"Another popular one was that Fred Smith had the idea of FedEx for a college paper while he was at Yale, and that the professor gave him a C on the paper and said it was a bad idea."

I've heard this as well. This goes along the lines of many similar "ironies" that the business press likes to bandy about. The problem with saying how foolish the business prof was (or was not) is that we don't have any data on the other ideas that he said were foolish and never went anywhere (or the ideas he liked) nor do we know exactly what the paper said to see if there was a particular reason the prof thought it was foolish. Devil in the details. Maybe something changed between the implementation and the paper. I mean has he ever published that paper?

Also, maybe the paper itself was foolish, and then he amended the business plan? Hard to say without reading exactly what was written.

My first experience out of school was support at FedEx ground. Man it was terrible. Almost killed myself.