To drop out of college or not to pursue my dream ?
This is a very funny and quite serious question which I’ve been asking myself for sometime now. Well from my earlier posts you might have already realised that I want to have a company of my own sometime soon.
But how soon is the real question ? I’ve several ideas bumping in my mind at all times and it feels real misreable when I see others launching that idea before I could even start to work upon it.
Yesterday saw the movie Antitrust and I guess the initial speech by CEO of NURV company in the movie encapsulates the tech business. It’s a binary business he said, either 1(alive) or 0(dead) and with new technologies mushrooming every hour it’s very hard to keep up with the pace. If it was not for Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry and Brian then maybe some other kid working somewhere in a Garage might have been a success today. The difference between these guys and others I feel is that they are ready to take their chances while others are terrified to an extent, to stick to the orthodox way of secure life. It’s not that all budding entrepreneurs who’ve left their college midway have been successful but if the idea is really rocking and coool then there is no way that one can’t build another Microsoft, Apple or Google. And these are just the few renowned companies, there are thousands of others like Blake Ross (Firefox Kid), Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning (Napster), Bram Cohen (BitTorrent), Max Levchin (Paypal) who have made it real big despite having dropped out of college quite early in their career.
Max Levchin, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign graduate who sold the company he co-founded, PayPal, to eBay for $1.5 billion when he was just 26, uses his blockbuster success to persuade students at his alma mater not to follow his example. He makes the case that young people should seize the fleeting opportunity to get a different kind of education.
“You are essentially taking a class in real-life company-building on the nickel of a venture capitalist,” Levchin said. “It’s a pretty unbeatable deal.”
So the big question that remains to be answered is should one drop out of college or not to pursue his/her dream ? Debate is on ….
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April 9th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
“You are essentially taking a class in real-life company-building on the nickel of a venture capitalist,” Levchin said. “It’s a pretty unbeatable deal.”
very inspiring words. Thank you mayank for starting an interesting debate. I got an email from NY columbia university student regarding your post. I will forward the mail to you.
April 9th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Ooops I’ve made a slight goof up it seems … Levchin wasn’t a drop out as mentioned in the post, but he urges guys at his college to drop out in case anyone has ideas bursting in his/her head ! Wish I’d a Levchin in my college
April 10th, 2008 at 2:21 am
You could always start your venture while still pursuing your studies. Your performance in your studies might suffer a bit, but that is an acceptable tradeoff in my opinion. When you feel that your venture is much further along than when it started and is starting to show some promise, you can then make a decision as to whether you should quit your studies or not. It will be a much easier decision at that point than if you were to quit your studies first while your dreams are still a bit hazy.
my 2 cents.