14 DAY TRIAL // The number of college dropouts that have made a successful career in tech seems to be higher than in any other domain.
This proves that if you have a good idea and some support, school really is optional, especially when you could potentially be making millions of dollars. It’s true, however, that dropping out of school is something that’s good for everyone.
Here’s a list of some of the most influential people in tech that have changed your online life despite never finishing college, according to Business Insider.
Mark Zuckerberg is possibly the most famous young college dropout. He stopped attending Harvard classes in 2004, putting the bases of Facebook, the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion users.
Dustin Moskovitz is yet another Facebook founder that didn’t graduate Harvard in 2004. He left the social network in 2008 and founded Asana.
Matt Mullenweg, the man behind WordPress, a blogging platform that powers a huge chunk of the Internet, dropped out of the University of Houston nine years ago.
David Karp, the charming Tumblr founder, didn’t even finish high school. By the age of 15, he was already product manager for an Internet forum. He had dropped out of high school in 2001 to be home schooled but never got his high school diploma. Now, the 27 year old has sold his blogging platform for over $1 billion (€760 million).
Arash Ferdowsi founded DropBox, a business that is now worth an estimated $4 billion (€3 billion). He dropped out of MIT in 2007.
Sahil Lavingia dropped out of the University of Southern California to become the second employee of Pinterest, the popular network. He soon left the company and started his own, Gumroad, a product that lets people sell anything they can share.