Incorporating a great idea Every successful company starts with a customer need.
Some students find that market niche quite naturally.
Microsoft Corp. He combined studying with running a company for a little while, then dropped out his junior year to concentrate on Microsoft full time. He became the richest man in the world. David Filo and Jerry Yang were Ph.D. candidates in electrical engineering at Stanford University in the spring of 1994 when they started keeping track of their favorite Web pages in an index. That index came to be known as Yahoo Inc. - which also made its founders very, very rich. The desire to make a lot of money still motivates students to start their own companies.