And the rest, they say, is animation history. In this small space, the team filmed the Alice Comedies, which would later inspire Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland.Ī few months later, Disney, along with his brother Roy, moved to a bigger lot down the street from their uncle's house, which is where Disney signed a deal with Universal Studios to distribute the Alice Comedies. At the time, the company was called The Disney Brothers Studio and was located about 45 minutes from today's Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California. It's the highest-grossing media conglomerate in the world, and it all started in the summer of 1923 in a one-car garage that belonged to Walt Disney's uncle, Robert Disney. Within one year, the Google team would outgrow the garage space and move to an office in Palo Alto along with their eight employees. At the time, Wojcicki-who held a senior vice president position at Google until January 2014-was a recent business school graduate and rented out her garage to the Google guys in order to make her mortgage payments. Two years later, the partners established Google's headquarters in Susan Wojcicki's 2,000-foot Menlo Park garage for $1,700 a month. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford in the mid-1990s and decided they wanted to start a company together. The company is now the world's largest online retailer. Two years after that, Bezos issued his IPO. In July 1995, Bezos launched and sold his first book from his garage startup. He set up shop in his garage in Bellevue, Washington, and began developing software.īecause he couldn't have meetings in a garage with a potbellied stove, Bezos held meetings at a nearby Barnes & Noble, where most of Amazon's first contracts were negotiated. Today, Packard's garage is a private museum and is known as the "birthplace of Silicon Valley." Amazonįour years after being named the youngest vice president of a successful Wall Street investment firm, Jeff Bezos quit his job and moved to Seattle to pursue what he believed to be untapped online retailing opportunities in the book industry. The company was incorporated in 1947 and, 10 years after that, became a public company. The garage was used as a research lab, development workshop and manufacturing facility for nearly a year before the partners outgrew it and moved to roomier quarters nearby. One of their first customers was Walt Disney Productions, which bought eight audio oscillators to use for certifying the surround sound systems installed in theaters for the film Fantasia. In the 12-by-18-foot garage in back of the house they were renting, Hewlett and Packard built their first product: an audio oscillator. (HP), in 1939 with an investment of just $538. Just 10 miles from the garage where Apple was started, Stanford graduates Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard launched their own company, Hewlett-Packard Co. Today, the Silicon Valley home where Jobs grew up is listed as one of the city's historic properties. Although Wayne had already abandoned the business, Jobs and Wozniak successfully reached their goal in just 30 days. One of their first big orders was from a local retailer who ordered 50 computers at $500 apiece, which they were able to produce in just 30 days. He then joined forces with the late Steve Jobs and another partner, Ronald Wayne, to launch Apple Computer Co. In 1976, Steve Wozniak created the first Apple computer. It's one of the most valuable brands today, so it's often surprising when people learn that Apple's first computers were built in a small garage in Cupertino, California. The humble beginnings of the following six multibillion-dollar companies prove that great ideas are still great ideas, no matter where they're started and developed.
Other times, the entrepreneurs had to rent a garage just to get a little privacy for their ideas to grow. Sometimes the garage was at the childhood home of the company's founders. However massive they may seem now, at one time, some of the largest and most successful companies around started in someone's garage.