Nontechnical 17 year old startup founder with chutzpah is asking for advice

1) Large amounts of free time. You've got a six to eight hour or so block of time every night, every weekend. You can probably pull programming books into class with you if you're that insatiable. If not, just carry around a notebook with you dedicated to the startup, it'll be chalk full of ideas whenever you have a spare moment.

2) No responsibility. Granted, high school is tough, but it's also inconsequential. If you've studied the PG essays as much as you think, you'll remember the concept of a day job in "What You'll Wish You'd Known". Here's the link, it's worth a reread in your situation. http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

3) Your parents are funding you. They pay for your housing, food, and are probably quite open to the idea of buying you and books you want to pursue your goals. You can afford to take the time to learn right now. If you drop out, are your folks going to want to keep feeding you while you sit around the house? You'd probably be expected to get a job, which cuts into all that free time you'd be gaining by dropping out.

Delay University if you want, but honestly you can get a lot of the same deal out of it if you approach it well. Right now you've got an idea and no skills with which to execute it. Don't create a situation that's more hostile to you getting those skills.

Is it just me that finds this quite funny. I feel like David Beckham (except I can't play football).

Put as much time as you can into your startup and learning to program, just don't fail out. If you're smart enough to write as lucidly as you do then you're smart enough not to fail high school. Find some loopholes to make the classes easier, figure out what the easiest way to make 70% is, and execute.

Like someone else said, hack morning, hack lunches, hack nights- put your time into moving your startup forward.

Skip college, it doesn't sound like you need it- if you do need it down the line you can do it then.

However, experience does matter- and you can pack a ton of experience into a short amount of time if you're ok with taking risks, which it sounds like you are.

Check out Inside Steve's Brain if you get the chance, this quote stuck out at me a lot:

"For Jobs, innovation is about creativity, putting things together in unique ways. "Creativity is just connecting things," Jobs told Wired magazine. "When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have."

Also:

"I wish Bill Gates the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger." -- Steve Jobs

With all that said-- you've got a great opportunity. You've got a co-founder, you (hopefully) have a good idea, so execute and give it a shot. If it doesn't work, bone out to Argentina or Eastern Europe for awhile, regroup, come back, and give it another shot.

And, on college, there's a great article by Sean Nelson of Harvey Danger about the merits of dropping out of college:

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=12087

Good luck!

Second thing is, you absolutely must gain the technical skills as quickly as possible. A startup of two cannot support one business guy. But you already know that I take it.

I wish you luck!