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. Oem Carport Supplier
Today, Bezos is the richest person in the world, with a net worth of about $127 billion. Amazon is valued at about $1 trillion.
On February 2, 2021, Amazon announced Bezos would be stepping down as CEO and transition to the role of executive chairman. Andy Jassy is now the CEO of Amazon as of July 2021.
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 anymore in the house."
In-N-Out is credited as the first fast-food restaurant to have a two-way speaker system for drive-thru orders — an invention that revolutionized the fast-food industry and is still used industry-wide today.
While the restaurant wasn't run out of their home, Harry's wife, Esther, handled all the accounting for their new restaurant at their home right around the corner from their 10-foot-wide hamburger stand.
In 1948, the same year that the stand opened, Harry Snyder invented a two-way speaker system from his own garage that allowed customers to place orders without leaving their vehicles or speaking to an employee face-to-face.
In-N-Out is still in the Snyder family. Harry and Esther's only grandchild, Lynsi Snyder, now leads the company as the owner and president.
Her net worth is $4.2 billion as of April 2023, according to Forbes. In 2018, Forbes conservatively valued In-N-Out at $3 billion.
Mark Zuckerberg created a website called Facemash in 2003 while studying at Harvard. The site let students judge other people's levels of attractiveness, but he took it down after two days due to criticism, the Harvard Crimson reported in 2003.
Keeping the momentum going, a year later, Zuckerberg and his friends — Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes — created The Facebook, a social networking site that quickly spread to colleges across the country.
In the years since, Facebook has come under attack over privacy concerns. While testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Commerce Committee during the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, Zuckerberg often cited his humble roots, explaining, "The history of how we got here is we started off in my dorm room with not a lot of resources."
Today, Facebook is valued at about $552 billion and had around 87,000 full-time employees in 2022. However, Facebook's total staff has been cut recently through multiple rounds of layoffs. In November, Meta, Facebook's parent company, laid off more than 11,000 people and in March it was announced that another 10,000 employees would be laid off.
In 1975, the pair started Micro-Soft, for microprocessors and software, to develop an operating software for the Altair 8800, an early personal computer.
Gates and Allen worked in a garage in Albuquerque, but later used the Sundowner Motor Hotel as a basecamp because it was conveniently located across the street from a personal-computer company.
Today, Microsoft is valued at about $2.1 trillion and employs around 221,000 people.
On a visit back to Albuquerque in 2019, Gates said, "There's no better symbol for the entrepreneur than the humble garage. Of course ... we founded our company in a garage to preserve the pile of money I got from my parents, but I assume other people do it because they're poor."
According to a Business Insider profile of Susan Wojcicki, in 1998, Wojcicki and her husband, Dennis Troper, bought a four-bedroom home in Menlo Park, California, and rented the garage out to two Stanford doctoral students to help pay their mortgage.
The students happened to be Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were working on their new company, Google.
Wojcicki eventually became the 16th employee at Google, which later moved to an office space in 1999. Susan Wojcicki served as CEO of YouTube from 2014 to 2023. Neal Mohan became CEO of YouTube in February 2023.
In 2019, Page and Brin stepped down from the company, writing, "We could not have imagined, back in 1998 when we moved our servers from a dorm room to a garage, the journey that would follow."
Today, Google is valued at about $1.3 trillion, and Alphabet, which owns Google, had around 187,000 employees at the end of September 2022.
Back in 1976, Steve Jobs' parents' garage in Silicon Valley played a role in the early stages of Apple. However, Jobs and his co-founder, Steve Wozniak, quickly outgrew the space, Wozniak told Bloomberg Businessweek.
According to a Washington Post article, Wozniak has dubbed the idea that Apple was "founded" in a garage "a bit of a myth," but he also admitted that the garage is part of the company's story.
In 2014, he told Businessweek, "The garage represents us better than anything else, but we did no designs there. We would drive the finished products to the garage, make them work and then we'd drive them down to the store that paid us cash."
The garage — which is attached to Jobs' childhood home in Los Altos, California — has since been designated as a historic site.
Today, Apple is worth about $2.6 trillion with retail stores in 25 countries. As of 2022, the company employed about 164,000 people around the world.
In 1922, Walt Disney created "Alice in Cartoonland," which were seven-minute bits combining animation and live-action. But Disney was cheated by a New York film distributor and eventually had to move to Hollywood to find other work in the movie industry.
In Hollywood, Disney lived with his uncle and set up shop in his garage drawing cartoons. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, after hearing that his "Alice" cartoon was still popular, Disney and his brother Roy purchased a $200 used camera and set up Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, where they created the entire "Alice Comedies" series.
Today, Disney is valued at about $178.9 billion and employs around 220,000 people.
According to a Business Insider profile of Under Armour, in 1996, Kevin Plank founded the company with the goal of creating athletic wear that was able to wick away sweat and be worn as a base layer for intense activity.
At the time, Plank was living in his grandmother's townhouse in Georgetown, where he used the basement as his office.
Today, Under Armour is valued at about $4.47 billion.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Plank said, "I remember the guys from the NFL called me up one day and they said, 'Kevin, we're going to be in D.C. today, we want to come by the office and see you,' which had me looking around Grandma's house thinking 'Oh my gosh, don't do that.'"
Sara Blakely was working as a door-to-door fax-machine salesperson when she came up with the idea for Spanx. While wearing open-toe shoes, she decided to cut the feet off a pair of pantyhose and realized she was on to something.
As explained in a story by Forbes, Blakely spent two years carefully researching and preparing for the launch of Spanx while also working a full-time job. She then went to a pitch meeting and convinced Neiman Marcus to give her product a chance. Using Neiman Marcus as leverage, Blakely was then able to also convince Bloomingdale's, Saks, and Bergdorf Goodman to give Spanx a shot.
But even then, she had no corporate space. She'd package and ship the Spanx orders from home with the help of her boyfriend, and took phone calls from her bathtub or bed, according to the Forbes article.
Laurie Ann Goldman came to help Blakely, becoming the fifth employee and eventual CEO. In an interview with Forbes, she recalled her first office being the kitchen in Blakely's Georgia apartment.
According to Forbes, as of April 2023, Blakely had a net worth of $1.1 billion.
In 2007, David Karp founded Tumblr, a micro-blogging and social-networking site. At the time, Karp was working from his bedroom in his mother's small apartment in New York. According to The Guardian, on the night the site went live, it gained 75,000 users.
In an interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune about Karp's love for computers, Karp's mom said, "David would come running through the apartment saying, 'Mom! Mom! There's this and this and this!' And I didn't know what the heck he was talking about. Because it was a whole other language."
High-Quality Carport Manufacturers The Washington Post reported that in 2013, Tumblr was sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion. But in 2019, WordPress bought the blogging site for a rumored mere $3 million.