Three Nerds Who’ve Made it Big

1. Sergey Brin (born 1973), co-founder of Google

Brin, a Russian-American computer scientist, emigrated from the USSR when he was a child to escape religious intolerance of his family’s Jewish faith. Upon meeting Larry Page at Stanford while working on their PhDs, the two began developing what would become the popular search engine.

2. Steve Jobs (born 1955), co-founder of Apple (pictured)

Originally from California, Jobs is a college dropout who worked at the video game manufacturer Atari before founding Apple with another designer, Steve Wozniak. Jobs also founded NeXT, as well as Pixar Animation Studios. His return to Apple was followed by the development of the iPod, iPhone and (most recently) iPad, a quasi-laptop tablet.

3. Bill Gates (born 1955), founder of Microsoft

One of the richest men in the world, Gates used his genius (an estimated IQ of 170) to form the software company with partner Paul Allen. Like Jobs, he’s a college (Harvard) dropout who became a pioneer of the personal computer.