Fred Smith

It began as a hobby but quickly became a legitimate business.

They broke even on their first release.

The studio would survive for decades.

Led Zeppelin would eventually record there.

At Yale from 1962 to 1966, Fred wasn't much of a student.

I was a crummy student, he'd later admit.

But he wasn't wasting his time either.

He failed to make a football team and threw himself into flying.

He discovered that Yale's flying club was defunct.

Smith didn't just restart it, he turned it into a business operation.

He convinced Piper Aircraft to lease planes, negotiated with New Haven Airways for instructors, and recruited a legendary professor as a sponsor.

His classmate, Mike Waterman, remembered Fred was looking for a less expensive way to fly.

He also saw there was a real need on campus for people to learn to fly.

So he put the deal together.

It was like financing a startup company, and Fred was good at that.

Then came the term paper that would change everything.

In Economics 43A, Professor Chalice Hall asked students to identify a problem in the modern economy and propose a real solution.

Fred identified something everyone else simply accepted.

The shipping system was fundamentally broken.

Packages traveled as afterthoughts on passenger planes competing for space with luggage.