Michael Dell founded his $90 billion company - once the largest PC maker - as a 19-year-old in his college dorm. Here’s his secret to making it big

Some of the most successful tech companies in U.S. history started from humble beginnings. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs built the tech giant’s first computer model in a garage—and Dell’s founder started his $90 billion legacy from his dorm room. Another thing they have in common—they were both college dropouts.

While many businesses have modest beginnings, Dell says risk-taking focused his mind.

“If you want to really make it big, you better come up with something unique,” Michael Dell, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Dell Technologies , told Fortune in a 2017 interview . “It better be differentiated—that nobody else is doing.”

His other piece of advice for entrepreneurs is to take feedback with a grain of salt. Instead, he says, he empowers people to trust their gut instincts on whether a new product or business idea will be successful in the long run.

“If you go and ask people if it’s a good idea, most of them will tell you no,” Dell told Fortune. “So don’t go ask.”

To please his parents, Dell took up pre-med at the University of Texas in 1983, according to Entrepreneur . But Dell had long been fascinated by computers and technology, having disassembled an Apple II model at the age of 15 to see how it worked, according to a 1999 biography, Direct From Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry . It was at the age of 19 that Dell started selling upgrade kits for personal computers to other students in his dorm—a move that launched his tech empire.

Dell Technologies was born from risk. Only partway into his college career, Dell had just $1,000 to invest into the business, and his manufacturing team consisted of “three guys with screwdrivers sitting at six-foot tables,” he said in Direct From Dell.

“You have to embrace risk, and you have to accept failure,” Dell told Fortune.

“Jackpot!” Dell said in the 2021 Fortune podcast. Dell then used those addresses in direct-mail campaigns, and even hired a few friends to help him with his venture.

Growing from a dorm room operation into a full-blown tech empire, Dell remained steadfast in taking risks. By the age of 27, he had become the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500 in 1992—and by 2001, Dell Technologies became the world’s largest personal-computer maker. The company’s success in the 1990s owed a lot to what Dell learned selling newspapers, with a similarly innovative direct-marketing strategy.

The numbers tracking Dell’s trajectory as a public, then private, then public company are headspinning. Valued at over $120 billion in 1997 , when Apple was floundering at $2.3 billion, the company’s devotion to its core PC business threw it for a loop after the dot-com crash. By 2007, it was time for a change amid slower and greater competition.