shop in a small office in a strip mall alongside a vacuum-cleaner dealer and a massage parlor. The partners credit the Mother's Club at their high school for funding the first computer terminal installed at their school, in 1968, which helped generate their early fascination with software development. They developed their first product, Traf-o-Data, while in high school. It was designed to automate traffic analysis and was a flop, but their later products, which include MS-DOS, Microsoft Word, and Windows, have done reasonably well; net revenues for 1995 totaled nearly $6 billion, and Microsoft employs 20,000 people worldwide.

Apple Computer: The legendary Homebrew Computer Club, whose members included Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, shared characteristics as well as personnel with an earlier project called the Midpeninsula Free University (MFU), a "radical alternative education" experiment in the Palo Alto, Calif., area. The freewheeling format of Homebrew's weekly meetings, modeled after similar MFU gatherings, led to numerous innovations and partnerships. It may have been the excruciating experience of producing MFU's course catalog on equipment not much better than a typewriter that drove Larry Tesler, now Apple's vice-president for Internet platforms and chief scientist, to develop bit-mapped graphics, the desktop-publishing breakthrough that was to become a centerpiece of Apple's Macintosh computer. Apple now has roughly 15,500 employees; sales exceeded $11 billion in 1995.

Kinko's: With 23,000 employees and 800-plus locations in the United States, 10 in Canada, 5 in Japan, 2 in the Netherlands, and one in South Korea, Kinko's is the world's largest chain of copy centers. The company was founded in 1970 by University of Southern California student Paul Orfalea, who obtained a $5,000 loan from the Bank of America and opened his first shop in a former hamburger stand in Isla Vista, near the University of California at Santa Barbara. The first store, named for Orfalea's trademark curly hair, was so small that Orfalea had to wheel the copy machine out to the sidewalk to make copies. Ten years later Kinko's operated more than 80 stores, located primarily near colleges and universities, where the company -- which also pioneered round-the-clock hours in its industry -- specialized in publishing custom materials for the academic market. Today Kinko's calls its stores, which now average 7,000 square feet, "the new way to office" and offers such services as digital color copying, hourly personal-computer rentals, and videoconferencing.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Leadership and Managing Newsletter

Email Address: