5 Successful Entrepreneurs With Surprising Educational Backgrounds

Having done formal education surely adds up to the confidence and value of an individual. This set of formal education, which merely is in the hands of the students, may/ may not prove to bring success later in life.

Here are some examples of entrepreneurs who didn’t complete their education but still ended up as billionaires.

1. Mukesh Ambani

The richest man in India and the chairman of Reliance Industries Ltd., Mukesh Ambani didn’t complete his formal education thoroughly. His father, Dhirubhai Ambani, always said that it is more important to harness life skills through experiences than to be sitting in a classroom. For this, he called his son back from Stanford University in the USA to help him set up Reliance. Today, Reliance is amongst the most prominent companies and, Mukesh is.., well, everyone knows about that.

Recently, according to reports from The Hindu, the Reliance Foundation was to set up a university. This new venture would prove to affect the other private institutions like LPU University, NMIMS, and others.

2. Bill Gates

Born in Seattle in 1995, Billy was always a smart kid. At 13, he wrote his first program on BASIC. He was in 8th grade at that time and worked on several other projects during his time in the Lakeside School. Adding, his teachers exempted him from attending some regular classes to help him give time for his projects.

Gates was a National Merit Holder when he passed out of Lakeside School. Also, he scored an outstanding 1590 in 1600 on the Scholarship Aptitude Test (SAT). Both these achievements made it evident for him to get admission and get enrolled at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts.

After two years at Harvard, he decided to drop out to start a venture of his own. His friend at Harvard, Steve Ballmer continued studying and later led Bill Gates’ Microsoft as the CEO.

3. Travis Kalanick

The brain behind Uber and its success is because of this man. Travis was born on Aug 6, 1976, in Los Angeles, California. His father was a civil engineer, and his mother worked for the distribution of the local newspaper.

After his schooling in the neighbourhood school, we went on to take admission at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He studied computer engineering and business economics there alongside doing several projects. As he was a part of the Theta Zi fraternity, he started a business of his own there. It was called Scour. Later, he dropped out of UCLA to give full attention to Scour.  

Kalanick started a few more companies before getting into Uber. It was his eagerness to start something of his own, which kept him moving all the time.

4. Steve Jobs

The renowned founder of Apple Computers, Steve Jobs, was also a dropout. In fact, his biological parents, Abdulfattah and Joanne gave him up for adoption, and that is how he got the surname ‘Jobs.’

Later in life, Jobs met another Steve, Wozniak. Wozniak was older than Jobs, and he went off to study at the University of California, Berkeley. Jobs would often visit him.

Later, Steve Jobs joined Reed College. This college was famous for calligraphy. He dropped off this college to focus on what Jobs and Wozniak were working on, Apple. Adding, Jobs once stated in an interview that the calligraphy classes he had attended were the reason why the first Mac computers had a variety of fonts and proper spacing.

5. Michael Dell

The founder of Dell Technologies, Michael Dell, was born on Feb 23, 1965. He was born to a Jewish family in Houston, Texas. As a kid, he was always curious to know how things worked. He even opened his Mac computer, which he had received as a gift.

When he was 19, he started working in his dorm room in the University of Texas, making it his office. Later he convinced his parents to drop out and form his own company, Dell Technologies.