Airtime cofounder and UPenn student Dan Shipper explains why he won’t drop out of school for a startup

University of Pennsylvania incoming junior, Airtime for Email co-founder and all around wunderkind Dan Shipper has not dropped out of school to focus on a startup. Even though his buddies were accepted to Y Combinator, the prestigious Silicon Valley business accelerator, and asked him to join them. Even though a San Francisco startup publicly offered him a job that he never even applied for.

What’s Shipper thinking? Last week, on his blog, he asked himself the same thing. Here’s just a snippet from his detailed answer:

For a long time I accepted the “leave school and raise money” argument because I assumed that “swing for the fences” and “scale as quickly” as possible were inviolable tenets of company building. But it turns out they’re not inviolable. They’re not even tenets. They’re just a common way of thinking about how to do a startup. And when I really sat down to examine why I wanted to leave school and raise money something became clear: I didn’t want to hit a homerun. [more]