Me too. I never left school. I shipped my first commercial product in 1978 at the age of 11, launched my first company at age 14, and sold my first company at age 19.

Here I am 44 years later with zero years of experience because I keep adding more years of college and university. I am not exactly the brightest crayon in the box, but I found college "easy" because I had years of professional discipline meeting deadlines.

This idea of counting experience only after you left college is absolute nonsense.

And too add, I never actually graduated from the UK equivalent of high school, which drives HR people nuts, especially when they find out that the CTO of the company they are acquiring is a high school dropout.