1. 5 FORTUNE 500S FROM GARAGELAND THE TOP 5 COMPANIES OF OUR TIME THAT STARTED IN A GARAGE!

2. 1. APPLE 3. The quintessential garage-to-riches story of corporate America is definitely Apple. Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniack, and Ronald Wayne started their business in a garage, and together they built one of the first prototypes of the Apple personal computer. By way of startup capital, Jobs sold his VW bus for $1,500 and Wozniack used $250 from the sale of his programmable HewlettPackard Calculator. Soon, money wasnt a problem, as Mike Marrakula and Xerox invested in Apple, and when the company went public, it quickly grew to join the Fortune 500. 4. 2. GOOGLE 5. Google started in a garage on September 7th, 1998, with a staff of three. Shortly after opening Google in their garage, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin moved out of their dorms, raised $1 million, and incorporated the Google name. For five months, Google worked out of a friend of Page and Brins garage, with the two wunderkinds working on the search engines algorithm throughout this period. In March 1999, the company moved out of the garage, and eventually found its way to the Googleplex. 6. 3. WHOLE FOODS 7. College dropout John Mackey and his partner Renee Lawson Hardy were evicted fro their apartment for using it as storage for their store, and began living at the store full time. After borrowing $45,000 from friends and family for an initial investment, they incorporated and began expanding through mergers and acquisitions. It was just a matter of time, and today they are listed on the Fortune 500. 8. 4. MATTELL 9. Matt Matson and Elliot and Ruth Handler started the toy company in a garage, where they made dollhouse furniture out of scraps from their picture frame business. Fifteen years after their founding, they went public, released their Barbie doll, and made toy history. 10. 5. AMAZON 11. Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his garage in Bellevue, Washington, where he shipped book orders across the United States and to 48 countries. An initial investment of $140,000 was used to make the website more user-friendly, after which Amazon incorporated, went public, and expanded into selling a wide variety of toys, electronics, tools, and hardware, entering the Fortune 500.