> Some speakers were even advocating dropping out of High School (!?!?) to work on your startup. Huh, I hadn't heard that one before. I do think there's a par

> Some speakers were even advocating dropping out of High School (!?!?) to work on your startup. Huh, I hadn't heard that one before. I do think there's a particular subset of the startup sector, mostly focusing on web, MVPs, and business-model innovation, which has a negative view of academic-anything, whether it's formal education, academic research, even CS as a subject. But it's also worth noting that that isn't the whole of the technology business! Plenty of startup founders not only graduated from college, but even went to grad school (graduating from grad school seems less important than spending a few years there). A number of high-profile startups were formed by grad students or professors as spinoffs of their academic research. A few technologies that were either developed in academia, or are direct derivatives of stuff the founders developed in academia, include PageRank, Mathematica, SPARC, PostgreSQL, Matlab, etc.