Steve Jobs. Mark Zuckerberg. Bill Gates. Jack Dorsey. Sean “Diddy” Combs. They have two things in common:
They’re all wildly successful entrepreneurs.They’re all college dropouts.
And they’re not the only entrepreneurs who dropped out of college. Take a look at this list of 50 successful entrepreneurs who were college dropouts and you might start wondering whether dropping out of college is a prerequisite for succeeding in startups.
For the record, it’s not. Heck, I’m sure we could create a significantly longer list of entrepreneurs who did graduate college. And, personally, I’ve been teaching entrepreneurship at Duke University for a decade, and, so far, the most successful entrepreneurs I’ve taught all walked out the door with degrees.
However, during those 10 years, I’ve also taught a few founders who dropped out of Duke to pursue their growing companies. One of them recently emailed me to catch up, and it was an interesting opportunity to explore the relationship between school, entrepreneurship, and startup success.
This particular student had left the university two years earlier. Truth be told, I actually didn’t know he’d left, and I was surprised when I saw his email asking if I’d still be willing to get on Zoom with him despite his having dropped out.
“Of course,” I replied to his message. “Once a student, always a student. I’m happy to offer whatever help I can.”
A few days later, we were on Zoom, and I learned more about what he’d been doing since dropping out. Apparently, by the end of his sophomore year, his company had gotten enough traction to raise a few million in VC from West Coast investors.
But simultaneously running a multi-million-dollar startup and studying for his calculus midterms had become too hard, so he abandoned the rolling hills of North Carolina’s Research Triangle for the… umm… rolling hills of California’s Silicon Valley.