BMIC

Microsoft, Google, Sun, Dell, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, Cisco, HP…

What do these companies have in common? Beyond market and technology leadership and a legacy of achievement – college students founded all of these companies.

People who started working on their ideas in their dorm rooms founded almost every great technology company. (There are many notable exceptions to this rule, particularly in enterprise software. There are also a large number of successful companies where college students formed large parts of the founding team – including Zynga, Netscape, and Silicon Graphics.)

But why have these dominant positions in technologies like search, web portals, personal computers, operating systems, and so many other areas been taken by relatively inexperienced college students, instead of the many larger technology companies steered by experienced executives?

While I certainly don’t know (and the answer is at least a little bit unknowable), I have some ideas:

-The Incredible Role of Iteration in Technology Startups – When we dig into the history of each of these companies, we find they each went down a variety of dead-ends, and had several false starts. As eminent venture capitalist and entrepreneur Marc Andreessen tells us, most startups that were successful were not successful by executing their first idea. (Marc talks a little about what they did at LoudCloud before he talks about iteration.)

I think college students are less afraid to make mistakes – and fundamentally less afraid to say “oh, this isn’t working – let’s try something else” then traditional executives. College students will experiment – and this is what leads to great companies.

Bringing Together Students From Different Disciplines – In The Medici Effect, Stanford Professor Franz Johansson talks about how truly innovative ideas often come from the intersection of disciplines. At large companies, people become true experts in micro-scopic areas, but college students study a large variety of different disciplines, and hang out with a true variety of people.

Steve Jobs has talked about the impact of his calligraphy class on the ultimate typography of the Macintosh – what seemed to be random, unrelated knowledge picked up by dropping in during a course reappeared years later, as a groundbreaking feature in a truly new device.

On Calligraphy Class:“None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.”

The Beginner’s Mind

“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind, there are few.” – Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Traditionally, computer systems have been difficult to deal with, staffed by a curmudgeonly technological priesthood and used for things like accounting. If you’ve worked with computers in an enterprise environment (especially before the current era of IT), you’ve probably thought of them as something less than delightful and personally transformative.

As I look at the companies that have made information technology smaller, more ubiquitous, and more social, I see college students behind all of them. In the pursuit of making technology friendlier, lack of preconceptions is a virtue – especially when later combined with experienced executives.

How BMIC Helps

At the Berkeley Mobile International Collaborative, we believe that college students can drive technology innovation. The mobile internet is a new area with unique potential – the most ubiquitous, internet connected consumer device, at the locus of location, social networks, and payment. The mobile opportunity is bigger than we’ve ever guessed – more than 5 billion (that’s billion with a B) devices will be coming online soon.

If you’re a student and you want to learn more about how you can be part of the next wave of technology innovation, check out our ‘for students’ section. If you’re a faculty member looking to get your students involved in mobile innovation and plug into a network of support from industry, trade organizations, and non-profits, please reach out to us and we’ll see how we can help. And if you work for a player in the mobile space, you can tap into a network of college students innovating by becoming a BMIC sponsor.

P.S. – College students also start excellent non-technology companies like FedEx and Kinkos.

What do you think? Why are so many consumer technology companies started by college students? What’s your favorite company started by a college student? Leave a comment and share with the community…