Facebook, Amazon and 12 more companies born in a garage, basement or humble home: from billion-dollar tech brands Apple and Microsoft to Walt Disney, Harley-Davidson and Sara Blakely’s Spanx
- From bedrooms to sheds, a surprising number of the world’s most successful companies started in the humblest of places
- Bill Gates developed Microsoft from his garage, Mark Zuckerberg tested Facebook from his dorm and Under Armour began in a basement
As a new or young entrepreneur with big ideas and perhaps little money to spend, a proper office space is often out of the question in the early stages of building a business.
Knowing that, it’s no surprise that childhood bedrooms, home garages, dark basements, and college dorm rooms are where some of today’s most successful companies were born.
Here’s where 14 big-name businesses got their start in life.
Amazon began as an online book store in Jeff Bezos’ home garage
In 1994, Jeff Bezos decided to take advantage of the internet’s potential. He quit his New York hedge fund job and drove to Bellevue, Washington, where he rented a house.
Bezos spent a year programming the site – which initially sold books – out of his garage, and in July 1995, Amazon.com went live.
On February 2, Amazon announced Bezos will be stepping down as CEO later this year and transition to the role of executive chairman.
In a 1998 interview, Bezos said, “I know why people move out of garages. It’s not because they ran out of room. It’s because they ran out of electric power. They have so many computers in the garage that circuit breakers kept flipping … We couldn’t plug in a vacuum cleaner, or a hair dryer any more in the house.”