8 ms·

Thoughts on dropping out to do a startup

30 points by DanielRibeiro 14y ago

bob_tyson 14y ago
this is a tricky subject with the current state of free online education. im currently enrolled in a small tech for game design. its becoming more apparent as time goes on that everything im learning in school is easily found online. not to mention my school keeps losing all of our good instructors to full sail and Disney leaving us with fresh college graduates. for me it boils down to the quality of education im paying for. i know being in debt is apart of getting your degree but at what point do you take the leap of faith and just try to educate and grow on your own?
FD3SA 14y ago
I think the value proposition of college is completely based upon whether the learning strategy of classroom lectures followed by written tests works for you. For me, reading books and attempting projects are the only way I can learn effectively. Technical lectures are incredibly boring as I can't control the pacing, and many times I find they are altogether irrelevant. Technology moves at such a blistering pace that if you aren't working with the cutting edge tools on a regular basis, you are falling behind. Unfortunately, most classrooms insist on teaching with antiquated methodologies and overemphasize classroom time/testing versus building projects with modern tools. For example, I had to take a full year of Scheme, which in hindsight was helpful, but could have been done far more efficiently by me reading How to Design Programs [1] over the summer and attempting the exercises. School time could then have been used to teach modern methodologies via project work. 1. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/ http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/
mememememememe 14y ago
How many startups can actually reach stable revenue? I don't mean you need to take down Facebook or Google. But there are way too many startups. Sometimes I start to think: how many customers do they get? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? How long? A year? But on the other hand, startup is great for fresh out graduates. They learn better and quicker in theory - they are forced to adapt to the change of specs and environment. It's a great place to test your ability as an engineer and a team person. It's a challenge.
- moocow01 14y ago
  I think the majority of startups teach great lessons in how not to run a business. Some of the best lessons Ive learned is watching others as well as myself inadvertently blow stuff up and realizing that should have been done a lot differently. Every once in a while the stars align but what the tech media doesn't say is that the majority of work that goes on in startups is doing stuff that is experimental but typically turns out to be a not so great or extremely bad business decision.
  - mememememememe 14y ago
    I think it's true. Well, two blades. Business wise, you need a real business man. Technologically you must employ the right technical lead. Then you and your employees (in particular fresh graduates) will learn quicker and better.
Jonanin 14y ago
Hopefully this is related: can anyone give some advice or input on dropping out to work in silicon valley in general? I'm not close to done (first semester freshman), but I have an internship at a certain large SV company this summer. If you were in my position, and that company offered a job, would you take it?
- breckenedge 14y ago
  Not to discourage you, but your education will likely benefit you far longer than most SV companies will be around. The benefits of education also brought, in my life, career choices that would not have been available without it. Choice is liberating. Who knows though, the world does seem to be changing.
  - c_t_montgomery 14y ago
    I agree, but I think it's fair to say that education definitely exceeds the classroom in our fast-paced industry. I learned a lot during my 2.5 years in college, but very little of it, IMO, was related to classroom or homework-based criteria. It was almost all side projects.
  - randomdata 14y ago
    > Choice is liberating. I find it to be overwhelming. I am routinely contacted by people asking if I am looking for work, and what they are doing seems like it could be an amazing experience, but you get comfortable in your six figure job that you love and taking the risk on something new is a huge decision. Like, "should you divorce your wife to date the interesting new girl you met?" kind of huge. I did not have the opportunity to obtain a formal post-secondary education though, so maybe that is something you learn to manage in that process.
    - jarek 14y ago
      > I am routinely contacted by people asking if I am looking for work, and what they are doing seems like it could be an amazing experience, but you get comfortable in your six figure job that you love One percent (of developers) problems.
dools 14y ago
A lot of the benefits he's talking about appear to assume that you're being supported financially during tertiary education (college/university) so the advice is like "if you find yourself in a situation where you are completely financially supported with a lot of free time, don't stop being financially supported in order to start a company". Which is pretty obvious advice.
colinbartlett 14y ago
Stop thinking about "doing a startup" and start thinking about "starting a business".
- pg 14y ago
  That's like saying stop thinking about eating an apple and start thinking about eating fruit. Startups are a proper subset of businesses. It's up to each individual what type he or she wants to start.
  - timc3 14y ago
    I think what he is trying to say is just concentrate on what you are building/creating and not whether it fits a certain buzz word which is sound advice.
    - bravoyankee 14y ago
      He probably should have said that then. I didn't know what he meant initially either.
  - cperciva 14y ago
    That's like saying stop thinking about eating an apple and start thinking about eating fruit. It seems to me more like "stop thinking about eating durian and start thinking about eating fruit" -- true, one is a type of the other, but it's a wildly unusual type and certainly not one which is to everyone's taste.
stevewilhelm 14y ago
As an experiment, pick three random portfolio companies from a16z.com, benchmark.com, and sequoiacap.com and see what percentage of the founders are college drop outs. In SV, what you know and who you know are both very important.
timc3 14y ago
Customer development is not a "Startup concept" it's fundamental. If you get that wrong then you certainly shouldn't drop out.
jorde 14y ago
One thing that almost never rises up when people talk about college is US work visas. Having a university level degree is pretty much essential in order to obtain a H1b visa to be able to work in the US. Of course there are ways around it but that itself is a good motivation to finish your studies if you're a foreigner. I agree that school is good time to work on side projects and learn by doing. One other good way is to do a internship for a US based startup as obtaining a J1 internship visa is relatively trivial if you're in college. That was the single best thing I did in school.
TheMakeA 14y ago
In my early 20s. Dropped out of college to get "real world experience." In retrospect, the thought of having blocks of free time to pursue whatever I want is very appealing. For now I am stuck doing 40+ hour workweeks and trying to cram side projects in on nights and weekends. I wish I were back in college.
- csomar 14y ago
  Could you elaborate more how college would have benefited you more now? Many people with college degrees are wearing your shoes.
  - TheMakeA 14y ago
    I think in particular, I would/could have benefited more from the increased number of opportunities for free time and flexibility: * No longer have seasonal breaks outside of the odd vacation time. * Can't cram work into only a couple days a week as I am expected to show up every day. * In college, you can skip classes that you already know the material for and only show up for tests (i.e. do the minimum possible to maintain a good grade). With work, you are expected to be 100% productive every single day. There is no chance to get ahead: If you run out of work to do, you are given more, or more will be created for you. This mostly assumes that you're already very smart and while in college you are financially supported via loans or scholarships, but if you're attending Stanford, MIT, or Harvard, you probably meet both criteria. It's not that I want a college degree. I want to be financially supported while having (more) time to work on the cool things I want to work on, which is actually the same reason I want to run my own company. College is one such example that provides that opportunity.
    - randomdata 14y ago
      Why not try freelancing? Take on only enough work to support your living costs, which should be far less than a full time job if you are a developer (I'm betting you could get by on 5-10 hours per week if you are careful with your money), and leave the rest of your time free to do whatever you want. You are not going to get rich doing it that way, but wealth doesn't seem to be a concern of yours anyway.
pg 14y ago
"As a result, my advice to anyone thinking of dropping out is to keep studying, and use every opportunity to build projects and startups on the side." Yes. In fact, I'd go even further. Don't even try to build startups. That's premature optimization. Just build things that seem interesting. The average undergraduate hacker is more likely to discover good startup ideas that way than by making a conscious effort to work on projects that are supposed to be startups.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  And unless you're Gates or Zuckerberg (protip: you're almost definitely not), that college degree is going to be infinitely more valuable to you than anything you might come up with while in college. A lot of people think that it was because he dropped out that Zuck was so successful, but IIRC, during Startup School 2012 he said that Facebook hit 1 million users before he dropped out. So unless you're coming up with the next Facebook (and you're almost definitely not), dropping out is a boneheaded move. Your startup can fail at any time before people give two shits about it (and most do, quite quickly), but a good degree from a quality university will stay with you for life.
  - CamperBob2 14y ago
    Your startup can fail at any time before people give two shits about it (and most do, quite quickly), but a good degree from a quality university will stay with you for life. Actually it'll stay with you for your first entry-level job, after which people will simply stop asking when/where you went to school.
    - kamaal 14y ago
      No, College degree matters. In fact in many cases your resume may not even pass through the filters if you don't have college degree on it. People seriously need to think before dropping out. What do you plan to do, if your start up folds up? Which is a very likely scenario given how many start ups fold up. You can do the start up thing anytime. But going to college has always been a young mans game.
rayiner 14y ago
I'll second the "keep studying" part. After high school and summers during college, I worked at a wonderful startup. Software was a big part of what they were doing, but hardware was the real innovation and everybody there except me was a hardware guy. By my second year I was giving architecture presentations to the client, because who else was going to do it? At one point I contemplated just dropping out and going to work because I'd be coming in at a higher salary than if I graduated and went somewhere else. I spent the summers grinding at that company, spent the school year doing projects on the side, and frankly blew off school because who cared about GPA when you had all that experience? It's been five years since I graduated college, and to this day I regret not spending that part of my life focusing on that part of life. Fact of the matter is that I realized the things I genuinely enjoyed hacking (compilers, operating systems) had all been done in the 1980's, and I had no interest in all the web stuff that was being done now. At the same time, anything else I might have wanted to do was closed off because of my college grades. You don't realize at 18-19 how much your college grades matter, especially if you wander outside the tech field. I'm sure lots of kids are more responsible than I was at that age. They can balance hobby projects along with acing classes. But if you're not one of those people, then I suggest either doing school or doing a startup, but not trying to do both at the same time and letting both suffer. There is plenty of time in life for entrepreneurship. And frankly, outside the little Silicon Valley bubble, your chances at starting a successful business will be greatly enhanced by the signaling devices you can earn by focusing single-mindedly on school. I do always like to point out the irony of the fact that Peter Thiel graduated from Stanford UG and Stanford Law, clerked for a Circuit judge, then went to go work for an investment bank. He was almost thirty by the time he started his first venture! Life is long, the only thing you're rushing towards is death. :D
- munin 14y ago
  >Fact of the matter is that I realized the things I genuinely enjoyed hacking (compilers, operating systems) had all been done in the 1980's FYI, this is false
- dctoedt 14y ago
  > anything else I might have wanted to do was closed off because of my college grades. You don't realize at 18-19 how much your college grades matter, especially if you wander outside the tech field. 'rayiner, if you're who I think you are (Northwestern Law?), your grades must not have been that bad; you seem to be doing just fine career-wise.
jandrewrogers 14y ago
There is a reason the average age of successful first-time startup entrepreneurs is something like 35. And this is something I only learned in retrospect, having precocious talent for being at the right place at the right time in my 20s and never really capitalizing on it. Yes, there are outlier cases but really successful startups tend to be led by people that already have a few iterations under their belt. Experience is more valuable than it ever seems like it is before you have it. It will also take more than the couple years in college you might skip to acquire it. College does not add that much value from the standpoint of building a technology startup but there is also little upside in not completing college or using it as an opportunity to gain some early good experience. Dropping out and doing a tech startup should be independent decisions.
- timc3 14y ago
  Where does the 35 figure come from? being in that age group and as a founder of a business it kind of interests me.
- csomar 14y ago
  Your whole point is based on the "35 year-old" static. That being said, if you don't link to the resource you are getting that data from; your argument is likely not going that far. I dropped for two years, and experience was the main bottleneck (though I thought I had a lot of experience when I did). I'd be interested to confirm that.
gabchan 14y ago
If you are not American, do not drop out. You will have issues obtaining a US work visa without a uni degree, i.e. you cannot go to Silicon Valley, i.e. you will be at a disadvantage.
- csomar 14y ago
  Does it matter if I have a Uni. degree in Medical Studies and I'm applying for an engineering position? (say a Front-End developer)
- randomdata 14y ago
  On the flip-side, if your reason for going to SV is to look for riches, the composition of the top 1%, according to Gallup, is comprised of: 23% college graduates 27% college dropouts, or less 49% post-graduates Unless you are willing to do post-graduate studies (which, I imagine, is primarily limited to professional degrees like MD and JD), you are statistically worse off by having a college degree.
  - sskates 14y ago
    The statistics you present do not show that you are worse off for having a college degree.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
zacharyvoase 14y ago
It’s really easy to forget that the only reason you have these swathes of free time is because your life is funded by a student loan (which is usually the cheapest credit you’ll ever get in your life).
damian2000 14y ago
One thing to keep in mind ... sure, look at Gates and Zuckerberg the two prime examples of college dropouts who went on to found wildly successful companies. But if I'm not mistaken, these guys were already wildly successfull before they dropped out? Another thing to keep in mind is that the majority of successful tech startup founders probably did finish college and have some life experience... E.g. Elon Musk is a prime example - he got degrees in both Economics and Physics before going on to found Zip2, X.com (precursor to PayPal), SpaceX and Tesla motors.

30 points by DanielRibeiro 14y ago

this is a tricky subject with the current state of free online education. im currently enrolled in a small tech for game design. its becoming more apparent as time goes on that everything im learning in school is easily found online. not to mention my school keeps losing all of our good instructors to full sail and Disney leaving us with fresh college graduates. for me it boils down to the quality of education im paying for. i know being in debt is apart of getting your degree but at what point do you take the leap of faith and just try to educate and grow on your own?

FD3SA 14y ago

I think the value proposition of college is completely based upon whether the learning strategy of classroom lectures followed by written tests works for you. For me, reading books and attempting projects are the only way I can learn effectively. Technical lectures are incredibly boring as I can't control the pacing, and many times I find they are altogether irrelevant. Technology moves at such a blistering pace that if you aren't working with the cutting edge tools on a regular basis, you are falling behind. Unfortunately, most classrooms insist on teaching with antiquated methodologies and overemphasize classroom time/testing versus building projects with modern tools. For example, I had to take a full year of Scheme, which in hindsight was helpful, but could have been done far more efficiently by me reading How to Design Programs [1] over the summer and attempting the exercises. School time could then have been used to teach modern methodologies via project work. 1. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/ http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/

mememememememe 14y ago

How many startups can actually reach stable revenue? I don't mean you need to take down Facebook or Google. But there are way too many startups. Sometimes I start to think: how many customers do they get? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? How long? A year? But on the other hand, startup is great for fresh out graduates. They learn better and quicker in theory - they are forced to adapt to the change of specs and environment. It's a great place to test your ability as an engineer and a team person. It's a challenge.

moocow01 14y ago
I think the majority of startups teach great lessons in how not to run a business. Some of the best lessons Ive learned is watching others as well as myself inadvertently blow stuff up and realizing that should have been done a lot differently. Every once in a while the stars align but what the tech media doesn't say is that the majority of work that goes on in startups is doing stuff that is experimental but typically turns out to be a not so great or extremely bad business decision.
- mememememememe 14y ago
  I think it's true. Well, two blades. Business wise, you need a real business man. Technologically you must employ the right technical lead. Then you and your employees (in particular fresh graduates) will learn quicker and better.

Jonanin 14y ago

Hopefully this is related: can anyone give some advice or input on dropping out to work in silicon valley in general? I'm not close to done (first semester freshman), but I have an internship at a certain large SV company this summer. If you were in my position, and that company offered a job, would you take it?

breckenedge 14y ago
Not to discourage you, but your education will likely benefit you far longer than most SV companies will be around. The benefits of education also brought, in my life, career choices that would not have been available without it. Choice is liberating. Who knows though, the world does seem to be changing.
- c_t_montgomery 14y ago
  I agree, but I think it's fair to say that education definitely exceeds the classroom in our fast-paced industry. I learned a lot during my 2.5 years in college, but very little of it, IMO, was related to classroom or homework-based criteria. It was almost all side projects.
- randomdata 14y ago
  > Choice is liberating. I find it to be overwhelming. I am routinely contacted by people asking if I am looking for work, and what they are doing seems like it could be an amazing experience, but you get comfortable in your six figure job that you love and taking the risk on something new is a huge decision. Like, "should you divorce your wife to date the interesting new girl you met?" kind of huge. I did not have the opportunity to obtain a formal post-secondary education though, so maybe that is something you learn to manage in that process.
  - jarek 14y ago
    > I am routinely contacted by people asking if I am looking for work, and what they are doing seems like it could be an amazing experience, but you get comfortable in your six figure job that you love One percent (of developers) problems.

dools 14y ago

A lot of the benefits he's talking about appear to assume that you're being supported financially during tertiary education (college/university) so the advice is like "if you find yourself in a situation where you are completely financially supported with a lot of free time, don't stop being financially supported in order to start a company". Which is pretty obvious advice.

colinbartlett 14y ago

Stop thinking about "doing a startup" and start thinking about "starting a business".

pg 14y ago
That's like saying stop thinking about eating an apple and start thinking about eating fruit. Startups are a proper subset of businesses. It's up to each individual what type he or she wants to start.
- timc3 14y ago
  I think what he is trying to say is just concentrate on what you are building/creating and not whether it fits a certain buzz word which is sound advice.
  - bravoyankee 14y ago
    He probably should have said that then. I didn't know what he meant initially either.
- cperciva 14y ago
  That's like saying stop thinking about eating an apple and start thinking about eating fruit. It seems to me more like "stop thinking about eating durian and start thinking about eating fruit" -- true, one is a type of the other, but it's a wildly unusual type and certainly not one which is to everyone's taste.

stevewilhelm 14y ago

As an experiment, pick three random portfolio companies from a16z.com, benchmark.com, and sequoiacap.com and see what percentage of the founders are college drop outs. In SV, what you know and who you know are both very important.

timc3 14y ago

Customer development is not a "Startup concept" it's fundamental. If you get that wrong then you certainly shouldn't drop out.

jorde 14y ago

One thing that almost never rises up when people talk about college is US work visas. Having a university level degree is pretty much essential in order to obtain a H1b visa to be able to work in the US. Of course there are ways around it but that itself is a good motivation to finish your studies if you're a foreigner. I agree that school is good time to work on side projects and learn by doing. One other good way is to do a internship for a US based startup as obtaining a J1 internship visa is relatively trivial if you're in college. That was the single best thing I did in school.

TheMakeA 14y ago

In my early 20s. Dropped out of college to get "real world experience." In retrospect, the thought of having blocks of free time to pursue whatever I want is very appealing. For now I am stuck doing 40+ hour workweeks and trying to cram side projects in on nights and weekends. I wish I were back in college.

csomar 14y ago
Could you elaborate more how college would have benefited you more now? Many people with college degrees are wearing your shoes.
- TheMakeA 14y ago
  I think in particular, I would/could have benefited more from the increased number of opportunities for free time and flexibility: * No longer have seasonal breaks outside of the odd vacation time. * Can't cram work into only a couple days a week as I am expected to show up every day. * In college, you can skip classes that you already know the material for and only show up for tests (i.e. do the minimum possible to maintain a good grade). With work, you are expected to be 100% productive every single day. There is no chance to get ahead: If you run out of work to do, you are given more, or more will be created for you. This mostly assumes that you're already very smart and while in college you are financially supported via loans or scholarships, but if you're attending Stanford, MIT, or Harvard, you probably meet both criteria. It's not that I want a college degree. I want to be financially supported while having (more) time to work on the cool things I want to work on, which is actually the same reason I want to run my own company. College is one such example that provides that opportunity.
  - randomdata 14y ago
    Why not try freelancing? Take on only enough work to support your living costs, which should be far less than a full time job if you are a developer (I'm betting you could get by on 5-10 hours per week if you are careful with your money), and leave the rest of your time free to do whatever you want. You are not going to get rich doing it that way, but wealth doesn't seem to be a concern of yours anyway.

pg 14y ago

"As a result, my advice to anyone thinking of dropping out is to keep studying, and use every opportunity to build projects and startups on the side." Yes. In fact, I'd go even further. Don't even try to build startups. That's premature optimization. Just build things that seem interesting. The average undergraduate hacker is more likely to discover good startup ideas that way than by making a conscious effort to work on projects that are supposed to be startups.

w1ntermute 14y ago
And unless you're Gates or Zuckerberg (protip: you're almost definitely not), that college degree is going to be infinitely more valuable to you than anything you might come up with while in college. A lot of people think that it was because he dropped out that Zuck was so successful, but IIRC, during Startup School 2012 he said that Facebook hit 1 million users before he dropped out. So unless you're coming up with the next Facebook (and you're almost definitely not), dropping out is a boneheaded move. Your startup can fail at any time before people give two shits about it (and most do, quite quickly), but a good degree from a quality university will stay with you for life.
- CamperBob2 14y ago
  Your startup can fail at any time before people give two shits about it (and most do, quite quickly), but a good degree from a quality university will stay with you for life. Actually it'll stay with you for your first entry-level job, after which people will simply stop asking when/where you went to school.
  - kamaal 14y ago
    No, College degree matters. In fact in many cases your resume may not even pass through the filters if you don't have college degree on it. People seriously need to think before dropping out. What do you plan to do, if your start up folds up? Which is a very likely scenario given how many start ups fold up. You can do the start up thing anytime. But going to college has always been a young mans game.

rayiner 14y ago

I'll second the "keep studying" part. After high school and summers during college, I worked at a wonderful startup. Software was a big part of what they were doing, but hardware was the real innovation and everybody there except me was a hardware guy. By my second year I was giving architecture presentations to the client, because who else was going to do it? At one point I contemplated just dropping out and going to work because I'd be coming in at a higher salary than if I graduated and went somewhere else. I spent the summers grinding at that company, spent the school year doing projects on the side, and frankly blew off school because who cared about GPA when you had all that experience? It's been five years since I graduated college, and to this day I regret not spending that part of my life focusing on that part of life. Fact of the matter is that I realized the things I genuinely enjoyed hacking (compilers, operating systems) had all been done in the 1980's, and I had no interest in all the web stuff that was being done now. At the same time, anything else I might have wanted to do was closed off because of my college grades. You don't realize at 18-19 how much your college grades matter, especially if you wander outside the tech field. I'm sure lots of kids are more responsible than I was at that age. They can balance hobby projects along with acing classes. But if you're not one of those people, then I suggest either doing school or doing a startup, but not trying to do both at the same time and letting both suffer. There is plenty of time in life for entrepreneurship. And frankly, outside the little Silicon Valley bubble, your chances at starting a successful business will be greatly enhanced by the signaling devices you can earn by focusing single-mindedly on school. I do always like to point out the irony of the fact that Peter Thiel graduated from Stanford UG and Stanford Law, clerked for a Circuit judge, then went to go work for an investment bank. He was almost thirty by the time he started his first venture! Life is long, the only thing you're rushing towards is death. :D

munin 14y ago
>Fact of the matter is that I realized the things I genuinely enjoyed hacking (compilers, operating systems) had all been done in the 1980's FYI, this is false
dctoedt 14y ago
> anything else I might have wanted to do was closed off because of my college grades. You don't realize at 18-19 how much your college grades matter, especially if you wander outside the tech field. 'rayiner, if you're who I think you are (Northwestern Law?), your grades must not have been that bad; you seem to be doing just fine career-wise.

jandrewrogers 14y ago

There is a reason the average age of successful first-time startup entrepreneurs is something like 35. And this is something I only learned in retrospect, having precocious talent for being at the right place at the right time in my 20s and never really capitalizing on it. Yes, there are outlier cases but really successful startups tend to be led by people that already have a few iterations under their belt. Experience is more valuable than it ever seems like it is before you have it. It will also take more than the couple years in college you might skip to acquire it. College does not add that much value from the standpoint of building a technology startup but there is also little upside in not completing college or using it as an opportunity to gain some early good experience. Dropping out and doing a tech startup should be independent decisions.

timc3 14y ago
Where does the 35 figure come from? being in that age group and as a founder of a business it kind of interests me.
csomar 14y ago
Your whole point is based on the "35 year-old" static. That being said, if you don't link to the resource you are getting that data from; your argument is likely not going that far. I dropped for two years, and experience was the main bottleneck (though I thought I had a lot of experience when I did). I'd be interested to confirm that.

gabchan 14y ago

If you are not American, do not drop out. You will have issues obtaining a US work visa without a uni degree, i.e. you cannot go to Silicon Valley, i.e. you will be at a disadvantage.

csomar 14y ago
Does it matter if I have a Uni. degree in Medical Studies and I'm applying for an engineering position? (say a Front-End developer)
randomdata 14y ago
On the flip-side, if your reason for going to SV is to look for riches, the composition of the top 1%, according to Gallup, is comprised of: 23% college graduates 27% college dropouts, or less 49% post-graduates Unless you are willing to do post-graduate studies (which, I imagine, is primarily limited to professional degrees like MD and JD), you are statistically worse off by having a college degree.
- sskates 14y ago
  The statistics you present do not show that you are worse off for having a college degree.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

zacharyvoase 14y ago

It’s really easy to forget that the only reason you have these swathes of free time is because your life is funded by a student loan (which is usually the cheapest credit you’ll ever get in your life).

damian2000 14y ago

One thing to keep in mind ... sure, look at Gates and Zuckerberg the two prime examples of college dropouts who went on to found wildly successful companies. But if I'm not mistaken, these guys were already wildly successfull before they dropped out? Another thing to keep in mind is that the majority of successful tech startup founders probably did finish college and have some life experience... E.g. Elon Musk is a prime example - he got degrees in both Economics and Physics before going on to found Zip2, X.com (precursor to PayPal), SpaceX and Tesla motors.