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[6] [7] He never attended college, citing his father, who ran a glassware company, as his primary inspiration in pursuing an entrepreneurial route. [8] His father died in December 2019. [ 7 ]
He dropped out of college to build Chewy, alongside cofounder Michael Day, and quietly built the Florida-based online pet retailer into one of the fastest-growing e-commerce websites in the...
- Steve Jobs. The Apple co-founder "may ... be one of the most famous dropouts in history," per Reed College, the liberal arts school in Oregon which Steve Jobs left after just one semester.
- Mark Zuckerberg. In 2017, the Facebook CEO was a commencement speaker at Harvard University. Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of the Ivy League school in 2005 to focus on his then-young but growing social media platform.
- Alicia Keys. In the late 1990s, according to an Oprah magazine interview with singer-songwriter Alicia Keys, the future Grammy-winner left Columbia University after four weeks for a music deal with Columbia Records.
- Dick Cheney. According to the Yale Daily News, Dick Cheney dropped out of the Ivy League school twice. (Biography.com and other sources describe the departures as Cheney having "failed out.")
- Mark Zuckerberg. - Company: Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg started creating what would eventually become Facebook while still a student at Harvard, then dropped out to put all his attention on the site—a story dramatized in the 2010 film The Social Network.
- Richard Branson. - Company: Virgin Group. Richard Branson is a high school dropout, quitting his formal education at 16 years. He was just 20 when he founded Virgin Group as a mail-order retailer.
- Bill Gates. - Company: Microsoft (former) Bill Gates implemented the programming language BASIC, first designed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz and released at Dartmouth College in 1964, as a first-year student at Harvard.
- Russell Simmons. - Company: Rush Communications (former) Music mogul Russell Simmons until recently was best known as the cofounder of Def Jam Recordings and chair and CEO of his company Rush Communications, which oversaw his many businesses.
- The Myth of The College-Dropout Billionaire
- The Role of Survivorship Bias
- The Enduring Appeal
Let's start by dissecting why the college-dropout billionaire archetype is problematic. Anecdotal examples like those above lead to a few inaccurate potential assumptions. For example, you might conclude that if you're going to college and have a great idea for a business, you should drop out to pursue it; after all, you might become wildly success...
When you look at all billionaires, the number of college dropouts is not impressive. We can also examine the career-long performance of the average American college dropout, to look at things from the opposite angle. According to College Atlas, 70 percent of Americans will study at a four-year college at some point, but more than a third of student...
While survivorship bias explains our uneven attention distribution, it doesn't explain why the myth of the college dropout success is so appealing. Why are we endlessly fascinated with the rogues who took an uncommon, unrecommended path and still found success? In part, it's because we love to root for underdogs, but we're also drawn to statistical...
6 days ago · Ryan Cohen is the former CEO of online pets supplies store Chewy, which he cofounded in 2011. Cohen grew the business to $3.5 billion in annual revenues and stepped down in 2018 after selling it...
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Aug 16, 2020 · I never went to college and instead learned by following his example. His unconditional love gave me the confidence to be misunderstood, to walk away from things that didn’t feel right, and to...
