Students: You Are Probably Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School | Hacker News Reader

Students: You Are Probably Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School

wadhwa.com

51 pointswoan66 comments

One commonality between many successful dropouts like Zuckerberg and Gates is that they dropped out to do something specific, not because they were too lazy or undisciplined to finish. Had the right opportunity not come along, I suspect many celebrity dropouts would have cruised to graduation.

Of course a lot of students who are lazy and undisciplined do not think that they are lazy and undisciplined

In fact, I'd imagine Zuckerberg would be better off both personally and professionally had he finished his undergraduate education.

Moreover, I think it's interesting to think if Facebook would be different had it been founded by post-graduation Zuckerberg. Better? Worse? I bet the Facebook experience would be richer had Zuckerberg been more mature when he crafted the initial vision.

That is a pretty bold claim. It sounds ridiculous to me.

Also, how can someone consumed with an idea finish school? It is that singular purpose that drive Zuckerberg to succeed. You can't just put that on hold and finish up a degree.

Both of these claims are tossed out as random assertions with no support. Why would Zuckerberg be better off if he had finished undergrad? Why would the Facebook experience have been richer if crafter by a post-college founder?

That is one of the most absurd claims I have ever heard on HN. However, I do not think it should be downvoted, because it was made in good faith.

I like to think of it as they went out and made the opportunity happen for themselves instead of waiting for the opportunity to present itself.

Yes and no. Gates had a large amount of experience with programming in an era where most people had not seen a computer, and had very wealthy parents who supported him dropping out. Now you may argue that he "made the opportunity" by convincing his parents that this whole software thing was a good idea, etc., but the reality is that he was born at the right time, in the right place, with the right set of parents, etc. This is not to lessen what he did: he grabbed the opportunity by the tail. He did no less than any other wildly successful entrepreneur. But for a vast majority of college students out there, the resources and experiences he had at the time are untouchable. To use an analogy: you can have all the willpower, drive, motivation, etc. to move the world, but you still need that damn big lever.

But they didn't drop out to find the opportunity, is his point.

The uber-point is really, people who are bright enough to found $1B businesses are also bright enough to realize that you don't leave college until you have the idea moving along a good path.

To put it another way, are there any $1B SW companies started by people who either didn't go to college or dropped out of college before they had started creating product for what would be this company? I honestly can't think of any (but that doesn't mean there aren't any -- and it should be easy to enumerate since there's probably only 20 or so billion dollar SW companies).

Twitter & Apple.

I'll give you half-credit for Apple. Jobs was out of school, but Woz was still at UCB and withdrew after they had already begun selling (but before the company was officially formed).

And I think half credit for Twitter. I don't know much about Twitter, but it appears Dorsey was still in college when they started Twitter.

But in any case two pretty good examples.

If you count Woz as "still at UCB" because he was on a leave of absence, then you have to count Gates as "still at Harvard" and Page & Brin as "still at Stanford" even today. Officially, they never actually dropped out of their universities - they just remain on perpetual leave of absence, and could go back next semester if they wanted to. Woz was at HP because he didn't have money for the next semester of Berkeley, and he thought he would always be at HP, and even after Apple started selling things and went public, he remained officially on a leave of absence, and actually did go back after his plane crash.

It's actually really hard to drop out or fail out of an elite college - I tried a couple times when I was still in undergrad. They always want you to take a leave of absence because then you don't show up in the dropout statistics that drag down their U.S. News rankings. This is why it's not really all that risky to drop out of college; you can always go back and pick up where you left off, but you'll have a much better idea of why you're there.

I was definitely thinking about Evan Williams for Twitter. He dropped out of college because he always knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur, but had no idea what sort of company he would start. I don't really know about Dorsey and Biz Stone's backgrounds.

OK, you get 1.75 points. :-)

(Woz did go back to Berkeley later, and got his undergraduate degree in 1986.)

I'd also argue even including Gates in a list of typical college dropouts. He was taking graduate level computer science and mathematics classes his first and second year in college. Anyone who can take handle graduate level technical classes has shown a decent grasp of the undergraduate material.

That's an interesting point (re: doing something specific) which applies not just to college students. The truth is once you have clarity and vision, what ever it is you are doing seems like poor usage of your time. Having said, it's not easy arrive at that kind of clarity or vision.

One can argue that there is no clarity of vision involved. Rather, for every individual like Gates who gets lucky with a good business opportunity, there may be many equally qualified individuals who do not get a lucky break with a good idea.

It is always assumed that success and failure in business corresponds directly to skill. I doubt this assumption and suspect luck has a lot to do with it. Once you get your first success earning you several million, many doors open to you.

why did steve jobs drop out?

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html "all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it."

but he continued listening lectures - he just stopped paying. Apparently he was smart enough to realize that the knowledge is worth much more than the degree.

To figure out who he was and what he wanted in life.

It's a fallacy that one should avoid ambitious choices because few succeed at them. On average the odds of starting a successful startup are low, but the reason that's so is that it's an average of a few people for whom the probability of success is high (not 100%, but still high considering the risks) and a large number for whom it's practically zero.

I suppose in a sense he's doing students a favor with this article, because the ones who don't perceive the fallacy are probably the ones with a low chance of succeeding.

It is also a fallacy that one should make ambitious choices because some well-known few have succeeded.

In either case you are making a decision out of emotion (fear or hope).

edit: better noun.

Exclude the "well known few" from the list of successful entrepreneurs and you still have a list of people that is quite large.

I am very fortunate I did not listen to anyone who told me their opinion when I was preparing to drop out of college some 5 years ago. As difficult as it was to do back then, the choices I have to make to run my company and keep my employees employed make that one decision appear pathetically simple and obvious.

Being an entrepreneur is about making decisions for yourself because no one else can tell you what to do (and once you become successful everyone will have an their opinions of what you should do.)

If you are incapable about making challenging decisions to run your own life you are not going to be a successful entrepreneur and you should listen to what other people tell you.

I was not aware that weighing up advice, and sometimes taking it, was an inability to make challenging decisions.

I am glad you were successful, however your experience remains only anecdotal. I have one too: my father did not go to university, worked hard at his trade, started a business, and went bankrupt.

Of the people I know who think they're smart enough to drop out of school and start a successful business, most of them are smart enough to start a business, but not necessarily the one they want to start.

Students: You are probably not Mark Zuckerberg, so pay $200,000 to put up with old-fashioned syllabi and badly-designed courses employing poor methods of evaluation and professors who do their best to make feel as mediocre as possible!

Amen. Whereas graduate studies in certain disciplines can help advance your career, the basic undergraduate curriculum has become increasingly useless. Work experience is what counts for more than anything. Ideally you would attend a reasonably priced institution with good teachers and be given enough time to explore independent projects - business ideas or artistic pursuits depending on what your interests in life are. For tech, something like Y Combinator, sponsored by the University perhaps, should be a part of every campus scene and students should be given the time to launch projects on the side. Many will fail, but the lessons learned will still be invaluable in life. This is how we will remain an economic powerhouse and create the next generation of leaders.

"basic undergraduate curriculum has become increasingly useless"

Why do you think that has happened? From my perspective (I graduated over 20 years ago) things like CS degrees seem to have been tried to become far more directly useful by becoming rather more like vocational training than pure academic subjects.

[NB I'm largely interested because I have a son who is starting to think about what he might do at University].

Well I think the problem is the way the job market has changed, not the way that the curricula have changed; they've remained remarkably static. It used to be that if you had a college degree in something you could get an entry level position in... something. Nowadays you have to have had some sort of vocational training in that field. If you have a degree in history there aren't many fields that applies to. And the problem in C.S. isn't that C.S. programs aren't teaching advanced algorithms well, it's that all the job listings want you to know RoR. Computer science != programming, as my C.S. Ph.d. friends like to frequently point out. You could (theoretically) get a graduate degree in C.S. without ever opening your text editor, if you're into proofs and the like.

"You could (theoretically) get a graduate degree in C.S. without ever opening your text editor, if you're into proofs and the like."

Other than to edit your LaTeX document files, or course! :-)

And that's really the question as far as I'm concerned. I think the author would be unquestionably right 10 years ago. But as Universities have become more self aggrandizing in what they teach the value of that education has gone down to the point where people are now questioning whether an education is worth it at all.

I mean 10 years from now will a college education be devalued to the point of not being worth what you paid for it?

I don't know the answer to that but if I were giving the advice I'd tell students to try the startup community while attending an accredited online institution. You could spend a few hours a week doing that and have a degree in 6 years while still chasing your startup dreams.

It does rather depends where you are - there is a fair amount of outrage in the UK because Oxford and Cambridge have said that they may increase their fees to £9000 a year.

[Edit: £9000 is the fee for EU citizens, probably a good bit more for anyone else]

> It does rather depends where you are

Indeed. If you make decent high school grades in the states, then it's possible to attend a state university on scholarship and owe less (perhaps much less) than $20K in school loans after graduation.

If you are Scottish and attending a University here in Scotland then you pay zero fees.

[NB I actually don't think this is very fair]

The thing is, you are mediocre.

So what? Why live your life with that perspective? There's absolutely nothing good coming out of having the belief that you are mediocre, notwithstanding whether you actually are or not.

The consequences are that if you don't understand this and drop out of school to become a programming rockstar, you might be in rough shape... which I believe was the point of the article.

Those that can do, those that can't, teach, and those that can't teach get tenure.

If this guy was an econ professor at least he would know he was just talking his book. You don't need a symposium on entrepreneurship you need to sell stuff at a higher price than you bought it to paying customers. Thats it, it's a sentence not a 2 year degree program.

Those that can do, those that can't, teach, and those that can't teach get tenure.

This is an extremely ignorant and insulting statement. Further, you have just asserted that the worlds best minds, and many of histories great figures, are all incapable fools. I hope you realize how this statement makes you look.

I would posit that "worlds best minds, and many of histories great figures" are revered for what they did and not what they taught, nor their positions of tenure.

Did Einstein have tenure or a teaching position when he discovered relativity? Point out to me those revered figures of history known primarily for their teaching or tenure positions. The worthlessness of the university system is exemplified by people like the Admissions Dean of MIT who was able to perform magnificently at her job sans the appropriate degree. The degree obviously being so unimportant to MIT to even bother checking that she had it for some 30 odd years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/27/us/27mit.html

The statement is insulting only to those who hold their degree / teaching position as part of their identity which is supposed to be some kind of proxy for them knowing / being able to do something.

I greatly respect the capable, the intelligent, and the driven, what I don't think is that having a teaching position / tenure is a great proxy for knowing that.

You do realize that you cannot get tenure without publishing many, many, relevant pieces of work, right? You also realize that to teach something you need to really understand it, correct? On the other hand, you can certainly apply knowledge without understanding it.

Your statement is insulting to anyone who values knowledge, teaching it, and pursuing it. Perhaps you are not a native english speaker, but your statement is very easy to read as implying that only those who cannot do [what? research? engineering?] teach, and only those who are lousy teachers get tenure.

It is an indefensible position and your obvious hostility towards modern academia is unjustified. For one academics don't necessarily want to teach. But as a society we deemed that we will in essence force them to. Why? We need good teachers and goodness knows industry won't waste money on it, let alone have any sort of quality control. So we force these people who have devoted their lives to research to also teach.

As for tenure, it is often attacked as something protecting poor researchers. I think this notion is very much overblown. In modern times you cannot even get tenure before you are 35 or 40. If you look at those with tenure, the majority continue to do good work for the remainder of their careers. That aside, the main purpose of tenure is actually to protect the pursuit of knowledge. It exists to prevent management from dictating what people may research. It is to allow researchers to pursue risky or unpopular approaches.

Academics do what they do because they primarily enjoy research. Insinuating that they are incapable of doing this simply because they also teach and are granted the protection of tenure is very insulting.

the worlds best minds aren't those with tenure

This is a false dichotomy that sidesteps the question, "Are universities a place where the brightest students, regardless of which campus they are attending, are able to actualize real world goals?"

In many cases, for a person who has real conviction and skill about what it is they do, dropping out is merely the path of least resistance.

For the 'regulars,' the ideal should be for universities to offer the resources to students who are passionate about their field, and not saddle them with administrative barriers in the name of 'getting a degree.'

Students you are probably not Mark Zuckerberg, so find yourself who you are! (then decide about school)

I disagree with this entirely.

1. Stop comparing yourself and/or others to Mark Zuckerberg...it's an insult to both parties.

2. School is useful for connections and work ethic, but if you need neither, than there's no reason to cling to the dying ideal that school = security.

3. Any skilled hacker can find enough freelance jobs to support himself (or herself) while he builds a side project.

For what it's worth, I dropped out of college, ended up starting a company, and had a decent exit (fortunately). But I'm using the freedom that gave me to go back to school.

I was able to manage before by teaching myself out of books, but there's something to be said for learning with expert guidance and a community of peers.

I am also gaining exposure to a variety of fields which lend themselves less well to self-instruction than programming does (for example, molecular biology) and in which I believe a lot of the action for the next fifty years will be happening.

So, yeah, unless you already have a product that has traction and that demands your fulltime attention to continue growing, there's no reason to drop out of school.

My advice to students is: imagine that you were forced to drop out of college against your will, and then were given a chance to go back five years later after slogging it out in the real world. Would your attitude be different than it is now? Would you perhaps go to more office hours, skip less class, explore more subjects, play less Xbox, join more clubs?

I find that having the "guts" to leave the school to pursue a personal goal is more important than staying in and wait for thinks to happen.

I resent this kind of thinking.

"students may come up with great ideas and start a company, but they aren’t going to be able make it big unless they have the educational foundation."

College isn't the only way to get this educational foundation. I'd rather learn through trying to succeed in business, even if it means failure at first.

"To build a business, you need to understand subjects like finance, marketing, intellectual property and corporate law. "

And you can only learn these topics in university.

"Most importantly, if students don’t learn the importance of finishing what they start, they will never achieve success—this requires perseverance and determination."

And you can only learn perseverance at university.

"And by dropping out of college, they won’t have the alumni networks that they need to help them later in their careers and in business."

And you can only make friends at university.

To me, the only real reason to stay in university until I graduate (aside from inertia) is the belief that being a dropout instead of a graduate will hurt my future career. (I speak as one who's been tempted to drop out a few times)

The list of business titans who either never attended or dropped out of college is so long it makes you wonder if graduating from college is actually a liability.

Paul Allen, Richard Branson, James Cameron, John Carmack, Andrew Carnegie, Michael Dell, Barry Diller, Walt Disney, George, Eastman, Thomas Edison, Larry Ellison, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, David Geffen, J. Paul Getty, William Randolph Hearst, Steve Jobs, Ingvar Kamprad, Kirk Kerkorian, Ray Kroc, Ralph Lauren, Craig McCaw, John D. Rockefeller, Steven Spielberg, Dave Thomas, Ted Turner, Ted Waitt, Steve Wozniak, Frank Lloyd Wright, Orville and Wilbur Wright, and Mark Zuckerberg.

Some lesser known billionaires: Eike Batista, Ronald Burkle, Richard Schulze.

If you have what it takes to become a billionaire, you don't need college to become rich. As for you and me...

the first thing every kid needs to learn is opportunity cost. the second is very basic finance and how compounding interest works. after that a lot of the decision process will naturally fall into place by itself.

I am a complete proponent of pursuing an undergraduate degree at a traditional school. The constant networking, opportunities to round yourself as an individual from field experts, and development of general life skills are nearly invaluable to become a successful leader.

MBA's are a different story.

I like school, I'm not planning to drop out, but this guy isn't convincing anyone. His basic premise is that school is the "safer" path - something that I don't think the Zuckerbergs of the world have ever found terribly appealing.

Wasn't Zuckerberg given this same advice, that he wasn't the guy who founded Friendster, and should just stay in school? Should a business fail can't you just go back to school? How many great business opportunities does one get in life? I'm betting it's far less than the opportunities to blow two hundred grand on a piece of paper.

If professors knew what business ideas would succeed and which would fail then they'd be investing instead of teaching.

If professors knew what business ideas would succeed and which would fail then they'd be investing instead of teaching.

It's not ideas that succeed or fail, but founders.

If that is your position (pick founders, not ideas), does this preclude you from picking a future google/microsoft/ etc. except by chance?

I am assuming that the really big hits are a consequence of the right idea, right time, and right people.

No. The right people (eventually) find the right idea for the time.

How could this statement be anything other than a tautology?

Because it's also claiming that such people exist.

I'm not saying P(x) ≡ Q(x), but ∃x P(x) ∧ Q(x).

I wish he had addressed the fact that school is incredibly expensive. It's much harder to start a business when you are 100k in debt from your expensive MBA (or your undergrad for that matter).

You're probably not Mark Zuckerburg, so find your own passion.

And think twice about exhortations to follow in the footsteps of the masses too.

He makes a good point about the value of business experience...

...and then advocates waiting a few years before seeking such experience.

Why swim to learn how to swim when you can sit and study swimming?

Those students are probably not Zuckerberg too.

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