Want to be an entrepreneur? Drop out of college. | Hacker News Reader

Want to be an entrepreneur? Drop out of college.

caterina.net

44 pointsdwynings57 comments

I think advice like this should be taken lightly. This writer simply says look at this or that, not realizing these guys are the exception, not the rule. What worries me is she gives life changing decisions without any data to back her approach.

Some data for you: 1. 95.1% of entrepreneurs had a bachelor degree or higher 2. 41.4% of entrepreneurs succeed on the first go (There goes the apprentice argument) 3. The average and median age of company founders in our sample when they started their current companies was 40. The standard deviation for this distribution was 7.7.

http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/ResearchAndPolicy/TheS...

I think correlation is being confused with causation. It is probably more that intelligence and ambition are traits of great entrepreneurs, but are also correlated with dropping out of college. In addition I bet that most people who graduated from college do not regret the experience.

I suspect it may not be so much that the kind of people who don't finish college make good startup founders as that many other jobs filter them out. But that may be changing. General Motors probably still cares if you have a college degree, but I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook doesn't, so long as you can hack.

Besides the fact that technology makes it easier to develop a network, a good reputation, and a track record for shipping, do you see any other factors driving this change? These factors are more than enough to allow someone to start a startup or get a job at one, but the biggest problem at big companies is that taste still doesn't scale.

Performance is more easily measurable (a) for hackers and (b) in small organizations. And economically both hackers and small organizations have been increasing in importance.

Dell (another company founded by a dropout) has divisions that wont promote a non-college-grad. We were bought by Dell, my friend had to leave because VP Mike Lambert told him he could never be promoted.

The filtering phenomenon is obsolete; as you note, GM probably still cares because it's old fashioned, but modern companies don't care at all. Even if the filter exists/existed, that's hardly a sufficient or effective motivation to start a startup -- good startup founders don't seem like the type who'd just take a salaried gig and become complacent if it was offered to them.

There's probably some traits useful to startup founders that are more common amongst dropouts than the general population -- like a willingness to take responsibility for one's future into one's own hands.

If widespread filtering means a founder couldn't get a salaried gig long enough to pay the bills and accumulate some savings, that's a worst-case problem they need to be aware of. I keep hearing it really is rough out there without a degree, but I started out with one so I don't actually know.

Ha! The title reminds me of an old Calvin & Hobbes comic, Calvin is talking about Einstein getting bad grades and he says something like "you heard Einstein got bad grades in school? well mine are even worse!"

I don't think not attending college was good or bad for me but I'm going to do what I can with what I've got.

Sorry to nit-pick, but Einstein doing poorly in his earlier education is a myth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#Early_life_and_...

("In 1889 Max Talmud (later changed to Max Talmey) introduced the ten-year old Einstein to key texts in science, mathematics and philosophy, including Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Euclid’s Elements" -- my goodness, Kant's critique when he was _ten_?)

Classic selection bias. The dropout founders of Apple, Twitter, and Facebook need to be balanced against dropout founders whose companies failed. Of course, we have no idea who they are and so it's difficult to point to examples.

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.

Read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - Mssrs Dell, Gates and Jobs are all the same guy, largely social forces put them where they are.

Huh? First off, I'm not really into Malcolm Gladwell. Second, what are you replying to anyway? The general point that anything one does matters?

On the other hand, look at Brad Fitzpatrick. He managed to successfully run LiveJournal while enrolled in college (full-time I believe) and said he wouldn't have done it any other way if he had the chance.

This is more or less the route I've been taking (though I'm short on the type of success Brad has had). I rather like it. I feel like I'm learning a lot more when both lifestyles collide.

I also have to admit that college has really been an enlightening experience even though the work was tough (I graduate in a few weeks). I'm so glad I went, even if I've been distracted the last year on my business.

Sounds like burning bridges. "Want to do something hard that few people succeed at? Eliminate your alternatives so you have no other choice than to keep going!"

Well you have to make a choice to some degree.

If you postpone school till you're 40 the job market might not accept you. If you don't attempt your startup while young you might not have the energy.

Entrepreneurship is a compulsion, not a want.

I think you find the spark and become an entrepreneur when you stop "searching" for something, but begin reacting intelligently to your future customers.

You don't need to drop out of college if the college demographic is a good demographic for your next product.

I think that college is the perfect time to be an entrepreneur. Any typical college class schedule leaves students with a fair amount of free time. If you want to start something, it's a lot easier to find time while in college than once you are out and having to support a "real life". Essentially, you have nothing to lose.

Additionally, you are surrounded by other smart people who are in the same "nothing-to-lose" situation. Grab and friend and make something great! The opportunity to go to class and learn something new is secondary to the people you meet.

Awesome advice everyone should follow it. Just imagine how much more start-ups (future corporations) we would have since "1 college drop out = 1 kick ass entrepreneur".

I think the better model is to hang around a college and meet the interesting folks...without enrolling in classes and having to go into heavy debt. Spend your days on your startup...and your nights meeting/talking to interesting potential co-founders.

The other important thing is the mindset shift...from having to validate your learning by an authority figure to being able to trust yourself to learn things.

> You put in a student and out comes a scholar.

This seems generous.

Been there, done that. Advice: if you're dead set on your company, go focus on that. You can always go back. If not? Use college as a time to learn new things and find similar minded people. Also fill the gaps in your weaknesses.

This topic comes up on HN every few months and never fails to create a lively debate. As a (potential) future entrepreneur / freshman in college, I've gone back and forth a few times about whether I should continue my education. Here are the conclusions I've made:

(FYI - I'm probably just reiterating what others have said, but I'm lazy and don't want to properly cite by finding all the "should you go to college" blog posts / comments...)

0. Staying in school doesn't hurt. College is a four year block of time where you are encouraged and expected to experiment with every aspect of your life. This experimental space can't be found anywhere else. (The financial aspect is a different story; if going to college puts you in a huge amount of debt, this point may not be true.)

1. Know that you can always dropout. I take comfort in this fact. If I come across a life-changing opportunity, I can always just postpone college.

2. Theory != Practice. When I first started studying CS at school, I was peeved that professors didn't optimize code as much as possible. Why should I disregard the constant for a linear time algorithm? However, I've since come to appreciate the generality of this method of thinking. Thinking generally about specific problems is (to me, at least) a valuable skill to have and one that I need to work on.

3. It's not about the classes, it's about the people. This is an old but important argument and it's completely valid. You'll learn way more from your classmates than you will from your professors. It doesn't matter how great of a coder you are... if you don't learn social skills you'll be a terrible entrepreneur.

4. Professors are really smart. At any decent university, you'll have access to a group of people who have spent their entire careers being clever. Most are more than happy to explain their work / mentor an interested student / try to impart some cleverness.

5. A three-month summer. The fact that summers are exactly three-months is a good thing. If they were longer, students might not return from really wonderful jobs. If they were shorter, students wouldn't be exposed to jobs long enough. By taking full advantage of summers, you can "job hop" and sample careers / businesses in a way that would be otherwise frowned upon. I've learned a lot about how I would create company culture by working at different companies, and I still have three more summers to keep learning.

6. Keeping relevant paths open. Entrepreneurship has always sounded attractive to me, but I'm curious about a lot of things. I'd rather be positive about the career path I choose than always wonder if I should have done something else with my life. By trying out research / acting / underwater basket weaving now, I can either decide certain professions aren't for me or find a way to incorporate them into my eventual line of work.

7. Recruitment. From a purely economic, slightly perverse perspective, college is a great place to recruit for a future startup.

This is pretty amazing insight for a freshman in college. I would love to have had your breadth of perception when I was 18. It doesn't sound like you are going to have any trouble analyzing whether to stay in college or to drop out and pursue something else worthwhile.

"college is a great place to recruit for a future startup"

Indeed. I've seen this in several startups, and saved LMI in 1983 by recruiting a fantastic engineer who was just graduating. He'd built a baby Lisp Machine for his 6.111 final project and finished the design and debugging of LMI's first in-house designed machine (something Greenblatt and the physics graduate he'd hired to do the digital design weren't capable of).

And it's worth pointing out that he learned the skills necessary to do this by finishing his formal education.

I'm an entrepreneur and a college dropout. One reason I'm an entrepreneur is that, lacking a formal education and degree, I had fewer options within big tech companies. While I'm completely happy with my own career trajectory, I advise young folks to finish their degree so that they have more options.

I really think the article and the general sentiment of romanticizing the drop out entrepreneur does a disservice to young people.

On the flip side, the best thing you could do for your entrepreneurial career at 18 is to go to Stanford.

Did that, working on my 5th startup, 3 were bought out (by Unisys, Screaming Media, Dell). Works pretty good.

If only there were schools that encouraged entrepreneurship while broadening your horizons with more smart, interesting people than you might ever meet again...

Stanford

At college you might learn the phrase "anecdotal evidence."

I found out why I'm not in college. It's not the "learn", but the "must lear".

Apparently, dropping out of grad school also works well.

Want to be an entrepreneur? Be an entrepreneur! Want to be a college dropout? Drop out of college!

Me think, education and entrepreneurship are not, and should not be presented as, mutually exclusive.

Agreed. Talk about sweeping generalizations.

They are mutual exclusive. But, I particular don't like the flippant nature these advice are being thrown about. I encourage people to think how things will affect them in the worst case scenario. Sometimes, even if you don't want to do something, it might be an easier and quicker path to achieve success.

We love to root for the underdog. Many examples are given in the comments to this post about college grads who founded successful companies (Intel, Bose, etc).

There are arguments both for the enlightening and factory-product aspects of college. Academia is definitely a path to the great body of thought that has come before us; this is particularly important in the field of engineering. At the same time, it also does teach being obligated to an outside sense of importance, possibly diminishing out own internal value systems.

Not a new debate, but one I usually like to leave as, "There's a place for both sides."

I think you're right, but in my opinion they don't overlap very well either. A startup is very unlikely to succeed without complete devotion and it's very hard to take the most rigorous classes while working >20 hours a week.

Who says you can't start a startup after completing college?

Sally Mae?

Or, pick another college. I attended a school in the City University of New York system. When I started it cost around $700 a year (yes, you read correctly). By the end, even with a massive increase in tuition (by percentage), it cost around $1400. I worked part-time all the way through, lived at home and went off to graduate school debt free. I also got an excellent education. State by state and city by city, I'm sure the quality of public colleges varies, but many local systems are quite good.

This semester I was in school full-time and working on my startup part-time with co-founders. That was a huge mistake. As much as it was fun, the only time where I got major progress done was during vacations, when I should've been focusing on the assignments thrust upon me by my studies. Since I was focusing more on my startup, rather than my classes, my grades ended up not being as good as they could have been.

Luckily, for the next 8 months I get to focus 100% on my startup; I won't have to choose between a mediocre grade and a mediocre product. I'll have the energy and resources to create a great product.

Rats! I stupidly finished college many years ago. Now I can never start a company!

That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying I think it's unwise to do both at the same time.

Some colleges may not appreciate out-of-box thinking

If you find yourself in one of them there's no reason you have to let them know you're thinking subversive thoughts.

It's basically true. You only have so many hours in the day.

My answer: Google. Drastically different from all the companies created by entrepreneurs mentioned in the article. (The difference is that Google is truly innovative - built on a very original idea of PageRank, while neither MS, nore FaceBook, nor even Apple invented anything new). Why? May be because the founders are not dropouts?

Now if you want to be drug addict - be a college dropout. The best addicts I know are dropouts. Do you want to be a crank - be a college dropout. The best cranks I know are dropouts.

built on a very original idea of PageRank

careful about this slippery slope ... it's rare for something to be 'very original'. PageRank is based on well-known academic research by Jon Kleinberg and others on graph reputation algorithms ... of course, the application to web search and wonderful execution was what made Google's start possible. You could argue that MS, Facebook, Apple, etc. also innovated greatly on existing technologies and created something 'very original'.

To understand the scientific paper, nonetheless you need to have a degree. Even to know about its very existence, you would still need a degree.

i totally agree ... if larry page hadn't been in a Ph.D. program, he would've likely not gotten exposed to that sort of research, especially because back in the early 1990's, it was much harder for people to get access to or even knowledge about research papers (you couldn't just, ummm, Google for them!)

In addition there's long standing research in the field of Library Science about the importance of citations. It seems like a natural progression from judging the quality of a paper by the number and quality of papers citing it, to PageRank.

This book basically described something very similar to PageRank in 1993 (5 years before Google): http://www.amazon.com/Library-Research-Models-Classification...

Some of the best addicts I know are writing their doctoral theses or doing post-grad work.

Yet this came up on HN (again). Why?

What do people here really want to talk about? It's surely not Caterina!

Damn. I'm (almost) tempted to sign up (again) just to be able to talk smack. Actually, I just deleted a whole crapload of incendiary junk. Um. Me sad now.

Yeah, so I got an account (again). Grrrr.

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