On May 10, hundreds of founders will meet at the Marina Theater in San Francisco for a kind of start ceremony.
Their shared alma mater? Some could say Y Combinator or The Thiel Fellowship, but do not expect Stanford diplomas: “Dropout Class of 2025,” said Bi Ali Debow, an event organizer.
“Dropout graduation” has everything that traditional start would be – diplomas, caps and dresses, hundreds of registered participants and a class photo in front of the Palais des Beaux -Arts – with the exception of a key component: anyone graduated from a university.
For Debow and its co-organizer Cory Levy, “Dropout graduation” is personal.
Debow left Nyu in 2024 after being accepted to the prestigious Thiel scholarship – which grants participants $ 100,000 and forces them to abandon the university – to build Swsh, a photo sharing startup. (She shared a stock market course with rising stars like AI recruiting the start-up Mercor, which claims to be the fastest growth in the world.)
Levy – who did an internship at Founders Fund, Union Square Ventures and Techstars at high school – abandoned the University of Illinois after a year to build startups of social applications. Today, Levy directs Z Fellows, a week -long accelerator that gives technical founders of all ages – even high school students, he added – $ 10,000.
When Levy left university over ten years ago, the Thiel Stock Exchange was launched for the first time. Compare this today: “The community of dropouts is at a record level at the moment,” said Levy. “During a large group dinner of 15 or 20 people, we will look around the table and no one has a university diploma.”
The idea of ”Dropout graduation” began on a whim. A weekend at the end of March, Debow and Levy launched a Google document, linked an invitation and published it on X.
There is no joke for a long time: hundreds of inscriptions have been flooded, according to Debow and Levy.
“We just want it to be high -quality, really determined and brilliant founders who did not find the greatest value of their time at school for what they wanted to build,” said Debow. “And so they wanted to go to the real world and build something.”
The blow struck a nerve. In Silicon Valley, abandoning the university like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates has long been a badge of honor, but large technological companies have only recently started to walk. Take palantants to the heavyweights of defense technology, for example, which launched its Merritocracy scholarship, an internship aimed at attracting recent secondary graduates to full -time technological jobs and far from the university in April.
In addition to all graduation accessories, “Dropout Gradation” will star a “very crazy start” president, said Debow. Although she did not disclose their name, she promised that they were naturally never graduates.
businessinsider
