Monday, October 22nd, 2007

Famous tech drop-outs

Filed under: Science and Technology — Daniel Lemire @ 12:27

I decided it to update my list of famous tech drop-outs.

Mark Zuckerberg - Facebook
Bill Gates - Microsoft
Steve Jobs - Apple
Michael Dell - Dell
Larry Ellison - Oracle
Mike Lazaridis - Blackberry
Shawn Fanning - Napster
Blake Ross - Firefox

I am sure you can help me complete my list. (Note: I think a better list would be “people without a college degree who made it big in tech.”)

See also my preceding article Where would we be without school drop outs?

Update: I do not mean to imply that there is a causal relation between dropping out of college and making it big.

1 Comment »

  1. What would be interesting would be to compare this type of list with a list of people who have “made it big” who got through college. Would a systematic difference in the what “makes it big” means for each list? I suspect the former list would be all outliers, with college serving to level the playing field among the extreme outliers (who might have made it big anyway) and folks closer to the mode of the population’s distribution. This is the academy as an engine for creating an egalitarian, just society, very different than the spin the US neo-conservatives place on colleges as bastions of elitism.

    Comment by Michael Stiber — 24/10/2007 @ 17:18

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