Famous CEO's Who Started As Interns - Part 2

In this three part series, we’re featuring some of the most popular CEO's who started their career as interns. In this, the second part of the series, we are covering next three successful CEO's who gained valuable experience during their internship, which later helped them rise to the apex of the corporate pyramid.

Larry Ellison (Founder, Oracle)

Internship History: After dropping out from University of Chicago, Ellison got his first industry exposure at Amdahl Corporation, an IT company which later got acquired by Fujitsu. It was during this time he learned his computer and programming skills. The turning point of his life came when Ellison got a full time opportunity to work for an electronics company called Ampex, which had a contract to build a database for the CIA codenamed "Oracle."

Net Worth: 59.6 billion USD (2017)

Juan Koum (Whatsapp CEO)

Internship History: While studying at San Jose University, Koum used an open-source operating system called FreeBSD. It was one of the main reasons that landed him a 2 weeks project at Yahoo, because Yahoo was looking for FreeBSD engineers. After completing this 2 weeks job, he returned to San Jose University. While still studying there, it was Yahoo Co-founder David Filo who convinced him more, to drop out of school and join Yahoo as a full-time employee. He worked there for nine years at first in Systems Security department and then in Infrastructure Engineering. It was at Yahoo, where Koum met Brian. In 2007, the two left the company and in 2009, they launched WhatsApp.

Net Worth: 9.5 billion USD (2017)

Kavin Mittal (Founder and CEO, Hike)

Internship History: In 2007, during the second year of his undergraduate course at Imperial College, London, Kavin Mittal did his summer internship at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, and was impressed with its informal work culture. And the next year, Mittal interned with Goldman Sachs in London. It was during this internship at Goldman Sachs, Mittal founded his first start-up, AppSpark, along with his classmate Namit Chadha to make apps for the Apple iPhone. This was way back before Hike even existed.

Today Hike Messenger, with a valuation of $1.4 billion, has over 100 million users and ranks in the list of top five apps in the country.

Also read: Famous CEO's Who Started As Interns -Part 1 Note: Part 3 to be published on weekend.

#larryellison #kavinmittal #jankoum #firstinternship #job