Don’t drop out. (until you have to)

On a dreary Wednesday evening back in November 2012, I was sitting in a Mountain View motel room when I got a call that every beginning startup founder dreams of. My company, Posmetrics, had been accepted to Y Combinator’s Winter 2013 class, which meant that my cofounder and I were dropping out of our sophomore years at Harvard and moving to California to work on it full time. It was an opportunity that we couldn’t turn down; seed funding, three months to grow our company under the guidance of some of the most highly respected founders and thought leaders in the valley, and an audience of 500 investors to pitch to share our progress with at the end of it all. Looking back on it though, I think we should have seriously considered saying no.

Posmetrics had grown out of a freshman year computer science class project that my cofounder and I had built to collect live feedback on the food...