University life is not just about lectures and exams, sometimes, it is the birthplace of groundbreaking ideas that go on to reshape industries. Even amid the stress of assignments and exams, some students have managed to turn their campus projects and big dreams into million-dollar businesses.
These entrepreneurial minds not only navigated the hurdles of university life but transformed their academic challenges into opportunities for innovation and success.
Here are four university startups that grew into thriving businesses.
Jobberman
While still students at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ayodeji Adewunmi, Olalekan Olude, and Opeyemi Awoyemi revolutionized Nigeria’s disorganized labor market by creating Jobberman, the country’s largest job search portal. Their entrepreneurial journey, ignited during the ASUU strike in 2009, was driven by a shared passion for internet entrepreneurship. Despite their demanding academic schedules, Opeyemi and Olalekan in Computer Engineering and Ayodeji in Medicine, they built a platform that now has over a million job seekers and 10,000 registered companies. Inspired by the success of India’s naukri.com, Jobberman not only transformed job searches in Nigeria but also attracted significant investment from New York-based Tiger Global, going ahead to be listed as one of Africa’s Top 20 Tech Startups in 2012 in Forbes Magazine.
In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two PhD students at Stanford University, teamed up to create what would become the world’s leading search engine. The duo met when Brin was tasked with showing Page around the campus as he considered attending Stanford for graduate school. From their dorm rooms, they developed the search engine initially called BackRub, named for its ability to analyze backlinks and gauge the relevance of websites. The project soon caught the attention of Silicon Valley investors, who were impressed by the concept and provided $100,000 in funding to launch the venture. The search engine was later renamed Google, a play on the mathematical term ‘googol,’ representing the number 10 followed by 100 zeros. The company’s first office was a modest garage in California, complete with a ping pong table and a bright blue carpet, elements that have become part of Google’s unique work culture. Today, Google has grown into a tech giant worth over $280 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg, widely recognized as the driving force behind Facebook, was not alone in its creation. Alongside his Harvard classmates Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, Zuckerberg developed the social media platform that would change online interaction. The concept of Facebook actually originated from an earlier project called Facemash, which Zuckerberg launched in 2003. Facemash was a controversial site that allowed students to rate the attractiveness of their peers, using photos he obtained by hacking into Harvard’s network. After Facemash was quickly shut down by the university, Zuckerberg shifted his focus to a more ambitious project, “TheFacebook”. Launched in February 2004, the site initially served Harvard students but rapidly expanded to other universities and eventually opened to the public. With early support from key figures like Napster co-founder Sean Parker, Facebook grew into the world’s most popular social networking platform, transforming how people connect and communicate globally.
Snapchat
In April 2011, Evan Spiegel, alongside fellow Stanford classmates Reggie Brown and Bobby Murphy, developed an app originally called “Picaboo” as part of Spiegel’s product design class project. Renamed Snapchat, the app introduced a novel approach to messaging with its focus on ephemeral content, images and videos that disappear after being viewed. This concept quickly gathered attention, leading Spiegel to leave Stanford in 2012 to concentrate on the app full-time. By the end of that year, Snapchat had attracted one million daily active users. Spiegel’s focus on real, authentic communication rather than polished images struck a chord with users and fueled the app’s rapid growth. By 2021, Snapchat had 293 million daily active users and saw over four billion snaps sent daily. Spiegel, who became the youngest billionaire in 2015, has a personal net worth of $2.6 billion as of August 2024.
