Joel Gascoigne's cofounder, Leo Widrich, dropped out of university to start successful startup Buffer. Here are Joel's insights (some gleaned from Leo) about the interaction between university and startups.
My belief and experience with going through Leo dropping out is that when it is good to drop out for your startup, you will know it. That said, I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that you have to abruptly cut everything off and burn all your bridges with university.
How I've seen it play out more often than not, is that someone does many different side-projects during college and then when something begins to work, they go through a massive amount of learning and progress in an incredibly short space of time. This is very much related to Paul Graham's notion of compressing your life:
But don't be too keen to do it:
[M]y advice to anyone thinking of dropping out is to keep studying, and use every opportunity to build projects and startups on the side. When something starts to work, you'll have that same feeling that many others have, and you'll know that it's your duty to keep building it and bring it to the world. Until that happens, keep studying and keep building. When it happens, drop out slowly.
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