Three people, all of whom I met in my first year at university.<p>The first was a guy I met on my first weekend, who lived in a house next door to mine on campus, and later became one of my best friends. He was/is working on a social networking site in PHP and MySQL, and taught me the basics of those two languages. Originally I planned to help him out, but soon realised I knew enough to start my own projects.<p>The second was a fourth year Engineering student who was starting his own humanitarian aid agency. He's also started a business when he was 16 (IIRC, it provided ICT recovery to companies, eg, carting IBM servers and emergency generators when their systems went down). Meeting someone doing something so balls-to-the-wall ambitious, but realising they don't seem much smarter than you, inspires you as to what is possible.<p>The third was a Nigerian postgrad student, who told me that he was trying to encourage his country-people to get rich through entrepreneurship rather than fraud, and also wanted to encourage a startup hub at my own university (he's pretty involved in the UK startup scene). Somehow I've found myself in charge of a campus society to bring together those working on web applications and businesses. The community is still small, but I've already found meeting other people working on web projects has motivated me to work harder on my own.