Patrick Collison dropped out of MIT twice before going on to become the cofounder and CEO of Stripe. In an interview at Y Combinator’s Startup School, Collison imparted some of his wisdom to the Gen Z founders in the crowd, including the advice to not feel pressured to make the same choice he made.
“When I was dropping out, people thought it was super weird,” Collison said. “I think, overall, if you enjoy college, I think there’s no harm in finishing. I felt this real sense of urgency, which I think, in hindsight, was a bit unnecessary.”
“I thought that a bunch of the opportunities in startups and in Silicon Valley were ephemeral and fleeting,” he added. “If we didn’t build it then, it wouldn’t be possible to do it in three or four years, and maybe all the opportunities would be gone.”
Collison was admitted to MIT when he was just 16. There, he studied math, but dropped out just a few months into his freshman year to launch an e-commerce software company with his brother. After selling that company for $5 million, he returned to MIT to resume his studies in math and physics. But old habits die hard, and Collison left a year later to found the payments company, Stripe, which is now valued at $159 billion.
But looking back, Collison wouldn’t necessarily urge other eager founders to follow in his footsteps.
“In hindsight, I think that was a poor intuition,” he said. “It’s been pretty robustly and reliably the case over many decades that Silicon Valley has a surfeit of opportunities.”
Still, Collison reiterated that dropping out of school doesn’t mean shutting out education completely. “It’s not totally a trapdoor,” he said. “You can drop out and in fact return.”
“A lot of parents think that dropping out is very risky and will impugn your reputation for the rest of your life and so forth,” he said. “And as far as I can tell, nobody has ever cared. So I both think you don’t need to, but also the cost of doing so is ‘de minimis.’”
Some of the world’s most notable founders got their start after dropping out of college. Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard University during his sophomore year to run Facebook full time; Bill Gates also dropped out of Harvard in his junior year to co-found Microsoft; Steve Jobs left Reeds College after one semester to focus on building out Apple, although he continued to auditing classes.
Still, a Stanford Venture Capital Initiative analysis last year found that unicorn founders are twice as likely to have completed undergraduate studies, three times more likely to have a master’s degree and six times more likely to have a doctoral degree, compared with the average U.S. person over 25. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has credited his time at Princeton University for giving him the analytical and problem-solving skills necessary for his career. Ali Kashani, the CEO of Serve Robotics, told Business Insider that college is “where you learn how to learn, how to think critically, how to work hard and how to become an independent adult.”
Now, as AI becomes a central talking point across different industries, college students have had to reckon with their career paths. Lumina Foundation and Gallup polling from April shows 42% of bachelor’s degree students have reconsidered their major because of AI.
Collison and other founders, like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, have argued that AI has made it easier to start and operate a business. Collison himself said that his company is seeing nearly twice as many new businesses launching on the platform as a year ago. “It seems to be a better time than ever to start a business,” Collison said.
“You might think, ‘okay, fine, you know, there’s way more vibecoded kind of lightweight,” Collison said. “But actually the median business is doing better this year than a year ago.”
Nvidia’s Huang reiterated this sentiment in his own Y Combinator interview, saying “this is absolutely the single greatest time to start a company.”
