Dropping Out of University & Dropping In to Community
15 years ago, I struggled to find other young people who wanted to build things on the Internet. It made me want to go to University. After I dropped out, I was incredibly lonely for many years.
Dropping out of Edinburgh University was easy—it took days. Dropping in to the right community for me was so hard—it took years. Eventually I found a way to build my own education:
👘 I sold hoodeasy, my little apparel company in 2009, to pay for travelling.
🌅 I did an accounting course at University of California, Santa Barbara in 2010. I learned that the Computer Science course had been filled up by kids who had been inspired by watching The Social Network. Fuck Zuck.
💎 I taught myself Ruby on Rails in 2011 and started hacking on a bunch of web-apps. It helped me understand the internals of a database.
🚀 I joined Stripe in 2012 and got fired after a few months. It taught me what is possible when great people get together and how office politics works.
🤓 I went to Hacker School (Recurse Center) in 2013 and started poking around iOS and Objective-C. It taught me the power of iPhone and how poker pokes people. I then co-founded Sourcing.io, which generated some cashflow.
💠 I helped Gavin Wood and Vitalik Buterin in 2014. It taught me about the power of protocols and the value of taking a chance on someone.
🌊 I lived and kited with the world champion kitesurfers in 2015. It showed me the power of the human body when you focus on your mind.
⚖️ I started Balance in 2016 to explore macOS and fintech software. It has been a wild ride ever since with so many ideas and so many failures.
It has taken me over a decade to find my community and settle there. It is:
California ∞ Apple ∞ Ethereum ∞ Startups ∞ Design ∞ Engineering
I had to fight for the right to participate in all of these spaces. America requires a lot to get a visa. Apple has incredibly high standards for featuring applications. Ethereum was so weird I needed to be weirder. Startups have left me with many psychological scars. Designing is a constant reminder that I have poor execution skills. My awful code that barely compiles makes me admire true engineering even more.
The search has been worth it. But it does not have to be so arduous.
I recommend a few things to everyone considering dropping out:
Do a short programming course to learn about how software works.
Do a short accounting course to learn about how business works.
Find a hacker house in any city around the world to learn how to live with other people and resolve disputes. Hack on fun things together!
Start any kind of website that gets you a customer. There is nothing like the feeling of making your first bit of money online. Sell something!
Create content for the platform that has the secrets. Mastering Twitter’s algorithm and responding to DMs set me free financially.
Dropout How? DropoutDAO
I wrote this post for the participants in the DropoutDAO experiment. It seems wonderful from afar:
The people involved are creating a softer landing spot for people who are looking for community. I love what they are trying to do and their meme game is on point:
College in America is basically debt slavery at this point. It is hard to justify the six figures of debt if you are not sure about what you want to do. Just look at the costs over time:
What have you made that you are proud of?
At Balance, we are looking for renegades, rebels and odd-balls. We do not care about test scores. We care that you care. Even if you are a graduate, we will never ask you where you went to school. We just want you to want to make the best software in the world—it is that simple.
If you are looking for a place to drop in, join us:
https://discord.gg/balance-wallet
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awesome story! thanks for sharing!
Thank for sharing Ric! Same happened to me. Dropping out of University was one of my most difficult and profitable decisions I made in my life. Hope some of your readers find in this lines the courage necessary to take a decision like that.