Dropping out of an elite university to start a company means tapping into a narrative. It’s a nice way of associating with a prestigious place while also not really associating with it. It’s elitism that very visibly snubs the elite; or, perhaps even better, snubbing the elite while nevertheless basking in its glow. But it’s worth asking: What kind of an education is dropping out? Because the quintessential tech wunderkind as portrayed by the media noticeably doesn’t not go to college. He or she goes to college in a new way—by showing up, taking a few classes, making a few friends, and then dropping out. As we shall see, in Silicon Valley in particular, the act of dropping out conjures a set of associations that have more to do with sixties counterculture than with entrepreneurial success, but which share with the famous tech dropouts a vocabulary of unconventional thinking and independence.
It also creates a challenge for historians who want to show what influences shape the current crop of founders. There have been professors at Stanford who taught nearly every technologist who graduated from the institution, so it’s safe to assume that some aspect of how they have thought about computers has influenced their former students. The founders of Google credit Terry Winograd with shaping the way their famous venture turned out. How does this equation change when the encounter with academic thought is less about getting trained and more about a momentary, utilitarian flyby? When the university is less about patient incubation of talent than a brief pollination with prestige and some cool ideas?
This chapter provides the basis for all the terms explored in the following chapters. How do concepts like communication or content function when the person using them has encountered their extremely long and rich histories in the context of a general ed course, talked them over with roommates, and then left the university to figure out how to make credit card payments easier? How do these concepts work when you’ve basically gotten the gist, but perhaps not much more than the gist?
Anyone who’s gone to college in the United States knows that it can be a scattered experience: random requirements, exciting but seemingly disparate course offerings, choices determined by time conflicts and departmental whims. This is particularly true the first few years—that is, the only ones a dropout typically spends at school. No one seems to have gone to the trouble of finding out what courses Mark Zuckerberg took at Harvard before he dropped out in 2004. What gets noted is CS 121 with Professor Harry Lewis (partly because Bill Gates took it as well before he jumped ship) and his major in psychology (presumably because Facebook plays with our psychology, even though Zuckerberg himself has said that he hadn’t taken many classes in the field by the time he left). He mentioned taking the introductory economics course EC 10 in his 2017 commencement speech there.
So even though Zuckerberg almost certainly would have taken courses from Harvard’s core curriculum (in eleven areas, such as “moral reasoning” and “foreign cultures”), the courses that have made it into popular legend are the ones that seem predictive of what he would do after he left Harvard early. The funny thing is, that’s not really how college works for most people. Every year I get emails from anguished parents asking me what their kid could possibly do with a degree in, say, feminist, gender, and sexuality studies—and I answer, pretty much anything. Somehow the act of dropping out changes that equation: the liberal arts aspect of the American college experience drops out too. College becomes predictive and vocational in a way that (four-year) college really isn’t supposed to be, especially at the places people drop out of and are then commended for having dropped out of.
Mark Zuckerberg is on record saying, “I probably learned more coding from random side projects that I did than the courses I took in college.” The dropout’s relationship to college is pretty openly transactional. The idea of a holistic education, of the liberal arts, of the well-rounded student, of the future responsible citizen all depend on you going through a curated educational program. Cynics might say that’s why colleges are so happy to promote these ideas, given that they entail your handing over four years’ worth of cash to them. But that isn’t how the dropouts see it. They simply approach college as customers, and vaguely dissatisfied ones at that. With the exception of Peter Thiel, who seems locked in some weird I-don’t-know-whether-to-kiss-you-or-kill-you codependency with higher education, most dropouts appear to look at college as a sort of forgettable experience. But that requires shifting what you consider part of college.
When CNBC reported Zuckerberg’s remarks, it framed them as his saying he “learned more from a hobby than he did at Harvard.” But that’s not quite what Zuckerberg said. He said he learned more coding from a hobby than he did in his Harvard courses. And he had these hobbies while enrolled at Harvard; one would probably say they were part of his Harvard experience. Moreover, the metonymy “Harvard” is not identical to the courses you
