America's next generation of business leaders will almost all be from the information technology sector. Perhaps more interestingly, nearly all of them dropped out of college.
Forbes recently published its annual billionaires list, and nearly all of the fresh faces came from dot.com IPOs. The top three are among tech's most famous college dropouts, all from the team that built Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg ($34B, Harvard), Dustin Moskovitz ($8.1B, Harvard) and Sean Parker ($3B, never made it to college).
But this handful of other successful techies who abandoned college proves that dropout happy tech billionaires may dominate the world's elite:
- Jack Dorsey ($2.7B, NYU) of Twitter and Square
- Jan Koun ($7.6B, San Jose State University) of WhatsApp
- Travis Kalanick ($3B, UCLA) of I-will-destroy-government-regulators/Uber
- Nicholas Woodman ($3.9B, UC San Diego), fun enthusiast and founder of Go-Pro
- Robert Pera ($2.8B, UC San Diego) of Ubiquiti networks
Some tech titans as Google's Eric Schmidt, have lambasted Thiel's message, saying it's a terrible life lesson for the majority of aspiring technologists. Still, a number of Thiel's fellows have managed to make a mark. And the overwhelming success of so many dropouts from such a diverse set of companies is a sight to behold.
