As artificial intelligence fuels a new startup boom, debate for students over whether to spend years—and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars—earning a degree or dropping out to chase the next billion-dollar unicorn has intensified. But Patrick Collison, the billionaire cofounder and CEO of Stripe who dropped out of MIT (not once, but twice), recently told Gen Z they shouldn’t feel pressured to rush that decision.
“When I was dropping out, people thought it was super weird,” Collison said last week at Y Combinator’s Startup School. “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.”
The Irish entrepreneur first enrolled at MIT at just 16 to study mathematics. But within months he left to launch Auctomatic, an e-commerce software company, with his brother, John.
After selling the startup for $5 million, he then returned to MIT to study mathematics and physics. But a year later, he left again to start Stripe, a payments company now valued at $159 billion. And looking back, Collison said much of his urgency came from an unfounded feeling that he needed to be in a “speedrun” mode.
