Re:Start-up culture is corrupting our youth and killing real...
by unabst on Monday December 12, 2016 @06:17PM
(#13162996)
Good points.
For Steve Jobs:
"If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts."
Also I looked up Larry Oracle, and for him he quit school because of a family tragedy.
Elon also quit his phd at a new school after 2 days, which seems more like he changed his mind than "dropped out".
Of course, life is complex. But the point is, none of these people were anti-academic or anti-school. They were anti-wasting time and pro-opportunity, but they were never for dropping out.
This is false for Jobs and Musk. It wasn't until 4 years after Jobs dropped out from Reed that Woz showed him the Apple I, and Musk started Zip2 with $28K of his dad's money after dropping out of a Stanford physics PhD with no specific plans.
It's only semi-true for Gates (Gates and Allen had obtained a deal with MITS over the summer when he chose not to return to Harvard in the fall), but Harvard allows students to take indefinite leaves of absence, so he took a risk-free path.
It was only after the rise of the internet made exponential growth in the space of a few months a real possibility that you saw Page, Brin, and Zuckerberg leave college with very clear evidence of growth to point to.