As artificial intelligence fuels a new startup boom, debate for students over whether to spend years—and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars—earning a degree or dropping out to chase the next billion-dollar unicorn has intensified. But Patrick Collison, the billionaire cofounder and CEO of Stripe who dropped out of MIT (not once, but twice), recently told Gen Z they shouldn't feel pressured to rush that decision.
"When I was dropping out, people thought it was super weird," Collison said last week at Y Combinator's Startup School. "I think, overall, if you enjoy college, I think there's no harm in finishing. I felt this real sense of urgency, which I think, in hindsight, was a bit unnecessary."
The Irish entrepreneur first enrolled at MIT at just 16 to study mathematics. But within months he left to launch Auctomatic, an e-commerce software company, with his brother, John.
After selling the startup for $5 million, he then returned to MIT to study mathematics and physics. But a year later, he left again to start Stripe, a payments company now valued at $159 billion. And looking back, Collison said much of his urgency came from an unfounded feeling that he needed to be in a "speedrun" mode.
"I thought that a bunch of the opportunities in startups and in Silicon Valley were ephemeral and fleeting, and if we didn't build it then, it wouldn't be possible to do it in three or four years, and maybe all the opportunities would be gone," Collison, who has a net worth of $17.5 billion, said.
"In hindsight, I think that was a poor intuition. It's been pretty robustly and reliably the case over many decades that Silicon Valley has a surfeit of opportunities."
Fortune reached out to Stripe for further comment.
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One of Collison's biggest takeaways was that students often think dropping out is an irreversible decision. In reality, he said, it's much easier to change course than people fear.
"A lot of parents think that dropping out is very risky and will impugn your reputation for the rest of your life and so forth," Collison said. "And as far as I can tell, nobody has ever cared. So I both think you don't need to, but also the cost of doing so is diminutive."
Collison encouraged young people to think of it as something they can return to if their plans change.
"It's not totally a trapdoor," Collison said. "You can drop out and in fact return."
While some of the world's most famous founders—including Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Dell, and Steve Jobs—built successful companies after leaving college early, many have also stressed that education and experience can be valuable. Jeff Bezos, for one, has argued that the traditional path may actually improve someone's odds of entrepreneurial success.