Article · ~15 min read

What the Founders of Facebook, Snapchat and Home Depot Have in Common

Grace Donnelly, Laura Entis, Stacy Jones, Polina Marinova, Jasper Scherer · Fortune Free Beginner

This is a concrete look at products that grew straight out of what young people were already doing on campus, from Snapchat starting as a fraternity conversation to Facebook beginning as a Harvard dorm project. The point for you is that these did not come from market reports, they came from founders noticing their own peer behaviour and taking it seriously. Treat it as proof that your everyday campus life is a real source of ideas, not a distraction from finding one.

• Several large companies started by formalizing a behaviour young people were already doing among themselves.
• Proximity to a specific peer community (a campus, a friend group) gave these founders an edge outsiders lacked.
• The signal is in ordinary behaviour you can see up close, not in trend reports written after the fact.