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At the first startup I worked for we polled our office of 12 people to see who had graduated from college. I'm pretty sure the answer was just two people, mysel
by tonystubblebine 18y ago
At the first startup I worked for we polled our office of 12 people to see who had graduated from college. I'm pretty sure the answer was just two people, myself and the other middle manager. Everybody doing interesting work, developers, designers, and founders had either skipped or dropped out of college.
Three of those college dropouts went on to found a company that Fred is funding. So his story could easily be about those three people.
There are two things I realized after that poll. First, the conventional path is boring and I needed to jump off.
Second, the amount of work required to be great at something completely trumps the tiny amount of work that you're going to put in during college. Sure, the background knowledge is helpful, but only a little bit compared to everything you're going to have to learn after college.
- light3 18y agoYour second point is certainly not universal, some people do a lot of work during college. If you know what you really want to do before college, sure go for it, but in most cases people have no idea, college is a good place to keep busy and learn about your interests.
- tonystubblebine 18y agoI was really talking about the specific work (or practice) that goes into being great at something, not about misspent youth. Let's take a computer science degree and a ten year path to great (whatever that means). If you just measure by time spent, you're maybe coming out of college 5-20% of the way down the path. But I'd argue that the computer science degree isn't specific enough to count nearly that much. Really, you're graduating as an broadly experienced non-expert who then has to put a boat load of time into developing a specific expertise. The value of that time spent outside of college completely trumps the value of the time spent in college, even if the amount of time spent is equivalent.
- rw 18y agoYou had a startup of 12 people, with 2 middle managers?!
- tonystubblebine 18y agoCrazy, right?! We both did a little bit of real work (and I wrote the first version of the software for my current company), but we were definitely hired to fill some checkbox on a company growth map.