He started Dell with just $1,000 in 1984. It made $101 billion in revenue last year

Michael Dell started Dell Technologies in 1984 (Image credit: MichaelSDell/Facebook)

Michael Dell, founder and chief executive of Dell Technologies, took a trip down memory lane as he remembered starting his business with just $1,000 in the year 1984. Dell Technologies posted $101 billion in revenue last year – a definite step-up from its humble beginnings in a college dorm room.

Michael Dell was 19-years-old when he started his business, which has today grown to be one of the world's leading sellers of personal computers. With $1,000 as start-up capital, Dell began buying and re-selling upgraded personal computers to customers from his dorm room. He recalled the beginning of his business in a LinkedIn post yesterday.

“A fun memory from 34 years ago. I started Dell Technologies in 1984 with $1,000 in my The University of Texas at Austin dorm room,” Michael Dell wrote on LinkedIn.

The Dell founder and CEO added that by 1987, Dell had posted $159 million in revenue. And Dell’s revenue in 2021? A whopping $101 billion which put its compound annual growth rate at 20.9%.

“#PlayNiceButWin,” the CEO hashtagged his post, which also shows a snippet from a newspaper article which pegged Dell, then 23, as entrepreneur of the year.

With a net worth of $47 billion, Michael Dell today occupies the 23rd spot on Bloomberg Billionaires Index and is counted among the world’s richest people.

Dell made his fortune riding the computer boom of the ‘80s and ‘90s. What started a side hustle soon led to Dell dropping out of college to focus on his business full time.

“I start exploring this whole computer thing further, and one of the things I noticed about the computer business was that it was very inefficient,” Dell once explained, according to CNBC. “It took a really long time for the technology to get from the people that made it to the people that were buying it, and it was actually rather expensive and slow.”