When you read about most founders who dropped out, they already had significant traction before making the leap. In my honest opinion you shouldn't drop out of college until you have a finished product(even if it's only a MVP) with traction and can show that this is a better alternative. Obviously you're free to do whatever you want but from an impartial observers perspective, this move seems unecessarily risky until you have a finished product, and enough users to prove it's viability.
Yes, dropping out of college to start a company is risky. However, if you can't handle that risk are you sure you can handle the risk of starting a startup?
Don't get me wrong, you're making a good argument for staying in college. However, I think it's hardly a prima facie case for staying in school.
I'm often amazed at how cavalierly advice like this is given. We're talking about a major (yes, major) decision here.
And the logic... drop out of college because a handful of very smart entrepreneurs were able to start successful businesses without their degree? Come on. Let's count the successful college graduates who have made it big AND the college drop-outs who have tried and failed (and double count the ones that never went back; yikes, hard to count). Or let's make it conditional, "if you know you're of Bill Gates' stature and timing is of the essence, sure, drop out. If not, get the piece of paper you've already put time and money towards (and have fun!). Then start your business."
But at least they're putting their money where their mouth is via investments. I'd be curious, though, whether the drop-outs they're funding are recent drop-outs, or whether the founders cut their teeth elsewhere before starting their current venture. If the latter, the advice perhaps becomes, "drop out of college to get a job at a start-up and maybe start your own business later." Which leads us to the obliging question to Fred and Caterina (and everyone else in tech) - how many young non-grads have they hired recently in their own companies or portfolio companies.
I agree with that call for students thinking twice before dropping out for a startup. If everyone is leaving school to start companies, just go the other direction. This is just a classical case of market psychology. You never want to enter the tail-end of a big wave of risk-taking like this. Education is one of the lowest risk, highest return investment you'll ever make.
What's the argument(s) against just dropping out now and starting something up?
As someone currently on indefinite leave from college to work on my startup... I think you have the order backwards. Get something going first, and when it is going so well that it would be foolish not to work on it full-time, then take the plunge. College is an excellent (and safe) place to throw a bunch of ideas at the wall and see what sticks.
I went through the same decision 6 months ago. We had a company going and were ready to raise capital and drop college, but we decided otherwise. I am also 23, self-taught and I never liked college. Ever since I was allowed to surf the internet by myself (at 9, in a dial-up connection), my curiosity and patience permitted me to absorb a lot of knowledge "ahead of time". Because of that, college was boring for the most part of it, even more boring when I got into entrepreneurship and decided to start my first company with a friend. The feeling of actually creating stuff and seeing people test what we built and give feedback was amazing, even though most of the feedback was negative. Before deciding to either drop college or close the company, we talked to many entrepreneurs, angels and people we trusted.
Our decision to close it, instead of dropping, basically came down to a few points. We didn’t have a working MVP that tested our idea, what we had was a solid beta team and a half finished MVP, so dropping out of college would mean that I would not have a solid foundation that would allow me to get back on my feet, in case things went wrong (I live in Brazil, entrepreneurship and failing aren’t seen as good things here; on average, degrees are valued much more than the life experience of failing a company). I also ended up having my doubts if we actually needed to drop out of college to build this, or if I was just trying to escape the frustration of going to classes that mostly wasted my time.
So, I ask you two things: Are you sure you are not thinking of dropping college as a way of dealing with the frustration you (might) feel when going to it? Don’t you think you can use the college as a sandbox for testing ideas and working on interesting projects without having to deal with a) social pressure, b) financial health and c) failing consequences? If you aren’t sure, don’t drop it. If you think the frustration of going to some classes, is a lower cost than a), b) and c), don’t drop it. I would also suggest you use the social experience of going to a college in order to meet other people like-minded, possibly even a cofounder for future projects, because the friends I made through college are the ones I am taking with me for the rest of my life and certainly the most valuable thing I am taking out of college with me.
Hey HN,<p>So backstory, I am a university Student in my third year of Systems Design Engineering and also the CTO of a tech startup that is starting to gain a lot of traction. So much so, that we pretty much got our first customers before we even finish building the product. Now as we are nearing product launch we have gotten so many calls from various companies and clients wanting to use our product that it almost seems possible we are going to be the next big thing to revolutionize the industry we are targeting. <p>Now here is my dilemma: I want to drop out or rather just defer my education and work on this full time because I am certain that we will succeed. However, I am afraid that in the off-chance it doesn't succeed, that I will have trouble finding employment there after due to an unfinished degree. Of course I could still go back to school...but then again I dont know how that would look to potential employers on my resume. In terms of skill, I consider myself quite a qualified full stack developer(I have been handling front end, backend and some mobile development for my startup).<p>SO here is my big question, should I drop out/defer my education or should I try doing school while doing my startup? Also, does any one have experience dropping out of school running a successful company then leaving it and finding a job/starting another company? I would really like to hear your thoughts.<p>Thanks
coolsebz, I felt the same way when I was in college. A year and a half in I dropped out. Like you I also programmed for fun at a young age and loved the pleasure it gave me. The ability to create something on my own from virtually nothing was incredibly exciting. Once I found out I could also make money I was hooked.
When I dropped out I started a company that failed horribly in the first year. However, in that year I networked with other small business owners and entrepreneurs in the area. From these connections I was able to work my way from one startup to the next. Six years later I now working with a more traditional "corporate" company and live comfortably.
Like any journey in life it came with a great set of experiences that I learned from that formed who I am today. However, I wouldn't say that dropping out of college was the best idea I ever had. Had I attempted to apply for the corporate job that I am in now when I dropped out I would have never got it. It took a backlog of personal opensource projects, a positive track record at previous companies, and a good deal of networking. Having a degree wouldn't have been a guarantee at getting in either -- but it would have gotten me past HR faster.
Life is a crazy journey, and I understand wanting to run as fast as possible. If I was you, I would use college as an opportunity to work on your own ideas and projects, learn, network, explore yourself, and have fun. Even if it doesn't seem like it, you have a lot of time ahead of you. This time in your live is an amazing opportunity to live and explore without boundaries.
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.
Everyone knows about the dropout billionaires (Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.), but nobody knows about the many people who dropped out to make a startup and failed. The majority of people who try startups fail.
Unless you have a time-sensitive breakthrough idea, I think it’s better to take a pragmatic approach and at least finish college so you have a backup, or at least work on a startup in college, and then drop out if you become successful, not before.
I definitely agree it's an exception but the more blogs like TechCrunch publicize people dropping out (Thiel Fellows, Penn students from a post yesterday), the more prominent (and viable) it appears. The best option is to run the business at school, leverage the vast array of (usually free) resources on campus, and graduate with a startup AND a degree.
About the numerical argument, that's not a good argument. The fact that 92,5% of the people on the Forbes 30 Under 30 for Tech list did not drop out is meaningless by itself. Why?
Imagine that 92,5% of all population had degrees. Or even better: that 99% of all population had degrees.
It'd be more meaningful if you added the percentage of the population with degrees, the % of people without degrees who created failed startups...
But, anyways, I don't think that having/not having a degree is a fundamental factor in the success of your startup. Maybe you're already good enough to go forward. Maybe your idea is so great it compensates your lack of technical knowledge. Frankly, I think that dropping college to do a startup is neither a good or bad idea. It depends on you, your circumstances and the startup itself.
Is this idea really worth leaving school for? I know of at least a few competitors in this space, so it seems like a pretty big risk (even with $1M in seed funding) to drop out.
This is a hard question. I considered dropping out multiple times in college, but ended up sticking it out and getting my degree. I'm still not sure if it was the right choice, but it seems to be working out so far. Anyways, I have no answers, but I have some observations.
One of my main fears in college was that I would graduate, take a soul-crushing job, and then lose all desire to start a startup. This hasn't happened. I still want a successful startup just as much as I did in college, or maybe even more. You're not going to stop wanting what you've always wanted just because you have a degree, a job, money, and options.
OTOH, having a job and an income fucks with your perceptions a little. I was lucky (smart?) and didn't change my spending habits; over the past year and a half that I've been working, I banked close to 90% of my take-home pay. Even though I'm financially much more secure than I was coming out of college, it feels much more precarious - I've gotten used to having a certain amount of money coming in each month. Quitting my day job wouldn't be an issue if I didn't have a day job.
Don't underestimate the experience you'll learn on the job. I feel like I've benefited significantly from working in somebody else's startup for a year and a half before trying my own. It also creates a sense of momentum and gets your brain in gear; you'll need all the focus you can have when starting your startup.
Don't overestimate the book learning you'll get in college. Honestly, I don't think a single thing I learned in the classroom has helped me with my startup.
OTOH, a lot of college learning occurs outside the classroom. My impossible quest to complete a computer science major in one semester while the department would not let me declare one turned out to be exactly what startup life is all about. There will be many moments when you have to work like hell for what feels like zero payoff. It's a good experience to really fuck up and then recover from it, because you do that a lot with startups. If you skip the recovery part in college, how do you know you'll be able to do it with your startup?
Also, I met my cofounders in college. Had I left after freshman year, I would never have known them. Had I left later, I probably wouldn't have kept in touch.
Probably the biggest factor in my decision not to leave is that I didn't have a clear idea what I would do instead. That's probably the biggest determinant: if you know exactly what you'll be working on instead (like Michael Dell, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg) do that instead. If you don't, stay in school, because you'll probably end up doing nothing instead, and nothing isn't a particularly good teacher.
Why would a university incite you to drop out of it? What does the university gain from that?
Why would you go to university with the intention of dropping out as soon as your startup gains traction? Why not just start your startup right out of secondary school and save yourself thousands in tuition fees?
Failing that, what's wrong with finishing your degree and then starting your startup?
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