The Brains Behind the Operations: Tech Nerds, Before They Were Stars!

Looking almost identical to his high school self, David Filo has come a long way from being a measly freshman at Sam Houston High School in Moss Bluff, Louisiana. David met future business partner Jerry Yang at Stanford University, where they were both studying electrical engineering. In 1994, after having trouble keeping track of their favorite websites, Filo and Yang created a website named David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web. A month later they renamed it the much more recognizable Yahoo!
Did you know: Yang and Filo added the exclamation point to the end of Yahoo! because "Yahoo" was already owned by a company that produced BBQ sauce.

Born in Taiwan, Jerry Yang graduated from Piedmont Hills High School in San Jose, California. Yang and David Filo created the search engine Yahoo! The name comes from the slang term for an uncouth or unsophisticated rural Southerner, but it is also drawn from the fictitious beings in Gulliver's Travels. Yahoo! began as a web portal that acted as a directory of sites, but its instant success and business potential made it one of the most popular search engines of today. Roughly 700 million people visit Yahoo! websites each month, proving that these so-called "yahoos" are a force to be reckoned with.
Did you know: Jerry Yang only knew one word of English when he arrived in the United States but became fluent in just three years!

Looking smiley and shaggy-haired in this senior photo at Mount Lebanon High School in Pittsburgh, Mark Cuban had a mind for business that would make for a happy marriage with technology during the dot-com boom. At a time when websites were all selling things, Cuban wanted to create a company where he could stream and listen to sports (specifically college basketball) games over the Internet. This idea evolved into Audionet, and then became Broadcast.com. After selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo! for $5.9 billion, he bought the NBA's Dallas Mavericks team in 2000 for $285 million.
Did you know: Mark Cuban went seven years without taking a vacation and still eats 7-Eleven hot dogs!

Online shopping: We've all done it. But Jeff Bezos capitalized on it. In 1982, Bezos graduated from Miami Palmetto Senior High School in Florida, then attended Princeton University. In 1994, after writing up the business plan for an online bookstore during a cross-country road trip, he founded Amazon.com. Just like that. You can now purchase practically anything on Amazon, including a quart of wolf urine. Watch this funny TV interview from 1998 with Jeff Bezos about online shopping.
Did you know: Like so many other dot-com start-ups, Amazon.com based its initial operations in the founder's garage. Bezos had a bell that would ring when an order was placed, but he eventually threw it out after it wouldn't stop ringing!

John Lasseter, a Hollywood native, looked like quite the ladies' man as a senior at Whittier High School in Whittier, California. Lasseter pursued a passion for graphics and studied animation at the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied under three of "Disney's Nine Old Men," the team of animators responsible for some of Disney's most famous animation projects. His first job was at Disney, but later he joined Pixar, which was a computer division at Lucasfilm at the time. Lasseter soon presented his ideas to Lucasfilm in the form of the first all-CGI short film, then 12 years later cowrote and directed the first-ever computer-animated feature film, Toy Story. Beauty and brains!
Did you know: Lasseter won $15 from the Model Grocery Market in Whittier, California, for a crayon drawing of the Headless Horseman when he was only 5 years old!

A bespectacled and properly nerdy looking Larry Page was destined for greatness in this junior year photo from East Lansing High School in Lansing, Michigan. While studying for his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University, he chose to research the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web for his thesis. Page wanted to map out Web connections, and soon attracted future business partner Sergey Brin to the project. Together, the two founded one of the most famously playful start-up environments. The Google HQ is dog-friendly, and they have fun items like Google bikes for employees. While Google no longer qualifies as a start-up, the spirit remains.
Did You Know: Their first server to test the PageRank code was made of 10 4-gigabyte hard disk drives in a cabinet made of Lego bricks!

Sergey Brin immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union when he was 6 years old and graduated from Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Greenbelt, Maryland. Brin went on to study at Stanford, where he met Larry Page: It was a match made in techie heaven. Working on a joint thesis with Page, Brin developed the data-mining system while Page focused on the concept of citations and their importance. Project BackRub, as it was known, became Google (a misspelling of the word "googol").   Did you know: The Google motto is "Don't be evil," which refers to the idea that you don't have to be evil to make money.

This blackmail-worthy senior photo of Michael Dell at Memorial High School in Houston, Texas, gives no indication of the computer mega-mogul Dell would become. When everyone else was begging their parents for an allowance, Michael Dell was making thousands by the age of 12 setting up a direct marketing company for stamp auctions. When he was a premed student at the University of Texas at Austin, he started a business upgrading computers from his dorm room and saved money by not paying for computer store overhead. In 1984, he started a company called PCs Limited, which he ran from a condo. The company sold upgrades, kits, and add-ons. Four months later, PCs Limited became the well-known Dell Computer Corporation.
Did you know: PCs Limited offered the first toll-free technical support and on-site service in the computer business in 1986, a practice which later became the industry standard.

After scoring an 800 on the math section of the SAT, Detroit Country Day School senior Steve Ballmer was accepted into Harvard, where he managed the football team, worked on The Harvard Crimson and The Harvard Advocate, and lived down the hall from Bill Gates. At Microsoft, Ballmer headed a number of different divisions within the company and became known for his high energy and unusual speeches at conferences. Many videos of him onstage have gone viral, including this one and this early Windows commercial. Ballmer is definitely a certain kind of crazy, but hey, not all crazy is bad, right?
Did you know: He uses an Excel spreadsheet to track his calendar. We're still not sure what that means.

Pictured here as a junior at Homestead High School in Cupertino, California, Steve Jobs went on to father the iconic company Apple with Steve Wozniak. The two met when Jobs was 16 and Wozniak 21. Jobs convinced Wozniak to sell personal possessions (ranging from a scientific computer to Jobs's Volkswagen van) to raise money to build and sell circuit boards and start a business. In 1976, Wozniak invented the Apple I computer, and by 1984, Apple employee Jef Raskin had invented the Macintosh personal computer, which revolutionized the industry (as shown in this iconic TV commercial). Jobs's marketing prowess and creative foresight made him one of the most influential nerds of our time, but sadly he passed away on October 5, 2011, from pancreatic cancer.
Did you know: Jobs loved calligraphy (almost to the point of obsession) and studied it at Reed College. He revealed that the Mac "was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."

Also a graduate of Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. While Wozniak was working for Atari, new friend Steve Jobs encouraged him to design a revolutionary type of circuit board. Wozniak is the sole creator of the Apple I and II. "Woz," "The Wizard of Woz" or "iWoz," as he is affectionately called by both coworkers and fans, ended his full-time employment with Apple in 1987 but remains an employee and receives a small token paycheck. He briefly reentered popular culture via Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List (he was dating Griffin at the time but is now married to Janet Hill).
Did you know: Jobs and Wozniak built the first digital "blue box," which allowed them to illegally make toll-free calls. Both admit that if it were not for the blue box, there would have been no Apple!