Contact Christopher Blizzard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Blizzard , who dropped out of high school, got a GED later, and is now working for Mozilla. Find out what he would advise after having gone the high school dropout route himself.
Nontechnical 17 year old startup founder with chutzpah is asking for advice
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Re: Nontechnical 17 year old startup founder with chutzpah is asking for advice
#62dude learn programming.. dont fall into the trap of thinking you are an "X" kind of guy, where X is "programming", "marketing", "design" and so on... keep learning as much as you can and build what ever you can.. you may not make it into an app but you will learn heaps to propel you forward...
Re: Nontechnical 17 year old startup founder with chutzpah is asking for advice
#63Public high school in the USA is indeed a waste of time. And, there is no time like the present to start a company. However dropping out can really mess up your life, and I don't mean 5 years down the road. I mean it can immediately mess up your life. A hacker friend of mine in high school did just what you are proposing, but 10 years ago. As soon as he dropped out of high school his parents kicked him out of the hou…
I don't mean to suggest dropping out, but it's not necessarily as bad as you imply. I dropped out at 16 (12 years ago) and still managed to go to a good college, and have had a series of good jobs. More problematic things that I see: You'll need an older co-founder. Justified or not, business folk and investors aren't going to take you seriously at 17. Not to mention that you won't be able to rent hotel rooms for bus…
I didn't mean to suggest that you're automatically out on the street if you drop out of high school - I just wanted to point out a worst case scenario. Dropping out and being successful requires some sort of support team, since you're starting out with a huge social disadvantage.
Re: Nontechnical 17 year old startup founder with chutzpah is asking for advice
#64Learn to program. Deciding at 17 that you're "nontechnical" is premature optimization, without the optimization. At that age you're not non-anything you don't want to be. And if you're going to be in a world where people make software, there's nothing more valuable you could learn than how that's done, even if it's not what you ultimately spend most of your time on.
I am in the midst of learning to program in PHP. I am working hard and loving it. I realize the value of the skill. I met with one of the founders of a YC company and got inspired. I now plan on graduating early and working full time on my startup at that time.