Thoughts on dropping out to do a startup
joel.is
joel.is
Yes. In fact, I'd go even further. Don't even try to build startups. That's premature optimization. Just build things that seem interesting. The average undergraduate hacker is more likely to discover good startup ideas that way than by making a conscious effort to work on projects that are supposed to be startups.
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.
Actually it'll stay with you for your first entry-level job, after which people will simply stop asking when/where you went to school.
People seriously need to think before dropping out. What do you plan to do, if your start up folds up? Which is a very likely scenario given how many start ups fold up.
You can do the start up thing anytime. But going to college has always been a young mans game.
If you want to be a doctor or lawyer, sure. If you want to work in technology, I've never met anyone who cares. In hindsight, I believe you can optimize your path for your career which often would not include college, but admittedly it is difficult to see that path as a youth, which I suppose could make college a good default.
It's a bummer that I'll probably never work for the Facebooks or Googles of the world, but there are always jobs going in tech and once you have experience, your education is pretty much irrelevant.
Your education shows your first employer that you are dedicated and know your stuff, when you go to your second job, it is your performance in job one which will instead be validated.
I agree that school is good time to work on side projects and learn by doing. One other good way is to do a internship for a US based startup as obtaining a J1 internship visa is relatively trivial if you're in college. That was the single best thing I did in school.
It's been five years since I graduated college, and to this day I regret not spending that part of my life focusing on that part of life. Fact of the matter is that I realized the things I genuinely enjoyed hacking (compilers, operating systems) had all been done in the 1980's, and I had no interest in all the web stuff that was being done now. At the same time, anything else I might have wanted to do was closed off because of my college grades. You don't realize at 18-19 how much your college grades matter, especially if you wander outside the tech field.
I'm sure lots of kids are more responsible than I was at that age. They can balance hobby projects along with acing classes. But if you're not one of those people, then I suggest either doing school or doing a startup, but not trying to do both at the same time and letting both suffer. There is plenty of time in life for entrepreneurship. And frankly, outside the little Silicon Valley bubble, your chances at starting a successful business will be greatly enhanced by the signaling devices you can earn by focusing single-mindedly on school.
I do always like to point out the irony of the fact that Peter Thiel graduated from Stanford UG and Stanford Law, clerked for a Circuit judge, then went to go work for an investment bank. He was almost thirty by the time he started his first venture! Life is long, the only thing you're rushing towards is death. :D
FYI, this is false
'rayiner, if you're who I think you are (Northwestern Law?), your grades must not have been that bad; you seem to be doing just fine career-wise.
Startups are a proper subset of businesses. It's up to each individual what type he or she wants to start.
It seems to me more like "stop thinking about eating durian and start thinking about eating fruit" -- true, one is a type of the other, but it's a wildly unusual type and certainly not one which is to everyone's taste.
Technology moves at such a blistering pace that if you aren't working with the cutting edge tools on a regular basis, you are falling behind. Unfortunately, most classrooms insist on teaching with antiquated methodologies and overemphasize classroom time/testing versus building projects with modern tools. For example, I had to take a full year of Scheme, which in hindsight was helpful, but could have been done far more efficiently by me reading How to Design Programs [1] over the summer and attempting the exercises. School time could then have been used to teach modern methodologies via project work.
23% college graduates
27% college dropouts, or less
49% post-graduates
Experience is more valuable than it ever seems like it is before you have it. It will also take more than the couple years in college you might skip to acquire it. College does not add that much value from the standpoint of building a technology startup but there is also little upside in not completing college or using it as an opportunity to gain some early good experience.
Dropping out and doing a tech startup should be independent decisions.
I dropped for two years, and experience was the main bottleneck (though I thought I had a lot of experience when I did). I'd be interested to confirm that.
In retrospect, the thought of having blocks of free time to pursue whatever I want is very appealing. For now I am stuck doing 40+ hour workweeks and trying to cram side projects in on nights and weekends.
I wish I were back in college.
* No longer have seasonal breaks outside of the odd vacation time.
* Can't cram work into only a couple days a week as I am expected to show up every day.
* In college, you can skip classes that you already know the material for and only show up for tests (i.e. do the minimum possible to maintain a good grade). With work, you are expected to be 100% productive every single day. There is no chance to get ahead: If you run out of work to do, you are given more, or more will be created for you.
This mostly assumes that you're already very smart and while in college you are financially supported via loans or scholarships, but if you're attending Stanford, MIT, or Harvard, you probably meet both criteria.
It's not that I want a college degree. I want to be financially supported while having (more) time to work on the cool things I want to work on, which is actually the same reason I want to run my own company. College is one such example that provides that opportunity.
You are not going to get rich doing it that way, but wealth doesn't seem to be a concern of yours anyway.
In SV, what you know and who you know are both very important.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the majority of successful tech startup founders probably did finish college and have some life experience... E.g. Elon Musk is a prime example - he got degrees in both Economics and Physics before going on to found Zip2, X.com (precursor to PayPal), SpaceX and Tesla motors.
> Choice is liberating.
I did not have the opportunity to obtain a formal post-secondary education though, so maybe that is something you learn to manage in that process.
One percent (of developers) problems.
I was in a similar situation as you, except the opportunity came to me as a sophomore, instead of a freshmen. Let me preface by stating that I think college is an extremely invaluable resource to grow up and learn outside of the classroom. I did, and love it.
If I were you, assuming you do get an offer, I'd register it as a co-op with your college. I did that last year with Lift (http://lift.do), and think it was the best way to go about the situation. Here's why: it's still a full-time job, you're still technically a student, and you don't pay any tuition. If you like it, great — stay out there. If not, no harm-no foul, and go back to school.
Happy to chat over email with you, if you'd like. Look in my profile for contact info. Good luck!
- If you like programming/CS, then studying CS in college can be fun (once you figure out if you're more into programming or theory you can take more systems or theory courses as appropriate).
- Having a degree will never harm your chances at a company, and can be seen as a legitimizing factor at many [usually larger] companies. If things ever go south, getting a job at a bigger company will be much easier.
- You learn a lot in a short time at university. A lot of this will be the type of things often asked in technical interviews, so it will generally make getting a job in the future easier (the CS interview process can be a little biased toward college type questions rather than industry type questions. Whether the system is broken is another topic). You will learn things in industry too, but if you stay in college you'll still learn them, just later. If you drop out, you might always wonder what topics you're missing out on.
- I don't feel like you're delaying your life by attending university, as that's generally what people expect you to do with the four years after high school, IMO.
As to how useful university has been, I found it very useful. But university, like many things, is what you make of it. It can be useless or very useful or somewhere in-between depending on what you do while there (what classes you take, what projects you work on in your spare time, possibly what clubs you find a fit in).
I've technically been in that situation, and my manager at the time encouraged me to finish my degree. But take this with a grain of salt; I would have finished my degree regardless of what anybody said at that point.
You have a better idea than anyone else of what's best for you, and you should make this decision, if it comes up, at the end of your internship rather than now. But I generally encourage people in CS to get their degree.
If you have any questions related to that, I'd be happy to answer them.
If so, then I'd say dropping out early is something to consider. But do so knowing the risks associated with it. Any business you start will most likely fail. And many companies will require that you have a degree to get a job^. If you have a chance to move to SV then do it. There's a lot of negative aspects (group think, etc) but the positives drastically outweigh them. You'll have the opportunity to surround yourself with people who think big and take big chances...the type of people who are great at starting businesses. You won't find it anywhere else.
If not, then stay in college. A degree gets you a good amount of choice that you'd lose if you opt not to get one. But those choices are always when working for someone else. If that's something you can do (99% of the population) then the degree will go a long way.
I'm 34, now living in SV. Dropped out in my 3rd year to take a contracting gig at GM in the late 90s. If I knew better I would have came out to SV. Instead I moved back to Cincinnati and did a startup for 3 years before I was married or had kids. Now I'm on my second startup (normally spend 3 years at a "real" company between startups) but this time I have a wife who stays home and I have 2 kids. The lack of degree has not yet had a negative impact on me. But I don't know if that will continue.
^ I've not yet finished college and I never have trouble finding work between starting up. YMMV
(Yes, some people end up rich or with atypical work schedules that make the above categorization not true, and others roll the startup dice and have a great time at that too, but the vast majority of people, including many intelligent, interesting, and otherwise nontraditional people, fall into the above pattern.)
Ten years from now nobody's gonna care whether you've been in the industry for five years or eight, but some will care about your degree, and much more importantly you will care whether you took the initiative to learn something interesting (not about computers!).
I dropped out of college a few months ago & I'm focusing on self educating myself on subjects that I'm particularly interested in, investment, accounting, web design, I'm working on a few great ideas & I have no intentions of working five days a week with minor breaks for vacations in the future because I am currently working 7 days a week with no vacations in order to not only live a life that most people only dream of, but also to make a real impact in the world within a few years (I'm 19).
I guess it's all opinion, but assuming that the process of enjoying life at school then going into work for the rest of your life to suffer is the standard among 'the vast majority of people' is just non-existent to me. I consider myself to be a normal person who is just damn willing to work hard for what he believes in, and fortunately at this time in my life, I have a concrete vision of what I believe in.
If you love what you do, then your work days are just as fun and fulfilling as your vacation days, and believe me, I intend to do what I love.
(Btw I hope I don't come across as arrogant or rude, I respect your comment and I'm just offering my opinion.)
If there's any interesting life lesson I've learned in my few years it's this: just because you're different from the people immediately around you (due to intelligence, drive, etc.) it doesn't mean your broad needs in life (e.g. human companionship, time to unwind) are going to be significantly different than the billions of humans that came before you. That's not dooming you to mediocrity, that's just stats -- that's the intelligent read of the data we have. But despite a million cliche stories of the powerful magnate whose only life regret is that they had spent more time with their children (even Steve Jobs, perhaps: http://technology.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=28... ), it may just be a lesson you can only learn from experience.
Thanks everyone for the replies. My logic is: I learned everything I know about programming on my own (specifically, almost exclusively from the internet), and I am dying to get to SV, get some industry experience, and hopefully soon start my own company (me and my brother hope to eventually apply to YC together, he's got big ideas too). I spend my spare time working on those "undergraduate hacker projects" pg mentions, but I would be regardless (possibly more so if I wasn't in college)
I'm loading up on CS theory classes this semester in and the next semester, because I do appreciate the importance of them, so if I do drop out I'll have that mostly covered. I really feel like 3 more years of mostly fulfilling degree requirements will only delay me, I'm not learning anything from the applied CS courses I take.
The internship is at Facebook, if that matters.
It's also easier to work on side projects in college.
You should not leave college as early as this unless (a) you start something so successful that it pulls you out, or (b) you are one of the very rare people who are temperamentally unsuited to it.
Unless your college is awful, your longing for SV is a case of the grass being greener on the other side of the fence. SV is full of people who wish they were back in college.
This topic hits home so this may end up a long post -- you don't have to read it by any means :) Instead go read Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement speech, it's much more eloquent and compelling than anything I have to say, and he tells a great story about how hard he tried to stay in college though he could not afford the tuition.
I thought I'd share my experience in hopes it would help give some perspective. First, I would never advise anyone to entirely drop out of school, but I totally get how you're feeling because I took two years away from college to explore and pursue a business idea. I grew up in Silicon Valley (or more accurately, I grew up with Silicon Valley) in an environment where your peers expected you to stay on a straight, almost preordained path to an acclaimed university and then a big tech- or science-related company. And should you stray from that path, it had better be to start a tech company with immediately obviously benefits that everyone understood and praised, or else you'd better prepare to be scorned. Even in SV, the word "startup" doesn't always connote glamor, most often people's views of success and fearless entrepreneurship are in hindsight.
I was tired of the social pressure and looking for different problems to tackle so I left school temporarily and went as far away from SV as possible -- I went all the way to a mountain village in China to oversee a teeny-tiny clothing factory -- not the type of "startup" my SV peers would have been proud of. But I always knew I'd come home to SV and I was determined to finish my degree. I took distance learning classes online so I could earn credits for transferring into a good business program. "Distance learning" from a mountainous village in China in meant hooking up a very slow, very unstable dial-up connection (it was a miracle they even had a modem and Internet service at all) at work and doing some random micro-Econ coursework while dozens of sewing machines whirled around me, and praying that the power wouldn't go out suddenly. Sometimes it meant taking final exams at 4am because of the time difference.
That experience was both vastly frustrating and great fun, but it would not have been complete if I hadn't gone back to college. I enjoyed being able to hack out my own curriculum, but those online classes would not have mattered if I didn't turn them into a real degree. I got the credits I needed and successfully transferred into the undergrad business program of my choice. After being away for two years, I had become used to being without many resources, and now there were tons of university programs and people who wanted to know all about what I've been doing and help me take those ideas further. The graduate school had entrepreneurship competition and I even got to pitch my ideas on reforming manufacturing processes in the fashion/clothing industry to some VCs. One thing's for sure-- I would've had a hard time coming by those opportunities to drive my ideas even further had I not gone back to finish my degree. I still had to take quite a few pointless classes but those didn't matter compared to everything else the university offered. Sometimes it's hard to tell what's useful and what isn't till further down the road.
In the case your college sucks, now's a good time to check out some SV schools since you're already coming out here for your FB internship. You don't have to quit school to explore your ideas.
Hope this bit of insight helps and good luck with everything!
I worried at first that my lack of a degree would make it hard for me to find a job in the Bay Area, but the market is incredible right now. If you're good enough, it doesn't matter if you have a degree. I managed to find a great job with people I have fun working with. Sometimes I forget I'm getting paid for it.
Reader, your mileage may vary. College is great, but it's not for everyone. I got a lot out of my three years (especially studying abroad -- if you can afford it, do it), but I knew I was ready for something else. The other path turned out great for me.
For me, after doing this, dropping out was an easy decision and I have no regrets. I'm more engaged and challenged each day at TaskRabbit than I ever was in class.
However, ensure you'll have no regrets about your college experience. I achieved my goals, tried new things, and got what I wanted out of college - it just didn't take me 4 years.
But on the other hand, startup is great for fresh out graduates. They learn better and quicker in theory - they are forced to adapt to the change of specs and environment. It's a great place to test your ability as an engineer and a team person. It's a challenge.