Not all tech startups today are founded by engineers or computer scientists. There are some trailblazers who jumped into the tech startup world without proper tech knowledge themselves, and yet they have held their own in the super-competitive startup environment.

Here are some of them:

• Brian Chesky of Airbnb:

  Brian Chesky co-founded Airbnb, a hospitality exchange service, and is CEO of the firm. Brian has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Industrial design, a far cry from the vision of his company which was to ease travel and hospitality in today’s world. He was named one of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People of 2015”.

• Jessica Scorpio of GetAround:

  Founder of GetAround, the young Jessica Scorpio holds a degree in Political Science. She got the idea for the company after attending a program for young leaders tackling world problems. GetAround lets users rent out their own cars when not in use to other users who don’t own cars themselves, thus saving a lot of money on both sides.

• Walker Williams of Teespring:

  Walker Williams founded Teespring along with Evan Stites-Clayton while still studying at Brown University. They started Teespring in an effort to sell protest T-shirts. The idea took off and in the last year Teespring sold nearly 6 million shirts.

• James Beshara of Tilt:

  James Beshara came up with the idea for Tilt when he was working in Africa as a collection agent for micro loans. A couple of name changes later, he developed the final idea of a micro-crowd funding platform into Tilt which allows people to pool together money for anything – from organizing parties to even buying houses.

• Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare:

  Rashmi Sinha holds a degree in cognitive neuro-psychology from Brown University and also studied human-computer interaction at the University of California. She started SlideShare along with her husband and brother as a platform to share presentations. SlideShare was bought by LinkedIn in 2012 for a whopping $100 million.

• Evan Sharp of Pinterest:

  Sharp is the Chief Creative Officer of Pinterest. He actually studied architecture at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. He also has a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Chicago. Pinterest is an online photo sharing platform where individuals can “pin” images as ideas for future reference.

• Aaron Levie of Box:

  Aaron Levie co-founded Box which is an enterprise cloud storage company. Aaron was studying at the University of Southern California when he got the idea for Box along with his friend Dylan Smith. Box started by offering cloud storage solutions to individuals, but later moved onto selling only to businesses in 2007.

So these are the success stories of some ‘plain’ Johns and Janes who were not afraid to dive into the tech startup world in spite of coming from varied backgrounds, none of which were even remotely connected to the technological stream or their current startup.

This just goes on to prove that whichever stream your education may be in, it shouldn’t stop you from chasing your dreams.

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