Students: You Are Probably Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School

Students: You Are Probably Not Mark Zuckerberg, So Stay In School
techcrunch.com

While in college, start a startup!

It's the optimal time of your life where taking such a risk is really no risk at all. If your idea takes-off, great, figure out what to do then. For everyone else, finish your degree and try again soon (you'll be that much more experienced).

Anywhere else, your family, your friends, your colleagues, they will not take you seriously until you finish your degree.

The stigma will only die when every single college dropout has found success. So.. let's not egg people on to quit school because social pressures aren't there anymore, that's not true.

Secondly, I don't thinking you have to quit completely. I am a HUGE supporter of taking a year or two off after high-school to explore the world, read books, grow up and develop a character before pursuing post-secondary education.

This is what I did and I can tell you every word that came out of my professors mouth made sense to me, and if it didn't I would challenge him and raise my voice. I understood the subjects better. I felt compelled to challenge myself and take on TA roles. If I had gone to university straight out of high-school, I don't think I would have benefited the same way.

This expectation that you have to choose a college in your senior year, getting accepted, doing four years and moving on to a job has made student numb. not dumb, but numb to the fact that they're merely a tiny spec in an automated process. No one really grasps the subject as long as they memorize enough to pass the course, and eventually get handed a piece of paper which they can get a job with.

Break out of this cycle and start learning. You will then see education as a tool that will broaden your horizon and open a lot more opportunities.

I released my iPhone app this Summer (SeizeTheDay, http://seizethedayapp.com). I'm in school at Ohio State for my senior year. We got featured on the App Store, and received app of the week from Time and CNET. This has put us around 100k downloads in the first couple of months. While in SF this Summer, I received a lot of advice to drop out and blow it up. I disagree significantly. College is fun, and the idea is that it's something I can do on the side while I'm in school.

I'm currently making somewhere between beer money and a salary from iAds (will probably post some data on this at some point when we have more data available). I figure if I can grow revenue to about 4x what we're currently doing, I can afford to dive in full time. This gives me 9 months of school to keep working on the side, and see if it's realistic when I graduate.

We put about $800 of investment into it, and our only recurring cost is Apple's dev license ($100/year). While not every startup can operate this way, I feel this is the way to do it. Our model lends itself pretty well to tackling a small problem and growing slowly.