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 in Harvard’s dining halls. After the project was over, we realized that our iPad kiosk system could be generalized to replace the customer comment cards and email surveys used by all kinds of physical businesses around us, and we spent the next summer testing and developing the system further with about 20 businesses in the Boston area. We tried and failed to convince these pilot customers to pay for our MVP at the end of the summer, and we went back to school in the fall knowing we had to make significant improvements if we were to build a successful company. While we managed to solve some of the major problems with the product in our free time, we never managed to generate sustained growth before we were accepted to YC. Although we were considering it, I doubt we would have left school if it were not for YC, and Posmetrics (perhaps rightfully) would have simply died.

But therein lies the problem with our approach. Our only justification for dropping out of school was to go through YC. We had some positive user feedback but no real traction, and certainly no reason to expect (as we did, in part) that moving to California for three months would dramatically change that. While we managed (with great effort and toil) to deploy 72 more of our iPad kiosks, raise a bit more funding during and after YC, and eventually find ourselves an exit, we never achieved the growth and profitability we needed to build the company to anywhere near the scale we had envisioned.

We’re certainly not the only college founders to make this mistake. Leaving school to found a company has become a widely accepted (and glorified) practice, and programs like the Thiel Fellowship have at least partially alleviated the monetary and social consequences of doing so. While several of the most public successes in tech dropped out of school to found their companies (and some of them before they had any traction or even an idea), survivorship bias drowns out the stories of those who dropped out and failed. Over the course of the past year I’ve spent living in the valley, I’ve watched myself and several friends leave school only to end up with companies that languish, and the growth in this nascent population of ambitious yet directionless 20 year-old dropouts seems unlikely to slow down anytime soon.

If you want to start a company in college, build something that can grow itself to a million users in the first ten months like Facebook, or make $500,000 a year while you’re still taking classes like Panorama Education. Unless you have traction, it simply doesn’t make sense for you to leave the greatest concentration of ideas and potential colleagues you’ll ever have access to in order to likely waste a year or more trying to force an idea to work. If you need funding to get enough initial traction, look to smaller funds created to support college entrepreneurs like Roughdraft.vc, The Experiment Fund and [Dorm Room Fund](dormroomfund.com) (although such funds need to be highly selective with their investments to prevent students from starting companies without an adequate reason to do so), win pitch competitions and hackathons, or do anything you can think of to get your company the money it needs to grow. Don’t drop out until you have both absolute certainty in your mind that what you’re working on will become a billion dollar company and data to back your claim up. Don’t drop out until the most talented people you know are skipping every class to work with you and together you still can’t keep up with demand. Don’t drop out until you have to.

Thanks to Hugo Van Vuuren, Peter Boyce, Zach Hamed, Erik Schluntz, Jean Xin, and Kat Manalac for reading drafts of this post.