The garage is where some of the world’s most innovative and disruptive startups were founded. Google and Apple both started from garages, so there’s no reason why your startup can’t do the same. We’ve listed five examples of successful startups that started in garages below:
Airbnb
Airbnb is a company that allows people to rent out their homes or apartments to travelers. It was founded in 2008 by two friends who were trying to make some extra cash so they could pay their rent.
The idea came about when one of the founders had trouble finding a place to stay while visiting San Francisco, so he turned his apartment into an Airbnb rental and started charging his own friends money for staying there! When other people heard about what these guys were doing, they wanted them too–so they made it into a business!
In 2009, the founders moved their company from San Francisco to Silicon Valley and started working on it full-time. They’ve since grown into the world’s largest housing community, with over 2 million listings in 190 countries!
Dropbox
Dropbox was the first company to get venture funding and raise a Series A round. It was founded in 2007, by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, who were students at MIT. The company’s first product was an online game called “Rainbow Town” that allowed players to upload their own photos and videos into the game world.
Dropbox raised $7 million in its Series A funding round in 2009 from Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners; this was followed by another $10 million round in 2010 led by Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners. In 2011 they closed yet another round at $250 million valuing Dropbox at over $4 billion dollars!
PayPal
PayPal was founded in 1998 by Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Luke Nosek, and Ken Howery. The company started as a service called PayPal Credit that allowed people to make payments over the Internet. It was later renamed to just PayPal when it became clear that this was its core product.
The founders then rented office space in Palo Alto before moving into their first garage location in Mountain View where they worked from 2000-2002 before moving again into another building nearby called “the Big Garage” which housed many startups at the time including Facebook and LinkedIn (Hacker News).
Google’s Most Successful Startups
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were students at Stanford University when they started working on BackRub, a search engine that would return better results than existing ones. The pair didn’t want to build just any old search engine; they wanted their own version of the U.S.’s National Library of Medicine (NLM), which contains over 20 million citations from biomedical literature dating back to 1946.
So they created an algorithm that could analyze words in documents, determine their meaning and then rank them based on how important those terms were within each document relative to one another–a process known as “PageRank” after its creator’s surname.
The pair announced their creation at a conference on information and knowledge management in 1998. They called their search engine Google, a misspelling of the word “googol,” which is the number one followed by 100 zeros.
The Internet search engine soon became immensely popular, due in part to its clean design and ease of use. In 2001, Google started selling advertising alongside its search results; two years later, it launched AdWords, its programmatic buying platform that lets marketers bid on keywords tied to specific campaigns.
Most Successful Startups Tesla Motors
Elon Musk is the CEO of Tesla Motors, a company that makes electric cars. In 2003, Musk started the company in Silicon Valley with his own money and some help from friends.
The first car that Tesla produced was called Roadster; it could go over 200 miles on one charge and cost $100k–a lot more than most cars at that time! In 2010 they released their second model called Model S which cost around $70k (still expensive though).
The company has had some financial problems, but as of July 2017, it is worth around $50 billion. They also make batteries for homes, businesses, and utilities (like solar panels).
Most Successful Startups Takeaway:
The takeaway from this post is that if you have a vision, it doesn’t matter where you start. If you have an idea, there are ways of making it real. You don’t need to be rich or famous to make something happen–you just need some determination and perseverance.
Start small and iterate until your product is ready for the world!
Conclusion
We hope you’ve enjoyed learning about these five startups and the stories behind them. All of these companies have done amazing things for the world, and we’re excited to see what comes next from each one of them!
