What We Miss When We Glorify the Dropout Story

"Real builders have never sat in lecture halls."

I saw this quote in Business Insider's piece on Silicon Valley's anti-college movement.

It's great content but it got me thinking about the gap between narrative and reality.

How much overlap is there between the college dropouts and the founders actually building billion-dollar AI companies?

Turns out it's likely the founders building unicorns did in fact sit in those lecture halls.

Some interesting data — unicorn founders are:

• 6x more likely to hold doctoral degrees
• 3x more likely to have Master's degrees
• 2x as likely to have completed undergraduate studies compared to the average American over 25 years old
• Overwhelmingly coming from Stanford, MIT, and Harvard

(h/t to Ilya Strebulaev for his research on this)

A few things I'm wondering:

1. Are we seeing survivorship bias?
   
   • For every Cal AI success story, there might be hundreds of failed 17-year-old founders we never hear about. College dropouts probably get outsized media attention precisely because they're exceptional, not representative.
2. Launching is not the same as building an enduring business.
   
   • Building an app isn't the same as building a business. Can you negotiate enterprise contracts at 17? Can you recruit seasoned operators and investors to your company? Potentially, but that skillset is likely exceedingly rare amongst this age group.

Despite the anti education rhetoric, the data would suggest that elite universities actually seem to provide:

• Network effects (co-founders, early employees, advisors who matter)
• Battle-tested frameworks for complex problem-solving
• Exposure to diverse disciplines and perspectives
• Learning how to learn systematically

‍Anysphere's founders didn't drop out of MIT, they launched directly from it.

There are exceptions to every rule, but education seems like the feature here, not the bug.