How to drop out of college and start a venture-backed Social Network | Hacker News

Dropping out of college is often seen as a marker of huge success and drive. In reality, it's just one path you can pick when answering the question, "given this dream, how can I maximize my chances of realizing it?" This is a little more subtle than it sounds. I left school after my sophomore year and went on to raise a $1 million Series A from a blue-chip VC. A year and a half later, I ended up back at University not in defeat, but in realization that for my specific ambition there was more I could get out of the university. I wouldn't call myself a student -- I'll always be a student in that I'll be learning my whole life -- but I have as specific a reason for being at the institution as I did for dropping out. Traditional "students" are those who are in school without a better reason for why they're there. There are a lot of potential businesses where it makes sense to be affiliated with a university right now. There are also a lot where the right move is to stop out and move immediately to SV. You could drop out and still start a biotech company -- but you'll most likely end up net-negative, spending 6 years quietly hacking away on very limited resources on the fringes before breaking through. You could start a spaceflight company without a degree, but you're taking the hardest possible route to get there. If you're smart enough to do that, you're smart enough to figure out how to do the minimum possible work to get by in your classes, and spend the rest of your time talking the university into giving you access to resources (and credibility) you'd never have otherwise. It's not about the degree: it's about what you can get out of the university while disguised as a student. It's definitely easier now than ever before for great hackers to do well without a degree. And you can certainly get rich down a lot of those paths. But the really cool companies -- space travel, clean energy, biotech, and so on -- can use the university for a lot for a few years in order to advance the same goals before breaking off on your own. The two more years I have access to subjects with chips implanted in their brains and tens of millions of dollars of cutting-edge equipment is a springboard for any subsequent activities, however inane classes might be. The opportunities are there if you go and take them.