David Karp Quit School to Get Serious About Tumblr | Hacker News Reader

David Karp Quit School to Get Serious About Tumblr

nytimes.com

44 pointswyclif37 comments

You could say I'm the flip side of the "drop out of high school and make a million bucks" coin, although I'm not giving up yet. I dropped out of high school 2 years in due to a confluence of factors (primarily boredom and some family issues that resulted in me entering foster care.)

My perspective is that the academic aspect of high school is nearly worthless for the long tail of people who have above-average intelligence. What is valuable is the social interaction with peers and other extra-curricular activities. You can get most or all of those activities elsewhere, but it's harder. Additionally, if you have plans of attending a prestigious college you may have more trouble getting in with a GED - although a reasonably high score guarantees admission to a lot of state schools.

Unfortunately I wasted any potential gain by spending a few years not doing much of anything except playing video games - in hindsight, probably due to depression.

Currently I'm taking college classes and working independently on some projects; I'd be happy to answer most questions.

This is a more recent occurrence in schools. From my experience, the best place to be to be stimulated was school. But with budget cuts it's getting harder to keep students interested, period. When I started middle school we had a fully equipped science lab, week long camping trips to the everglades, snorkelling, scuba, sailing and computer camps at various universities. All paid for by the taxpayers. By the time I graduated highschool the money had dried up through budget cuts and those programs were shuttered.

My old, college roommate worked in the admissions office told me exactly why they don't bother with GED applicants. If you are that smart you are supposed to be doing college prep courses. Getting a GED means you might be smart but probably lazy. And they have no shortage of smart, college ready students applying. If you didn't immediately enrole into community college after getting your GED you're cooked. It also means you don't have any of the minimum requirements (4 years english, 4 years math, physics, chemistry, 2 years language, etc.) to enrole to even the lowest ranked state school.

> Unfortunately I wasted any potential gain by spending a few years not doing much of anything

This is the type of the student universities tend to avoid.

Have you gotten treated for the depression? Are you working towards an AA? Full-time or part-time student? Colleges will allocate some spaces for non-traditional students but the good ones prefer FT students.

State schools I've looked at just require minimum GED scores (I had no problem getting perfect scores on several parts) and a few years of foreign language.

> This is the type of the student universities tend to avoid.

Agreed, but retroactively fixing mistakes is impossible so I have to settle for not repeating them.

I'm taking classes full time right now, if I get into a "good school" it'll be a transfer. I'm not sure if I'll get an AA; either way I'm planning to get a computer science BS.

Let's continue to preach anecdotal evidence about million to one chances of becoming ridiculously rich.

But Mark Zuckerberg didn't wash his socks for a whole month while fleshing out the idea that would become Facebook! No one should wash their socks. Innovation would be through the roof! </sarcasm> ;-)

We should all emulate the 80's entrepreneurs and sport full beards </serious>

Currently sporting a reasonably full beard. I agree.

Yep.

Who has time to shave when you're killing it.

Since I moved to California I no longer wear socks at all. I find that there is little need given the climate. Maybe this is the real reason for the miracle of Silicon Valley?

This is bit of a nitpick but he did not quit school to work on tumblr. He was homeschooled, first of all, while working at various startups. Secondly he started tumblr in 2006?, long after he had dropped out of high school.

I’m not a parent and this article may be 20/20 hind sight so parents please correct me if I’m completely off base. Allowing your child to drop out of high school is a poor choice assuming they are capable of finishing it. I could maybe see this if you started the site when you were 11 and were looking at VC funding when you were 15 but based on the article Tubmlr wasn’t even started when he dropped out. There was no guarantee that David would have founded Tumblr and you were basically taking a lottery ticket on something like this. I’m glad it worked out for him but this isn’t a path any 15 year old with decent tech skills should follow.

I guess the assumption is that high school is not just a waste of time cultural formality? One could do a lot with the 4 years they would otherwise spend in high school if they don't really need it.

Yeah, like learn how to write, calculus, some history and a smattering of the sciences.

Yes! I'm not sure if you are being sarcastic or not, I guess it depends if you went to a good high school that actually taught those things or not.

From my own experience, high school was super easy and I was shocked when I got to college in that I hadn't learn very much at all (there were exception of course).

Karp went to Bronx HS of Science. This is the 2nd most competitive school, after Stuysvesant, in NYC. I would be impressed if they didn't cover any of those subjects. By graduation, 100% of their students are college ready.

That makes sense, but he still might have been bored. I don't think its unreasonable to take control of your destiny, even if you are a kid. It obviously worked out well for him.

I am thinking that those who drop out in this manner are the ones who (cognitively) could have done well in school and needed school the least, so to speak. When a follower herd forms, bad things could potentially happen.

Of course your are now going to read(at least for the next couple of weeks) how some one did a lot of things against common wisdom and yet made a lot of money.

These stories are like those drawing books given to kids, where an outline is already present and they just have fill up the blank with a pencil and then fill color using crayons.

Look at how these articles go. They take dropping out as pointA and then becoming a billionaire as pointB. Then they just draw a straight line connecting them both. And now the end inference which is tried to press upon is "Dropping out will make you a billionaire". Co relation of one in a million almost certainly doesn't imply causation.

And now, for the true facts. For every billion $ company founded by a dropout there are likely several hundreds of thousand of examples, where some one ended in McDonalds, or working repairing cars in some body's garage, or a cab driver somewhere. And if you drop out of school, you are likely(heck, almost certain) to meet this fate.

This reminds of a question I read in Times Of India(A leading news daily here in India). A guy once asked how to test if a stone is a diamond? Can one be sure by trying to smash with a hammer and then see if it doesn't break. The editor gave a pretty good reply which explains the situation. Yes you can be sure that the stone is a diamond if it doesn't get smashed on hitting with a hammer, But if it gets smashed it doesn't mean it wasn't a diamond.

>Look at how these articles go. They take dropping out as pointA and then becoming a billionaire as pointB. Then they just draw a straight line connecting them both. And now the end inference which is tried to press upon is "Dropping out will make you a billionaire". Co relation of one in a million almost certainly doesn't imply causation.

The stories also don't consider in depth what the person has done before they dropped out and how special they were already. Even the oft-told Bill Gates stories often gloss over his unique position of having ample computing time in his youth and how capable he was prior to dropping out.

A big part of high school and even college is figuring out what you want to do with the rest of your life. You learn a little bit about a lot of different things and hopefully by the end have some sense of what you want to pursue further.

He had already figured that out by 14.

A lot of people think they've figured out what they want to do with their lives when they're 14. But we never hear about the 99% of those people who end up unsuccessful after pursuing their dreams. We only hear about guys like this one.

>>A big part of high school and even college is figuring out what you want to do with the rest of your life.

Frankly speaking, looking back what I was when I was 14. I am very glad I didn't make that 'what to do with the rest of my life' decisions back then. I'm sure 100% I would have made a very big mess of my life.

14 years is way to younger to make such decisions.

It depends a lot on the person, and maybe quite a bit on how they've invested/been raised those first 14 years. No need to extrapolate from one anecdote.

Again the media fall in love in the "drop out of school makes millions story". But that's not reality. only 0.0000000001% of school and college dropout will get such a huge deal. Other will just waste their life. What's sad is that somewhere a child is reading this and thinks he really got a chance to beat the odds. It's no different than pumping out lottery raffles.

Hardly, this is only true if you believe that high school is the most effective way to gain the knowledge that high school teaches and/or that we are still stuck in a credentials orientated world that won't let someone without a high school completion (that basically says nothing about their ability) should be given any kind of good job.

He speaks at a rapid clip and, often, for minutes without stopping

Aaron Levie seems to speak this way as well.

I'm not sure what it stems from - but many founders/entrepreneurs have this trait.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Deleted comment

Having been on the receiving end of this a few times, I do not find it to be an especially useful way to communicate.

usually folks that talk for minutes without stopping like the sound of their voice.

I have heard anecdotally that many of the paypal mafia members share this trait

I think it is more like he left formal schooling and started home school,which is not exactly the same as quitting school.

David Karp may or may not be in for a surprise. He may realize, after all this time and all this work, that no amount of money will make up for a lost childhood.

Indeed, his childhood sounds fucking paradisical compared to being forced to sit quietly in a room full of people you didn't choose to associate with while some adult who has a great deal of arbitrary power over you teaches the median student in their class.

Karp lost nothing, and gained a great deal. I suspect that he can only shake his head at the notion that anybody with a three-digit IQ would step inside a high school under any circumstances.

Anti-intellectualism at its finest. You advocate that people not learn. What Karp lost is knowledge. He can try to gain it back as an adult, but most likely he'll be too preoccupied with his lottery winnings and socializing in the business world to care. Meanwhile, others will make serious progress for our society.

Unless you have the luxury of equivalent or better education than high schools provide, you are choosing a life of ignorance.

Are you saying that he isn't at it above the level of the average high school graduate?

I would argue that he has made more serious progress and impact that most of us ever will. Of course no doubt some will say that Tumblr is worthless to society, pretty much the same thing that crops up every time there is a thread about Mark Zuckerburgs achievements.

You seem to labor under the misapprehension that learning things and going to high school have something in common.

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