Dropouts Who Made It Big - Part 2

This is the second and concluding part of the article "Dropouts who made it Big". Here we will continue our talk about the people who had the courage to pursue their dreams and held on to it in spite of innumerable Challenges they faced. You can read about the first five profiles here. 6)     Barry Diller: This media mogul who started out in the mailroom of William Morris agency, is famous for Creating Fox television network which became famous for shows like “The Simpsons”. Which he later left in 1992 after having fallout with Rupert Murdoch. He later bought shopping channel QVC, he also tried to buy Paramount communications but lost it to Viacom, he is currently the chairman of Expedia and IAC – InterActiveCorp which bought Ask.com in 2005. With a net worth of $1.6 billion he currently stands at No. 273 in Forbes 400 list.

7)     Mark Elliot Zuckerberg: you probably know him if you are reading this. Mark had an interest in computers since his early years, he started off by creating “zucknet” – a messenger program to use in his dad’s office and later synapse – a music player, which big players like Microsoft and AOL also expressed interest in. At Harvard he created “CourseMatch” and “FaceMesh”, which helped students choose their courses based on their friends choices and facemesh compared two different pictures and allowed users to vote on the more attractive one. Facebook was created in early 2004 for Harvard students to put up their profile online, but then it expanded to other universities as well and also opened to general public. By the end of 2004 facebook had one million users and has crossed 900 million users recently.

8)     Dhirubhai Ambani: Founder of the Reliance Industries which provides upto 5% of Central Government’s total tax revenue. Dhirubhai had to drop out of school after his matriculation due to financial constraints. He moved to Aden where he worked as a clerk with A. Besse & Co which was the largest transcontinental trading firm east of Suez. He also learnt nuances of commodity trading and business skills while working at Aden. On return to india he established Reliance commercial corporation. His expertise in trading was so good that in 1982 when “The Bear cartel group started short selling reliance shares on BSE and did not had money to pay up to friends of reliance. BSE had to be closed for three days until they could arrive at a solution.” At the time of his death Reliance group had a gross turnover of US$ 15 billion, A business which he had just started with US$ 3500.

9)     William Henry Gates III: Most of the people reading this would be using at least one Microsoft product (yes, operating system included!). Bill Gates with a net worth of $61 Billion is currently the richest person in United States and second richest on the planet. With a SAT score of 1590/1600 he enrolled at Harvard College where he met Steve Ballmer who succeeded Gates as Microsoft’s CEO. It was his partnership with IBM and the licensing model which he implemented in 86-DOS which kick started his career and got him noticed. Bill gates held the top spot in Forbes billionaires list for 13 years.

10)     PNC Menon: lost his father when he was 10 years old. Dropped out of college due to financial constraints. And went on to do small interior design jobs. He went to oman from kerala when he was 26 years old with just 50 Rupees in his pocket. He took a loan of 3000 rials (around Rs. 3.5 lakh) from a bank in oman to set up his interior décor business. He founded Shobha developers Ltd in 1995 named after his wife. It became a public listed company in 2006.