One summer, my cousin came back from his hostel thoroughly frustrated with his life. He was studying to become an engineer at one of the Tier-3 colleges, but he had other plans for life. When he mentioned his desire to drop out of college, pat came the reply from my grandfather: “Na tu Steve Jobs banne vala hai, or na hi Mark Zuckerberg. Bill Gates to agle 7 janam mein nahin ban payega. Chup chaap engineering khatam kar.”

Well, one might think the evidence suggests that my grandpa was right. Dropping out of college comes with its risks. In this article, we are going to talk about 5 people who made it big despite dropping out of college.

1. Amritanshu Anand

Be it a romantic relationship or one with your startup, when you know it’s right, it’s right. Amritanshu Anand, the founder of Retention.ai dropped out of IIT Kharagpur to work on his start-up which went on to be acquired by InShorts. Retention.ai was built to help app developers analyse users and retain them better by tracking other information, along with app uninstalls.

He is currently working on his new venture, called Recruiter Flow, which aims to revolutionize the way recruitment works.

2. Abhishek Gupta

Abhishek Gupta, an IIT Delhi dropout, founded Frankly.me along with Nikunj Jain, also an IIT alumnus. Frankly.me was a video expression platform which received massive attention even from celebrities. However, the fans were thoroughly shocked when they decided to shut down Frankly.me just a few weeks after receiving massive funding.

Currently, Gupta is working on his latest education startup, NavGurukul, which aims to transform how higher education works in India by teaching important skills to underprivileged students.

3. Rahul Yadav

AKA “the bad boy of Indian startups”, Yadav co-founded Housing.com with his batchmates from IIT Bombay. Housing.com, which provides housing solutions to people, was named the hottest tech startups in 2012.

Yadav has also earned the title of enfant terrible of the startup world because of his habit of being openly critical of people and organisations who cross his path, be it the founders of other startups, CEOs of tech empires, or even the co-founders of Housing.com. He even dropped out of his alma mater, IIT Bombay, when they asked him to shut down his college venture called exambaba.com

He is currently working with ANAROCK, a real estate services company.

4. Azhar Iqubal, Anunay Arunav, and Deepit Purkayastha

In the time of information overload, tech products which aim at delivering maximum value by usurping minimum time of users are always welcome in the market. InShorts (formerly NewsInShorts), a venture by 3 IIT dropouts, which provides snappy, 60-word summaries, was no exception.

InShorts declared that it had an operational profit in the last quarter of 2017, and things are expected to look even better in the future.

5. Zaheer Khan

“Engineers toh bahut saare hain, tu bowler hi ban na” These are the exact words Khan’s father told him.

The second most successful fast bowler in India’s Test history had secured admission in Pravara College of Engineering in Loni to study mechanical engineering but ended up dropping out and following his dreams. In IPL 2018, he joined Cricbuzz’s expert panel as an analyst.

What we are saying is…

Dropping out is risky and one might face a lot of heat for it, but in the end, if you have the skills and determination to make it big in life, the absence a piece of paper can’t keep you from being successful.