When you start up a new business working out of your home, you may daydream of one day having that company be amongst the most important and powerful in the world, but it’s hard to really visualize it happening. However, there’s plenty of examples of real life companies that are now worth millions – if not billions – that started with humble beginnings.
We’ve all heard the story of how Apple and Google started out in someone’s garage, but both companies are all-powerful and huge, it’s not easy to picture the likes of Steve Jobs actually slaving away in a confined space with only his determination and belief to keep him going. That’s why HomeAdvisor has recreated his garage – and four others – to help you see what it was really like for a bunch of dreamers who took on the world and won.
Apple – Steve Jobs’ Garage
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were the two famous founders of Apple (only with Ronald Wayne, who left shortly after helping to found the company) and the story of their time in Jobs’ family garage working on the Apple I computer is the stuff, quite literally, of the silver screen. Hollywood painstakingly recreated that garage, and here it is for you to really see what it must have been like for them – and how far removed it is from those glossy Apple product launches we see today.
Wozniak actually had the idea for the Apple I while working for another business that had grown out of a garage – Hewlett-Packard, more of whom shortly – but after they refused to buy it from him, he went to Jobs and they worked on it together instead. HP might not have helped Wozniak make his invention but its founders might have given him the belief that he and his friends could take on the world from their garage and win.
Disney – Walt Disney’s Uncle’s Garage
Walt Disney didn’t make his first cartoons in his Uncle Robert’s Hollywood house, he’d already produced Alice In Wonderland stories while working in Missouri, but he knew where the major movie studios were based so he followed his brother Roy to Los Angeles. Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio was the initial version of what we know today as the entertainment industry colossus.
It may have just been two brothers in garage, but the studio produced more Alice cartoons that included live action segments as well and it led to work with Universal Pictures making Oswald The Lucky Rabbit cartoons. The Disney brothers saw the potential in that kind of animation, so they swapped a rabbit for a mouse called Mickey and started creating for themselves. It worked out well, as you can probably tell, with Disney releasing films like Avengers: Infinity War, which alone made over $2bn at the cinema in 2018, something Walt and Roy could never have imagined back in the garage.
Hewlett-Packard – Dave Packard’s Garage
We’ve already mentioned how the birth of Hewlett-Packard might have been an inspiration for Apple after HP had turned down the chance to work on what became the Apple I computer and it’s intriguing to ponder how different the world would be now if their decision had been different. Would Apple ever have existed? Would we have iPhones and iPads? Whatever happened, it’s indisputable that HP had a big influence on many other Silicon Valley start-ups as well as making an impact of their own on the technology world.
Ironically, it was another garage start-up that helped HP off the ground with an order for one of their first products, the audio oscillator, the HP200A, eight of which were bought by Disney for use on the ground-breaking movie Fantasia. It was a first step towards many other important products that were designed by Hewlett-Packard over the next few decades, taking the company a long way from being just Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett working in Dave’s garage – Bill lived in a shed on the property at the time.
Google – Susan Wojcicki’s Garage
One of the biggest companies to come out of the Silicon Valley that Hewlett and Packard helped to inspire was Google. Like Dave and Bill, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Stanford students who saw an opportunity to work together to make something big and what they created was a search engine that continues to shape the internet and the wider world. Their company now makes phones, runs YouTube and lets you watch movies, read books and listen to music via its services.
Page and Brin are now both worth over $50bn each, but when they started out they needed to rent Susan Wojcicki’s garage to have somewhere to work and as you can see from the floorplan, it was a chaotic and humble workspace that they had to fit as much as they could in to create the tool that so many of us still use every day to find what we need on the internet. Tech start-ups are notorious for the long hours needed to make them work, so it’s no surprise to see that Google had everything its few staff needed in that small garage to sustain them while they worked.
Running a business out of your garage is not an easy task. Yet, these four widely successful companies have shown that with the right amount of hard work and determination – anything is possible.
