The hundred billion dollar question

Though Mark Zuckerberg’s 28th birthday week is coming to a close, the floodgates are just beginning to open. As of Friday, Facebook – the company he founded – went public, officially marking their door at the Nasdaq Stock Market, ‘open for business.’

The IPO, or initial public offering, for the social networking site was $38 a share, valuing the company at just over $100 billion.

Zuckerberg immediately sold a portion of his shares, simply to cover the taxes he would owe on his personal stake, valued at over $16 billion.

With over 900 million users logging in at least once a month, the complexities, add-ons, and intricacy of Facebook weren't always there – nor was it the creator’s original intent.

The site – originally called Thefacebook.com – was created in 2004, and started as a simple website initially used for connecting Harvard students to each other online.

Now, anyone with a name and a face (sometimes, not their own) can join. And over 500 million use it every day.

The most notable thing about Zuckerberg is not his ever-present awkwardness, or relentless refusal to dress in attire more appropriate than jeans and a hoodie.

Rather, it is his age, and the fact that he is so young; something that is one of his most viable assets.

Today more then ever, young students just like Zuckerberg are applying every resource possible to try and make something out of their ideas, including their age.

Harrison Forman, an upcoming junior sport management major at the University of Michigan is doing just that.

Forman and his partner were accepted to Michigan’s TechArb program this summer. It is a selective program, offered twice a year, that serves as a business incubator for students, by providing other student-run start-up companies with office space, mentoring, advisors and the like.

Their result? The wheels for their integrative idea, Notifly, have been set in motion.

The concept takes its form as a mobile phone application that creates an easy way for people to discover events and opportunities in any given location that may appeal to their preset interests.

“Michigan as a whole is really pushing entrepreneurship,” said Forman. The team has received a little over $1,500 from on-campus groups and award programs.

Much like Forman, recent Syracuse University graduate and real estate and finance majors Chris Grant has used school resources as a sturdy backbone as well.

The idea for WaterPort started in a classroom, as Grant and his team members molded their idea for a business proposal, for a required Whitman School of Management Capstone class.

Each team was challenged to come up with a unique service project; their vision was to provide purified water to people who could not get it themselves.

Harvesting and purifying rainwater has been an increasingly popular idea in our ‘green’ society. WaterPort designed an independent and self-sustained system made to harvest and then filter said rainwater.

While many builders are increasingly incorporating mechanisms like this onto their rooftops, there is a much larger need in impoverished villages like those in Africa or India, where the only way to collect drinking water is with dirty buckets or pails.

With a system that measures about 200 square feet, WaterPort – with only one inch of rainwater – can provide 120 gallons of water.

In the Capstone competition, the WaterPort team placed first over 63 other teams. Team WaterPort was awarded $500.

Now, the company consists of just Grant and his partner, as the rest of the team had other plans after graduation.

WaterPort has since been awarded $12,000 from the Panasci Business Plan competition (progressing to Texas for Nationals), another $10,000 from the Raymond von Dran IDEA Awards for best green idea, and were a semi-finalist in the DELL Social Innovation Challenge. The two will be perfecting their prototype at the Syracuse Center for Excellence this summer.

And then there is Boston University senior Erik Bogaard, who did it all on his own.

Facing the struggle many college students deal with every year, Bogaard wanted to find his own way to reduce the cost of textbooks for students. “The inspiration behind it made it clear that something needed to be done in the textbook space,” he said. That’s when myBookCrate.com was born.

As an economics major, Bogaard didn’t know the first thing about computer programming. He purchased a few books on how to write code, and formulated the initial stages of the website.

The website is among the first of its kind.

It is an online marketplace for local transactions for students who are buying and selling textbooks on their own campus; it eliminates the middleman (like the bookstore, and people camped out in vans). Thus, students can receive the fair market price.

Though the idea was Bogaard’s alone, he now has a team of employees helping him pursue his dream of helping students pay for school.

The 100 billion dollar question

Just like these three innovators, who wouldn’t want to imagine their company growing to an estimated value of $100 billion? Thus, the 100 billion dollar question: ‘What would you do with all that money?’

Forman would “hire the best development team in the world for a couple million,” after which he would set up an office, a marketing team, and a sales team. He would also have the capital needed to “go global” and make routine business trips to budding tech centers in China, India, and Brazil.

Grant also viewed his potential Monopoly money with a holistic approach.

Much of his money would be used to set up shop in places like Africa, where there is minimal pure water. “One person needs five gallons of water in 90 degree heat to survive for 30 days – one of these systems could provide drinking water for 70 people for the entire year. One system could save 70 lives. All for $2,500.”

Bogaard is equally practical: “If we were fortunate enough to have even a small fraction of the success that Facebook is enjoying, we would continue to build and scale,” he said. “We would use the funds to do a few key things: first, we would continue to build the infrastructure as we have today. We would make important hires, and add more members to our team. We would certainly look to acquire additional teams and technology that could help our service and better serve even more students.”

Allie Caren is a USA TODAY Summer 2012 Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here or follow her on Twitter.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.