This post was originally featured on FounderCode.com.

Business Insider recently posted a list of successful college dropouts, adding to the mystique of dropping out of college to chase a startup dream:

• Matt Mullenweg started WordPress, which now powers 16 percent of the web.
• Arash Ferdowsi is a co-founder of DropBox, which is now worth an estimated $4 billion.
• Aaron Levie started enterprise software company Box, and the company could IPO at a $3 billion valuation.
• Mark Zuckerberg has built Facebook into the world's largest social network, with over a billion monthly active users.
• Twenty-year-old Stacey Ferreira turned a tweet from Richard Branson into an investment.
• David Karp created Tumblr, now the 9th-most visited site in the United States, despite never graduating high school.
• Dustin Moskovitz is one of Facebook's billionaire co-founders, and went on to start Asana.
• Pete Cashmore founded Mashable, which attracts more than 20 million unique users each month, at age 19.
• Daniel Ek co-founded the wildly popular music streaming service Spotify at age 21.
• Danielle Morrill was the first employee at Twilio and named as one of the top tech people to watch by Forbes.
• Before founding a million-dollar company, Threadless co-founder Jeffrey Kalmikoff was kicked out of one school and dropped out of another.
• Zach Sims started Codecademy, which has over a million users and raised more than $10 million from investors last year, including Richard Branson
• At 18, Sahil Lavingia helped design Pinterest, but left a year later to launch Gumroad.
• Ben Milne turned his payment platform from a $1,200 investment to a multi-million-dollar company by the age of 22.

Okay, I'll admit it, that is a pretty impressive list. Christian Yang, the co-founder of ReelSurfer, recently wrote a blog post that offered a dissenting voice to the whole startup dropout movement:

"There’s an old saying that sums up my view: 'You don’t know what you don’t know' ... It wasn’t until I took courses in formal principles like design patterns, programming paradigms, or architecture that I realized how much I didn’t know. It wasn’t until I worked on team projects that I realized how many practical project management skills I didn’t have. At the time, I 'didn’t know what I didn’t know'. In hindsight, embarking on my own startup before building a skills foundation would have been disastrous."

He also raises the point that one thing the college experience provides is the opportunities to network with like minded entrepreneurs, possibly even find a co-founder. However, Danielle Morrill would embody the counterpoint his story. She dropped out of college to join the workforce (just to spite her father), went on to become the "1st employee of Twilio," and then went to become founder and CEO of Referly, all without the college experience.

On a side note, the way Danielle got hired by Twilio reminds me of how Robbie got hired by FullContact.

While I'm not going to go as far as my Asian-brother-of-a-different-mother and say that a college education is an absolute must, I'm not sure if I'm entirely sold on the other extreme either. Actually, the entire debate is framed incorrectly. To limit the debate to whether or not college is the best way to learn about entrepreneurship is no less arbitrarily absurd than limiting the discussion to whether a PC or a Mac will produce better programmers. Dumb. As Chris Wanstrath pointed out in an interview with 37Signals: Signal vs Noise:

"I personally have no opinion on whether you should or shouldn’t get a college degree as I’ve met fascinating and successful people on both sides of the fence, but the reasons I didn’t do well in school are the same reasons I didn’t do well in a corporate structure and started my own company. I think a lot of people would be much happier working for themselves but never realize it. Your job doesn’t have to suck."

The most insightful post I've read so far about whether or not to dropout of college comes from Leo Widrich. Rather than evangelizing the cult of the startup dropout movement, he focuses on WHY he dropped out:

"The one thing I like to remind myself of is that I didn’t drop out of college to work on a startup. I started working on a startup, which saw great traction, so I had to drop out of college. When I tell this story, I often get it wrong and mix up the causal relationship between the two."

Since so many people like to use Facebook as an example, let's remember that Mark Zuckerberg didn't drop out of Harvard to build Facebook. He built Facebook (or TheFacebook.com as it was called ) while he was living in the dorms of Harvard. Facebook had 1200 users signed up within 24 hours of launch, and access was only restricted to Harvard students (roughly 10,000+ students). When's the last time your dorm room startup captured more than 10% market share of your targeted audience and signed up 1400 engaged users within in a 24 hour period?

If you can't build or validate your minimum viable product for your dorm room startup while in college, it's probably not a good idea to start off with. Before you make the life changing decision to stay in school or to dropout of school, just make sure you have the accountability metrics to back up that decision.  

As Steve Jobs once said, "There's just one more thing..."

If business schools want to persuade MBA students to stay in their programs, something needs to radically change about the way business schools are run.

"Radical innovation is suffering. We need to foster a new generation of innovators. If your goal is to become an entrepreneur, it would seem that college has become a very bad place to do that." ~ Sean Parker

Brad Feld pointed out that being in an accelerator like TechStars can be an effective "education program" alternative. Perhaps business school should think that view, and consider running their MBA programs like an accelerator rather than a school. Modeling the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship might be a good start.

 

"Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United State. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It's like telling the world there's no Santa Claus" ~ Peter Thiel

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