3 founders who dropped out of college share the moment they knew it was time

Steven Wang planned to start a business after graduating from Harvard.

But eight months into college life, in June 2021, he dropped out to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions, inspired by the boom in meme stocks and crypto.

Investing was one of his long-term interests, and Wang wanted to take advantage of that year's retail investor craze, and his company, Dub, was born.

The platform allows retail investors to automatically copy the trades of more experienced investors. In an interview published in February 2025, Wang told Business Insider that Dub had a team of around 25 people and had raised $17 million, including from Uber's CEO and Robinhood's founding chief operating officer.

The journey has come with trade-offs, he told Business Insider. Wang has sometimes felt jealous of friends who've been able to ride out the college experience, and he has fantasized about returning to study philosophy.

If the investor craze never happened, Wang said he would have probably finished his degree, but when he saw the opportunity presented by the growing investor movement, he couldn't let it go, he said. As someone with a deep love for building products, he believes he made the right choice.

David Kobrosky dropped out of college twice. Once to work for the businessman and social media personality Gary Vaynerchuk, and once to build his own company.

In late 2020, at age 21, he left college to take advantage of an emerging market in digital connection prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, creating Intros AI, which uses artificial intelligence to help people connect and network.

After eight months of bootstrapping, he raised funds from investors, including the White House AI advisor Siriam Krishnan. In July 2025, Kobrosky's business was acquired by a software company called Bevy.

With success came sacrifice. Kobrosky told Business Insider he used to work seven days a week and missed out on time with friends. Even after he was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer, in early 2024, he worked 60 to 80 hours a week on the business while undergoing chemotherapy. He was told he was in remission in November 2024.

Looking back, Kobrosky said he doesn't regret abandoning the traditional college route. He thinks starting and selling a business at his age set him up well for the future.

When Eric Chen went to NYU in 2016, he pictured going into finance or tech after graduating. Then he found he could spend hours learning about blockchain technology without getting bored, and decided to immerse himself in that space rather than stay in college.

In the fall of 2018, Chen took a leave of absence from NYU and started Injective, a decentralized crypto exchange platform. Chen saw the moment as a once-in-a-generation opportunity for a young person like him to contribute to a nascent space without much prior experience.

Chen faced challenges like investors not buying into decentralized exchanges, and he said not having a degree probably didn't help his case. However, when the industry blew up in 2020, the company was able to raise a seed round, and Chen decided not to go back to NYU.

In an interview published in September 2025, Chen told Business Insider the company had raised $50 million and secured investment from Mark Cuban.

Chen concluded that the industry would have changed drastically if he'd waited a few more years to start Injective, and said those passionate about an opportunity they spot should take it.

Do you have a story about dropping out of college to start a business? Contact this reporter at ccheong@businessinsider.com