My theory is that college has become too expensive to afford to drop out and start a company with a massive student loan bill that you may never pay off, and will cripple you with debt for a couple of decades.

Given that reality, it makes way more sense for someone to finish their degree, land a FAANG job, work a few years to pay off their debt/save, and then take a swing at a startup if they still have the itch.

This has changed the financing substantially, because an ex FAANG engineer is only going to do a startup if they can get back to a similar pay/lifestyle within a few years. This means the VCs have to write much bigger funding checks, and the companies need to have bigger ideas and reach unicorn status much more quickly.

You'd need enough wealth to both drop out of college and have a garage. I'd say there's no longer enough people who can afford to do that, and Silicon Valley is too expensive for this.

Dropping out of college also made sense when there was a fast growing new technology. That was true with PCs and the Internet, and it might be the case with AI, but there's nothing currently urgent.

IMO, yeah.

The reason I got into tech (around 2007) was because I realised how easy it was to start an online business if you knew a little code. Back then it was so easy to spin something up and get users on your site. Between 2007 - 2010 I launch a handful of relatively successful projects with no money and a few months work.

I realised towards the end of my time at university things had started to change. This was around 2011-2012 and I started to notice it was getting far harder to build something and attract users. It wasn't impossible, but it wasn't as easy as buying a good domain and putting some keywords on a webpage anymore. Today the number of websites and content online is orders of magnitude larger. 15-20 years ago there were so few websites and so little content you could get Google to basically rank anything within a few months (sometimes weeks) if the bare minamum effort.

There also wasn't much competition even if you wanted to do something extremely generic like sell something you brought online or start a new social network. In fact, my first job in tech was basically building and maintaining websites selling stuff we imported from China. I must have started around 2009 and in the few years I worked there I probably launched 5 or so successful ecommerce stores.

Today if you want to build something you need money or you need connections. You're not going to get organic traffic anymore unless you're lucky enough to get your product picked up by HN or some other social media site. I mean, I guess if you spent all day writing content, trying to get blogs and other sites to talk about your product then link back to your site you might be able to get Google to rank you, but it's far from easy.

In 2021 if you want people on your site you basically need an advertisment budget, and college students don't typically have that.

Alternatively, if you know people well connected in some industry it's possible to start a company without money, but again this is rare for a college student. Over the last decade the only people I know who have started successful tech companies have been people who were well connected and basically had their first few clients handed to them which provided them the funds to expand.

This is a common trend with all new technologies though. At the start you always get a handful of individuals who build something awesome, but then as the industry grows so does the size of the competetion.

anecdotally, i think college drop out founders, or even college-aged startup founders, were always rare. zuck generated a lot of press, and there are some thiel fellows still around, but most founders will have had at least a few years of industry experience.