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The main point, really, is causation. Mark Zuckerberg (and Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, etc, etc) dropped out of school AFTER starting a successful business. Even Paul Graham quit his day job AFTER starting a successful business.

On the other hand, dropping out of school, or even quitting your day job, do not guarantee success.

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I thought Bill Gates left school to start a company. He hadn't even started a company before dropping out.

Technically, it seems both are correct.

(From http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/billg/?tab=biography) While at Harvard, Gates developed a version of the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer - the MITS Altair.

In his junior year, Gates left Harvard to devote his energies to Microsoft, a company he had begun in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen.

Exactly right. To think otherwise is to have cargo-cult thinking.

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