Why Not to Drop Out
"contra the sophomore dropout founder, find better problems, settle for nothing less, my (!) advice (!!) for young people (!!!!)"
07.07.24 05:03am
Dropout tech founders (e.g. Gates, Zuckerberg) have been (rightfully? poorly?) lionized to the public and youth. “Startup founder” is now a job title as prestigious as any other, since the Bay Area VC complex has made “getting into YC” as selective as Harvard. There's a particular pull to the idea of a barely-legal child genius, so visionary that they left school behind to pursue their startup with a single-minded devotion.
My argument is that these kind of founders are an exception, and they're getting rarer. All the problems that are obvious to sophomore CS students, such as dating, food delivery, coding and social networking, are fairly well-covered by startups now. Zuckerberg was a sophomore who noticed he was at the right time in the Internet's deployment, facing the right problem at the right school, which is why his company succeeded, not because he dropped out to do it. In fact, he had way, way more conviction and evidence that his idea would work than your average contemporary dropout.
I've met a few dropouts, some of whom left to found a startup. By far the largest common trait they have is that they're a little lonely. Some left school before college even started, some earlier during high school. Many don't have many friends their own age anymore - their friends are their employees, their VCs or their older colleagues. Some, especially those who dropped out young, are a little socially awkward or stunted.
As I said above, the problem space obvious to sophomores is now well-covered. However, there's still plenty of meat on the 20th century economy's bones - Elon Musk (notably not an undergraduate dropout) picked space and cars, today one might pick insurance, or biomanufacturing, or energy, or lawyers, or the DMV. Probably none of those, something I haven't heard of yet. There are plenty of burning problems in the world that you can't see without a little exploration, and maybe the amount of time you have to spend exploring strictly increases over the years.
Some people don't drop out to found a company. They just drop out to continue their internship or get a job. If that's what you really wanna do, more power to you, but bear in mind that you can always do that eventually. Consider what you're giving up in the meantime if you're in college, and that there are few (mostly marketing, from my experience) prizes in life for being unusually young. Bigger than all of those reasons, why settle for anything less than the coolest thing you can think of doing? You have time, but quite a limited amount, so, and I know this is weird to hear from me, no rush to get started?
P.S. All this being said, I reserve the right to gap semester or drop out without being a hypocrite, as long as I'm sure it's the coolest thing I could be doing.