I really like patio11's comment, so I won't repeat any of that. I have two reasons for you to be cool and stay in school: 1. If you want to be successful in t

I really like patio11's comment, so I won't repeat any of that. I have two reasons for you to be cool and stay in school: 1. If you want to be successful in the Hacker News sense of the word, which seems to mean hacking on something interesting and getting something for it in return, there are some things you really can't learn from just playing around with your little toy projects. Rather, you need to have feedback and guidance from someone more experienced, or just with a different perspective on your work. Preferably several someones. The masturbation analogy is a surprisingly good one in this respect, but I think I've pumped it for all it's worth. (ha ha! lemmas.) Seriously though, you aren't going to learn the more serious maths or algorithms, nor will you learn how to really think about solving the sorts of problems you'll see, unless you go to school. I'll grant that it's possible to pick these things up while working, but getting a job where you can learn them will be hard, and the learning process in that environment is much slower. These concepts don't seem important when you're writing your newest blog in Fancy New Web Framework #628, but they will be important when you're working on programs that lots of people use to do something interesting, and if you don't have them, you'll likely fail to solve those problems, and whoever is paying you won't want to anymore. 2. The other big utility of a college education is the free time (as in beer) that lets you decide if you actually like what you think you want to do. If you spend 4 years working on a computer science degree, and can still stand it, it's probably a good choice for you. On the other hand, if you get a year and a half in, you can still decide that you hate it and want to switch to biology, and your school will likely be pretty flexible with you about changing your mind. If you had gone out and tried to get a job right away --- either a decent programming job, or a job flipping burgers while you practice coding at night --- you aren't going to have that luxury. A programming job will let you know whether you like it quickly, but switching from that to a career that strictly requires an education is going to be tough, and an unrelated day job is never going to let you find out whether you like programming. epilogue. If you just want to do the startup thing, go for it. Go to school, and while you're there, work on it as a side-project. You won't have to fight to get investment just so you can pay rent and eat while you're coding, instead, you get lodging, education, and free time for 4 years for at most a very low-interest loan.