Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2013; the figures, valuations, ages and roles it gives for companies such as WordPress, Dropbox and Mashable are as of that time. Evan Williams had already stepped down as Twitter’s CEO in 2010.
Every new generation has its own university dropout heroes: students who could have gone to a good university but decided to leave it to pursue their dream and become millionaires. These people send out a message: you don’t need a university degree to succeed in life.
Of course, we could be talking about exceptions, since the vast majority of people without a university education end up earning much less money than those with a degree. That said, if you are very clear about what you want to do, going to university may be a waste of time, always bearing in mind that you might regret it later if your project fails. To risk it or not to risk it, that is the question.
Well-known examples of great business people who decided to ditch university include Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple), Paul Allen, Michael Dell, Kevin Rose (founder of Digg), Evan Williams (CEO of Twitter) and even the founder of Napster. All of them left university to devote themselves to their projects and became millionaires before the age of 30.
Let’s look at some other cases:
1. Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress
At 20 he left university to start working at CNET while he was shaping his great creation, WordPress. For anyone who doesn’t know what WordPress is, let’s just say there are two leading platforms for creating blogs: one is Blogger (from Google) and the other is WordPress. Matt Mullenweg owns the company behind WordPress (Automattic). Its sites receive more than 500 million visits, and it has a staff of 140.
2. Arash Ferdowsi, co-founder of Dropbox
After 3 years at university, he decided to leave to create Dropbox, a small storage service that is now used by millions of people. Ferdowsi became a millionaire at 27. Today Dropbox is worth around $4,000 million.
3. Pete Cashmore, founder of Mashable
Pete Cashmore has a great story of overcoming adversity behind him; it is said that he started out on the internet out of boredom. Throughout his teens he was ill, with one medical complication after another. He would have liked to finish a university degree, but his health problems prevented him.
Last year Cashmore appeared in Time magazine among the 100 most influential people in the United States, and no wonder: his blog, Mashable.com, gets no less than 20 million visits a month. There were even rumours that CNN was thinking of buying it for $200 million.
4. Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify
An early starter: he founded his first company at 14, and at 16 he was already doing engineering work for Google. Five years later he founded the well-known Spotify. By 23 he was already a millionaire.
5. Sahil Lavingia, of Gumroad
In 2011 this young man left university to take charge of design at the latest social media success, Pinterest. Last year he left the company to create his own site, Gumroad.com. He is currently 19 and has managed to raise $7 million to launch his project, although his entrepreneurial story goes back to when he was 14 and started designing iPhone apps.
These are just some of the many university dropout stories that ended in success, not forgetting Zuckerberg (Facebook), David Karp, the creator of Tumblr, and others.
These are people who took a risk and won, just as, I imagine, many others tried and failed. But those who won and those who lost have something in common: at least they fought to make their dream come true.
Further reading
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