Student Success Stories

How a sophomore's social directory project became Facebook, the platform that connected billions and redefined the internet.

How a 19-year-old Aston University student built Gymshark from his parents' garage into a global fitness brand worth over £1 billion.

A 19-year-old design tutor in Perth saw that tools like Photoshop were needlessly complex. She built Canva — now used by 170 million people.

Two design school graduates couldn't pay rent, so they bought air mattresses and rented them out. That side hustle became Airbnb.

At 15, Jamal Edwards started filming rappers in his neighbourhood. SBTV launched the careers of Ed Sheeran, Dave, and Jessie J.

Fraser Doherty made jam from his grandmother's recipes at 14 and became the youngest-ever supplier to a major UK supermarket.

Alexandr Wang saw that AI's biggest bottleneck wasn't algorithms — it was data. Scale AI is now worth $7.3 billion.

At 19, Ritesh Agarwal founded OYO Rooms. Backed by SoftBank, it grew to 1 million rooms across 80 countries.

Ohanian and Huffman pitched a food-ordering app and got rejected. The investor suggested they build something else — Reddit.

Michael Dell started upgrading and selling PCs from his UT Austin dorm room with $1,000. Dell Technologies is now worth over $50 billion.

Evan Spiegel's class project at Stanford became Snapchat — the app that introduced disappearing messages and changed social media forever.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin built Google's search algorithm as a Stanford PhD research project. It became the most visited website in history.